SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
RTX 3080 Mobile - 16 GB of VRAM?
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 mobile outed with 16 GB of VRAM, a GA104 GPU and 6,144 CUDA cores
The first details of the GeForce RTX 3080 mobile have appeared online. Not only do they offer an insight into what to expect from high-end gaming laptops next year, but they also raise the question about the continued existence of merely a 10 GB edition of the desktop variant of the RTX 3080.
[...] The apparent confirmation of NVIDIA equipping the mobile version of the RTX 3080 with 16 GB of VRAM raises questions about its desktop counterpart, though. Currently, NVIDIA only sells a 10 GB edition, but there had been rumours about it releasing a 20 GB version. NVIDIA had allegedly cancelled this SKU, but a recent EEC registration by MSI suggests otherwise. It would be strange for NVIDIA to sell mobile GPU with 60% more VRAM than its desktop namesake, so maybe a 20 GB variant of the RTX 3080 is on the way after all.
Coming to a $2,500 laptop near you.
(Previous mobile flagship was the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q with 8 GB of VRAM. Edit: Max-Q is the same thing but with a lower TDP of 80 Watts instead of 150 Watts, still great for warming the lap.)
Australian Wine
Politicians urge people to buy Australian wine in defiance of China
Politicians from various Western countries have asked consumers to buy Australian wine in order to fight back against China's punitive tariffs on the beverage.
China is the most important export market for Australian wine, and winemakers are scrambling to find new markets following Beijing's decision to slap tariffs of up to 212% on Australian wine imports amid an escalating trade war between the two nations.
China rejects Australian PM's call to apologise for 'repugnant' tweet
China’s foreign ministry has rejected calls from the Australian prime minister to apologise over an inflammatory tweet over war crimes allegations, insisting it is Australia that should be saying sorry for the loss of life in Afghanistan.
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, had demanded the Chinese government apologise and take down a “repugnant” foreign ministry tweet that depicted an Australian soldier cutting the throat of a civilian in Afghanistan.
[...] The tweet was accompanied by an inflammatory image that appears to depict an Australian soldier cutting the throat of a young civilian holding a sheep, together with the words “Don’t be afraid, we are coming to bring you peace!”
[...] At the ministry of foreign affairs’ regular press conference on Monday, Zhao did not appear. Instead Hua Chunying, director of the ministry’s department of information, addressed media, doubling down on Zhao’s tweet.
“The Australian side has been reacting so strongly to my colleague’s tweet. Why is that? Do they think that their merciless killing of Afghan civilians is justified but the condemnation of such ruthless brutality is not? Afghan lives matter,” Hua said.
Hua said Australian soldiers committed “heinous crimes”, detailing some of the more graphic findings from the Brereton report, and the Australian government owed the Afghan people a formal apology.
WeChat blocks Australian Prime Minister in doctored image dispute
The Chinese social media platform WeChat blocked a message by Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison...
China's WeChat blocks Australian PM in doctored image dispute
China’s WeChat social media platform blocked a message by Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison amid a dispute between Canberra and Beijing over the doctored tweeted image of an Australian soldier.
[...] Morrison took to WeChat on Tuesday to criticise the “false image”, while offering praise to Australia’s Chinese community.
In his message, Morrison defended Australia’s handling of a war crimes investigation into the actions of special forces in Afghanistan, and said Australia would deal with “thorny issues” in a transparent manner.
But that message appeared to be blocked by Wednesday evening, with a note appearing from the “Weixin Official Accounts Platform Operation Center” saying the content was unable to be viewed because it violated regulations, including distorting historical events and confusing the public.
Hong Kong Activists Sentenced For Their Role In Anti-Government Protest
A trio of young Hong Kong opposition activists have been sentenced after pleading guilty to organizing a demonstration last year as part of a larger protest against Hong Kong's receding autonomy.
Their sentencing on Wednesday is the latest blow to the region's opposition movement, which seeks to preserve Hong Kong's limited autonomy from Beijing.
The three — Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam — have been held without bail since pleading guilty in late November for organizing and participating in the protest last year that surrounded police headquarters. Wong, Chow and Lam, all in their 20s, are also founding members of the now-disbanded Demosisto opposition political party.
Trumptastic Fundraising Effort Fleeces His Supporters...
No surprise there.
The Trump "Legal Defense" Fund has raised more that $150,000,000 since election day, reports the failing Washington Post:
President Trump’s political operation has raised more than $150 million since Election Day, using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the election to shatter fundraising records set during the campaign, according to people with knowledge of the contributions.
The influx of political donations is one reason Trump and some allies are inclined to continue a legal onslaught and public affairs blitz focused on baseless claims of election fraud, even as their attempts have repeatedly failed in court and as key states continue to certify wins for President-elect Joe Biden.
Much of the money raised since the election is likely to go into an account for the president to use on political activities after he leaves office, while some of the contributions will go toward what’s left of the legal fight.
[...]
The surge of donations is largely from small-dollar donors, campaign officials say, tapping into the president’s base of loyal and fervent donors who tend to contribute the most when they feel the president is under siege or facing unfair political attacks. The campaign has sent about 500 post-election fundraising pitches to donors, often with hyperbolic language about voter fraud and the like.
[...]
The donations are purportedly being solicited for the Official Election Defense Fund, which is blazed in all red across the Trump campaign’s website, with an ominous picture of the president outside the White House.There is no such account, however. The fundraising requests are being made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee that raises money for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. As of Nov. 18, that committee also shares its funds with Save America, a new leadership PAC that Trump set up in early November and which he can use to fund his post-presidency activities.
[...]
According to the fine print in the latest fundraising appeals, 75 percent of each contribution to the joint fundraising committee would first go toward the Save America leadership PAC and the rest would be shared with the party committee, to help with the party’s operating expenses. This effectively means that the vast majority of low-dollar donations under the current agreement would go toward financing the president’s new leadership PAC, instead of efforts to support the party or to finance voting lawsuits.“Small donors who give to Trump thinking they are financing an ‘official election defense fund’ are in fact helping pay down the Trump campaign’s debt or funding his post-presidential political operation,” said Brendan Fischer, who directs federal regulatory work at the Campaign Legal Center, which supports greater restrictions on the role of money in politics. “The average donor who gives in response to Trump’s appeal for funds to ‘stop the fraud’ likely doesn’t realize that their money is actually retiring Trump’s debt or funding his leadership PAC.”
Suckers. But then, Trump has always been about fleecing the gullible.
If it weren't so sad it would be funny.
AMD Cezanne 5800U
One of the biggest changes in the Ryzen 7 5800U is the cache redesign which now packs 16 MB of L3 cache versus the 8 MB of L3 cache on Ryzen 7 4800U. The L2 cache will still be 4 MB or 512 KB per core. This would allow for reduced latency and faster inter-core interconnect bandwidth.
The doubling of L3 cache to 16 MB is interesting, and could have been necessary to reproduce Zen 3's benefits in Cezanne. From a Renoir review:
AMD’s Mobile Revival: Redefining the Notebook Business with the Ryzen 9 4900HS (A Review)
For Renoir, AMD decided to minimize the amount of L3 cache to 1 MB per core, compared to 4 MB per core on the desktop Ryzen variants and 4 MB per core for Threadripper and EPYC. The reduction in the size of the cache does three things: (a) makes the die smaller and easier to manufacture, (b) makes the die use less power when turned on, but (c) causes more cache misses and accesses to main memory, causing a slight performance per clock decrease.
With (c), normally doubling (2x) the size of the cache gives a square root of 2 decrease in cache misses. Therefore going down from 4 MB on the other designs to 1 MB on these designs should imply that there will be twice as many cache misses from L3, and thus twice as many memory accesses. However, because AMD uses a non-inclusive cache policy on the L3 that accepts L2 cache evictions only, there’s actually less scope here for performance loss. Where it might hurt performance most is actually in integrated graphics, however AMD says that as a whole the Zen2+Vega8 Renoir chip has a substantial uplift in performance compared to the Zen+Vega11 Picasso design that went into the Surface Laptop 3.
[...] It’s important to note that even though the chip has 8 MB of L3 total across the two CCX domains, each core can only access the L3 within its own CCX, and not the L3 of the other CCX domain. So while the chip is correct in saying there is 8 MB of L3 total, no core has access to all the L3. This applies to the desktop and enterprise chips as well (in case it wasn’t explicitly stated before).
It sounds like each core of an 8-core Cezanne APU should be able to access up to 16 MB, from 4 MB.
The Ryzen 7 5800U is reportedly equipped with an enhanced Vega GPU featuring 8 CUs or 512 cores, clocked in at 2000 MHz.
That's 14% more frequency than the 4800U's 8 Vega CUs. Probably on the same "7nm" node. AMD is currently delivering only modest graphics improvements on its top APUs, since many of them will be paired with discrete mobile graphics chips. AMD's lower-powered Van Gogh should have up to a Zen 2 quad-core paired with RDNA 2 graphics (faster graphics than Cezanne seems likely), and Cezanne's successor "Rembrandt" will have RDNA 2 graphics (or RDNA 2+).
AMD will apparently also be releasing a Renoir (Zen 2) refresh known as "Lucienne", using the same 5000-series naming. Nobody liked that.
The Ryzen 7 5700U (Zen 2/Lucienne) will outperform the Ryzen 7 4800U, using the same 8 cores and 16 threads with a slightly higher boost clock and better graphics clock speeds, and will probably be found at cheaper price points than the 4800U.
6-core Ryzen 5 5600U (Zen 3/Cezanne) will have 12 MB of L3 cache, still an improvement over Renoir. Ryzen 3 5400U (Zen 3/Cezanne) will have 8 MB of L3 cache, usable in full by 4 cores.
Rembrandt will have some significant improvements over Cezanne, landing in 2022. It looks like every APU with RDNA 2 graphics in it will have "CVML", which I take to mean machine learning acceleration using the graphics cores. Rembrandt will also have PCIe4 and LPDDR5, on TSMC's "6nm" process, which may only offer a density increase (no performance or efficiency improvements).
The same chart in that article points to all Zen 4 desktop CPUs having a graphics chiplet, which would be a nice change.
Saudi Arabia denies 'secret meeting' with Israeli PM
Saudi Arabia denies crown prince held 'secret meeting' with Israeli PM
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister has denied that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to the Gulf kingdom on Sunday to secretly meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
"No such meeting occurred," Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud tweeted.
Mr Netanyahu has declined to comment on the Israeli reports that he was on board a private jet that travelled from Tel Aviv to the Red Sea city of Neom.
[...] Also on Monday, a delegation of senior Israeli officials travelled to Sudan on what would also be the first such visit to a formerly hostile country, an unnamed Israeli official confirmed. The countries are expected to map out areas of co-operation.
Citing unnamed Israeli sources, Israeli public broadcaster Kan and other media earlier reported that Mr Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad intelligence service, Yossi Cohen, attended talks in Saudi Arabia on Sunday evening with Crown Prince Mohammed and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu visits Saudi Arabia, official says
The Global Cabal Responsible for Fake Milk Sell-by Dates
The jews make maple syrup so expensive. The lizard people are forcing you to throw out your milk to control your mind. George Soros brainwashes teenage boys into becoming homos. Nancy Pelosi drinks the blood of little children. It's all so obvious, if you know where to look!
The essay below discusses similar ridiculousness. Time to take sides, Soylentils! Do you support the idea that there's a global Zionist conspiracy of lizard people and adrenochrome addicts, or do you have a functioning frontal lobe?
Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the Global Cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”
Thirty seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.
Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.
But at its heart, Nazism was a Global Cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democracies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”
Understanding the common structure of such Global Cabal theories can explain both their attractiveness — and their inherent falsehood.
The Structure
Global Cabal theories argue that underneath the myriad events we see on the surface of the world lurks a single sinister group. The identity of this group may change: Some believe the world is secretly ruled by Freemasons, witches or Satanists; others think it’s aliens, reptilian lizard-people or sundry other cliques.
But the basic structure remains the same: The group controls almost everything that happens, while simultaneously concealing this control.
Global Cabal theories take particular delight in uniting opposites. Thus the Nazi conspiracy theory said that on the surface, communism and capitalism look like irreconcilable enemies, right? Wrong! That’s exactly what the Jewish cabal wants you to think! And you might think that the Bush family and the Clinton family are sworn rivals, but they’re just putting on a show — behind closed doors, they all go to the same Tupperware parties.
From these premises, a working theory of the world emerges. Events in the news are a cunningly designed smoke screen aimed at deceiving us, and the famous leaders that distract our attention are mere puppets in the hands of the real rulers.
The Lure
Global Cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes. Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of Global Cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything.
The war in Syria? I don’t need to study Middle Eastern history to comprehend what’s happening there. It’s part of the big conspiracy. The development of 5G technology? I don’t need to do any research on the physics of radio waves. It’s the conspiracy. The Covid-19 pandemic? It has nothing to do with ecosystems, bats and viruses. It’s obviously part of the conspiracy.
The skeleton key of Global Cabal theory unlocks all the world’s mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle — the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook — or what they try to conceal.
The Flaw
Global Cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that history is very simple. The key premise of Global Cabal theories is that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics.
Particularly remarkable is this group’s ability to see 10 moves ahead on the global board game. When they release a virus somewhere, they can predict not only how it will spread through the world, but also how it will affect the global economy a year later. When they unleash a political revolution, they can control its course. When they start a war, they know how it will end.
But of course, the world is much more complicated. Consider the American invasion of Iraq, for example. In 2003, the world’s sole superpower invaded a medium-sized Middle Eastern country, claiming it wanted to eliminate the country’s weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some suspected that it also wouldn’t have minded the chance to gain hegemony over the region and dominate the vital Iraqi oil fields. In pursuit of its goals, the United States deployed the best army in the world and spent trillions of dollars.
Fast forward a few years, and what were the results of this tremendous effort? A complete debacle. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the country was plunged into chaos. The big winner of the war was actually Iran, which became the dominant power in the region.
So should we conclude that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were actually undercover Iranian moles, executing a devilishly clever Iranian plot? Not at all. Instead, the conclusion is that it is incredibly difficult to predict and control human affairs.
You don’t need to invade a Middle-Eastern country to learn this lesson. Whether you’ve served on a school board or local council, or merely tried to organize a surprise birthday party for your mom, you probably know how difficult it is to control humans. You make a plan, and it backfires. You try to keep something a secret, and the next day everybody is talking about it. You conspire with a trusted friend, and at the crucial moment they stab you in the back.
Global Cabal theories ask us to believe that while it is very difficult to predict and control the actions of 1,000 or even 100 humans, it is surprisingly easy to puppet master nearly eight billion.
The Reality
There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world. Individuals, corporations, organizations, churches, factions and governments are constantly hatching and pursuing various plots. But that is precisely what makes it so hard to predict and control the world in its entirety.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union really was conspiring to ignite communist revolutions throughout the world; capitalist banks were employing all kinds of dodgy strategies; the Roosevelt administration was planning to re-engineer American society in the New Deal; and the Zionist movement pursued its plan to establish a homeland in Palestine. But these and countless other schemes often collided, and there wasn’t a single group of people running the whole show.
Today, too, you are probably the target of many conspiracies. Your co-workers may be plotting to turn the boss against you. A big pharmaceutical corporation may be bribing your doctor to give you harmful opioids. Another big corporation may be pressuring politicians to block environmental regulations and allow it to pollute the air you breathe. Some tech-giant may be busy hacking your private data. A political party may be gerrymandering election districts in your state. A foreign government may be trying to foment extremism in your country. These could all be real conspiracies, but they are not part of a single global plot.
Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictator does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands. But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush. With great power comes great publicity.
Indeed, in many cases great publicity is a prerequisite for gaining great power. Lenin, for example, would never have won power in Russia by avoiding the public gaze. And Stalin at first was much fonder of scheming behind closed-doors, but by the time he monopolized power in the Soviet Union, his portrait was hanging in every office, school and home from the Baltic to the Pacific. Stalin’s power depended on this personality cult. The idea that Lenin and Stalin were just a front for the real behind-the-scenes rulers contradicts all historical evidence.
Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/global-cabal-conspiracy-theories.html
Joe Biden Taps DuPont Man
How a Human Rights Angel Lost Her Halo
How a Human Rights Angel Lost Her Halo (archive)
Ten years after she left house arrest and vowed to fight for justice, Myanmar’s civilian leader has instead become a jailer of critics and an apologist for the slaughter of minorities.
We're Not Doing Enough About COVID-19
It's important that we do more, much more, to ensure that we can weather this dire health crisis.
The number of new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are skyrocketing across the US, almost every day seeming to break new records.
But this isn't enough!
If we are to bring our economy back, we need to be able to go about our lives without worrying about some bullshit dempanic.
As such, the solution is obvious. We need *everyone* to contract COVID-19 as quickly as possible, to drive up immunity and weed out the sick and weak.
As I said, the current boom is a start, but it's not nearly enough. And states are taking action to make sure that *all* their citizens contract the virus as quickly as possible.
Several states (Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama) have joined together to implement a new plan to infect as many people as possible.
The plan includes a variety of public events featuring group sex, GHB laced beverages and sponsored bar fights to make sure that everyone gets infected quickly.
The new initiative has raised concerns from some in the religious community, especially a provision setting up glory holes in local churches.
Religious leaders understand the importance of infecting everyone quickly, but bristle at the idea of having gay men as well as women sucking off the congregation.
Reverend Gnar Slabdash (the 'n' is mostly silent) told a reporter that "just like marriage, a glory hole is a man and a woman, or in this case, many men and a woman or teenage girl. If God had wanted men on both sides of a glory hole, he would have created Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve."
Despite these differences, the neighbor states' collaboration has received significant support from the public.
The new initiative will kick off on Saturday with orgies on the floor of the state houses in Montgomery, Little Rock and Nashville.
Church-based glory holes will begin operations on Sunday, starting just after morning services and running all day.
There will be nightly raves at arenas, stadiums and public libraries which require all participants to dose with Molly when entering the venues. And condoms are *strictly* prohibited.
Alabama health commissioner Harlon Gateau said, "we didn't think about banning condoms at the orgies and raves at first, but thankfully Roy Moore got in touch and gave us some really useful suggestions."
At least some folks in this country are getting with the program! Now we just need to get the rest of the nation to start acting as responsibly as these three states.
Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Legislators Resign En Masse
Pro-democracy lawmakers resign in Hong Kong's 'darkest day ... so far'
Cheung is among 15 lawmakers who announced they'll resign en masse on Thursday to protest the disqualification of four fellow pro-democracy legislators.
On Wednesday, Beijing's top lawmaking body, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, or NPCSC, empowered the Hong Kong government to bypass the local judiciary in order to ban any lawmakers deemed "unpatriotic" or considered to be conducting themselves in a manner that "endangers national security."
[...] By exiting the chamber, the 19 pan-democrats effectively leave the 70-seat legislature entirely to Beijing-friendly lawmakers, without any meaningful opposition voice. Their exodus also raises questions about how the democracy movement will move forward without any legitimate channels or democratic avenue for dissent.
Protests have more or less died down in Hong Kong because of pandemic restrictions on gatherings and the deterring effects of the national security law, which was directly imposed by Beijing in June.
Until this week, the democratic camp had vowed to continue to be a voice inside the chamber, but Cheung explained that when the four members were disqualified they "lost the one-third of the votes needed to avoid impeachment initiatives."
Britain, EU, Join U.S. In Condemning China's Crackdown On Hong Kong Lawmakers
