SoylentNews

2020 Democratic Party presidential debates and forums

9 PM EDT on NBC.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii
Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio
Former Rep. John Delaney

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Commentary:

An Interview with AMD’s Forrest Norrod: Naples, Rome, Milan, & Genoa

There's some clarifications and small tidbits in the article. Not sure why the Rome DRAM question was asked and barely answered; I thought it was known that it would support 4 TiB.

Milan will be Zen 3. Genoa is confirmed to be Zen 4. "Another Italian city" will come after that, likely Zen 5. The Frontier 1.5 exaflops supercomputer will not use Milan, but rather a "custom CPU". IIRC, AdoredTV speculated about a server CPU with 4 attached GPUs (Infinity Fabric) for this purpose.

But the best part is this shade thrown at the end about 3D XPoint/Optane:

IC: Intel has extended out to all the other aspects of the enterprise market in order addressing more TAM than ever before, because that is the goal for investors. One of those aspects is volatile memory and Optane. What can AMD do in this space, or is it worth it the customers that you're going for to do some sort of non-volatile memory?

Forrest Norrod: With all these forms of NVM I do think that there are two value propositions that people have been talking about.

One is the non-volatile aspect, to blur the lines between memory and storage, and customers will get much better large memory database machines etc. On the whole non-volatile aspect, I think people are doing the software work to enable that on a broader range of applications, but at the end of the day, the fact that you still have a failure domain at the node level means that the value is relatively smaller. Before you can commit, you're going to trust a commit to just one machine, to the SCM on one machine. However realistically you're not going to commit until you got a commit on multiple nodes. And so, that tends to somewhat degrade the value that people were thinking about.

So the other aspect of course is lower cost per bit. They’ll use it as DRAM replacement and the fact is that it has longer latency and non-uniform latency, and so there are a bunch of issues there. Now withstanding that it is close enough that we can use it as DRAM replacement, I'd say there was probably more interest in that 12 months ago when DRAM price were at a historically high level. Today there is less interest in that now as DRAM prices have come way down and I do think that DRAM/memory is a commodity market, and commodity markets have a very set of economic rules. The cure for high oil prices is high oil prices right? You know because that increases production and that brings the oil prices back down. The prospect of Optane being a replacement for DRAM in of itself would bring the cost of DRAM down, regardless of the current market factors in play today.

But there are a lot of other storage class memory (SCM) technologies which are in development. I think that you will see SCM settle into a niche of the memory hierarchy over 2-3 years and I think that there will be a lot of choices, not just Optane. But I don't think it's the be-all and end-all. I think that that Intel has made a horrific mistake hitching their system architecture to a propriety memory interface. I think that they've made a key strategic mistake.

I think that in general, Intel may be forgetting what got them here. Truly having an open ecosystem where others could add value to that ecosystem, and that the platform is a key part of the success of the x86 market. Intel still talks about it in that way, but that's not what they are doing, any pico-acre of silicon that doesn't belong to Intel is something that they covet. But I think acting that way is to the detriment of the health of their platform ecosystem long term.

Here's another garbage non-volatile part announcement.

New PlayStation Patent Could Provide PS5's Killer Feature

“A system and method are disclosed for dynamically loading game software for smooth game play," reads the patent "A load boundary associated with a game environment is identified. A position of a character in the game environment is then monitored. Instructions corresponding to a next game environment are loaded into a memory when the character crosses the load boundary, such that game play is not interrupted.”

Hasn't this already been implemented in open world games like GTA V and Skyrim?

So, someone who is moderately important to me is aging. As we age, we tend to fall apart. This person needed surgery on her knees. Nice, new knees, they say. I suppose that's all good and everything - but there is recovery to go through.

This woman spends much of her free time on Facebook, anyway, keeping up with kids, grandkids, etc - it's what women do since the advent of computers and Facebook.

Sadly, now that she's sitting around in pain, and suffering through the start of rehab, all she has to do is to post about recovery.

I'm starting to think there ought to be a law, or something. Me? When I was recovering, I resorted to the computer as well. I registered with an online game, and killed aliens and such. Hell, I didn't WANT people to know how much misery I was in. Can't dope yourself up, and stay unconscious for a couple months, right? So, I killed stuff.

I almost want to make a post to her Facebook page, tell her to STFU, and let us know how great she feels AFTER recovery. But, even an asocial asshole doesn't want to be THAT frigging rude. *sigh*

Let's just have Facebook make a new rule (they love making rules) that you can't post anything until you're off the painkillers. New national law says "You must notify all social media prior to undergoing surgery." Then, each of the platforms put your posts on hold, until you demonstrate that you've recovered. Six months after your surgery, you can sort through all the posts you made, and decide if you really, and truly, want to post ANY of that shit you wrote while you were in pain.

We've come to expect the youth to post every irrelevant detail of their lives to Facebook. I would expect more mature people to have more dignity.

Senators receive classified briefing on UFO sightings

A group of US senators, including the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, received a classified briefing Wednesday about a series of reported encounters by the US Navy with unidentified aircraft, according to a congressional aide.

"If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn't matter if it's weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely — we can't ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily," Rachel Cohen, the spokeswoman for Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, told CNN.

The briefing was first reported by Politico.

President Donald Trump recently confirmed that he was also briefed on reports of Navy pilots spotting unidentified flying objects. "I did have one very brief meeting on it," Trump told ABC News in an interview that aired Sunday. "But people are saying they're seeing UFO's, do I believe it? Not particularly."

‘We’re watching’: Trump stokes UFO rumors during ABC News interview

Asked if he would be told if extraterrestrial life was found, Trump said: “We’re watching, and you’ll be the first to know.”

[...] On Thursday, UFO speculation hit Kansas City after several people said two mysterious, white, hazy and elongated “orbs” had appeared above the city’s airport. A local TV station tweeted a series of photographs of the purported mysterious objects. “We’ve taken several calls in our newsroom about these two orbs spotted in the Kansas City sky tonight,” KMBC said. “This picture was taken near KCI Airport.”

The National Weather Service declared itself flummoxed. “We honestly have no explanation for the floating objects over Kansas City,” it wrote.

Navy SEAL War Crimes Witness Says He Was the Killer

In stunning testimony that may upend the war crimes trial of Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, a SEAL medic told the court on Thursday that he — not the chief — had killed a wounded captive in Iraq.

The medic, Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, testified that he watched Chief Gallagher stab the prisoner, a teenage ISIS fighter, in the neck, but that the stab wound did not appear to be life-threatening. After the chief walked away, Special Operator Scott told the court, he pressed his thumb over the captive’s breathing tube until he died.

“I knew he was going to die anyway, and wanted to save him from waking up to whatever would have happened to him,” Special Operator Scott said, adding that he had seen other captives tortured and killed by Iraqi forces.

He testified after being granted immunity from criminal prosecution for the events and actions that he would discuss on the stand. A Navy official said that he could still face nonjudicial punishment, including being dropped from the SEALs or discharged from the Navy entirely.

Did he do it, or is he just exploiting immunity to try to be a lightly punished fall guy?

AMD’s “special binning” the 16-core Ryzen 3950X to make it “your best gaming part”

It would be interesting to see an 8-core, 2 chiplet Ryzen. 4 working cores on each, up to 4 completely broken. Select the 4 best cores, pump up the clocks. Gamers will probably prefer that over 12 or 16 cores.

AMD EPYC Rome Specs Leak: From 8 Cores Up to 64 Cores

Supposedly, Intel's Ice Lake (mobile) will own AMD:

Intel Ice Lake benchmarked - i7 performs better with lower TDP than Ryzen 7 3750H-APU

Intel Core i7-1065G7 – 10nm Ice Lake Incoming, Surpasses AMD’s 12nm Picasso Ryzen 7 3750H in Latest CPU Benchmarks

Warren emerges as potential compromise nominee

I've predicted that Warren will be the 2020 Democratic candidate for some time now. But now it's going to require Biden shoving his foot in his mouth or otherwise getting heavily attacked (and there's a lot of inconvenient stuff in his long political career). The meat grinder debates on June 26th and 27th (Wednesday and Thursday) should help with that.

Some potential good news for Warren:

1. She is in the first debate night.
2. Biden, Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Buttigieg are in the second group. Warren's closest competition is Beta O'Joke. The two groups were randomly selected.
3. She will literally be center stage, along with Beto, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar. Position is based on polling.

Maybe I'm wrong and being separated from Biden and Sanders will mean lower viewership and less chances to directly confront her top opponents. What do you think?

Biden/Sanders, Warren/O'Rourke to be center stage at first debate

The event is hosted by NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo, and will air live across all three from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET both nights. The debate will stream online for free on NBC News' digital platforms, including NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News Mobile App and OTT apps, in addition to Telemundo's digital platforms.

Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt, Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow and José Diaz-Balart will moderate the debate, NBC announced last week.

Notre Dame Cathedral holds first mass since devastating fire, with attendees in hardhats

We're gonna need a harder hat.

The Dark Implications of Facial Swap Filter Technology

Last month, Serena Lee was just another bubble tea-addicted New Jersey college student who loved to watch The Office while searching for her future beau on Tinder.

Except, actually, she wasn't. Lee was actually a male Princeton student named Sean who "got bored while cramming for finals and decided to catfish people with the new Snapchat filter."

Yep, that one. The one that makes men look like beautiful women and women look like men you'd cross the street to avoid. The one that's so popular that a lot of people who left Snapchat are re-downloading it just to see what the hype is all about. Snapchat's "gender-swapping" filter, which came out in early May of this year, quickly became a social media hit. And Lee wasn't the only one who immediately used it to pose on Tinder — there's a whole trend of catfishing-for-jokes, which consists almost entirely of men pretending to be women.

While on a surface level the filter may seem like harmless fun, its implications, both conceptual and practical, are deeply troubling. Besides spawning this real-life catfishing phenomenon, which tells us nothing new about men online, Snapchat's employment of face alteration technology along the axis of gender enforces stereotypical ideas of male and female appearances, and raises questions about how we should employ such identity-altering (or concealing) technology in the first place.

Student uses gender-bending Snapchat filter to catch cop allegedly seeking underage sex

A college student wanted to take down potential predators on Tinder. So, he posed as a teen girl using Snapchat's new gender filter — and ended up catching a cop allegedly looking to hook up with a minor.

Ethan, a 20-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area, used the Snapchat filter to pose as a 16-year-old girl named Esther. He created a Tinder account as a 19-year-old girl, but said he was communicating with San Mateo Officer Robert Davies as a 16-year-old, police say.