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AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 to launch on March 8, 2022

So apparently no cheaper quad-channel Zen 3 Threadripper, there may or may not be versions with 3D V-Cache later, and then you can expect to see 96-core Zen 4 Threadripper in 2023.

Edit: AMD confirms Threadripper PRO 5000WX series through SATA-IO filing

Edit 2: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 specifications have been leaked

There are 64, 32, 24, 16, and 12-core options.

You must remember the old joke about the electron who was stopped for speeding. The policeman said to him, "Sir, do you know how fast you were driving?"

"No," replies the electron.

"You were driving at precisely 100 miles per hour, sir."

Despondently the electron retorts, "Great, now I'm lost."

I was explaining that joke to Turgid jr. recently. When he was much younger, he just thought it was funny because an electron driving a car would be funny.

I said to him that he should ask his Religious Education teacher whether God knows the positions and momenta of all particles in the universe. His RE teacher is also his science teacher.

This should be interesting.

You know you love them! The SoylentNews definitive aristarchus submissions! Here are some that the Editorial stiffs do not want you to see! (Especially chromas and FatPhil!)

We have had many productive discussions about the total intellectual bankruptcy of the American conservative movement, what with their racism, misogyny, and basic ignorant moronity, but there is more! Yes, much more! And Soylentil Eds have prevented this from coming to your attention. I wonder why. Well, actually, I do not. But here it is, regardless.

Note that this is not irregardless, which I am at a loss to interpret!

  (excuse me if I do not edit up the original submission too much, the eds expect too much already).

From the fine website, History News Network.
What Will We Lose if the Anti-CRT Movement Wins?

Using the disingenuous label of Critical Race Theory, conservative parents and pundits have worked to stifle African American and other minority voices in the school curriculum and to minimize the teaching of race and slavery in America’s past. Coming of age in another time of division – the late 1960s and early 1970s – I had a very different experience.

I grew up just outside a conservative small town in western Ohio. The population was overwhelmingly white with only a few black residents. Goldwater did very well there in the 1964 presidential vote, as did Nixon four years later. Residents usually took a conventional line on the issues of the day, whether it be the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War. Life – and change – moved slowly. But I underwent change because of educational exposure to the history and culture of those who had a different skin color and life experience.

My different experience began with my parents. On my thirteenth Christmas in 1965, they gifted me three books on African American history. Two were compendia of important figures in the black past; one was a young adult biography of Harriet Tubman. The reasons for the specific gifts remain unclear. I had not requested them. I never asked why they made these choices. Likely the gifts had something to do with Mom’s Quaker upbringing and Dad’s egalitarian regard for and treatment of the few African Americans who lived in our community.

I guess we need to go back, further back into American History, into the Runaway Era.

In contrast to what conservative parents and pundits are claiming, none of these educational experiences produced self-loathing or white guilt. They did make me uncomfortable enough to explore further. They did produce awareness and some greater empathy for those outside my own life experience. And they affected my political, social, and cultural attitudes, especially those having to do with race. I was not alone.

Social survey data, most notably that from the extensive General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, suggests that white Baby Boomers, those born (like me) between 1946 and 1964, underwent greater positive change in their attitudes toward African Americans and other minorities than those of any generation before or since. These same surveys posit that it resulted from the broader educational exposure that white Baby Boomers received in learning about the experience of other races and their place (including their brutal mistreatment) in the American past.

Meanwhile, Runaway is still going on about "thugs" and "darkies". Is he going against the entire boomer generation? Is he abby normal?

Conservative parents and pundits want to prevent white students from being exposed to the messiness and inequities of America’s past. What will it mean if they succeed in doing so? My experience and that of other white Baby Boomers suggests the positive role played by such educational exposure – racial attitudes and awareness changed for the better. Stifling such exposure will not mean a continuation of the status quo. It will likely mean several steps backward.

Yeah, they are just like that. Nothing to do with historical attrocities, and white supremacism, and genocide, and how Republicans used to be the Party that Freed the slaves. Nothing.

  And, yes, there is more.

  12/10/2021
Yes, it doesn't stop there. Conservatives, like Nazis, want to burn books, censor intellectuals, and get back at their teachers who made them do hard stuff, like learn to read and figure. So not likely they will stop at Cathode Ray Tubes.
Article to be found in The New York Times, which is not in Texas.
In Texas, a Battle Over What Can Be Taught, and What Books Can Be Read

A new state law constricts teachers when it comes to race and history. And a politician is questioning why 850 titles are on library shelves. The result: “A lot of our teachers are petrified.”

SAN ANTONIO — In late September, Carrie Damon, a middle school librarian, celebrated “Banned Books Week,” an annual free-speech event, with her working-class Latino students by talking of literature’s beauty and subversive power.

A few weeks later, State Representative Matt Krause, a Republican, emailed a list of 850 books to superintendents, a mix of half-century-old novels — “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron — and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margaret Atwood, as well as edgy young adult books touching on sexual identity. Are these works, he asked, on your library shelves?

Mr. Krause’s motive was unclear, but the next night, at a school board meeting in San Antonio, parents accused a librarian of poisoning young minds.

Days later, a secretary sidled up to Ms. Damon and asked if district libraries held pornography.

“‘No, no, honey, we don’t buy porno,’” Ms. Damon replied.

She sighed. “I don’t need my blood pressure going crazy worrying about ending up on a politician’s radar.”

For background, see my recent journal on these idiots interpretation of Immanuel Kant. Against the dummheit, even the God contends in vain.

Texas is afire with fierce battles over education, race and gender. What began as a debate over social studies curriculum and critical race studies — an academic theory about how systemic racism enters the pores of society — has become something broader and more profound, not least an effort to curtail and even ban books, including classics of American literature.

Can't be letting the kiddies be reading subversive literature. The Bible is enough for any red-blooded fundamentalist right wing Christian nut-job Texan!

The law singles out one text as forbidden: The New York Times’s 1619 Project. Now a book, the special magazine issue attempted to place Black Americans and the consequences of slavery at the center of America’s narrative. The project — for which Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator, won a Pulitzer Prize — is hotly debated among historians and became an ideological piñata for conservative critics.

Thus, Runaway. There is much more, but since janrinok and his Anglo-white supremacist crew will just reject this submission, not really worth my time to quote them here.

Oh, dear!
Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
Makes me and Xenophanes sad.

Interesting recent intellectual history from Salon. What could have been, and how it all went terribly alt-wrong.

What once seemed like a bracing intellectual movement has degenerated into a pack of abusive, small-minded bigots

Yes, those guys.

It was inspiring — really inspiring. I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?

Yes, looked like the Enlightenment was back, Baby! But, then,

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

Fast-forward to the present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized. This may sound hyperbolic, but it's not when, well, you look at the evidence. So I thought it might be illuminating to take a look at where some of the heavy hitters in the atheist and "skeptic" communities are today. What do their legacies look like? In what direction have they taken their cultural quest to secularize the world?

Let's see if you can spot a pattern:

Just the first case study, you can read the entire fine article, if you are so disposed.

Sam Harris: Arguably the progenitor of New Atheism, Harris was for me one of the more entertaining atheists. More recently, though, he has expended a prodigious amount of time and energy vigorously defending the scientific racism of Charles Murray. He believes that IQ is a good measure of intelligence. He argued to Josh Zepps during a podcast interview not only that black people are less intelligent than white people, but that this is because of genetic evolution. He has consistently given white nationalists a pass while arguing that Black Lives Matter is overly contentious, and has stubbornly advocated profiling "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim," at airports. (When Harris believes he's right about something, it becomes virtually impossible to talk him out of it, no matter how many good arguments, expert opinions or hard data are presented to him. Like Donald Trump, he's pretty much unteachable.) Harris has also partly blamed the election loss of Hilary Clinton on "safe spaces, trigger warnings, [and] new gender pronouns," released a private email exchange with Ezra Klein without Klein's permission, and once suggested that New Atheism is male-dominated because it lacks an "extra estrogen vibe."

His primary focus these days is boosting the moral panic over "social justice warriors" (SJWs), "political correctness" and "wokeism," which he apparently believes pose a dire threat to "Western civilization" (a word that has a lot of meaning for white nationalists). Consequently, Harris has become popular among right-wingers, and the sentiment of solidarity appears to be mutual. For example, he's described Ben Shapiro as being "committed to the … rules of intellectual honesty and to the same principles of charity with regard to other people's positions," which is odd given that Shapiro is a pathological liar who routinely misconstrues his opponents in service of a racist, misogynistic, climate-denying agenda.

And to think, Sam started out in Buddhism? THE religion with awakening as a soteriolgical goal? Such a waste. The other cases are equally interesting, or damning.

The king SoC of ARM single board computers approaches.

Rockchip RK3588 datasheet available, SBCs coming soon

We had most Rockchip RK3588 specifications so far for the long-awaited Cortex-A76/Cortex-A55 processor, but at today’s Rockchip Developer Conference 2021, more information surfaces with impressive CPU and GPU benchmarks, and the Rockchip RK3588 datasheet has just dropped from the sky directly into my laptop, as such document usually does. At least two single board computers are expected to soon follow from Radxa and Pine64.

[...] I’m quite surprised they could use a Mali-G610 “sub-premium premium” GPU as it was announced together with Cortex-A510, Cortex-A710, Cortex-X2 Armv9 cores, but it also works in SoCs with older Armv8 cores so that’s good, and that’s why GPU performance is truly a big step, up to over 10 times faster, compared to Rockchip RK3399.

Rock5 Model B layout

Pine64 December update: a year in review

Lastly, Rockchip will finally be introducing the RK3588 on December 16th (which means I can’t write about it on the day the update goes live – sorry), which will most certainly be of interest to us. What I will say is that it will bring entry-level desktop-class Arm CPU performance and plenty of IO options; keep a lookout for press coverage of Rockchip’s event.

While the prospect of a high-end computational device is certainly exciting, it also isn’t at the top of our to-do list.

It's sad that this thing can be delayed by a couple of years and still look good in comparison to everything else on the market.

The only competitor (limiting "competition" to ARM SBCs) might be the Amlogic S908X, which has also been scarce.

Cannabis bill approved in parliament, in first for Europe

Parliament on Tuesday approved a cannabis law that will allow users to carry, buy and grow amounts of the drug, making Malta the first European country to introduce laws to regulate recreational cannabis use.

MPs backed the Responsible Use of Cannabis bill by 36 votes to 27. All Labour MPs voted in favour of the bill while the opposition voted against it.

The reform must be signed into law by President George Vella - a process that usually happens within days of parliamentary votes.

Vella, a doctor by profession, has faced calls from NGOs and lobby groups that oppose the reform plans to refuse to sign the bill into law.

Malta to become first country in Europe to legalize cannabis for recreational use

In October, Luxembourg announced it would legalize cannabis, however parliament has yet to approve the measure.

Italy will likely decide whether or not to decriminalize cannabis in a referendum next year, after campaign groups managed to gather the required 500,000 signatures required to force a vote.

And Germany's incoming coalition government also included plans to legalize cannabis in its vision for the country, which was published last month.

The U.S. budget deficit totaled $356.4 billion in the first two months of the budget year, down 17% from the same period a year ago thanks to a sharp jump in government revenues that offset a smaller increase in spending.

In its monthly budget report, the Treasury Department said Friday that the government’s deficit in October and November was $72.9 billion below the deficit in the same two months last year. The government’s budget year starts on Oct. 1.

The improvement was due to government revenues rising at a faster pace than spending over the past two months.

U.S. government deficit down 17 percent from same period a year ago

Biden told Putin that 'things we did not do in 2014, we are prepared to do now' if Russia escalates in Ukraine, top adviser says

The White House says President Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday that the United States is prepared to launch strong economic measures should Russia invade Ukraine -- signaling that these new measures would pack a bigger punch than the sanctions issued in 2014 that failed to stop Russia from occupying Crimea.

"I will look you in the eye and tell you, as President Biden looked Putin in the eye and told him today, that things we did not do in 2014 we are prepared to do now," national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Tuesday afternoon after Biden's call with Putin.

Biden administration considering options for possibly evacuating US citizens from Ukraine if Russia invades

The Biden administration is exploring options for a potential evacuation of US citizens from Ukraine if Russia were to invade the country and create a dire security situation, half a dozen sources tell CNN.

The contingency planning is being led by the Pentagon, the sources said, and comes as the administration briefs Congress on how the US is preparing. In a "gloomy" briefing to senators by senior State Department official Victoria Nuland on Monday night, Nuland outlined the tough sanctions package being prepared by the administration in response to a potential Russian attack, but acknowledged that the US' options to deter an invasion are fairly limited, a person familiar with the briefing said.

It is still unclear whether Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade, US officials stressed. But he has amassed enough forces, equipment and supplies near Ukraine's borders that he could move to attack on very short notice.

A while back there was a discussion in a thread here about the difference in performance between compilers and interpreters, and someone mentioned assembly. Of course, someone immediately answered that it, too, had to be compiled or interpreted.
        In fact, it doesn’t. We call programming “coding” but assembly really is coding, in the sense of WWII combat type codes where one character is substituted for another. In assembly, each command corresponds with a number, and that number is the command in machine language. The command MOV A B is a number corresponding to the command MOV and two more numbers for the variables.
        Those numbers aren’t all the computer understands. The computer understands nothing, not even the numbers that control it. Your doorknob understands as much as a computer does. A computer merely manipulates symbols.
        In the last few decades, the BASIC language has been looked at with nothing but scorn. It’s too easy to abuse, they say, spaghetti code that even the programmer can’t decipher after a week. Endless loops. I say these errors aren’t the fault of the language, but of poor programming practices.
        If you clearly document your code as you write it, it won’t be unrecognizable in a week. If you write small interlocking modules instead of a giant unithing it won’t be spaghetti code. If your single GOTO is like IF A>0 GOTO 10 followed by shut down code, if needed, there will be no endless loops.
        Its huge strength is how close it is to assembly language in structure, with very similar commands. Assembly uses the computer’s memory’s physical addresses to tell it where it is, BASIC has line numbers. Basic GOTO does the same thing as assembly’s JMP (I’m using Z-80 assembly here). GOSUB is JR.
        It’s been so long since I’ve used either language I’ve forgotten most of it, but BASIC and a hundred books or so taught me assembly. The way it happened was that I wanted a two player battle tanks game on my TS-1000, which was incredibly problematic in BASIC. First, it was way, WAY too slow, taking five or ten seconds for a “shell” to move across the screen, or for a tank to move the tiniest bit. After all, it was only an eight bit CPU running at 2 kHz. Second, for a two player game, each player would have to be pressing a key the same time the other player was pressing a key. This was solved with direct addressing, reading the keyboard hardware directly, and boolean algebra.
        The first problem entailed using a language that was native to the Z-80 CPU, meaning Z-80 machine code. Since there were no assemblers for that computer that I knew of, I had to assemble the code by hand.
        But first I had to learn the language. That took a couple of months, if I remember right. But testing its machine code modules before putting them together I discovered that the damned thing was just too fast! Way too fast. I had to put in a timing loop to slow it down enough to use.
        Again, the difference between an interpreter and a compiler is that a compiler compiles the program into machine code before the program runs, while an interpreter does it on the fly, making it much slower; it not only runs the program, but its interpreter.
        The difference between assembly and them is that in assembly, a command is one byte usually preceded or followed by a byte or two of data. Each command is simply a different representation of machine code, while compilers’ and interpreters’ commands call whole subroutines. That’s why assembled code is so much smaller and faster than compiled code, where an assembly command is maybe three bytes total, a C command could encompass hundreds of lines of assembly.
        That TS-1000 had 2k of memory, and another 16k could be added via a slot in the back. The BASIC for the “too slow to use” tanks game required the expansion pack. The assembled version was only a few hundred bytes!
        Years later, when I had a 386 and had just installed Windows 95, I needed to write another assembly program to run the DOS games, so I used DEBUG to write the tiniest program I ever wrote: BOOT.COM. The filename was bigger than the actual code, which was three or four bytes. Its function was to make the computer restart, so the machine could be rebooted from within a DOS batch file. I made one for each game, renaming autoexec to backup, renaming a “run the game” batch file to autoexec, which set up the sound and ran the game, resetting everything on the game’s exit, then rebooting again.
        Obviously, this would have been completely unneeded in Linux, but DOS can’t change much without a reboot. With DOS games it was usually arcane nonsense with sound drivers.
        Can you write a full video game in under 1k and a useful program in fewer than five bytes with a compiler? If you can, you’re a hell of a lot better programmer than I was!

Seagate Exos X20 and IronWolf Pro 20TB Expand Retail 20TB HDD Options

Seagate has updated their flagship capacity options for the retail HDD market with the availability announcement for two new hard drives today - the Exos X20 and IronWolf Pro 20TB. These two models join the recently-released Western Digital WD Gold 20TB and Ultrastar HC560 to round out the 20TB hard drives currently available for retail purchase.

Our infamous drone war has largely faded from the headlines. Aside from one strike that went horribly wrong during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, there has been vanishingly little coverage of what's going on with the signature American tactic of the war on terror: remote-controlled death robots.

So I was rather taken aback to discover President Biden has almost totally halted drone strikes, and airstrikes in general, around the world. It's a remarkable foreign policy reform, but also a remarkable failure of both government communication and media coverage. A hugely significant change in foreign policy has happened — and almost nobody is paying attention.

Immediately after taking office, he set up a new system requiring White House approval for any strikes outside of active war zones (and later published Trump's loose rules that enabled so many civilian massacres). Now that the occupation of Afghanistan is over, that requirement applies almost everywhere, and it appears Biden is extremely reluctant to grant approval. Where Trump oversaw more than 1,600 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria during his first 11 months in office, Airwars reports just four during Biden's term so far. Strikes in Somalia fell from roughly 75 last year to fewer than 10 this year, with no civilian casualties. And in Yemen, the annual total dropped from about 18 to maybe four, with fewer than 10 casualties of any kind. (Precise figures are unclear because some strikes are classified.)

This drastic reduction in airstrikes, like Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, was genuinely politically courageous and morally correct (though both fell short of a full imperial rollback). Some well-earned bragging is in order.

Biden nearly ended the drone war, and nobody noticed