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Family outraged after a Universal character made 'OK' symbol on 6-year-old's shoulder

OK hand sign added to list of hate symbols

Petition Unicode for deprecation of 👌 immediately.

This is not OK!

It's in the queue! MartyB's final report on the rampant censorship on SoylentNews! Or, the rampant incompetence of SoylentNews. Or, how paranoia seeps deep into our psyches, poisoning our every move, no matter how innocent or unintended. Did Athanasius Kirchner accidently delete, or not post, a journal? Or, did The Mightly Broussaerd, in his role as alt-right sympathizing libertariantard, intervene in the free speech of SN? Well, I trust all who recognize the tagline "#Freearistarchus!!" know were I stand. This report will be as good as the report on whether or not Trump committed treason. And I expect no less from SoylentNews, after my experience of having been censored by the objections of the TMB, so it will be much the same. But this being the case, if any case can be made, such as the thousands of rejected aristarchus submissions, it does not look good for SoylentNews.

Janrinok is now rejecting aristarchus submissions in Swahili. Racist bastard!

Rumor: AMD Zen 3 Architecture to Support up to 4 Threads Per Core With SMT4 Feature

This rumor has been around for months now, such as in this May 8th video.

One possibility is that Zen 3 Epyc gets SMT4 and Zen 3 Ryzen only gets the current SMT2, or maybe SMT3.

Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

The other big thing to watch out for would be a large amount (at least 1 GB) of High Bandwidth Memory stacked on top of the I/O die, acting as L4 cache. This could happen with Zen 3, or Zen 4 at the latest. Compare to Intel's eDRAM which has been included on some of its chips with integrated graphics (64-128 MB). Ultimately, every chip should be getting some version of this in the years before the transition to 3DSoC designs.

Someone suggested that it was bad to put a bunch of DRAM on chips, since it is a single point of failure. But reducing the distance data has to travel on the chip is the way forward for more performance. You can still have DRAM DIMMs in addition to the CPU, but there will be a demand for as much DRAM or universal memory as possible near or inside the CPU. 1-8 GB is a good start, but it would be better to have room for the entire operating system, application(s), and full data sets. Meaning something more like 64 GB to 1 TB.

Iowa reporter who found a viral star’s racist tweets slammed when critics find his own offensive posts (archive)

King’s social media missteps came to light after Calvin, a trending news reporter at the Register, delved far back into the casino security guard’s old tweets. Calvin discovered two 2012 tweets, written when King was in high school, that the Register described as “racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another making light of black people killed in the holocaust.” When Calvin asked King about the tweets, he told the reporter seeing them made him feel “sick.”

Before the Register published its profile online, though, King held a news conference on Tuesday evening to apologize for the posts and to announce that Anheuser-Busch had ended its partnership with him. The beermaker still promised to donate the more than $350,000 it had already pledged to the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics.

King explained that the tweets had been jokes among friends watching Comedy Central’s “Tosh.0” and that he didn’t remember them until Calvin dug them up.

[...] Between 2010 and 2013, Calvin published tweets that used a racist slur for black people, made light of abusing women, used the word “gay” as a pejorative and mocked the legalization of same-sex marriage by saying he was “totally going to marry a horse.” The Register’s statement on Twitter was soon flooded with images of the reporter’s offensive comments.

Note that the reporter contacted Anheuser-Busch to share the old tweets before the profile even ran, flexing that "I'm about to end this man's whole career" spirit.

Des Moines Register hit after report digs up old, offensive tweets of local man who raised $1M for charity

After the piece stirred up controversy on social media, critics then performed a "routine background check" on reporter Aaron Calvin's social media footprint and found several insensitive tweets of his own.

In now-deleted tweets from 2010-2013, Calvin repeatedly used the N-word, and wrote posts attacking law enforcement like "f--- all cops," and in reaction to the legalization of gay marriage said he's "totally going to marry a horse."

Before locking his Twitter account, Calvin issued an apology for his own tweets.

"Hey just wanted to say that I have deleted previous tweets that have been inappropriate or insensitive. I apologize for not holding myself to the same standards as the Register holds others," Calvin wrote.

The Register later tweeted that it was "aware of reports of inappropriate social media posts" by Calvin and an "investigation has begun."

Aaron Calvin: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

King’s momentum came to a screeching halt when Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin found some offensive tweets King posted when he was 16. The tweets reportedly compared black mothers to gorillas and made light of the Holocaust. According to King, he and his friends were quoting the TV show “Tosh.0.”

The Washington Post glossed over the "quoting" of Tosh.0, instead saying "the tweets had been jokes among friends watching Comedy Central's 'Tosh.0'". That's particularly relevant, because:

Some Twitter users were angry with Calvin for digging into King’s past and raining on the donation parade. So much so that they started investigating his old tweets. What they found was just as if not more offensive than anything King had said.

“too many of these n*****s bitch made nowadays, don’t pardon my french” read one tweet. He also said the word again quoting a Kanye West song. “They’d rather give me the ‘n**** please award’. I’ll just take the ‘I got a lot of cheese award’ Tell it like it is Kanye.”

He also tweeted “I just got hit on by Tori Amos’ makeup guy. Never talk to strange gay men.” and “F*** the NYPD” in response to a tweet about rapper Desiigner being arrested.

[...] According to his portfolio, Calvin started his career as a Staff Writer/ Social Media Coordinator for Buzzfeed. His portfolio for them includes articles such as “This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is” and “Which “Friday Night Lights” Character Are You?”

He interviewed authors Claire Vaye Watkins and Padgett Powell for Vice and has also been published by Men’s Journal, Digg, and Catapult.

He did nothing wrong! He was just quoting Yeezus and trying to emulate his favorite rappers!

Not every Cancel Culture story has such an amusing ending, but the hypocrisy is probably more widespread than you think. Smarter reporters mass delete their old tweets before they attract attention. This action can be reflected in analytics data (e.g. SocialBlade). However, millennials and post-millennials who have lived their entire lives online are likely to have created a massive digital footprint, often using their real names, that can be used to hang them years later. Parents should probably give a crash course on using fake names and throwaway accounts before letting their kids loose on the spynet.

After Trump uses taxpayer money to extort the government of Ukraine for election assistance, a formal impeachment inquiry is announced.

Timeline:

Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say

Trump admits he discussed Biden in call with Ukrainian president
And, a cherry-picked and redacted transcript excerpt of one of the calls confirms this admission.

A whistleblower makes a formal complaint about these and other calls that Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined to be credible and of “urgent concern.” In violation of the law this complaint is witheld from Congress.

Pelosi pulls the trigger, announces formal impeachment inquiry.

The Whitehouse now claims it will follow the law by releaseing the complaint, but it will be redacted.

One of the things I noticed about the CPU of the Orange Pi Zero is that it tends to run very hot, and it would frequently hit 60°C+ during my tests of the random number generator circuit. So I put my tests to a halt, and I bought heat sinks for it, which just arrived today, installed them, and tried to run the generator. I noticed that the program I have sampling the GPIO pin ran much, much faster with the heat sinks (>40 kbps), but also it failed the FIPS 180-2 tests consistently. Now that says quite a lot. Seems what's been happening is that before I got the heat sinks, CPU speed throttling has been fortuitously preventing the OPi from sampling the RNG circuit at a rate higher than the maximum noise bandwidth available from the circuit (I estimate it to be at around 8 to 12 kHz or so), but with the thermal issues addressed by the heat sinks, the OPi was then able to sample it at a rate above that, and so the random bits became far more biased. I did a few more changes to the code to add delays to GPIO sampling, and the quality of the random bits generated increased substantially. So yeah, I think that was it.

I think that was also the reason why the RNG circuit experienced such catastrophic failure before as well. The room upstairs with my router and all of the other home server equipment is air conditioned, and so there were less thermal issues up there than downstairs where I conducted the other tests, where there is no air conditioning. The kernel was throttling the CPU down to a rate at which it was only capable of sampling the random circuit somewhat below the available noise bandwidth when I had the OPi downstairs, but upstairs where the CPU was being cooled by air conditioning, it wasn't being throttled as much, and so the RNG tests were coming up heavily biased as a result. Such are the vagaries of life.

So now it looks like I'm going to have to enforce stricter sampling of the random number circuit or use stronger unbiasing algorithms, like perhaps getting 1024 bits from the circuit and using SHA-256 or some other suitable hash algorithm to generate 256 less biased random bits from there. I'd prefer to avoid using such complex methods to unbias the circuit though.

I'm going to try to find some other promising circuit designs as well. The one described here sounds like it might work very well, but that requires me to construct a PCB and solder several surface mount devices. Seems I can manage that somehow, given that I managed to successfully solder an SOIC8 IC (an ATECC508a) onto a breakout board, but of course it will take much longer. The other circuit I've done experiments on, which involves driving the base-emitter junction of a transistor above breakdown voltage, requires a 12V+ supply. Maybe what I can do here is provide power to the whole board from a 12V power supply brick regulated down to 5V using a simple 7805-based regulator circuit, as it seems putting 5V on the GPIO header's power pins will power the whole board (at least according to this). That will save the 5V to 12V boost converter circuit which would otherwise take up a large amount of expansion board real estate.

Surface Laptop 3 Specifications Mention Unreleased AMD Octa-Core CPUs & up to 16GB RAM

Rather than the chiplets used by other Zen 2 CPUs, this is likely to be a monolithic die. Graphics is probably Vega, not Navi. I have an aging AMD quad-core APU that would be blown out of the water by an 8-core Zen 2 Renoir.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the prices, that's just Microsoft emulating Apple.

Finally, this is worth a look:

Not worth it: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H is only 4 to 8 percent faster than the Ryzen 5 3550H

Ryzen 5 3550H = 8497 multi, 1886 single.
Ryzen 7 3750H = 9051 multi, 1962 single.

+6.5% multi, +4% single. Bad segmentation.

The chips aren't bad but Intel's do about the same (but better single-threaded) at lower TDPs, and Intel has options like the 6-core i7-9750H in $1,100+ laptops, or the 8-core i9-9880H in $1,800-$3,000 laptops. AMD Renoir could bring those core counts down to earth, and trade blows with Ice Lake.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers

'Shallow' hit-maker Mark Ronson puts brains before looks as he comes out as sapiosexual

Chart-topper Mark Ronson has come out as sapiosexual. In case you're not familiar with the term, it means being attracted to intelligence above other traits -- or, in other words, putting brains before looks or gender.

Ronson, 44, is known for a string of successful collaborations with A-list artists from Amy Winehouse and Adele to Miley Cyrus. This year, he won the Oscar for Best Original Song with "Shallow," interpreted by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in Hollywood's latest reimagining of "A Star Is Born."

Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain on Thursday, he said: "I feel like I identify as sapiosexual." Anchors Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway congratulated him on being "out and proud."

Author Nichi Hodgson appeared on the show earlier, defending the term. "The definition of sapiosexuality means intelligence first," she said. "I have dated men, women, transmen, transwomen, and across the gender spectrum and identify now as bisexual," she added. "The thing that has linked all these people has been their brains."

[...] "It's always existed, we just didn't have a word for it," she said.

Brain in a vat, that's how I like 'em.

A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day’s labor in the fields, officials said on Thursday.

The attack on Wednesday night also injured 40 people after accidentally targeting farmers and laborers who had just finished collecting pine nuts at mountainous Wazir Tangi in eastern Nangarhar province, three Afghan officials told Reuters.

U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan