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This journal is #FAKENEWS. Statement from The Wall Street Journal.

Remember this story? Google Fails to Stop Major Brands From Pulling Ads From YouTube

If you can watch an 8m05s YouTube video, check this out: Evidence that WSJ used FAKE screenshots. [You can't, because it's down right now. It could be the user pulling it because they found out they were wrong, or it could even be retaliation from WSJ/News Corp. I will keep an eye on it.] Otherwise, read ahead:

A Wall Street Journal reporter, Jack Nicas, has been covering YouTube for a while. He apparently took some screenshots of ads playing alongside racist videos and uploaded them to Twitter. In one case, he "found" that Coca Cola and Starbucks were playing ads alongside a video with "Nigger" in the title. This video was obliquely referred to in one of his WSJ articles, and it was implied that he contacted Coca Cola and other brands to pressure them about his findings - resulting in their brands pulling advertising from YouTube.

Ethan Klein contacted the user that uploaded a video that was "screenshotted" multiple times by Jack Nicas. YouTube has detailed information and graphs related to monetization of videos, and the platform indicated that the video had been monetized for a few days back in September. The Nicas screenshots showed a view count close to the amount that the video reached towards the end of its life, before it was reported and deleted by YouTube (after being highlighted by Nicas on Twitter).

Basically, while YouTube may be scrambling to launch machine learning algorithms that automatically label ISIS beheading videos as offensive and minimize brand exposure to them, YouTube is not stupid enough to forgo implementing simple keyword filters. Content creators on YouTube have talked about how using the wrong words, even innocuous ones, in the title or description will result in a video getting demonetized. Why did it take days for that screenshotted video to get demonetized? Probably because the keyword filter flagged it, and then a Mechanical Turk came in days later and gave it the thumbs down, cutting off all revenue for good.

So either this Wall Street Journal reporter lied, or some of the details about how the YouTube system works are incorrect. Perhaps the revenue was not as flatlined as it appeared, or ads can accidentally play on videos that appear demonetized. Or maybe the evidence sent to Klein was itself faked. In the worst case scenario, a "reporter" actually edited screenshots to make it appear that major brands were advertising on offensive content, proceeded to pressure big companies to pull millions of bucks worth of advertising, and then bragged about it on Twitter.

Does WSJ have it in for YouTube? Klein puts out one theory. WSJ reporters, including Jack Nicas, were behind a recent hit piece on PewDiePie, the YouTuber with the most subscribers. Many YouTubers came to the defense of PewDiePie, recognizing that the alleged hate/anti-Semitic/"Nazi" content that he posted was in jest. WSJ ran its own video version of its article that stripped away much of the context surrounding the jokes. In the end, while PewDiePie was dropped from Disney's Maker Studios and lost his premium YouTube show, he appears to have gained rather than lost subscribers. So it is a bit of a lost cause for the WSJ.

Attacking YouTube directly has seemed to have a much bigger impact, with many brands pulling away from Alphabet/Google/YouTube and demanding stronger tools to prevent ads from appearing alongside offensive content. A tall order, since it is a machine learning task. Obviously, Ethan Klein and other YouTubers with millions of subscribers stand to lose a lot of ad revenue if YouTube's value to advertisers plummets. Klein also uploads videos that are likely to be labeled offensive and restricted to only advertisers that check the right boxes.

Why would the Wall Street Journal want to kill YouTube, other than baiting some clicks? WSJ is owned by News Corporation, which owns various old media outlets that would like to get a slice of YouTube's advertising pie and reach with younger viewers. Judging by the scale of the brand freakout, it was well worth the time it took to put together a half-dozen articles or so.

If you want, you can also watch this 13m59s video from Ethan Klein (part 1 to the part 2 this journal is about). There's also this 5m49s video from another YouTuber showing how at least one man (Eric Feinberg) stands to benefit from the ad controversy - by selling his patented offensive content detection algorithm to Google. This is the article that the video references:

Google said in a blog post that it's beefing up its tech efforts and hiring more people to prevent placement of ads with unsavory content. A spokesman declined to comment further.

But Mr. Feinberg said in an interview on Friday that he doubts Google can succeed. At least, he said, "not without violating my patent."

I'll turn this journal into a submission if there are further signs of the WSJ's narrative crumbling.

Trump takes risk with Freedom Caucus attack

A fun article.

Anti-tax and pro-life leaders who huddled with Ryan in the Speaker’s office Thursday were livid that the Freedom group scuttled the health bill. The legislation would have repealed $1 trillion in ObamaCare taxes and made $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, while defunding Planned Parenthood.

“I didn’t understand how big this was to the pro-life community. They are pissed as hell at the people who are undercutting them. You just torpedoed defunding Planned Parenthood and you don’t think you can be primaried from the right? You are just wrong,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform who attended the private meeting with Ryan.

Got to say, the green look on the site is actually *really* nice. If it was a few shades darker though, we'd be too close that the site that shall not be named.

Three transients arrested in Atlanta highway bridge collapse (CNBC)

Yes, they do mean that inter-dimensional travelers (persons staying or working in a place dimension for only a short time) are sabotaging America's infrastructure.

AP link #1
AP link #2
Fox News
The Republic

(all 4 links are the same AP story)

Dell’s 32-inch 8K UP3218K Display Now For Sale: Check Your Wallet

Overall an 8K monitor offers 33.2 megapixels of coverage, which in a 32-inch (31.5-inch) form factor gives 280 pixels per inch. 33.2 megapixels is four times that of UHD, which is 8.3 megapixels. Users wanting to play some AAA titles at 8K on this beast are going to run into walls with memory bandwidth very quickly, however eSports titles should run OK. Using some undocumented tricks, a pair of tests in our new set of gaming benchmarks for CPU reviews can render at 8K or even 16K without needing a monitor, so you might see some numbers in due course showing where we stand with GPU power on this technology. It’s worth noting that Raja Koduri, SVP of AMD’s Radeon Technology Group, has stated that VR needs 16K per-eye at 144 Hz to emulate the human experience, so we're still a way off in the display technology reaching consumer price points at least.

Oh no, that's not enough horrifying detail for me and I think I will wait for 16K.

The Unicode Consortium will adopt a new crop of emoji in June 2017.

So far, we're getting an exploding head, a face with "!@#$%&" in front of it, a vomiting face, a monocled face, an older (unemployable) adult, a woman with headscarf, a bearded man, breast-feeding, mages, fairies, vampires (you can potentially make a black vampire by adding the U+1F3FF Fitzpatrick modifier), merpeople, elves, genies, zombies, an orange heart, gloves, giraffes (pregnancy not specified), a hedgehog, a T-Rex, a steak, a fortune cookie, a flying saucer/UFO, and the flags of England, Scotland, and Wales (perhaps the Unicode Consortium is preparing for the dissolution of the United Kingdom by adding these in advance).

I'm not sure why this stuff popped up in Google News on the 22nd, since most of the glyphs have been known for months. There may be some new languages that weren't there back in August, as well as a Bitcoin sign.

Rumor: AMD Working on 16 Core/32 Thread Ryzen CPU To Take The Performance Crown In The HEDT Spectrum

AMD Announces Ryzen 5 Lineup: Hex-Core from $219, Available April 11th

$249: Ryzen 5 1600X
6/12 cores/threads
3.6/4.0 GHz base/turbo
95 W TDP

$219: Ryzen 5 1600
6/12 cores/threads
3.2/3.6 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

$189: Ryzen 5 1500X
4/8 cores/threads
3.5/3.7 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

$169: Ryzen 5 1400
4/8 cores/threads
3.2/3.4 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003574546

Their project is supported by a Japan Science and Technology Agency program that provides subsidies of up to ¥5 billion for promising technologies. The corporate-academic project team aims to achieve the fastest computing speed in Japan by June, which would make the computer the third-fastest in the world, and eventually claim the world’s fastest position.

The new supercomputer will be the first to be equipped with a high-capacity, low-power 3D integrated circuit (IC) developed by Keio University Prof. Tadahiro Kuroda. The team is utilizing ExaScaler’s original “liquid cooling” technology to efficiently cool down the heated computer using liquid carbon fluoride.

These technologies allowed the supercomputer to be downsized to about one meter wide by one meter long. The plan is to link and install 18 such computers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology’s Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, to achieve a speed of 24 quadrillion computations per second. If successfully realized, the new supercomputer will have the highest capability in Japan and be the third-fastest computer in international speed rankings.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/03/14/new-japanese-supercomputing-project-targets-exascale/