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“If the FISA Bill is passed tonight on the House floor, I will quickly VETO it,” the president tweeted just after debate on the measures began. “Our Country has just suffered through the greatest political crime in its history. The massive abuse of FISA was a big part of it!”

Studious critics pointed out that Trump himself signed into law the long-contentious spying authority he recently began railing against.

“He literally signed warrantless surveillance of Americans into law on January 19, 2018, with the reauthorization of FISA 702,” observed former Republican Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.).

“I’m sure you don’t remember this, didn’t really understand it when you did it, don’t understand it now, and lack the intellectual capacity ever to understand it, but you signed into law Public Law No. 115-118, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017,” post-2016 Election Trump critic George Conway noted via Twitter.

A presidential signing statement from 2018 reflects Trump’s prior view of FISA spying authority:

This intelligence is vital to keeping the Nation safe. As shown by the recent attacks in New York City and elsewhere around the globe, we face a constant threat from foreign terrorist networks and other foreign actors who would do us harm. In order to detect and prevent attacks before they happen, we must be able to intercept the communications of foreign targets who are reasonably believed to possess foreign intelligence information. Section 702 provides the necessary authority, and it has proven to be among the Nation’s most effective foreign intelligence tools. It has enabled our Intelligence Community to disrupt numerous plots against our citizens at home and our warfighters abroad, and it has unquestionably saved American lives. The Act I have signed today preserves and extends this critically important national security tool.

Reminder: Trump Signed into Law the Warrantless FISA Surveillance That He’s Railing Against

Just play the national anthem real loud. If he doesn't stand up, kick him off the precinct football team.

PineTab Linux Tablet will have an Optional RTL-SDR Expansion Module

What's interesting about the PineTab is that they are advertising that they are working on expansion options, with one expansion module being an RTL-SDR. It seems that the expansion module will allow cards to be inserted internally, keeping everything tidy on the outside. Apart from the RTL-SDR, they will also offer LoRa, LTE (with GPS) and sata SSD add on cards.

May Update: PineTab Pre-Orders, PinePhone Qi Charging & More!

It looks like AMD will launch some Zen 2 refresh CPUs to stave off Intel's Whatever Lake before the Zen 3 launch:

AMD Ryzen 9 3900 XT, Ryzen 7 3800 XT, Ryzen 5 3600 XT ‘Matisse Refresh’ Desktop CPUs Confirmed – Same Core Config, Higher Clocks & Price Cuts For Existing Models

If correct, these should replace the 3900X, 3800X, and 3600X, boosting clocks a bit. Pricing would be the same as the original lineup ($500, $400, $250 respectively), while the older chips will get price cuts.

Separately, Tom's Hardware reported replacements for 3800X and 3700X:

AMD Reportedly Planning Two New Ryzen 3000-Series CPUs

The Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 7 3700X are the two potential Zen 2 candidates that could undergo the refresh treatment. If there is a tiny bit of credence in the rumors, AMD will market the rewarmed parts as the Ryzen 7 3850X and Ryzen 7 3750X with the latter having already surfaced in AMD's Product Master guide since last year. In other words, the Ryzen 7 3850X and Ryzen 7 3750X would just be higher-binned variants of their vanilla counterparts.

"... you ain’t black"

That was weird...

Is the universe broken? Is the universe evil? Does the universe reward evil? Mr Betteridge was unavailable for comment.

This is a follow-up to my earlier joural entry, Humanity Failed. When its admittedly pessimistic tone was pointed out to me in the comments, I wrote:

The point is that entropy means that it's much, much more more work to clean up and repair after a few bad apples have caused widespread harm and destruction than it is for those harms to be initiated. Advances in technology, the organization of large corporations and nations, and the sheer weight of numbers of the human population mean that today a handful of bad actors can easily wield sufficient power to ruin much of the world for centuries to come. At that point the strengths are irrelevant. Barring the invention of some self-replicating conservation bot, it's just too hard for the humans that care to keep healing the world when the ones that don't go on fucking it up on ever larger scales.

I admit it was all very bleak and one-sided. I do recognize that such a big decline is not the only possible outcome for humanity. It's just that having seen humans' greed, short-sightedness and ignorance triumph again and again over attempts to introduce greater compassion has made me believe that the decline is the most likely outcome, by a very long way. It doesn't necessarily mean that humans will become completely extinct, although they might, and it doesn't mean every last human will be destitute. I'm talking instead about an overall downward trend.

On this subject of entropy, Subsentient suggested perhaps the universe itself is broken in a sense that it rewards evil and chaos over goodness and order and that human misbehavior is a product of that. It's an interesting idea, which makes a certain amount of sense in that the second law of thermodynamics dictates that total entropy tends to increase over time, and I've certainly expressed my displeasure in the past about Heat Death as a likely fate of the universe.

I'm personally not inclined to blame the universe for humanity's ills. I wrote in the comments that entropy is what gives us possibilities and variation and without the countless disordered states, we wouldn't have many interesting and beautiful ordered ones. However, this is such an intriguing topic that I felt it deserved further thought.

Evolution can help to increase local order for a living organism, although everything any organism does, including what we'd normally consider morally good acts, increases entropy globally. It's something that nature has just had to deal with, work around, and often embrace. Death at the cellular level isn't a bug, it's a feature.

To answer whether our own universe might be broken, let's try to imagine a universe where the harmful aspects of entropy are less of a threat, a philosophical heaven if you like. Perhaps there could be some kind of limits on entropy. Matter could have a kind of memory (maybe some physical link to its past) that could favor it returning to an earlier, more ordered state. Say, for example, your house falls down, but all you have to do is start putting back a few of the bricks into the right place and it pops right back into its more stable and more ordered past state. While this might sound nice initially, without some serious tuning it could be catastrophically awful. Imagine a centuries old house spontaneously reassembling itself in the middle of your freshly prepared dinner. Or worse, in the middle of your body. It makes transporter beams look positively safe in comparison!

Another way a universe might seem less threatening could be if the building blocks of macroscopic objects could just be much harder to mess up and simpler to assemble, like a natural form of Lego bricks. The obvious problem with this particular design is it would massively limit the complexity of organisms and machines that could be constructed in the world. Things like brains might turn out impossible to build, so they'd have to be there since the beginning of time if you needed them to exist.

If these sorts of ideas were applied to our own universe, with the sort of problems I identified ironed out somehow, I think we'd be starting to get close to something a bit like some MMO game servers, where anti-griefing restrictions aim to limit the harm players can inflict on one another. In a game like Minecraft, for instance, some servers use block protection plugins or backups and rollback to stop griefers destroying players' buildings. This may make the more constructive players happy in the short to medium term but there are eventual limitations to how a universe like this can work.

The problem is that, just like our own civilizations, there's a limit to how many people such a world can support. If you ban the destruction of buildings, over time the world will completely fill up with them as the population increases. If you start to impose limits on building and land use, increasing numbers of people will inevitably end up homeless. A game server would avoid tricky moral issues like this by simply placing a limit on the number of players. On our own planet, population restrictions have been used occasionally with some success but they're exceedingly unpopular.

To take this idea, of modifying a universe's laws to make it harder to do evil, to its logical conclusion, one might hope that we'd end up with the sort of philosophical heaven we mentioned earlier. We might adopt a very carefully crafted moral code and make it into a physical law. For example, Azuma Hazuki suggested a modification of "love thy neighbor" into her Platinum Rule: "do unto others as they wish you to do unto them, provided you are not harming others in doing so." If we accept this as an absolute physical law for our universe it's likely to be an extremely rigid place, devoid of even the illusion of free will; lacking challenge; boring, even. Or perhaps even paradoxical. The more libertarian among us might call it the ultimate nanny state. To go back to our computer game analogy, it would be like an open-world game that is actually much too heavily scripted and restricted, disallowing much experimentation by the player that the designer didn't intend. Unless these moral restrictions on a universe arose by chance, such a place would be typical of what we might expect from intelligent design. In our own universe, we don't have these moral restrictions, so it's unfortunately (or fortunately) up to us to define the morals for ourselves. This is where I think we, as a species, fail, big time.

Some will say that nature places its own sort of Darwinian restrictions on the growth of a population, making the system self-correcting, and that it's only human sensibilities that cause people to want to reject such a brutal outcome. Certainly it's only humans on this planet that can speak and write about such suffering, but I think it's completely obvious that animals have just as strong an aversion to suffering, and in many cases empathy for the plight of others of their species and sometimes even other species. Where humans are unique is in the scale and speed with which they can change this natural system, either for the better, or, all too often, for the worse. Evolution can't keep up with the pace at which humans are changing their environment, causing a widespread loss of biodiversity. Along with many other species, we're all victims of humans' excessive success.

So, yeah, I still think it's not the universe that's broken, it's the human psyche.

Hot Chips 32 (2020) Schedule Announced: Tiger Lake, Xe, POWER10, Xbox Series X, TPUv3, Jim Keller Keynote

Online-only conference, August 16th to August 18th.

IBM, USCB, and Google's quantum computing presentations should be interesting in light of: Some Serious Drama Went Down on Google’s Quantum Computing Team and IBM and Google disagree on quantum computing achievement

Other interesting presentations:

Marvell ThunderX3 ARM server CPU
2nd generation of the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine
Alibaba RISC-V
ARM Cortex-M55
DeepMind and Google's 2nd and 3rd generation tensor processing units (TPUs)
Manticore: A 4096-core RISC-V Chiplet Architecture for Ultra-efficient Floating-point Computing
Baidu Kunlun AI processor
Alibaba Hanguang 800 NPU

The democrats have quite the sense of humor:

Sen. Gary Peters (Mich.), the top Democrat on the panel, warned that the "extremely partisan investigation is pulling us apart."

Role reversal is so cool!

Watch for updates...

UPDATE:

So, do the Biden tapes exonerate him? Doesn't matter, they could be fake, they, and the girl will still occupy his entire campaign. The guy is so damaged. The DNC/GOP is very happy with Trump. They will be just as happy with Biden. *Back to Normalcy*, right?

Man who called coronavirus ‘fake crisis’ gets infected, wife in critical condition

Florida man who downplayed coronavirus as ‘fake crisis’ gets infected, warns others after ending up in ICU with wife

Florida man who called coronavirus ‘fake crisis’ gets infected, warns others

He didn’t wear a mask and called the coronavirus ‘a fake crisis.’ Then he was infected

Man who called coronavirus ‘fake crisis’ gets infected, issues warning

Quoting first article:

A Florida man who worked as a rideshare driver and refused to wear a mask out of skepticism of the coronavirus pandemic has been hospitalized, along with his wife, who is now facing a serious threat from the disease.

Brian Hitchens said was a self-proclaimed COVID-19 skeptic about a month ago, WPTV reported.

“I thought it was maybe the government trying something, and it was kind of like they threw it out there to kinda distract us,” said Hitchens.

On Facebook, Hitchens said he believed the pandemic was “blown out of proportion” and said he was putting his faith in God.

“I’d get up in the morning and pray and trust in God for his protection, and I’d just leave it at that. There were all these masks and gloves. I thought it looks like a hysteria,” Hitchens explained.

Now, Hitchens and his wife are in the hospital after contracting the virus.

“I don’t want to see anyone go through what I went through,” Hitchens said. “This wasn’t some scare tactic that anybody was using. It wasn’t some made-up thing. This was a real virus you gotta take seriously.”

Hitchens is showing signs of improvement, but says his wife’s condition deteriorated and she had to be sedated and placed on a ventilator 3 weeks ago.

“After 3 weeks I have come to accept that my wife may pass away and the peace I have about it is that I know without a shadow of a doubt that she will be going home to be with the Lord but I also do believe in miracles and I’m holding on to the chance that she may get healed but if not I am thankful for her I know we’ve been married for 8 years,” he said.

“Looking back I should have wore a mask in the beginning but I didn’t and perhaps I’m paying the price for it now but I know that if it was me that gave it to my wife I know that she forgives me and I know that God forgives me,” he said.

^{_<no-sarcasm>}
My first almost instinctive reaction, upon reading the headline was the Nelson "haha". But when reading the first paragraphs, this story is nothing but sad.

I would say to the guy, "God gave you a brain, use it."

Maybe this is a lesson learned too late and the hard way.

But I think the real blame goes deeper than just laughing at or blaming this working guy. I doubt he hatched his misconceptions on his own. He probably heard them in various right wing echo chambers he visits. This is where the real blame lies. (pun intended)

How is it in the 21st century we have half the population listening to echo chambers that outright deny science, have a disdain for education and intelligence, pick the worst human beings to be their representative (not the best and brightest), and blame the other half population for their chosen representative? How is it we have echo chambers that openly and brazenly spew outright lies? Alternate facts? Calling the free press the enemy of the people, without seeing the irony of 1984. This is where I think the true problem lies. I'm not absolving this guy of all blame, but I think he was convincingly led into dangerous (maybe fatal) misinformation, by someone who knew that they were lying. Someone made up these lies out of thin air. They didn't just get on the air by themselves.
_{^{</no-sarcasm>}}

Due to popular demand.
On your grocer's shelves...
Clorox Bleach now in Grape and Orange flavors! Traditional unflavored Clorox now available in convenient pre-loaded syringes.

Cybergang behind Lady Gaga data dump leaks hacked law firm's emails and contracts mentioning President Trump, says it is posting 'most harmless information' first

The unidentified cybergang who dumped Lady Gaga's data after the hack of a prominent entertainment law firm have dumped what they say is data about the president.

The cybergang dropped links to "the first part of data, with the most harmless information," on the dark web site. A sampling of the files reviewed by Business Insider were were legal emails, documents, and contracts mentioning the president, from an "Apprentice" costar's emails seeking to land a new show during his campaign, to the contracts negotiating legal use of his videotaped interviews.

The ransomware gang has stolen data from businesses and leaked it on a dark web site in the past, and a ransomware expert who has followed past data dumps said it's difficult to know what they data they have stolen – but said the crime adds to a wave of highly public ransomware extortion attacks.

Criminal group that hacked law firm threatens to release Trump documents

Hackers Release Dozens of Law Firm’s Emails Citing Trump, but There’s No ‘Dirty Laundry’

The criminals’ claims to have revealing info on Trump in connection with their hack of Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks were puzzling, given that the law firm has never represented Donald Trump or the Trump Organization.

The hackers claimed the emails they released Saturday contain “the most harmless information” about Trump — apparently trying to imply they are holding back more compelling material. But considering that what they published contained nothing remotely interesting, it seems likely that the cybercriminals are vastly exaggerating the value of the data they’ve stolen.

Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks refused to pay the cyberthieves’ initial $21 million ransom, after which the hackers doubled their demand to $42 million. Now that it’s clear the law firm, which has brought in the FBI to conduct a criminal investigation, will not even negotiate with the criminal ring, the hackers are claiming they will auction off the client data they stole on the dark web.

The attack on the Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks network, which appears to have occurred on or around May 7, allegedly resulted in the theft of documents on multiple music and entertainment figures. The hackers have claimed those include Lady Gaga, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Bruce Springsteen, Mary J. Blige, Ella Mai, Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey, Cam Newton, Bette Midler, Jessica Simpson, Priyanka Chopra, Idina Menzel and Run DMC.

What is the name of the group?