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Feds Warn Alex Jones to Stop Hawking Coronavirus Scams
The FDA sent a letter to the infamous conspiracy theorist on Thursday saying he needed to stop pushing colloidal silver as a therapy for COVID-19

The Food and Drug Administration is demanding that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones stop advertising dubious dietary supplements as coronavirus treatments and threatening legal action if he doesn’t comply.

The FDA sent a letter to Jones and his website InfoWars on Thursday demanding that he stop telling the viewers of his popular internet broadcasts that they can ward off the virus with colloidal silver products sold on his website. Those videos, the FDA wrote, “misleadingly represent them as safe and/or effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”

A failure to remove those claims, the agency added, “may result in legal action seeking a Federal District Court injunction and an order may require that you pay back money to consumers.”

Jones, who is famous for fabricating conspiracy theories and marketing dubious health supplements, has been hawking supposed coronavirus-killing colloidal silver products in videos with titles like “Deep State Using Coronavirus Fear and Panic To Destroy Our Country.” In one video posted last month, he told viewers of his ”Nano Silver” supplements: “the Pentagon has come out and documented, and homeland security have said this stuff kills the whole SARS corona family, at point blank range.”

[ . . . . ] Despite Jones’ on-air claims to the contrary, language on InfoWars’ online marketplace explicitly states that its colloidal silver products are not designed to treat the virus. “The products on this site are not intended for use in the cure, treatment, prevention or mitigation of any disease, including the novel coronavirus,” the website warns. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false and is expressly disavowed.”

Jones and InfoWars were also targeted by authorities in New York last month over his claims about the products’ ability to ward off the coronavirus. The state’s attorney general sent InfoWars a cease and desist letter demanding it stop airing dubious claims about its products’ health benefits.

I seem to recall that Jim Bakker was similarly threatened, then arrested for similar claims about the same bogus cure. Unlike Alex Jokes, at least Bakker could say that spreading this kind of misinformation to his followers was the christian thing to do.

Another source: FDA warns Alex Jones over false coronavirus claims

We have to decouple Wall Street from Main Street. And we have to eliminate usury. The working economy will snap back as soon as we are allowed to go outside.

Today Canada's prime minister finally admitted what was obvious to anyone with high school biology under their belt - until there is either a vaccine or the virus infects the majority of the population, this is the new normal.

Yesterday I went for an appointment with the social worker helping me deal with the consequences of vision loss. She forgot to call me to tell me that we'd be communicating by phone instead - which is okay. It gave me a chance to see the new precautions they've put in place. A nurse pre-screens you before you're admitted to the actual offices. Have you been out of the country recently, have you had any cough or fever in the last two weeks, are you feeling ill, etc.

And hand sanitizer and masks are obligatory. All chairs have been removed, replaced by tape markers on the floor at 6' intervals.

I had on of my N95 masks on, so no need for the crappy surgical masks. So we got to talking about how stupid the government has been not being honest with people about things like masks, and how this is not going to end any time soon. We both figure a year minimum.

I explained the measures we're taking where I volunteer, and how we couldn't take new volunteers as one of our precautionary measures. She recognized the place from a TV news interview about it, and agrees 100%. This is not the time for adding people with unknown histories into essential services "because they want to do something to get out of the house and away from the kids." Kids are spreaders. Period. You have kids at home, go take care of them.

Speaking of which, there was a news item today about a new group of volunteers doing drop-offs of groceries to shut-ins. No masks, going into people's homes. That's just too fucked up to contemplate. Volunteers need to demonstrate at least the same level of professionalism as paid workers. Otherwise you're just part of the problem.

Contrast this with our local grocery store today, all the customers were wearing masks and waiting outside way over 6' apart waiting to get in a few at a time, and everyone got a squirt of hand sanitizer at the door before being admitted.

"Do the needful" is now a handy phrase, not something to be ridiculed.

I was going to bike to my meeting, but one of the tires blew when I re-inflated it after a winter of storage. Oh well, I can always walk it - the weather's nice, and if I see a bus I can hop on it (bus services have been reduced to reflect the vastly reduced ridership, and it changes every day, so what the heck - it's only 3 hours and I need the exercise and fresh air).

Between walking there and back, and walking the dogs, I recorded a new personal best - 40,972 steps. So I'm happy about how it all turned out. Exercise and fresh air are always good, and all those miles along the bike paths, I only say one bicycle and a few other walkers. Rush hour traffic? A joke.

So this is the new reality - plenty of people working from home, (almost) everyone taking essential precautions, and until there's a vaccine or enough people get infected and die, expect wave after wave as people and governments try to relax existing precautions.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the economy works, but I doubt we'll do so, even with a gun to our head. Because collectively we're stupid.

Same as the Johovah's witness on the other side of the street yesterday horking her lungs out while saying that Jehovah will protect her from covid. Still stopping people and trying to convert them because she's "on a mission from Jehovah." Or the other woman who keeps saying that she can't be affected because "Jeebus won't let it happen."

Or all the people planning family get-togethers this Easter weekend in violation of government regulations because "family is not really a different household even if they live at a different address." Even if they obviously are a different household. Anything to justify bending the rules. Like the family downstairs who don't count people's kids in the "only 2 visitors per household" law. Or the neighbour who doesn't believe that covid is a respiratory disease, so no need for masks, and "the numbers are being exaggerated anyway."

Darwin will take care of all of them, since none of them bother masking up or taking other precautions. Who knows, maybe this will be a vast experiment in eugenics, increasing the average intelligence of those who survive because they weren't doing stupid shit all the time.

So, because of EBOLAIDS, I have found myself with a large amount of free time, having lost my job.
The last week or so I was fiddling with various compiled languages, trying to see if any of them were actually a good replacement for C++. That list included Rust, Crystal, Zig, and Nim.

Don't get me wrong, I actually like C++, but I can't deny it's a bit verbose and that can be painful at times.
It's also enormous and impossible to keep all of it between the ears. None of that would be enough to really bother me enough to switch, but all the languages popping up trying to replace it, I wanted to see what those would look like. I decided I don't really adore any of them.

I think Crystal has promise, but ultimately abstracts away too far from the machine.

I like much of Rust, but it has the same "verboseness" problem as C++ and Java, etc.

Rust's move semantics are nice, but ultimately a headache, and the compiler whines at you for stuff that really, it has no justification for doing so, e.g. the styling of variable names. Crystal won't let you use CamelCase at all!

Zig is fugly to me, and Nim feels too abstracted, and also doesn't feel like a real language, since it just compiles to C, though that might be me just being anal.

My attention eventually shifted around to poking around the docs for stuff like LLVM and libgccjit, wondering how difficult it would be to make a language of my own.

I really think I can do this.

Now, for the most part, I don't expect anyone else to really like my language, my main motivation is so I myself have something cozy to work in that I really like, but I do have some design goals in mind, and I do want at least some people to like my creation.

Here's the plan, in no particular order:

• Keep it small. The language should be small enough to memorize all or most of it, like C.

• Memory safe defaults, but unrestricted and un-nagged use of pointers. The programmer is probably not completely brain dead. No "unsafe" blocks or any of that crap. I will use libgc for the garbage collector, like Crystal does.

• Fairly easy to parse, fast to compile, encourage 3rd party compilers by making them easier to build.

• Reduce required typing to achieve a task.

• Portable. From hosted environments like Linux and Windows, to garbage-collection-free environments like kernels. Backend will be libgccjit, because it supports more targets than LLVM and produces slightly better code.

• Small compiler. Easy to just tar up and take wherever you go, run it right from an extracted zip file, or install it if you like.

• All datatypes are "plain old data", e.g., you can safely memcpy one to another without worrying.

• Freeform language, use whatever indentation and variable naming schemes you like.

• No centralized "ecosystem", like Cargo for Rust, Shards for Crystal, nothing like that. It should be easy enough to just plug into CMake and use. It should be decentralized in nature and able to be used anywhere.

• Real, normal looking, single-inheritance based object oriented support.

• GNU-compatible compiler flag options, e.g. -march=native, -Ofast, etc.

• Automated C parsing utilities that emit bindings, IN BOTH DIRECTIONS. This means you will get C header files to interact with libraries written in the new language.

• Public domain. Free to do whatever you wish with the compiler, with no restrictions.

The name of my glorious creation?

Gerbil.

I chose that name because it reminds me of a little gerbil running in a wheel, doing his best, and also because I'm a twisted bastard who likes Richard Gere jokes and has a couple other inside jokes about gerbils.

It has some quirks so far, and the syntax is *very* open to radical change, but here's a pastebin of the latest at the time of writing: https://pastebin.com/h5vYQiVq

Please give me your thoughts, opinions, and suggestions.

I'll put up a repo when I have something that compiles. I have a few hundred lines of header files right now setting up the compiler's internal type system.

Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment (5m28s video)

This AI Makes "Audio Deepfakes" (5m37s video)

Demo (disabled)

arXiv

Previously: Deeper Fakes

Bernie Sanders Drops Out of 2020 Democratic Race for President (archive)

Mr. Sanders championed and popularized liberal policies like “Medicare for all” and free four-year public colleges aimed at lifting up America’s working class, but he faced opposition from many party leaders, elected officials and major donors, as well as large numbers of moderate voters who saw him as too far left.

Mr. Sanders never accepted that argument. In recent weeks he said repeatedly that he had won the ideological debate, asserting that a strong majority of Democrats supported his progressive agenda. But during a striking news conference in Burlington, Vt., last month, he also acknowledged that he was losing the electability battle to Mr. Biden, saying voters had made clear that they thought the former vice president was the best candidate to beat Mr. Trump.

He repeated that argument in his announcement on Wednesday.

“Focusing on that new vision for America is what our campaign has been about and what in fact we have accomplished,’’ he said. “Few would deny that over the course of the past five years our movement has won the ideological struggle.”

Alleged sex pest Joe Biden in.

Two weeks ago I said I'd post the solution for how to get the information that jalrinok decided to pick a fight over in less than 20 minutes.

For those of you just tuning in (yeah, riiight ...) I mentioned that some of the comments on the green site had mentioned that Uber had initially tried to do a self-driving car OS using javascript.

This was years ago, buried in the comments, and everyone had a good laugh at Uber's expense (it was the sort of screw-up that we expected of Uber by then), but it wasn't at all newsworthy - Uber had just laid off 400 devs and it was obvious that they were not ever going to make a self-driving car quickly enough to be able to replace their drivers ("independent" but very dependent contractors) with autonomous vehicles, and they would continue to bleed money.

jalrinok demanded I prove it. My feeling was "why should I? It's not important to anyone, it's ancient history, and if it's that important to you do your own research."

He then proceeded to show that he doesn't know how search engines work (they don't index comments on slashdot because they respect the robots.txt file). "I can't find it using a search engine!" "Of course not, stupid, comments aren't indexed!"

So he goes on saying how he doesn't read slashdot because he doesn't want to be accused of plagiarism, but scrapes 3 years worth of stories ... and reads them.

And of course, he can't find the mention of Uber using Javascript, again because it's only in the comments. It was never important enough to make a story out of it.

So he keeps challenging me to prove it. I keep pointing out that he's claiming it's not true, so it's up to him to prove I;m a liar. Simple solution - all he has to do is dig up an article anywhere in the world on what Uber was using at the time.

He couldn't.

So he keeps on claiming that it's up to me to prove it. I keep saying that it's not up to me to prove anything, because the whole question is not important to ME. If it's important to him, that's simply not my problem ...

I also put it to him and everyone else that he can get the information with 20 minutes of work.

That was two weeks ago.

All he had to do was post to Ask Slashdot.

You all keep overthinking problems.

Reminds me of the story of a bunch of so-called geniuses who were given the problem of a bracelet with 6 black beads and 7 white beads. Each black bead had a white bead on either side, and each white bead had a black bead on either side, except for one pair of white beads side by side.

B-W-B-W-B-W-W-B-W-B-W-B-W

Without undoing the knot or cutting the highly elastic string that the beads were strung along, find some way to manipulate the beads so that every white bead has a black bead on each side,, and every black bead has a white bead on either side.

You can stretch, twist, and even loop and pass the string through the hole in each bead as many times as you want.

The geniuses couldn't figure it out.

Then the bracelet was given to a girl who was intellectually challenged. She took a hammer and broke one of the pair of white beads. Simple solution to what was actually a simple problem.

I was tempted to actually do this, but it wouldn't have been fair to martyb and a few other decent people.

So I've come up with my own "hammer" solution - just use the existing options to ignore the ignorant, and spend more time in the real world on things that actually matter, helping 800 people every week cope with the vicissitudes of real life, working with others who have the same values and are also willing to do the hard physical labour needed, even when it would be easier to say "sorry, this covid-19 thing makes it too risky for me, pre-existing conditions, you know ..."

So say what you want, I don't really care because you've demonstrated that many of you are not worth caring about. You need to step away from the keyboard and get a life, get a job, whatever it takes to add something relevant to your lives.

Or you can keep criticizing me, but I won't see it. It will be as if you're pissing in the wind ... or a cup.

Bunch of stupid lamers. Can't even figure out a simple problem ... because you hate slashdot so much that you couldn't bear to think to Ask Slashdot.

President Donald Trump's fixation with hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria and lupus, as a potential treatment for the novel coronavirus has left many medical experts, including members of his own administration, frustrated. The drug comes with severe side effects ranging from nausea and hair loss to blindness and cardiac arrest; the hoarding of the drug to test it in COVID-19 patients has resulted in autoimmune patients being denied it, and the evidence that it even helps COVID-19 patients in the first place is anecdotal at best.

The president himself, according to Peter Baker, Katie Rogers, David Enrich, and Maggie Haberman has a financial interest in Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical company that manufactures the drug under the brand Plaquenil.

"Some associates of Mr. Trump's have financial interests in the issue. Sanofi's largest shareholders include Fisher Asset Management, the mutual fund company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans, including Mr. Trump," said the report. "Another investor in both Sanofi and Mylan, another pharmaceutical firm, is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi."

Trump holds "financial interest" in pharmaceutical company that produces hydroxychloroquine: NYT

Latest Zen 3 rumor further reiterates 10-15% IPC gains per thread and 32 MB of shared L3 cache per CCX, Zen 4 to feature 1 MB L2 cache and AVX 512 support

According to AdoredTV's sources, the IPC gains in Zen 3 will be on par with that of Zen 2, which is between 10-15% per thread. Multi-threaded workloads could still see larger IPC gains. Zen 3 will also introduce a new CCX design, which could be among those core architecture improvements Dr. Lisa Su had alluded to earlier. Zen 3 will have one CCX with eight cores with a single L3 cache at 32 MB per CCX. Larger caches such as 48 MB or 64 MB are not indicated. With the new cache design, more number of cores now have access to a common L3 cache on the same die. This will likely reduce latency and improve gaming performance. Zen 3 will continue to use SMT-2 and not SMT-4 as was rumored earlier.

[...] Also being confirmed is something that we had reported back in December 2019 — that the 5nm Zen 4 Ryzen 5000 will herald the beginning of a new socket. New information we have now is that Zen 4 will feature more cores, a 1 MB L2 cache, AVX 512 support, and will look to offer much improved IPC.

"Rumor" in this case means "anonymous sources who (supposedly) emailed a YouTuber".

It was previously reported that Zen 3 would have a modest ~10-12% increase in integer operation performance, but something like a 50% increase in floating point operations.

Zen 2 has 512 KiB of L2 cache per core. New denser nodes like TSMC's "5nm" can allow an increase in the amount without increasing latency. This could go up even more in the future if 3D stacking is used, but the only thing that AMD has talked about so far is the use of HBM stacks on an interposer.

Zen 4 should be pretty interesting. AVX-512 support would allow it to catch up to Intel in the few benchmarks and pieces of software that actually use AVX-512 instructions, and could lead it to become more widely used. I am guessing that Zen 4 will have up to 50% more cores, e.g. a 24-core Ryzen 9 5950X.

I've been thinking that maybe I can avoid many of the problems here by just using the comment score modifiers.

For a couple of decades I've always browsed at -1. But the more I think about it, instead of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", maybe I can use the Covid-19 concept of "social distancing" to just get rid of the toxic crap in the comments?

So, no more seeing anonymous comments, no more browsing at -1 or even 0, and those I find to be a real PITA I'll just foe (I've just set foes to -6, and while I don't really like foe-ing anyone, it's a worthwhile experiment).

After all, their freedom of expression doesn't extend to any obligation on my part to listen to them.