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Aight, screw election year crap. Let's talk about something that really matters this weekend. The shitty state of vocals in music these days.

Look, Simon the douche-pickle and company, I'm fucking sick to death of you tools telling the nation think perfect pitch and complete lack of vocal character are what we should want to listen to. Fuck your vanilla, cookie-cutter, soulless voice clones. You're making everything into nothing better than fucking muzak.

No, fuck that. Let's talk about vocal artists who aren't completely interchangeable instead. Motherfuckers who can't be replaced because they actually put what makes them special into their music, themselves. The folks who you can hear sing and instantly tell who they are.

Here's some to get us on the same page and get things rolling:

• Dolly Parton
• Louie Armstrong
• Johnny Cash
• Mick Jagger
• Brian Johnson
• Willie Nelson
• Mike Ness
• Bob Dylan(decades ago Bob, recent bob is just entirely unintelligible even to fans)
• Cab Calloway
• Hell, Marshal Mathers even

That's my shortlist, whadda you guys got?

Update: This discussion got me to searching around. Just found Coulter Wall. Sounds like Johnny cash had a child with a bottle of whiskey. You can thank me below.

Apparently when I sacked out earlier I had left the TV and XBox in the other room on. One of the perks of being in your mid-40s though is you can rest assured that you will be up during the night to whiz and get a second chance to notice it. Now Microsoft being Microsoft, they just can't help advertising on the home screen about whatever random crap they're trying to push on you this week. Usually it's whatever they've replaced Gold Memberships with this week. Not this time though.

No, this time they felt the need to tell me to make sure and register to vote. Which is generally just annoying since nobody actually gives a fuck if you vote or not unless they're pretty sure you're going to vote for their lizard. It was annoying tonight for about ten seconds, then I remembered that it's five days too late to register if you want to vote in the November elections here in TN, six by the time the registration office opens in the morning. Which struck me as hilarious since I never heard a word about registering from them all last month.

So, my question is this: Was someone at Redmond trolling like a boss or are they stepping up their game as far as incompetence goes?

AMD announces Zen 3 CPUs tomorrow.

Intel Desktop Roadmap Through Q2 2021 Leaked – No HEDT Update Till 2H 2021, RKL-S In Mid March

Intel ‘Rocket Lake’ Desktop Processor With Next Generation Willow Cove Cores Landing In 2021

Intel Confirms Rocket Lake on Desktop for Q1 2021, with PCIe 4.0

Rocket Lake will compete with Zen 3, using backported "Willow Cove" cores on "14nm" instead of "10nm". That could improve performance by around 10%.

If it needs to, AMD could respond in the middle of 2021 with a Zen 3+ refresh, possibly on the new AM5 socket, or just wait until Zen 4 (late 2021, early 2022).

Intel 12th Generation ‘Alder Lake’ CPU With 8 + 8 Cores Spotted In Sisoft Sandra Benchmark

Alder Lake will likely end up competing with Zen 4.

This would be a second attempt at a hybrid x86 architecture, and it will probably find its way into laptops. Maybe even with the full "16" cores?

Intel Sapphire Rapids: MCM Design, 56 Golden Cove Cores, 64GB HBM2 On-Board Memory, Massive IPC Improvement and 400 Watt TDP

56 cores was expected, on-board HBM2e is new.

Kyrgyzstan election: Protesters storm parliament over vote-rigging claims

Protestors in Kyrgyzstan calling for the country's parliamentary election to be annulled have broken into parliament in the capital, Bishkek.

Footage showed people throwing papers from the building's windows, while others were seen entering the office of President Sooronbai Jeenbekov.

The break-in follows a day of clashes with police, who initially dispersed crowds with water cannon and tear gas.

The clashes come amid allegations of vote-rigging in last Sunday's election.

Following the vote, only four parties out of 16 passed the 7% threshold for entry into parliament, three of which have close ties to President Jeenbekov.

Kyrgyzstan election: 120 taken to hospital following result protest

Hailo-8 M.2 and mini PCIe AI accelerator cards deliver up to 26 TOPS

When looking at the performance chart released by Israeli startup Hailo, which pits Hailo-8 against Google Edge TPU and Intel Myriad X using popular ResNet and MobileNet models, I might as well titled this article as “Hailo-8 M.2 card mops the floor with Google Edge TPU and Intel Movidius Myriad X AI accelerators”.

The amount of AI processing power packed in such a tiny M.2 card is impressive, and it’s made possible by the higher 3 TOPS per watt efficiency compared to the typical 0.5 Watt per TOPS (or 2 TOPS per Watt) advertised by competitors. So a 26 TOPS Hailo-8 card will consume around 8.6 W, while a 4 TOPS Google Coral M.2 card should consume about 2 W.

As noted by LinuxGizmos who alerted us of the new cards, Hailo-8 was previously seen integrated into Foxconn fanless “BOXiedge” AI edge server powered by SynQuacer SC2A11 24x Cortex-A53 cores SoC and capable of analyzing up to 20 streaming camera feeds in real-time.

Good ole Slate, always ready, willing, and able to let everyone know exactly what kind of insane shit yall woke motherfuckers have going through your heads. Child abuse for social justice, baby!

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X “Vermeer” 12 Core & 24 Thread Zen 3 CPU Allegedly Up To 5 GHz With 150W TDP

Rumors say:

AMD will skip over 4000 to name the new Zen 3 desktop CPUs. There were plenty of complaints about Zen+ APUs being lumped in with Zen 2 CPUs and so on.

Somewhere between 15-20% higher overall IPC, ~10% higher clocks. Higher TDP: 150 Watts for the 12-core. Single core boost to 5 GHz.

Part of the improvement will be a unified 32 MB L3 cache for an entire core complex die (CCD). Maybe applications that are sensitive to that will show the most improvement.

12-core might be the top model at launch. That's how it was with Zen 2. The 16-core 3950X launched 4½ months after the 12-core 3900X. But it used better binned chiplets and had higher power efficiency than the 3900X.

So everyone's all got their panties in a bunch over the whole RBG spot on SCOTUS and Azuma the First has brought up the "What do you want in a Justice" question lately as well. Well, here's my $0.02.

I don't want anyone Trump would be likely to pick. And I sure as fuck don't want anyone Biden would be likely to pick. I do not want a Justice who will rule on any issues the way I think the law (or Constitution) should be written. I don't want a Justice who will take what's good for the government or the nation into account. I don't even want one who will take what's necessary for the government or the nation into account. I want a Justice who will absolutely always rule on the letter of the law, going to the spirit only if there is legitimate (not hairbrained, grasping for any straw) confusion about what the letter of the law actually meant to the authors at the time it was written.

Let's have an example. I don't have issue with the ramifications of Roe v. Wade. It's not an issue I feel I have wisdom enough to have an opinion on. I do, however, have every issue in the world with the legal contortions necessary to render the utterly shittastic and completely unfounded in law ruling. The proper ruling could have either been "Where life begins is for each state to decide," or "Where life begins is for Congress to decide via Amendment". Any other ruling is atrocious and absurd judicial overreach.

I'm probably about the only one who genuinely wants a court who will rule according to the actual law instead of what they think it should be though.

USB Overload: Portwell Motherboard Has 20 USB Ports

Surprisingly, the PEB-9783G2AR supports all 20 of it's USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports natively. That means there are no fancy gizmos like splitters or hubs, so you'll get the full bandwidth of the USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface on all USB ports. Of course, there are compromises; both chipsets support up to eight USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1, and 4 USB 2.0 ports natively. Presumably, to get to 20 USB ports, Portwell used the chipset lanes dedicated to 6 of the SATA ports and repurposed them to USB ports (there are only two SATA3 ports available).

Portwell positions the motherboard for server and workstation workloads. As such, it comes with an Intel W480E or Q470E chipset that supports 10th Gen Core i7/i5/i3 CPUs, including the 10th Gen Xeon W family of CPUs. However, the board doesn't support all CPUs from the 10th Gen Core and Xeon W Family - you're limited to a peak of 10 cores and an 80W TDP.

Belarus repeatedly interrupts at UN amid 'new iron curtain' warnings

Belarus and its allies have repeatedly tried to muzzle speakers at the UN amid warnings of a new iron curtain falling across Europe during an ill-tempered debate on alleged human rights violations.

The body’s 47-member human rights council voted by 23 votes to two with 22 abstentions to adopt a resolution condemning rights violations in Belarus and requesting the UN high commissioner on Human Rights to take up the issue and report back to the council.

The debate was repeatedly interrupted by the Belarus representative, backed by delegates from Russia, China and Venezuela, who tried to limit presentations – including from Alexander Lukashenko’s main election challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, on procedural grounds.

Tikhanovskaya’s short video message had barely begun when the Belarusian representative, Yuri Ambrazevich, demanded it be switched off. He repeatedly interrupted the screening, raising procedural objections and insisting her words had “no relevance on the substance ... on the events that are taking place today”.

He was overruled by the council president, Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger.