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Dell's New Precision 7000 Workstations
Dell’s New Precision 7000 Workstations: Dual Xeon, Triple RTX, 3 TB DDR4, 16 TB NVMe
Launching in May, the new Precision 7820 and Precision 7920 machines will be based on one or two Intel Xeon Scalable ‘Cascade Lake-SP’ CPUs thus offering up to 56 physical cores supporting AVX512_VNNI instructions advantageous for workloads that use neural networks, which is why Dell emphasizes AI (and VR) in its announcement. On the graphics and GPGPU side of things, the new Precision 7900-series machines will feature up to three NVIDIA Quadro RTX graphics cards (no word on GV100-based GPUs, but it is highly likely that they will be offered as an option too).
The most hardcore Precision 7920 configurations will be able to carry up to 3 TB of DDR4 DRAM, up to 16 TB of PCI/NVMe solid-state storage (i.e., several M.2 and/or U.2. drives, depending on the configuration), and up to 120/96 TB of storage space enabled by ten 3.5-inch hard drives (i.e., Dell has certified 12 TB HDDs with the new system). Obviously, the workstations will support all kinds of connectivity along with 5.25-inch FlexBays (enabling ODD(s) and/or additional I/O modules for special purposes).
libya.hmm
A US citizen wants to overthrow a US-backed government in Libya. Here's why
At the heart of this is Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, now leading the current move by forces from the east of the country towards the capital Tripoli. Haftar is, to be polite, the ultimate pragmatist. He supported Moammar Gadhafi in his 1969 coup, then found himself in Langley, Virginia in the 90s where he gained US citizenship, before returning to overthrow Gadhafi in the 2011 conflict. Since then, he has been one of many strongmen claiming pre-eminence in the nation's descent into disarray, based in the city of Benghazi and exerting most of his control in eastern Libya.
US pulls troops from Libya amid a surge in violence
The United States military pulled a contingent of its troops from Libya on Sunday amid a surge in violence in the capital city of Tripoli, America's top commander for Africa said.
"The security realities on the ground in Libya are growing increasingly complex and unpredictable," Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of US Africa Command, said Sunday in a statement. "Even with an adjustment of the force, we will continue to remain agile in support of existing US strategy."
The American forces, who provide military support for diplomatic missions, counterterrorism activities and improving regional security, have been relocated temporarily in response to "increased unrest."
The root of all evil. No, really, I'm serious.
This is close. Very close. But it's only one specific case of a more generalized problem. I've referred to this before in a few posts as a sort of "moral priority-inversion bug," a very deep and insidious one that corrupts what you may think of as a person's moral elevator algorithms.
And what is it? Very simply, it's this: treating objects as agents and agents as objects. Or, elevating objects to or even over the status of other people, and objectifying other human beings.
The reason I call this insidious is that very often one is not aware that one is doing it, and the fact that ideologies and beliefs are part of this class of "objects" is why, as well as where, the majority of instances of this bug occur.
On this site, the most common manifestation I see of this particular bug is when someone asserts that their summum bonum is something nebulous like "freedom" or "liberty" or some such. This is one of the most difficult glitches to debug, because a) being for these things is always seen as a good thing, b) implying that one is against them is a powerful argument from emotion, c) much evil may be rationalized if one tells oneself that it is being done in the name of freedom and/or liberty, and d) at least in my observation, the kind of people prone to this bug in the first place are the type that are selfishly-oriented to begin with and not much for actual (as opposed to fake, self-serving) self-reflection.
What does this bug look like in practice? When you see someone who's so driven by a single ideal, let's say "freedom" here, that s/he starts making assumptions that are actually self-destructive of that ideal with a perfectly straight face, you have a good indicator that the bug is triggering. For example, "all taxation is theft" or "show me my signature on the social contract" in a discussion about the social safety net is a pretty good tell that the person you're talking to is glitching. When challenged on this, doubling down on the position and retreating to pedantic interpretations of one's value system in the face of observable reality is usually the next step. An inability, or an unwillingness, to separate de facto from de jure, in other words.
Specifically, when you point out to this sort of person that a starving, homeless, sick, frightened human is not a free human and you get back a blanket, emotional denial without so much as a "screw you, MUH PURITY!" you've run smack into it. One of the prime pathologies of people prone to this bug is, again, elevating ideologies over people. This is where that famous saying about "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to steal their bread" comes into play.
So how do you debug this? I have no idea. Short of pointing out that this is a dark antipattern that exists and making people aware of it, there doesn't seem to be much else that can be done. Like the proverbial lightbulb in the old joke, the bulb has to want to change, and as a consequence mostly of d) and partly of c), people may not be incentivized to do the debugging. You can't change someone's mind for them; true repentance, "metanoia" in the Koine, comes from the will within.
I hope that by pointing this out, I can get people to be on the lookout for this pernicious tendency, not only in others, but in themselves as well. Just pointing out that it's there to someone when they're displaying it may (or may not be, depends on the person) the first step toward preventing it from triggering.
Orange Corn
More nutritious, better tasting, non-GMO ‘orange corn’ launches in US markets
But where is my goddamn 50 lb sack of Golden Rice?
DNA testing for ancestry
We have a lady at work. Apparently a caucasian, with a little something extra thrown in, on the paternal side. She was always told that the something extra was "Native American". Not a bad looking lady, fairly smart, a little annoying sometimes, in that she's a dedicated "company man". Likeable, but not overly likeable. Typical sort of redneck woman, with a public school education.
The fact that this woman is married to a black man is relevant here. And, the fact that her daddy disapproved of the marriage is very relevant. White girls just DON'T marry black men in the south, of course.
She and her sisters wanted to find out more about their ancestry, so they sent off DNA samples to learn more about their ancestry. I guess one sister sent her sample to one company, another sister sent her sample to another, and the third sister used yet another service. Kind of a quality control check, there.
Results come back, and there is no hint that there is any Native American ancestry. However, there is a list of half dozen or more east African and central African tribes. Maybe an error? Possibly, but if so, why would all three sisters get same (actually, very similar, the lists of tribes weren't precisely the same) results from three different companies?
Sisters approach Daddy, and inform him of what they've learned. Daddy's reply, "I don't know what you're talking about."
I note that Daddy didn't outright deny the results, instead pleading ignorance. Funny, I think. Sounds like Daddy might have heard from Great Granny about some family scandal or something, but isn't ready to admit it.
No, I didn't inquire about the family's history during the slave days. I don't want to know the details, nor do I especially want to encourage a friendship with this woman. She is a rather annoying woman, remember. But, I find it amusing that a fine, upstanding member of the redneck community (the father, not the daughter who married a black man) has been found out as being part African. Gotta wonder if Daddy and/or any of his male relatives have been members of the KKK.
I also didn't inquire as to Daddy's relationship with his grandchildren. Can a bigoted redneck admit that he has half (or more than half) black grandchildren?
The woman in question can't exactly be avoided at work. I'm certain to hear more details in the coming weeks and months, whether I want to hear them or not.
Which suggests a question: How many Americans who claim to be "part Native American" are really "part former slave"? How about those who claim to be "part Hispanic"? How 'bout Pocahontas Warren?
Tucker Carlson: President Trump Doesn't Want to be Reelected
Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggests Donald Trump plans to doom his own reelection chances
Even if he loses, he wins!
Bezos Post paywall is more aggressive than ever, so I switched to this article.
Mueller investigation, what's the score now?
I have my own dire, well, sarcastic take on the mess, but let's hear yours first.
ESO Black Hole Announcement on April 10
Good story on end of dinosaurs
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/scientific-sleuths-discover-fossilized-killing-field-day-dinosaurs-died/
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-find-fossilized-fish-that-may-have-been-blas-1833671176
It's a story about a fossil and geology find in North Dakota, US that is thought to be from a few minutes after the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. I don't think there are dinosaurs in this particular find, but I recalled some news stories claimed otherwise. The evidence is intriguing: dating to around 66 million years ago, tektites showing up in the gills of dead fish, tiny holes punched in sea bed flood by tektites (meaning the sea bed had to be exposed by some high energy event like a huge earthquake for that to happen), burned tree stumps, and being buried by a second layer high in iridium like the worldwide K-T boundary.
The story goes that the asteroid hit and generated an earthquake of around magnitude 10 or 11. This generated standing waves in the inland sea that existed in the North America continent at the time, exposing said sea bed. The fish thus exposed, breathed in a bunch of suborbital tektites that would be falling in the minutes after the impact as well as the impacts of the tektites on the sea bed (this latter part is what is thought to nail down the time so closely, it's hard to otherwise explain why you have tektites in a sea bed). Then it would all be covered up and preserved for posterity when the earthquake ended and the tsunamis directly from the impact rolled in later.
My take is that this may well be the biggest find of this era ever precisely because it can be dated to within minutes of the extinction event itself and contains so much information about the environment at the time.
Nvidia Hologram Thing Leaked on Train
NVIDIA Project R.O.N Leaked – Google Home Like AI + Hologram Device
Nvidia employee takes a train, nosy nerd lands a scoop.
What will Nvidia call its Alexa?
(for ray tracing, and a GPU that will be released long after the RTX 2000-series came out)
Valve’s long-rumored VR headset is finally real: the Valve Index, coming in May
Valve just surprise revealed its own VR headset called the Valve Index
