SoylentNews

MDC quotes are going in the motd at the bottom of the page rotation starting tomorrow morning if my alarm can wake me up before I have to head out for yet another day of extreme remodeling. Post your favorites here.

[Update: Let's give it until Saturday before they go live, so people can be awake to actually contribute some quotes.]

Epic Showcases Gorgeous Ray Tracing Unreal Engine 4 Demo Running on a Single RTX 2080Ti GPU

During yesterday’s ‘State of Unreal’ keynote at the Game Developers Conference 2019, Epic Games showcased a gorgeous ray tracing demo titled ‘Troll’. Running on a single GeForce RTX 2080Ti graphics card and made with the Unreal Engine 4.22, Troll was developed with no custom plugins or code by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films.

‘Troll’ was visually inspired by the works of Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, who is famous for his illustrations of Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology ‘Among Gnomes and Trolls’. Epic’s 3Lateral took care of 3D and 4D facial scanning.

“Troll’ from Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films | GDC 2019 | Unreal Engine (1m33s)

AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs Get Early BIOS Support in X370 & X470 Motherboards, Next-Gen Zen 2 Based Family Internally Codenamed as Valhalla

Also, the creator of the Ryzen DRAM calculator has listed down some new features that might be coming in the Ryzen 3000 processors with one confirming that the Ryzen 3000 series processors would indeed ship with CCD (Compute Core Design, a new name for CCX), support a maximum of 32 threads which confirms 16 core parts, following is the full list of features which were found:

1) New memory controller with partial error correction for nonECC memory
2) Desktop processor with two (2 CCD) chiplets on board, 32 threads maximum
3) New MBIST (Memory built-in self-test)
4) Core watchdog – is a fail/safe function used to reset a system in case the microprocessor gets lost due to address or data errors
5) XFR – at the moment I do not see anything special about it, the algorithm and limits have been updated. Scalar Controll come back with new processors.
6) Updated core control has a symmetric configuration of the active cores . In 2CCD configurations, each chiplet has its own RAM channel in order to minimize latency to memory access. 1 channel on 8 cores will be a bottleneck if you use the system in the default state.

Have you heard of any feature like this? Does it even matter?

If you are buying 8 GB or 16+ GB DRAM modules, do they need to be ECC?

Hipsters and millennials, please learn what irony means. Most of the ways you use it, they're just you being a pretentious little shit not irony. This is irony (and also funny as a motherfucker).

"He's not really a Doctor, just a sort of a Doctor."
– Charles Kelley "Chuck" Lundquist

My name is Mad Doctor Mike, and my days are numbered. How cool can that be? Now I'll get all the Chicks!

There may be a treatment - but not a cure - for what I've got, those being Theophylline - the stimulant in Tea - or Aminophylline. Commonly found in Asthma Inhalers, I'd get injections or tablets.

That Cheyne-Stokes Respiration or "Stoking" is commonly known as "The Death Breath" is due to it's being most-commonly experienced by those who are in their final hours of life. In this order, it is as well found in those who are about to slip into a Coma, have Congestive Heart Failure or as a - rare - Sleep Disorder.

None of these apply to me, though I do have some theories: secondary to my raging unquenchable thirst of Psychogenic Polydipsia, an uncommon, poorly understood symptom of Schizophrenia and my own Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, Water-Soluble Nutrient Deficiency other than Sodium or Potassium, that my Party Animal Life has finally caught up with me, that I have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy or that I've suffered five concussions, two when I was beat up by the Police that put me into a Coma for three solid days.

(I call that last kind of thing "The Cost Of Doing Business".)

Azuma Hazuki speculates:

I've actually been thinking about you and your case a fair amount, and am completely utterly baffled. My first guess was some sort of seizure disorder well beyond TLE, maybe with involvement in Broca's Area among other places, perhaps with the pons or other parts of the lower brain involved as well considering the horrible agonal breathing you're suffering. And that it may be secondary to an actual physical lesion (mini-bleeds? Transient ischemia?) rather than just electrical glitches.

My PubMed reviews of the Clinical Literature regarding or "The Death Breath" indicate that my own form of it - awake and physically healthy - is as yet unknown to Medical Science!

I'M NUMBER ONE!
I'M NUMBER ONE!
I'M NUMBER ONE!

Inspired by the film Lorenzo's Oil, the Made For Hollywood but arguably true story of Augusto and Michaela Odone's desperate, relentless quest to find a cure for their son's "most-cruel disease" of Adrenoleukodystrophy or ALD, as the Odone's ultimate success was to a large degree the result of their organization an international conference of ALD Researchers, I shall too, I expect at Portland's Oregon Health & Sciences University, perhaps late this Summer so as not to conflict with the researchers' teaching duties.

You drunken layabouts shall of course all receive free tickets.

There's a simple way to help:

I need Postage Stamps, Envelopes, Paper and Printing to mail a two or three page purely informal paper to those roughly one thousand researchers, in which I shall invite them to my conference but not yet call for papers, as well as lucidly explain what I know so far, for example that sleep eliminates my Stoking, but only until I've been up for an hour or two upon awakening.

The attacks of severe fatigue I call "The Wearies" have been my most-common symptom since 2005; there's naught I can do but lie quietly in my bed until it passes. Coffee does not help; neither does sleep in this case, as I cannot get to sleep when I have The Wearies. My - frequent - Syncopes or fainting that because each episode last less than one second I call "Drop-Outs" are far, far more severe when I've either gone for more than two nights without sleep or suffered just one night with poor quality of sleep.

United States Resident?

Please send me the Postage Stamps in your purse, briefcase, wallet or desk drawer:

Mike Crawford
707 SW Washington St, Suite 1100
Portland OR 97205-3528
USA

Damn Ferriner?

Snail a check or money order in any - RLY - of USD, CAD, UKP or EUR to my address in Portland, or:

Everybody:

• PayPal: mike@soggywizards.com
• BTC: 3QqqbegpkU9DzKZ8rCPfYSkiyWVGnDSE8J
• LTC: MTPPDPhxkW1nu52AqvCeSbSkD32L9Vjuab
• ETC: 0xF41Da126Da6f6238d71845dF807Fd48Fd7c87184

In return for your uncommon kindnesses, I shall invite you to my funeral, presently planned for April First of this year.

KTHXBAI

I want to consider the two separate incidents in Christchurch, and consider how gun control might have influenced those events.

In the first mosque, those people were just screwed. No one was armed, no one seemed to have any warning. Dude came on like gangbusters, firing in through the door, advancing, and shooting at anything that moved. The people inside had very, VERY little opportunity to respond in any meaningful way - they were pretty much herded into two different killing zones, and they were trapped there. There may have been the slightest opportunity for an armed person to respond meaningfully, if only someone had a weapon. Sometimes, that's how things go - no matter how prepared you think you are, you can be caught by surprise.

In that second mosque? Apparently, there were no armed persons there either. But, there was one ballsy man who stepped up, and said "NO!" Or, to steal back the phrase appropriated by Tarrant, "I will NOT go gentle into that good night!"

Abdul Aziz faced off with the gunman as he advanced towards the mosque, yelling at him to "Come here!" and leading him outside.

EDIT: one of many sources for the quote - https://www.businessinsider.com/abdul-aziz-christchurch-new-zealand-mosque-shooting-2019-3

Abdul had no weapon. There isn't even any mention that he had a knife, however large or small. No firearms. He grabbed the first thing at hand - a stupid CREDIT CARD MACHINE, and advanced on the gun man. The thing was no better than a rock, but apparently there were no rocks at hand. With this near worthless poor excuse for a hefty rock, Abdul advanced, calling for the gunman to "COME HERE!"

You've all heard variations on the phrase, "Fortune favors the bold." In this case, Fortune did indeed favor the bold.

Somehow, in the confusion, the shooter ran out of ammo, apparently dropped the empty weapon, and ran back to his car to get another weapon. Although the details aren't clear, it seems that maybe Abdul threw his sorry excuse for a weapon at the shooter, who ducked into his car. Abdul then picked up the EMPTY weapon that had been dropped, and smashed the (already damaged) windshield, trying to get at the shooter.

About the time that the window was smashed out, the shooter lost his nerve, and drove away, cursing and screaming - and crazy-ass Abdul chased the car down the street!

Fortuna audentes juvat, or, fortune favors the bold

That fact has been observed since even before there was a Rome.

I think that puts paid to the several ideas proposed by hoplophobes that there is nothing a single person can do in these situations. Or, that an individual fighting back only endangers the people around him. All the excuses offered for ensuring that no one CAN fight back. True, the assailant has the initiative, but there is nothing to say that he is calm, cool, collected, and STABLE. If you watch the video of the killings at the first mosque, there are signs that he is falling apart, and losing his nerve. Here, at the second mosque, there is no - I hesitate to use the word "rational" - but there is no rational reason for him to run from an unarmed man. But, the shooter has lost it, in the face of one determined man who maybe has more balls than brains. He tucks his tail, and runs away!

But, we knew this people. Many of us have learned this fact from combat veterans, from police officers, and from anecdotes in real life emergencies. Many of us have seen this in our own lives. And, in fact, there have been some studies on the issue.

What good can an armed teacher do in a shool shooting situation? I invite you to peruse one study: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/01/foghorn/ttag-simulated-school-shooting-experiment-results-and-analysis/

Some teachers are pretty ineffective, others are more effective, and others are extremely effective in neutralizing an assailant.

Conclusion

This experiment was a preliminary test, providing a proving ground for the methodology and scenarios selected for testing before being implemented in a large scale test at a later date.

Based on the limited data collected from this experiment it appears that an armed teacher would save lives in an active shooter scenario. The caveat: the teacher’s effectiveness depends on their level of training. Maximum effectiveness of an armed teacher of any skill level is achieved with advanced warning of the approaching shooter and implementation of a classroom “lockdown.”

If you prefer the full report, rather than the story linked above, PDF here: https://86262a2d5a8678610839-0d14e49ee6aa00b4013e3b6293913ee7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/SchoolShootingSimFINALREPORT.pdf

Executive Summary
At the King 33 facility in Connecticut, 11 volunteers along with 5 staff members enacted a series
of simulated shooting scenarios with the intent of determining whether an armed teacher or
armed guard at a school such as Sandy Hook Elementary would have been able to successfully
confront and interdict an active shooter.
When designing the scenarios for this experiment, care was taken to identify moments during
the progression of a “typical” active shooter case where armed intervention would have been
effective in interdicting the shooter. Three such moments were identified, specifically the
moment the shooter entered the school building, the moment they entered a classroom, and
the moment an armed response arrived on scene. One of these scenarios (when the shooter
entered the classroom) was enacted both without any advanced warning that the shooter was
coming, and with sufficient time for the teacher to enact a standard “lockdown” procedure as
implemented at Sandy Hook Elementary.
For scenarios where no advanced notice was given, unarmed participants were instructed to
leave and re-enter the area being defended at random in order to simulate normal traffic and
keep the defender from being able to react to an event such as the door opening instead of the
first sight of a gun or the sound of a gunshot, as would be the case during a real shooting.

Do you want to be safe, people? Put an end to gun control. Allow individuals to protect themselves, their loved ones, their friends and associates, as well as random strangers in the vicinity. Put gun safety courses in the junior high schools, and encourage kids to learn how to handle weapons. Put advanced courses in the high schools, and form gun clubs in those schools. Familiarize everyone with weapons, and end the fear of weapons.

An inanimate object cannot decide to kill you. A PERSON has to make that decision. A PERSON with the tools for the job can protect you from the nut case.

In this case, a PERSON, even without any tools for the job at hand, managed to protect a building full of people. Imagine, if he had a real weapon at hand. Imagine if someone at the first mosque had a weapon at hand. At the sound of the first gunshots, he might have armed himself, and put an end to the massacre.

Ask yourself a question: If you should ever be caught in a kill-or-be-killed situation, would you rather be armed, or unarmed? Yeah, you know the cops will respond to the situation - sometime. Would you rather be the survivor who drops his weapon, and surrenders to the police, or would you rather be the sheep, bleeding out on the ground?

The weapon is NOT what you should fear. Fear the bastard holding the weapon!

Tarrant feared Abdul, even though he had no weapon!

EDIT: link to the video, supplied by an anonymous coward, earlier today. via bittorrent, magnet:?xt=urn:btih:52b278c6769eb2edb9773ff6fe0923598ff42fea&dn=Christchurch-Mosque-Shooting-New-Zealand-FULL-VIDEO.mp4&tr=udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969&tr=udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80&tr=udp://open.demonii.com:1337&tr=udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969&tr=udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

Dr. Hamburg,

I'm in your ER's waiting room now, at 4:10 on the morning of Sunday, March 17th.

Your ER staff leads me to completely overcome with the desire to take my own life.

I'll explain later, I can't just now as I cannot breathe and so am fighting for consciousness - Syncope is quite a common symptom of this.

I Beg Of You!

Forget my aphasia!

Please FIND SOME WAY I DO NOT HAVE TO DIE!

I CANNOT BREATHE, AND YOUR EMERGENCY ROOM WON'T _DO_ ANYTHING ABOUT IT!

"Please I beg of you Sir, could you put me on a Respirator."

"No. To be on a Respirator is pretty extreme."

"Sir: I am going to DIE soon."

He didn't reply, just quietly looked down at the paper he'd brought for me: my Discharge Papers.

Surely there is some reason?

Thank You For Any Help You Can Give Me.

Anne: You are my only hope.

Mike

"But what can just one person do?"

-- Portland FBI Agent, after I explained to him the true meaning behind any flavor of Kool-Ade Mix other than Lemon.

It is a Technical Measure.

There is nothing in any way unlawful about it; thus your donations would not be regarded as facilitating crime.

I want you to understand that I am a very dangerous man, in that my chronic insomnia leads me to become obsessed with dreaming up such Technical Measures as for example dreaming up several significantly different ways not for America to lose the War On Terror, but for Vlad to Set Donald Up The Bomb without us G-d Fearing Americans having a whole lot of opportunity to do anything about it.

In that specific case, I dropped a dime to the United States Secret Service - Toll Free! - then after taking great care to reassure the - quite cheerful and friendly - agent who answered, I quite lucidly explained how I all by myself was The Antichrist, were I not such a nice guy. However, that security hole, while easily plugged with a technical measure of its own that would cost I'd say a half-billion or so - Chump Change to the Feds - remains exploitable, so instead I'll snail some dead trees to the National Security Council. But I digress:

I'd love nothing more than to lay waste to Silicon Valley right around now but to actually do so would result in Mom's California Public Employers Retirement System seeing a drop in its Portfolio Value. Thus, after A Great Deal of quiet contemplation, not only will I not release my Technical Measure as Free Software - Open Source misses the point, see - I will not release it for free along with a pint of Guinness, nor will I sell it.

No, I'm going to run in on my MacBook Pro while I relentlessly charm every last barista and waitress on G-d's Green Earth. Perhaps I'll even get blown on their breaks in the backs of their cars in their parking lots! How cool could that be?

Thus, I have some expenses:

Short-Term, I need just a few very modest things; some such as the Starbucks Card you can order online then send me an eGift Card - actually bar code: mdcrawford@gmail.com.

• $120.00 - TriMet/C-TRAN Thirty-Day Express Hop Card Transit Pass (The Mark Of The Beast)
• $30.00 - To get my shoes out of hock from the repair shop, as I walk like a duck
• $80.00 - Thirty Starbucks Grande Pike's Place Roasts with Washington Sales Tax
• $120.00 - Thirty free-refill coffees at Shari's Restaurant And Pies, Oregon so no tax.
• $225.00 - Thirty Portland Food Cart Burritos with Tip

That's it: $575.00 - but just for my first month.

• Michael Crawford, 650 NW Irving St, Portland OR 97209-1272 - but just this month!
• BTC: 3QqqbegpkU9DzKZ8rCPfYSkiyWVGnDSE8J
• LTC: MTPPDPhxkW1nu52AqvCeSbSkD32L9Vjuab
• ETH: 0xebb698DC6784461ca5Ef0a3338E8E389628389C1

After that, I'm going to need some wheels - that is, if you get my drift - but as I'm handy with tools, and Mom's been paying the rent on my locker, I've still got my tools, my father's tools, his father's tools, and because Grandpa's best friend had no heirs, Charlie Wilson's tools.

There is a word, "accelerationist," to describe the mindset of people like yesterday's Christchurch terrorist. You see, he didn't do this just for its own sake; he's trying for nothing less than to provoke the collapse of civilization via race war and internal strife, presumably to rebuild it as some sort of whites-only paradise. He in effect believes that he has to destroy it to save it (and that worked out SO well everywhere else that idea was tried...). I believe his scope is global, and he's trying to encourage copycat attacks worldwide with this.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't be too worried about one single psychopath trying to start a race war, and even saw him explicitly compared to Charles Manson and his "Helter-Skelter" plan in the main forum thread. Ordinarily, I'd agree and let it go as another sad but inevitable tragedy. Ordinarily, though, we wouldn't have an Anglosphere that's spent at least the last 20 years soaking in hatred and the last 2 and a half gleefully parading around its worst tendencies and members with all but official sanction from the leader of the supposed Free World.

"Accelerant" is also something that worsens and fuels fires, and there's a good reason for that. What we have now is the social equivalent of a pine barrens forest with decades of leaf litter, just waiting for that one spark. I did my junior year research on precisely this phenomenon, back in college. When the litter builds up, the entire forest goes up in flames at the slightest provocation. So I would say another term for people like this is "socilogical arsonist."

Unfortunately, I also believe his kind has won the day. I felt the US go over the edge about 12-18 months ago; civil war is at this point a matter of when, not if, and unlike the last one, today we have powerful enemies who are just waiting for the right time to swoop in and rip the country apart to loot it for their own ends. Which, to be fair, is probably what the country deserves at the national level, but will suck massively for individuals, most of whom are innocent. You know, just like when the US did it to other countries. Regardless, unless something incredibly huge and positive happens, I believe we're long past the point of no return.

Now, as to the other two terms in the title: you may be familiar with Roko's Basilisk already. I am referring to something more general than that: my definition of basilisk in this sense is "a pernicious meme or memeplex that does permanent damage to the mind in, at the very least, ways related to itself, specifically regarding removing itself or blunting its influence." Like the stare of the mythological basilisk, it slips in through the eyeholes and flays the mind from the inside out. You can think of them as a kind of memetic advanced persistent thread-type malware.

Basilisks have several things in common. They are "sticky" in memetic terms (that is, they leave a lasting impression). They are self-sealing, meaning they reinforce themselves, often recursively and through a variety of mechanisms, including hijacking other memes. Sometimes they work in pairs or larger groups, reinforcing one another. While they need not be readily infectious, they often are. And, like the stare of the real thing, they are often fatal if left untreated.

One key component of a good basilisk is that it takes advantage of the human tendency to be lazy thinkers. That is, once within its gravitational field, people will prefer to stay in it rather than change what at that point has become a large and important part of their thinking. Thus a good basilisk has an ad-hoc answer to pretty much every objection that might be raised to it as a sort of anti-malware-evasion routine.

Calvinism is an excellent example: it centers on the idea of TULIP, this being "total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, persistence of saints/saved." Basically, this undercuts critical thinking by making it an issue completely out of one's control; one is either saved or not, through God's action and not one's own, no one can do anything to become elect or reprobate, and (here's the stinger): "if you're really saved, you wouldn't be doubting in the first place, now would you?" The "stickiness" is of course the threat of eternal torture, which is probably the single "stickiest" meme it is by definition possible to create. So what we have here is a persistent, all-encompassing black hole of a memeplex.

Much white supremacist thought, or supremacist thought in general, works the same way. The hook, the "stickiness," is something along the lines of "your life sucks unfairly, and it's not only not your fault, it's the fault of $ETHNIC_GROUP." That is *very* powerful to anyone who's suffered unfairly. Plant this one, and entire categories of critical thought get cut off at the roots, not least because when people are suffering and tired and angry and traumatized, they very literally do not have the energy to do more than the laziest thinking.

Finally, the exploitation of these patterns is what I am referring to as "dark psychohistory," which is a direct nod to Asimov. People who understand this can have effects completely out of proportion to the amount of direct force they are capable of bringing to bear. "Stochastic terrorism" is another way of talking about this, and it's something Trump is doing: while we're going to get bootlicking psychopathic apologists like Hallow pointing out that Trump himself never directly incites people to violence, he says things that make it likely-to-certain that among a large enough group of people with a certain mindset, *one or more of them* will do something violent.

If hiring a hitman is one degree of separation, stochastic terrorism is two or three. We can't, in this case, draw a direct line as we could from the hitman and the person hiring him. But it's fairly obvious that things like "I'll pay their legal bills" are just a degree or two of separation further removed; we have a name for this, which is "incitement to violence."

And that is one tool in the accelerationist toolbox. Our friend in Christchurch sees himself as a sort of revolutionary vanguard trooper; he is hoping that the very fact that he was able to pull this off, combined with the force multiplier of global news broadcasts, will be enough to spark off more attacks of a similar kind, which themselves will generate more, and so forth. It's rather like a runaway nuclear fission reaction in that sense.

So what do we do about this? Unfortunately, little to nothing: i have concluded that most humans simply are not capable of the type of introspection and critical thought necessary to ward this sort of memetic plague off, many of them because they are suffering too much and too concerned with simple survival to have the energy to invest in that sort of mental hygiene. I do, sadly, believe that civil war is not only inevitable but not so very far away. My one solace is that these "accelerationists" are going to get exactly what's coming to them, here and hereafter; the world they create will be one in which the living envy the dead.

If you all wonder why I keep saying death holds no fear for me, this is why.

Pence hosts openly gay Irish prime minister and his partner for breakfast

Vice President Pence hosted the openly gay prime minister of Ireland and his partner for breakfast at the Naval Observatory Thursday.

Leo Varadkar, who is in the U.S. for an annual meeting with U.S. officials ahead of St. Patrick's Day, shared photos of the event on Twitter.

[...] Although Pence has hosted Varadkar before, this is the first time the vice president has hosted the partner of an openly gay world leader.

gay men > lone woman