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Kamala Harris Endorses White Segregationist
When Kamala Harris and Joe Biden Clashed on Busing and Segregation
About an hour into the debate held June 27, Ms. Harris, a black former prosecutor, leapt into the cross-talk with a request to speak “on the issue of race.” She then trained her attention on Mr. Biden, and after making clear that she did not believe he was a racist, proceeded to sharply criticize him for having made “very hurtful” comments about having worked with two segregationist senators.
Ms. Harris then also recalled Mr. Biden’s opposition to school busing in the 1970s and opened up about her own history. “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” she said. “And that little girl was me.”
Mr. Biden called her remarks “a mischaracterization of my position across the board.” Moments later, he added: “I did not oppose busing in America,” Mr. Biden said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.”
In reality, Mr. Biden was a leading opponent of busing in the Senate during the 1970s and 1980s, and his opposition went beyond the federal government’s role in the practice.
Kamala Harris endorses Biden's presidential bid
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) announced her endorsement of Joe Biden's White House bid Sunday morning, saying that the former vice president “speaks to the best of who we are and challenges us to live up to our ideals.”
[...] Harris and Biden clashed during Democratic debates last summer, with the California senator confronting Biden on his opposition to desegregation busing. Biden said he would consider her as a potential running mate after she dropped out of the race in December.
"She is solid. She can be president someday herself. She can be the vice president. She can go on to be a Supreme Court justice. She can be an attorney general. She has enormous capability," Biden said.
Warren Drops Out, Endorses REDACTED
Michael Bloomberg Ends Presidential Bid, Endorses Joe Biden
TV stations and YouTube thank you for your blown ad money, Boomerborg.
Warren reassessing campaign after disappointing Super Tuesday
Not winning your home state is a body blow.
Who will Warren endorse?
Update:
Warren, Sanders allies scramble to find her an exit ramp
The conversations, which are in an early phase, largely involve members of Congress who back Sanders (I-Vt.) reaching out to those in Warren's camp to explore the prospect that Warren (D-Mass.) might endorse him. They are also appealing to Warren's supporters to switch their allegiance to Sanders, according two people with direct knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate discussions that are supposed to be confidential.
The whirlwind of activity reflects the rapid changes in a Democratic primary that is still very much in transition. As late as Tuesday, many Warren allies believed she would stay in the race until the Democratic convention, despite her poor showing to date in the primaries, in hopes of retaining her clout and influencing the eventual nominee.
But after Warren's bleak performance in the Super Tuesday primaries, her associates, as well as those of Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden, say she is now looking for the best way to step aside. There is no certainty she will endorse Sanders or anyone else, but the talks reflect the growing pressure on the Massachusetts senator to withdraw.
Update 2:
Elizabeth Warren ends her presidential campaign
Elizabeth Warren is dropping out of the presidential race, a source familiar with her plans tells CNN, following another round of disappointing finishes in primary contests across the country on Super Tuesday.
[...] Both Klobuchar and Buttigieg endorsed Biden on Monday. Warren, a respected progressive leader who has been fiercely critical of the former vice president and, at least until the current campaign heated up, a friend and ally of Sanders, has not yet indicated who she will support moving forward. Sanders said he spoke to Warren on Wednesday, but did not share any details from their conversation.
Threadripper 3990X Running Crysis Without a GPU
AMD's Threadripper 3990X can run Crysis without a graphics card
DannyB's dream will become real some day.
U.S. Signs Peace Deal With Taliban
U.S. Signs Peace Deal With Taliban After Nearly 2 Decades Of War In Afghanistan
The U.S. and the Taliban have struck a deal that paves the way for eventual peace in Afghanistan. U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad and the head of the militant Islamist group, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signed the potentially historic agreement Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where the two sides spent months hashing out its details.
Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. commits to withdrawing all of its military forces and supporting civilian personnel, as well as those of its allies, within 14 months. The drawdown process will begin with the U.S. reducing its troop levels to 8,600 in the first 135 days and pulling its forces from five bases.
The rest of its forces, according to the agreement, will leave "within the remaining nine and a half months."
The Afghan government also will release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners as a gesture of goodwill, in exchange for 1,000 Afghan security forces held by the Taliban.
Coronavirus Cuisine
The other soup recipe. Electricity required.
1. Get an Instant Pot.
2. Add 2 cups of dried beans (such as black, pinto, etc.) and 8 cups of water. Manually pressure cook (High) for 5 minutes and leave it for 10 minutes before releasing the pressure. This eliminates the need to soak the beans for hours.
3. Drain, return beans into the pot, add a 15 oz can of diced tomatoes, and whatever spices you want (get bulk granulated garlic). Add 2 cups of water or broth (or water with bouillon).
4. Manually pressure cook (High) for 10 minutes. Release the pressure after ~20 minutes.
5. Mash the beans a bit with a potato masher. Add iodized salt or spices to taste.
ARM Apple; Biggest Navi
First Mac to Use Apple’s Custom ARM-Based Processor Said to Arrive in H2 2021
Apple has made some very powerful ARM processors, and they will be among the first to get "5nm" from TSMC. 8 cores? I guess iPad Pro is the sneak preview of what the experience would be like.
24 GB of VRAM would match what has been rumored to be the shared GDDR6 RAM pool of next-gen Xbox or PS5.
Some games already use over 10 GB at 4K, and machine learning workloads could use all of it.
As for the rest, they can dethrone the RTX 2080 Ti, but Nvidia will strike back with Ampere at some point. All product launches mentioned could be delayed by the coronavirus.
Full-Drive Pseudo-SLC SSDs
What's TLC is SLC Again: MEMXPRO Introduces PC32 Full-Drive Pseudo-SLC SSDs
Pseudo-SLC caches for TLC-based SSDs are almost as old as TLC NAND itself, serving as a simple and practical solution to TLC's lower sustained throughput. But like all caches, pseudo-SLC caches have a finite size; and once you run over it, you're back to directly hitting the TLC. So what is a user or system builder to do if they need a drive with SLC-like performance all the time? For a while, the answer to that has been MLC drives, but with MLC slowly but surely on its way out as well, other solutions are needed. And to that end, MEMXPRO is introducing a series of new drives that go the opposite direction, embracing pseudo-SLC mode to its very core by making the entire drive pseudo-SLC.
Based on 64-layer 3D TLC memory, MEMXPRO's PC32 drives use drive-wide pseudo-SLC mode to give the drives MLC-like performance and reliability. This setup is overkill for most applications, but for use cases that require SSDs with long lifespans, and high [durability] – MEMXPRO's specialty – the PC32 fills an important niche.
The MEMXPRO PC32 drives in are based on the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller as well as Micron’s B17A 64-layer 3D TLC NAND memory, which is rated for 10,000 P/E cycles. By putting the drives in pseudo-SLC mode, the manufacturer is able to increase their durability to 40,000 P/E cycles, albeit at the cost of capacity. Since TLC NAND that offers 3-bits of storage per cell is otherwise reduced to 1-bit per cell, the drives are available in capacities from just 80 GB to 320 GB. As for throughput, with the high-end controller used for the drive, MEMXPRO has rated the drives' sustained sequential read and write performance 3,250 and 2,980 MB/s respectively, which is in line with other modern SSDs featuring a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface.
If you can figure out what kind of die size this uses (e.g. 512 Gb), you could forecast how much capacity pseudo-SLC drives of given dimensions can store in the future. NAND will eventually reach at least 256 layers, and that can be multiplied with string stacking and other techniques.
SpaceX Nails Starlink Launch, Fails Booster Landing
SpaceX nailed the launch but missed a landing on Monday [Updated]
SpaceX launches fifth batch of Starlink satellites, misses booster landing
Despite the reduced workload, Falcon 9’s reusable first-stage booster missed the droneship “Of Course I Still Love You,” splashing down nearby in the Atlantic Ocean.
On the live stream, it looked like a "space snake" came off of the booster. Critical component?
If the booster is too salty or smashed to be refurbished, that is an expensive batch of Starlink sats.
2 more launches to go until the lower bound for launching a service. 8 more for "moderate coverage".
The Kodi "Piracy" Relationship
I saw this blog post on the Kodi news ticker on LibreELEC:
Kodi is undoubtedly synonymous with streaming 🏴☠️piracy🏴☠️, although it is useful software even when "clean" and you can do a decent amount with the official add-ons repo (YouTube, Pluto.TV, internet radio, etc.).
Are they going through the obligatory motions to distance themselves from 🏴☠️yarrrrr🏴☠️ or are they legitimately pissed off? It's probably a bit of both.
Big Intel HPC GPUs
Exclusive: Intel Xe HP 4-Tile 500W GPU EU Count Leaked, No It’s Not 512
This is a follow-up to an earlier story I linked.
- Intel Xe HP (Gen 12.5) 1-Tile GPU: 512 EUs [Est: 4096 Cores, 12.2 TFLOPs assuming 1.5GHz, 150W]
- Intel Xe HP (Gen 12.5) 2-Tile GPU: 1024 EUs [Est: 8192 Cores, 20.48 TFLOPs assuming 1.25 GHz, 300W]
- Intel Xe HP (Gen 12.5) 4-Tile GPU: 2048 EUs [Est: 16,384 Cores, 36 TFLOPs assuming 1.1 GHz, 400W/500W]
That's 81.3, 68.3, and 72-90 GFLOPS/Watt, if accurate.
Compare to about 44.2 GFLOPS/W for Radeon RX 5700, 53.8 for RTX 2080 Ti, or 116.3 for Tesla T4. I'm just getting those numbers by dividing the FP32 GFLOPS by TDP, so YMMV.
400-500 Watts sounds extreme but it might not be as hard to cool as you think since the die area of a 4-tile multi-chip module (basically chiplets) would be huge. An advantage of the MCM approach is better yields. It would be difficult to create a 1,600 mm2 monolithic GPU, while putting four 400 mm2 tiles together is easier.
If this is a success, Intel will probably shoot for a design with 8 tiles eventually (2024?).
