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Yesterday was a great day for me, and for America -- I always, always put America First. Because I held what I call a Listening Session. People don't know what that is, it's something new. Where I sit down with the American people and LISTEN to what they say. I had 44 predecessors, none of them ever did that. So simple, but none of them ever thought of that. But I'm listening, I listened to some of our students & parents. With cameras rolling. And I brought @VP Pence and Secretary @BetsyDeVos. So they could listen too.

And I heard some beautiful, and very smart things. Jonathan Blank, he's one of the students from Parkland, said, "Thank you for everything. You’ve done a great job, and I like the direction that you’re going in. Thank you."

And Ariana Klein, she's another student from Parkland, beautiful student, said, "I would just like to say thank you for leading this country. You’re a great leader, and I appreciate the direction that the country is going in."

Julia Cordover, she's the president of the students -- of the ones that are left -- there in Parkland. Nice looking girl, and very grateful. She told me, "I’m confident that you’ll do the right thing, and I appreciate you looking at the bump stocks yesterday."

Fred Abt, he's a parent from Parkland, he told me about something @BetsyDeVos said at lunch, he said she said "have people in the school -- teachers, administrators -- who have volunteered to have a firearm safely locked in the classroom, who are given training throughout the year."

Let me tell you, I've been thinking about that for a long time. Because she said it a long time ago. And I knew it was a very smart thing to do, but I said we'd better leave that up to the states. Leave it to our great states. Today I met with our wonderful law enforcement officers, our Governors and so many more to talk about school safety, very important talk. pic.twitter.com/WhC2AxgWXO

But maybe, probably, we need to move more strongly. That would be, certainly, a situation that is being discussed a lot by a lot of people. You’d have a lot people that’d be armed. People of talent. Teachers who are adept at firearms, a lot of people with that. They’d be ready. They’re professionals. They may be Marines that left the Marines, left the Army, left the Air Force. And they’re very adept at doing that. You’d have a lot of them, and they’d be spread evenly throughout the school.

And you would no longer have a gun-free zone. Our schools have been gun-free zones for too long. Much too long. A gun-free zone, to a maniac -- because they’re all COWARDS -- a gun-free zone is, let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us.

We need to do what we call CONCEALED CARRY, very important. Hunter Pollack, one of the parents, he said to me, "If a teacher or a security guard has a concealed license and the firearm on their waist, they’re able to easily stop the situation, or the bad guy -- I’ll put it that way -- would not even go near the school knowing that someone can fight back against them." Concealed carry, if you don't know, it's a secret firearm, a hidden firearm. So nobody knows, is this teacher armed? Or not armed? Nobody knows, nobody can tell which teachers or guards -- principals, nurses, everybody -- who's armed and who's not. Very smart!

And we're going to be doing many things, we're going to do a lot. We're going to look into the background checks. And into the mental illness, we have so many mentally ill people now, how did that happen? I'll tell you, years ago, we had mental hospitals -- mental institutions. We had a lot of them, and a lot of them have closed. They’ve closed. And we have so many NUT JOBS on our streets. Seriously degrading some of our finest and most luxurious shopping districts. It's a very deplorable situation. Some people thought it was a stigma. Some people thought, frankly, it was a -- the legislators thought it was too expensive. youtu.be/vKblXAikzEc

This is about a 12nm "Zen+" chip coming out this year, not "Zen 2".

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Pinnacle Ridge Processor Single And Multi-Core Benchmarks Leak

The Ryzen 5 2600 is a 6-core/12-thread processor with a 3.4GHz base clock and 3.8GHz boost clock. It also has 3MB of L2 cache, 16MB of L3 cache, and a 65W TDP.

In Geekbench, the chip scored 4,269 in the single-thread testing and 20,102 in multi-threaded testing. Compared to the Ryzen 5 1600, which is a 6-core/12-thread processor clodcked at 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz with the same cache arrangement and TDP, the Ryzen 5 2600 is anywhere from 7-15 percent faster in single-threaded performance, and 22-31 percent faster in multi-threaded performance. The ranges in percentages take into account different scores in Geekbench's database.

Even if going by the low end numbers a 7 percent jump in single-threaded performance and 22 percent gain in multi-threaded work chores is a nice upgrade. Part of the difference is obviously attributable to faster clockspeeds, but performance optimizations underneath the hood also play a role. The gap could be even wider when Pinnacle Ridge ships too, as AMD and its partners will have had more time to polish up drivers.

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 spotted in Geekbench database

Previously:

AMD Expected to Release Ryzen CPUs on a 12nm Process in Q1 2018
AMD at CES 2018

Folks, today is a VERY SPECIAL day. Because it's President's Day. When we honor the greatest President in history. And George Washington. Is it George Washington's birthday? Big debate about that one! Enjoy! 🇺🇸 whitehouse.gov/articles/great-debate-presidents-day-washingtons-birthday

As Peter Thiel ditches Silicon Valley for LA, locals tout 'conservative renaissance'

If the billionaire tech investor and noted libertarian Peter Thiel really does leave Silicon Valley for Los Angeles to escape what he views as an increasing intolerance for conservatives, the city’s growing community of conservatives will be there to welcome him.

Among LA’s right-leaning residents are the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, the political commentator Dave Rubin and the blogger Bill Whittle. There’s also the former members of the defunct Friends of Abe, a secretive group of Hollywood conservatives that fractured in 2016 over the candidacy of Donald Trump.

“Silicon Valley has long despised the American right and it’s beginning to flex its muscles against us,” said Michael Knowles, an LA-based podcaster for The Daily Wire, referring to a lawsuit filed by conservative media site PragerU against YouTube for allegedly “censoring” conservative videos.

“It’s a sign of the time that Peter Thiel is heading down here because there’s been a conservative renaissance in Los Angeles,” Knowles said.

PragerU’s chief marketing officer, Craig Strazzeri, added: “It’s both astounding and sad – but unfortunately not surprising – that there are parts of this country where you are socially and professionally shunned if you support the duly elected president of our country. That might be changing in Los Angeles.”

Previously: Peter Thiel Migrating From Silicon Valley to Los Angeles

Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, LONG before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong -- NO COLLUSION!!!! 🇺🇸👱🚫💕👱🇷🇺

The playboy who got away with $242m – using ‘black magic’

Air Dabia

You Up? College in the Age of Tinder

Frankly, dating apps can also just make things incredibly awkward. My freshman year I swiped through hundreds of people. At one of the last tailgates of the year, a random man walked by me and yelled: “Hey! We matched on Tinder! You are Tinder girl!”

I was mortified. Suddenly everyone around me knew that I was on Tinder. And I had swiped through so many people, I had no idea who this guy was. He was just another nameless “match” that I would never get to know. Because, needless to say, I walked away and never spoke to that guy again.

[...] The same Snap asking to “hang out” sent at 2 p.m. can have a completely different meaning when sent at 2 a.m.

[...] You don’t want to be mid-makeout while the jewel-encrusted crab from “Moana” is singing about how shiny he is.

So, most people know I've been using Linux since mid-2004, and that I started with Gentoo...which, yes, is the equivalent of learning to swim by donning a bacon bikini, rubbing yourself in A1 Steak Sauce, and jumping in the Amazon in the middle of piranha season.

Over the last 13+ years, Linux has...changed. A lot. I am sorry to say that I don't believe most of the changes have been good ones: GTK 3.x, the fiasco that was the KDE 4 series, RedHat aiming to become the next Microsoft, and the crux of the former, SystemD. Yes, I am a SystemD hater, and I make no apologies for it. It does things wrong, it does not even pretend to follow the Unix philosophy, and its syntax and "feel" remind me more than anything of PowerShell, which has to be the most bloated, flabby, weak, user-hostile CLI environment in history.

I also don't have a lot of money for hardware; this post is being typed on a used Thinkpad T440s I was lucky enough to acquire for $200 on EBay from a trusted source. And, being that i work 55+ hours a week *and* do anti-human-trafficking stuff, I don't have endless time to piddle around with Gentoo any longer. Much as I love the near-insane levels of control and configurability it offers, my poor ULV mobile i5 CPU just can't take that level of abuse for long.

So...I'd been distro-hopping for a while, playing with Devuan, Slackware, Artix, Obarun (unsuccessfully; the fucker just wouldn't install and I have no idea why), even FreeBSD.

And then a friend from college, the one who got me into Linux all those years ago, suggested Void.

Now, I'd heard of Void before, but had never even visited the homepage. Doing so left me somewhat underwhelmed, but intrigued; it was very businesslike. There wasn't the patronizing aura of the *buntu family, the slightly notionally-cabbage-smelling, half-baked feeling around Debian, or the complete unprofessionalism of umpteen hojillion other flavor-of-the-week distros.

If anything, it felt like FreeBSD, which I had limited success with and mostly enjoyed, but which didn't let me do a few things I really had gotten used to on Linux. So with Matt's encouragement, I downloaded the Xfce installer, backed up my stuff, cleared out my HDD, and booted it up.

It was a revelation. I don't know how else to describe this. Aside from the slightly WTF choice of using CFDisk, the installer was a no-nonsense NCurses-based affair that reminded me in all the good ways of the Slackware and FreeBSD bootstrappers. It was one of the most painless and ye-gods-FAST installs I had ever seen. Rebooting worked immediately; I was presented with a vanilla Xfce desktop and a very minimal set of programs, which is how I like it.

Two things immediately stood out: the first is the package manager, the XBPS suite (xbps-* commands). I can't say enough good about this; it's like Arch's Pacman for adults. it feels like the lovechild of Apt and Pacman in all the best ways, and it is *blazing* quick. It also has an xbps-src build system, which is to xbps something like the *BSD ports tree is to FreeBSD's pkg utility. It even acts a lot like the ports tree.

The second, and the thing that has made me a Void fangirl for life, is the Runit init system.

OpenRC isn't bad, and I'll take just about anything over Gawdawful SystemD, but Runit feels like alien technology. It is incredibly fast, it's very simple to administrate--just symlink stuff from /etc/sv to /var/services--and it will even, something like the Minix reincarnation server for its drivers, automagically restart crashed services for you!

Did I mention fast? Because this thing goes from "pushing Enter on the GRUB prompt" to "SDDM login screen ready for my credentials" in 10 seconds. 10. I counted. 9-and-a-bit, actually, but close enough to 10 to say 10.

If you run Linux, if you *love* Linux, try Void. You won't regret it. It will change the way you think about Linux. It sweeps away all the bad decisions of the last half a decade. Stuff Just Works. It's the most stable Linux I have ever used, and this despite being nearly as bleeding-edge as Arch. Runit is the star of the show and I wish it were standard on every distro. Do it. You won't b disappointed. Enter The Void.

Folks, this month is very special. Because I've proclaimed what I call National African American History Month.

Let me tell you, last February I toured our National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And they had a stone there. The slaves would stand on it. And get auctioned off. And I said to myself, "boy, that is just not good, that is not good.” They had little metal things, like handcuffs, that they put on the little slave children. And I said to myself, "that is really bad!" Sometimes handcuffs are fun. Trust me, it's not fun to put them on children. It's very sick, or bad.

So now I'm saying to all Americans, let's COME TOGETHER. 💕 As One Team, One People, One American Family! To celebrate the extraordinary contributions of African-Americans to our nation. Let's turn our thoughts to the heroes of the civil rights movement whose courage and sacrifice have inspired us all. Frederick Douglass, he's done an amazing job. Rev. King is being recognized more and more. We've got so many great people. Proclamation: 45.wh.gov/c9Gvt9 pic.twitter.com/Nx0AEKZy5p

Meet the Writer the New York Times Hired and Fired In Just Six Hours

After a Twitter Storm, The Times and a New Hire Part Ways