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On the first Tuesday of every month, from 7:30PM, geeks sew spherical plushies in the basement of McDonalds in Leicester Square, London, UK. Apparently, we will also be remembering MDC who is missing and presumed dead. Indeed, please make a particular effort to come along if you're in London and lonely.

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?

AMD Navi 20 GPU Allegedly Supports Ray Tracing and Enhanced GCN Graphics Architecture – May End Up Being Much Faster Than RTX 2080 Ti

(for ray tracing, and a GPU that will be released long after the RTX 2000-series came out)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series Receives Price Drop By Major UK Based Retailer – Custom RTX 2060 Down To £299, RTX 2070 For £419 and RTX 2080 for £599

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

Typewriters are ancient and should be abolished. People who want to keep a typewriter should be punished by being forced to use one.

One problem with typewriters is that sometimes certain letters might not work.

This would make it difficult to understand an article explaining the difference between a 3.5 inch floppy di_{_}k and a big hard di_{_}k, versus a mi_{_}roSD   _{_}ard.

It would become almost impossible for the reader to infer what the malfunctioning letter might be.

Or multiple malfunctioning letters on some typewriters.

Task:
        To blink an LED.

        A blinking LED is required on a control panel to indicate
          a warning condition.
        Therefore it must be extremely reliable.

Hardware engineer:

        Easy, I'll use a 555, a few resistors and a capacitor; or LM3909 chip.
        Done. Did I win a prize?

DIY Maker:

        Easy. I'll use an Arduino with the blink sketch and a resistor.
        Done. I have more billable hours than the first guy.

Senior Software Engineer:

        You guys have it all wrong.
        Such a system would never be flexible enough for a real application
          where a blinking LED indicator is required.

        Consider the inflexibility of the 555 approach.
        What if the marketing people change the requirements from a simple
          on/off blink to a different blink pattern.
        The simplest example would be the double blink.
                Blink, Blink, long pause, Blink, Blink, etc.

        Then consider the lack of sophistication that the Arduino has.
        With a simple microcontroller you can't have a web interface
          to configure the LED's blink rate.
        You would have to re flash the firmware.

        With a more sophisticated controller, like a Raspberry PI, or
          even better, a Beagle Bone, the system could automatically
          check on the internet for software updates; and automatically
          download and apply them.
        For security, downloads could be signed with 4096 bit keys
          using private certificates from the manufacturer.
        (This also ensures ongoing contracts since no other vendor
          would have the private certificates.)
        Higher end boards provide more flexibility.
        The LED controller could have it's own WiFI connection to
          not burden the rest of the system to provide its
          internet access.
        And even better . . .

(lightning bolt strikes in mid sentence)

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)

As I've often noted, it's sad that few people have a decent grasp of history.

Given that what has come before is both a strong indicator and a significant influence on what is now and what's to come, it seems odd that many folks choose to remain ignorant of the past.

History is vast. So much has gone before. And if the Doomsday Argument is considered valid, quite a bit is still to come.

As such, it seems to me that those with a reasonable interest in the future should also have a reasonable interest in history as well.

If one accepts that, the question becomes: "Where do I start?"

Given that SoylentNews is an English language site, most users likely live in cultures evolving from The Western Tradition. That seems like a good place to start.

The series entitled The Western Tradition^* is a personal (as Eugen Weber points out, history is inherently a personal journey) journey through the history of Western civilization.

The video series above consists of 52 half-hour episodes. That seems like a lot, but consider that the series covers many thousands of years.

As such, the series must go through all this very fast. But, as Dr. Weber points out, here in America, we do everything fast. For example, here's the history of man in four minutes or so.

Regardless, I invite you to check this out and share it with others, especially children, as it provides a good look at how we got to where we are now (and, if cogitated upon, can provide us with some clues as to where we might be going).

Do any of you have suggestions to supplement the above? Including the works of Gibbon, Spengler and Spheeris.

Also, what (if anything) has history meant to you? Has it impacted your thoughts and actions in the present and/or your ruminations about the future?

Let's discuss.

^*Updated playlist that's actually in order/complete. Thanks to Hendrikboom for calling me out on my laziness with the initial link.

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?

I have some tobacco seeds on order and I was gratified to discover that the subject was already being discussed on SoylentNews. I've previously grown tobacco and the result was curious.

Firstly, I grew them in the office of a start-up company. This led to some interesting conversations:-

Investor: Oh, that's a pretty plant. What is it?
Me: Tobacco.
Investor: Tobacco!? Is that legal!?
Me: It is if you pay the capital gains tax.

Investors like businesses which are financially rational and a business which has cash crops as office plants is viewed as maximizing opportunity. In practice, most tax on tobacco is paid by the shipping container. Any attempt to pay a significantly smaller quantity of tax will be deemed as time-wasting by officials.

Secondly, tobacco seeds are astoundingly small. Many people smoke cannabis with tobacco. Although I strongly recommend against smoking concentrated cannabis, people mix all forms of cannabis with commercial tobacco. Some people find that good quality cannabis opens their lungs too much and therefore commercial tobacco is used to compensate. Given the similarlies of the grown plants, the seeds are surprisingly different. Cannabis seeds often have an 8mm diameter whereas tobacco seeds are often mistaken for poppy seeds and have a diameter of 1mm or less. An advantage here is that it is difficult to purchase less than 200 tobacco seeds and they are typically less than US$0.01 each whereas cannabis seeds may exceed US$3 per seed. A seed of each, if viable, often leads to 1kg of dried material. However, tobacco is significantly cheaper and comes with its own insecticide, nicotine, which kills almost anything except tobacco weavils (which are able to metabolize nicotine) or apes and monkeys who smoke it or chew it.

Thirdly, tobacco is a strange looking plant. When it is very small, it looks like lettuce. As it grows and flowers, it looks like foxglove planted among rhubarb. At the top, the flowers look like Digitalis [foxglove] with a long, willowy string of bell flowers in white, pink and/or light purple. At the bottom, the leaves are bulbous, round and look like rhubarb. Each leaf may exceed a square foot (0.1m²). Like cannabis, tobacco grown outdoors may exceed 9 foot (2.7m), even when grown in Northern latitudes, such as London or New York.

Fourthly, tobacco is is one of the tuber plants. It is closely related to potato, tomato and poison ivy. All of these plants can be cross-bred although the result is more poisonous than the initial breeds. Tobacco cross-bred with tomato is commonly known as tomacco. There is an episode of the animated series: The Simpsons in which Homer Simpson starts a tomacco farm. Obviously, this poisonous crop has no commercial value. However, most people thought that tomacco was a work of fiction whereas some people grow tomacco for fun.

Fifthly, organic tobacco is very different to commercial tobacco. Technically, commercial tobacco is not food. Therefore, it is not subject to food regulations. Therefore, tobacco has additives such as arsenic. What is the purpose of such additives? Some additives increase the speed and intensity of a nicotine hit. Others increase the burn rate of tobacco to increase consumption whether it is smoked or not. Commercial tobacco is also processed with solvants. Many people assume this is to ensure a homogenous product which smoothes natural variation between batches. However, the opposite is true. Tobacco manufacturers have teams of field representatives who ensure that stock is correctly presented to maximize sales. The field representatives also ensure that stock is rotated in lockstep. Meanwhile, manufacturers (who invariably produce multiple brands) ensure that nicotine dosing follows a ramping sawtooth pattern. The intention is to rachet consumption from 20 cigarettes per day to 40 and then 60. Switching to another brand fails to satisfy the deliberately intensified nicotine cravings because each brand is racheted out of step. Organic tobacco is significantly more like organic cannabis. The natural buzz from the plant can take 15 minutes or more to have full effect. Indeed, if anything is to be smoked, it should be smoked communally and socially in the chilled manner of illicit cannabis or a peace pipe of tobacco or cacao.

Sixthly, although smoking tobacco or cannabis is harsh on lungs, it is preferable to smoke both without solvants or accelerants. When smoked in this state, it is difficult to consume an excess which feels sickly. Although it is possible to chew tobacco and eat cannabis, both have downsides. Chewed tobacco has a particularly concentrated risk of mouth and throat cancer. Whereas, "space cookies" and similar may cause an overdose which may feel worse than a norovirus. Regardless, cannabis advocates are horrified that tobacco companies may wish to process and package cannabis in the manner of commercial tobacco while lobbying for restrictions which would make personal cultivation of cannabis and tobacco equally illegal.

Seventhly, the downsides of smoking have only become apparent as life-spans have extended. When a person was lucky to reach the age of 40, nicotine provided an effective fumigant. Bedbugs, which are able to obtain all moisture from air, are particularly inhibited by micro-particles of tobacco tar. Negative effects, such as lung obstruction, peripheral circulation obstruction, blindness or cancer from long-term smoking were very secondary considerations. Furthermore, smoking was seen a sign of sophistication and disposable income. Indeed, to cultivate sophistication, schools, such as the (male only) Eton College, made smoking mandatory. It amuses me greatly that people have been expelled from school for not smoking tobacco. Unfortunately, since then, advertisers have used false ruse of female empowerment with the intention of doubling sales and have used cartoons to lure children into smoking particular brands for life. Advertisers have also used doctors and professional sports to increase sales. Even when smoking commercial tobacco was known to be harmful to the general population, the same techniques were repeated as each country industrialized.

Eighthly, despite advances in hygiene and associated increases in life-span, tobacco retains a social rôle and a means of aiding drug delivery; most notably the stimulant nicotine partially counters THC and CBD, the active ingredients of cannabis. Perversely, we may be in an age where tobacco provides the most benefit to unhealthy people. Some people with epilepsy find that cannabis reduces symptoms but leaves them "stoned" and non-functional for much of the time. Although "stoned" is preferable to a potentially fatal epileptic fit, many in this situation do not find the benefits of commercial tobacco to be worthwhile. Organic tobacco, with or without cannabis, may also provide a creature comfort for elders in terminal decline.

Ninethly, organic tobacco may be preferable to electronic cigarettes or vaporizers. Although the heating element burns liquid in a more controlled manner, the reduced cost may increase nicotine consumption by a factor of two or more. Consumption of all additives may also increase by factor of two or more. Although the controlled burn reduces lung damage, the reduced tar reduces effectiveness against parasites, such as bedbugs. Electronic cigarettes are also a source of lithium battery explosion; typically when used, when carried or when charged.

Tenthly, a fair comparison of drugs has been hobbled by decades of prohibition which left, at most, one adulterated upper (commercial tobacco), one adulterated downer (alcohol) and a long list of chemical coshes on prescription. Despite this, it is within many people's first-hand or second-hand anecdotal experience that some legal drugs (prescription opiates, alcohol) are more dangerous than some illegal drugs (cannabis, mushrooms), when used by responsible adults, with the best of intentions. Although this is the optimistic case, it is generally accepted that juveniles will get "smashed" or "crunk" on anything available. With very few exceptions, the minimum age for cannabis, tobacco, opiates and possibly other drugs should be raised to 40 or more; historically the age of menopause, andropause, tooth loss and general decline. Whether or not this is considered extreme or impractical, the option of home grown, organic tobacco provides an additional path away from high intensity drugs, such as distilled alcohol, commercial tobacco or concentrated cannabis (which causes cannabis psychosis in juveniles due to use of unregulated, low quality solvants). Cannabis has often been demonized as a "gateway drug". Furthermore, if a succession of mass media reports are true then cannabis exceeded 100% known active ingredients by the 1990s. However, it is commercial tobacco and, increasingly, prescription opioids which are the gateway to drug fatality. This process would be deferred if home grown tobacco was intermittently available and reduced if it was consistently available. Likewise, partial legalization of cannabis in the US shows the benefit of cannabis when it is not concentrated, smuggled and sold alongside smuggled opiates.

Eleventhly, in the UK and the US, a disproportionate number of opioid deaths occur in rural areas. A cynic would suggest that urban rent/mortgage reduces disposable income. However, remoteness, even relatively, reduces opportunity. To these people, I urge them to grow their own tobacco outdoors. To anyone who does not have this opportunity, rural or urban, I have a partial solution. It requires some technology and is not ideal. However, cost may be minimal. Specifically, it requires growing tobacco indoors. Many have attempted "indoor horticulture", typically of cannabis where it is illegal. This has involved a serious level of shenanigans such as fully-enclosed environments which have been bricked-in to frustrate search warrants or smuggled children who don't speak the local language (or any language) to work as unpaid gardeners. It has also involved exotic air filtering and light cycles. The most profitable of these ventures have involved electricity meter rigging, meter bypassing or fraud. However, all of this can be averted by growing legal varieties of plants in harmony with nature. When it is legal and beneficial to expose plants to natural sunlight, the worst of the subterfuge can be stopped.

Theft remains as a problem. However, it is possible to implement an augmented light cycle where natural light is boosted with artificial light rather than replaced with artificial light. This is typically achieved by having an overlapping phase of artificial light which increases the apparent length of day but not the peak intensity. The optimal choice depends upon electricity pricing, available space and lifestyle. Given a free choice, I'd follow Bennett's Laws Of Horticulture:-

1. Houses are for people to live in.
2. Gardens are for plants to live in.
3. There is no such thing as a houseplant.

Unfortunately, I know many people who live in a space of 15m² or less and have no access to a garden. Please understand that the solution given is suboptimal but may be preferable to no solution. After much consideration involving control theory and circuitry (and a trivial amount of programming), I have implemented an augmented light cycle controller suitable for deployment on a micro-controller with an Arduino compatible API. This code is licenced for personal use, for growing tobacco or tomacco only, under a maximum of 1kW LEDs and further restrictions described in the source code. If this doesn't meet your needs then write your own or pay someone else to do it.

This implementation uses a LDR [Light Sensitive Resistor] and one persistent variable which maintains an accumulated total. This is sufficient to trail the natural light cycle by almost five hours. (Specifically, 2^24 milliseconds or so.) The output is six binary values which are intended to be connected to banks of LEDs of different colors. After a status LED briefly lights, nothing happens for more than four hours. This is very similar to the lucid dreaming glasses featured in Make magazine which should never be constructed due to the increased risk of fatal photo-sensitive epilepsy while sleeping. However, rather than periodically blinking one channel to indicate dreaming, six channels are sequentially raised from 0% to 100% using PWM which is specifically outside of the frequency which typically triggers photo-sensitive epilepsy. It is intended that the first channel is connected to red LEDs, the second to orange LEDs and suchlike. This provides a broad spectrum of light. Also, the resulting color temperature will be similar to the Sun when viewed from Earth. In particular, in a temperate region, LED blue light should be proportionate to season. However, this may require tweaking. Debug of horticultural software can be tedious due to timescale. Therefore, a second set of constants can be selected which skips the initial wait and reduces a day cycle to a few seconds. Ideally, -DQUICK should be added to compiler parameters. However, in the patronizing Arduino interface, it may be easier to bodge an #ifdef to #ifndef. Finally:-

1. The licenced 1kW power limit is partly for your safety. The Arduino API does not implement safety features available in a micro-controller, such as watchdog timer or parity exception. Scaling this system and deploying in an unattended environment is contrary to licence and outright dangerous.
2. Ensure that all electronics are splash-proof and raised from areas where water may collect in puddles. Make a pessimistic calculation and raise it above that level.
3. You are strongly advised to use a linear, wound, Galvanically isolated power regulator even if it costs at least four times and much as a switch mode power supply. Switch mode power is not typically Galvanically isolated and may be fatal where electricity and water are mixed. If you really want to use a switch mode power supply then ensure that it is a Galvanically isolated variant of a Ćuk converter.
4. You are strongly advised to use power factor correction.

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(If you enjoyed use of "eleventhly", search for Mark Twain's use of the word. For Mark Twain's opinion about tobacco, search for "old soldiers".)

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