SoylentNews

I was going to make a submission about this earlier, but the add-on has already been wiped off of Mozilla and GitHub, seemingly "voluntarily" by its creator. So there may be more to the story.

Browser Extension Adds Sci-Hub Download Links to Publishers’ Websites

As scientists and academics of all kinds turn to Sci-Hub to freely access scientific papers, a new browser tool aims to make access even more straightforward. Currently available from the Mozilla addon store but also compatible with Chrome, 'Sci-Hub Injector' embeds Sci-Hub download links into popular publishers' websites.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954046

Mozilla and GitHub:

Sci Hub Injector

SciHub Injector is currently offline.

I will keep the paragraph below.

Important legal notice

I don't recommend doing things that go against whatever laws that apply where you are. I condemn illegal activities. This is the user's reponsibility. SciHub is not affiliated in any way with this project.

Replicating this yourself should be relatively easy. Grabbing the DOI should be trivial, and then maybe you want to find the best places to slap a Sci-Hub button on each major publisher's website. Insert a link or button anywhere a valid DOI is found as a fallback. Inline SVG could be used to replicate the raven logo.

We Finally Have Our First GeForce GT 1010 GPU Benchmark

NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 1010 Is So Slow That Even Intel’s Iris Xe Integrated GPUs Can Outperform It

This would be weaker than the Vega 6 graphics in the Ryzen 3 5300G (the OEM-only Cezanne quad-core desktop APU).

Turn An Android Phone Into A Desktop PC! Motorola’s New Desktop Mode! Moto Edge X30 (10m28s video)

The Motorola Moto G100 shows why we might no longer need a PC soon (May 2021)

https://nexdock.com/compatible-smartphones/

Samsung, Motorola, Huawei, and Xiaomi all have their own desktop modes.

Last Halloween, allegedly, there were fake tombstones on people's lawns, with the eptitaph "I did my own research." The New York Times published a piece on some actual studies (here, and here) that suggest that it is not always as successful as the tyro researcher believes it is.

One of the authors is familiar, a certain Professor Dunning?

A new slogan has emerged in the culture: “Do your own research.” On internet forums and social media platforms, people arguing about hotly contested topics like vaccines, climate change and voter fraud sometimes bolster their point or challenge their interlocutors by slipping in the acronym “D.Y.O.R.”

“Two days after getting the jab, a friend of mine’s friend had a heart attack,” a Reddit user wrote recently in a discussion about Covid-19 vaccines. “I’m not saying they’re connected, but D.Y.O.R.”

The slogan, which appeared in conspiracy theory circles in the 1990s, has grown in popularity over the past decade as conflicts over the reliability of expert judgment have become more pronounced. It promotes an individualistic, freethinking approach to understanding the world: Don’t be gullible — go and find out for yourself what the truth is.

That may seem to be sound advice. Isn’t it always a good idea to gather more information before making up your mind about a complex topic?

Philosophers are always about rejecting authority, and seeking the truth for oneself, so this seems like a sound procedure. Empirical studies, however, differ.

In theory, perhaps. But in practice the idea that people should investigate topics on their own, instinctively skeptical of expert opinion, is often misguided. As psychological studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to technical and complex issues like climate change and vaccine efficacy, novices who do their own research often end up becoming more misled than informed — the exact opposite of what D.Y.O.R. is supposed to accomplish.

Consider what can happen when people begin to learn about a topic. They may start out appropriately humble, but they can quickly become unreasonably confident after just a small amount of exposure to the subject. Researchers have called this phenomenon the beginner’s bubble.

Not pointing out an specific cases, but you know what we are talking about.

Anecdotally, you can see the beginner’s bubble at work outside the laboratory too. Consider do-it-yourself projects gone wrong. Power tools, ladders and lawn mowers are easily mishandled by untrained users who know just enough to put themselves in danger. A study found that U.S. consumer injuries from pneumatic nail guns increased about 200 percent between 1991 and 2005, apparently as a result of the increased availability of nail guns that were affordable for nonprofessionals.

Research also shows that people learning about topics are vulnerable to hubris. Consider a 2015 study by one of us (Professor Dunning) and the psychologists Stav Atir and Emily Rosenzweig. It found that when novices perceive themselves as having developed expertise about topics such as finance and geography, they will frequently claim that they know about nonexistent financial instruments (like “prerated stocks”) and made-up places (like Cashmere, Ore.) when asked about such things.

I spent a week in Cashmere, Oregon, one day. Drilled my hand with a power drill, and looked into the laser with my remaining eye. Doing my own research!

The take-away? Well, first, self-awareness and self-criticism are hard to come by, so do not just check your sources, check your motivation for checking those particular sources.

Likewise, a 2018 study of attitudes about vaccine policy found that when people ascribe authority to themselves about vaccines, they tend to view their own ideas as better than ideas from rival sources and as equal to those of doctors and scientists who have focused on the issue. Their experience makes them less willing to listen to well-informed advisers than they would have been otherwise.

There should be no shame in identifying a consensus of independent experts and deferring to what they collectively report. As individuals, our skills at adequately vetting information are spotty. You can be expert at telling reliable cardiologists from quacks without knowing how to separate serious authorities from pretenders on economic policy.

And on the other hand,

For D.Y.O.R. enthusiasts, one lesson to take away from all of this might be: Don’t do your own research, because you are probably not competent to do it.

Is that our message? Not necessarily. For one thing, that is precisely the kind of advice that advocates of D.Y.O.R. are primed to reject. In a society where conflicts between so-called elites and their critics are so pronounced, appealing to the superiority of experts can trigger distrust.

The problem is compounded by the fact that outsider critics frequently have legitimate complaints about advice provided by insider authorities. One example might be the initial instruction from public officials at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic that people need not wear masks.

So the problem is knowing when to trust those who know, when you don't really know that they know what they are talking about, because you don't know, either. Professional trust is the issue.

Instead, our message, in part, is that it’s not enough for experts to have credentials, knowledge and lots of facts. They must show that they are trustworthy and listen seriously to objections from alternative perspectives.

We strive to offer careful guidance when it comes to our own areas of expertise. Even so, some D.Y.O.R. enthusiasts may reject our cautions. If they do, we hope that they will nonetheless heed at least one piece of advice: If you are going to do your own research, the research you should do first is on how best to do your own research.

Article is NYT paywalled, so beware. And now, my dear Soylentils, time to do your own research, and stop calling those that attempt to do so Dunning-Kroeger idiots. Far more likely that they are lying insurgents and trolls.

Discuss!

I prefer direct URLs which can be loaded by an <audio> element. In some cases you have to inspect a web page to find a URL, but they may be dynamic and stop working after some time. Others will work indefinitely.

Two places to look: the Icecast directory and Radio Garden.

I'm also looking for the minimum amount of JavaScript necessary to extract the currently playing song/show without knowing about the type of stream loaded. I might end up using this:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/icecast-metadata-js
https://eshaz.github.io/icecast-metadata-js/

Check the 90.9 Jazzy rádió - Jazzy Cool example, and it clearly captures the song title metadata.

They are nothing if not easily suggestible. Seems the waco right in America cannot comprehend "pandemic". No wonder Republicans are dying off in rural areas, and Reddit is keeping a running tab on "Herman Cain Awards". But denial runs deep in the minds of conspiracy theorists, and a recent super-spreader event by the same must, therefore, have some other cause. And what is more plausible, but the underlying plot device of a recent movie? Award winning movie! Yes, the conservatives have been undone by The Power of the Dog.

The coverage is to be found at Vice.

A group of unvaccinated people who attended a huge conspiracy conference in Dallas earlier this month all became sick in the days after the event with symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath, and fever. Instead of blaming the global COVID pandemic, however, the conspiracy theorists think they were attacked with anthrax.

And they weren't even plaiting a rawhide lariat! Of course, all the shouting and spittle could have been a vector, but not usually for anthrax.

This far-right conspiracy claim began after a dozen people spent time together in a confined space at the ReAwaken America tour event in Dallas over the weekend of Dec. 10. And the fact that this was likely a COVID outbreak and superspreader event has been almost entirely ignored.

The anthrax claim was first made by Joe Oltmann on his Conservative Daily podcast earlier this week. In a video recording of the podcast, Oltmann can be seen coughing and sneezing on camera, symptoms often associated with COVID-19 or other illnesses.

Instead, Oltmann, who has spent much of 2021 spreading bogus election conspiracies, claimed that he and his fellow conspiracy theorists who recently attended the conference had been attacked by anthrax. The conference, run by Tulsa businessman Clay Clark, was headlined by figures like disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump, also spoke at the event.

More like "Re-Infect America", if you know what I mean. Flynn, Stone, MyPillow guy? And one of the Spawn? Just, wow.

“There’s a 99.9% chance it’s anthrax,” Oltmann said on his podcast, even though no one had tested positive for anthrax poisoning and none of the other 3,500 attendees have so far reported suffering the effects of anthrax.

Oltmann claimed that he and up to a dozen other people who were in the green room at an event fell ill over the following days.

That's funny, 99.9% of all statistics based on no data are totally made up! Coincidence? I think not! But, there is more: Oltmann took an arrow to the knee, or somewhere.

While Oltmann said he was “sick, sick,” he claimed his symptoms were tempered because he was already taking the antibiotic doxycycline as a result of impaling his leg on an arrow in an accident in his brother’s garage weeks previously.

Evidently, you can be not careful enough. But, now for the tie-in. Power of the Dog is trying to Stop the Stop the Steel!

Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracist who was also at the conference, apparently experienced more severe symptoms.

Pulitzer, a failed inventor who once created a barcode scanner listed as one of the 50 worst inventions ever, was heavily involved in the bogus Arizona recount, consulting for the Cyber Ninjas and promoting the idea that box of ballots had been flown into Arizona on election night from Asia to swing the vote in Biden’s favor.

According to Oltmann, Pulitzer has not been heard from in several days and he reported more severe complications including “body lesions and weeping skin.”

Not been heard from, except, of course, to report suspicious symptoms. Takes a special mind to hold these two facts together.

The claims that these illnesses were due to an anthrax attack were shared and viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Telegram and other alt-tech platforms like Gab and Parler. The claims have also been boosted on mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

After Oltmann made the claim about anthrax—without providing a shred of evidence—the conspiracy was boosted by other election fraud conspiracists like former New Mexico State University professor David Clements, and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne.

The bogus claim was also boosted by QAnon influencer-turned-Congressional candidate Ron Watkins, who called for prayers for those affected.

Of course, Ockham's Razor would suggest that, in the midst of a viral pandemic, the simpler explanation was that all these people, many of whom presumably are unvaccinated, were spreading the COVID-19 virus. That, of course, is a lie spread by the Deep State. Everyone knows that.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 to launch on March 8, 2022

So apparently no cheaper quad-channel Zen 3 Threadripper, there may or may not be versions with 3D V-Cache later, and then you can expect to see 96-core Zen 4 Threadripper in 2023.

Edit: AMD confirms Threadripper PRO 5000WX series through SATA-IO filing

Edit 2: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 specifications have been leaked

There are 64, 32, 24, 16, and 12-core options.

You know you love them! The SoylentNews definitive aristarchus submissions! Here are some that the Editorial stiffs do not want you to see! (Especially chromas and FatPhil!)

We have had many productive discussions about the total intellectual bankruptcy of the American conservative movement, what with their racism, misogyny, and basic ignorant moronity, but there is more! Yes, much more! And Soylentil Eds have prevented this from coming to your attention. I wonder why. Well, actually, I do not. But here it is, regardless.

Note that this is not irregardless, which I am at a loss to interpret!

  (excuse me if I do not edit up the original submission too much, the eds expect too much already).

From the fine website, History News Network.
What Will We Lose if the Anti-CRT Movement Wins?

Using the disingenuous label of Critical Race Theory, conservative parents and pundits have worked to stifle African American and other minority voices in the school curriculum and to minimize the teaching of race and slavery in America’s past. Coming of age in another time of division – the late 1960s and early 1970s – I had a very different experience.

I grew up just outside a conservative small town in western Ohio. The population was overwhelmingly white with only a few black residents. Goldwater did very well there in the 1964 presidential vote, as did Nixon four years later. Residents usually took a conventional line on the issues of the day, whether it be the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War. Life – and change – moved slowly. But I underwent change because of educational exposure to the history and culture of those who had a different skin color and life experience.

My different experience began with my parents. On my thirteenth Christmas in 1965, they gifted me three books on African American history. Two were compendia of important figures in the black past; one was a young adult biography of Harriet Tubman. The reasons for the specific gifts remain unclear. I had not requested them. I never asked why they made these choices. Likely the gifts had something to do with Mom’s Quaker upbringing and Dad’s egalitarian regard for and treatment of the few African Americans who lived in our community.

I guess we need to go back, further back into American History, into the Runaway Era.

In contrast to what conservative parents and pundits are claiming, none of these educational experiences produced self-loathing or white guilt. They did make me uncomfortable enough to explore further. They did produce awareness and some greater empathy for those outside my own life experience. And they affected my political, social, and cultural attitudes, especially those having to do with race. I was not alone.

Social survey data, most notably that from the extensive General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, suggests that white Baby Boomers, those born (like me) between 1946 and 1964, underwent greater positive change in their attitudes toward African Americans and other minorities than those of any generation before or since. These same surveys posit that it resulted from the broader educational exposure that white Baby Boomers received in learning about the experience of other races and their place (including their brutal mistreatment) in the American past.

Meanwhile, Runaway is still going on about "thugs" and "darkies". Is he going against the entire boomer generation? Is he abby normal?

Conservative parents and pundits want to prevent white students from being exposed to the messiness and inequities of America’s past. What will it mean if they succeed in doing so? My experience and that of other white Baby Boomers suggests the positive role played by such educational exposure – racial attitudes and awareness changed for the better. Stifling such exposure will not mean a continuation of the status quo. It will likely mean several steps backward.

Yeah, they are just like that. Nothing to do with historical attrocities, and white supremacism, and genocide, and how Republicans used to be the Party that Freed the slaves. Nothing.

  And, yes, there is more.

  12/10/2021
Yes, it doesn't stop there. Conservatives, like Nazis, want to burn books, censor intellectuals, and get back at their teachers who made them do hard stuff, like learn to read and figure. So not likely they will stop at Cathode Ray Tubes.
Article to be found in The New York Times, which is not in Texas.
In Texas, a Battle Over What Can Be Taught, and What Books Can Be Read

A new state law constricts teachers when it comes to race and history. And a politician is questioning why 850 titles are on library shelves. The result: “A lot of our teachers are petrified.”

SAN ANTONIO — In late September, Carrie Damon, a middle school librarian, celebrated “Banned Books Week,” an annual free-speech event, with her working-class Latino students by talking of literature’s beauty and subversive power.

A few weeks later, State Representative Matt Krause, a Republican, emailed a list of 850 books to superintendents, a mix of half-century-old novels — “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron — and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margaret Atwood, as well as edgy young adult books touching on sexual identity. Are these works, he asked, on your library shelves?

Mr. Krause’s motive was unclear, but the next night, at a school board meeting in San Antonio, parents accused a librarian of poisoning young minds.

Days later, a secretary sidled up to Ms. Damon and asked if district libraries held pornography.

“‘No, no, honey, we don’t buy porno,’” Ms. Damon replied.

She sighed. “I don’t need my blood pressure going crazy worrying about ending up on a politician’s radar.”

For background, see my recent journal on these idiots interpretation of Immanuel Kant. Against the dummheit, even the God contends in vain.

Texas is afire with fierce battles over education, race and gender. What began as a debate over social studies curriculum and critical race studies — an academic theory about how systemic racism enters the pores of society — has become something broader and more profound, not least an effort to curtail and even ban books, including classics of American literature.

Can't be letting the kiddies be reading subversive literature. The Bible is enough for any red-blooded fundamentalist right wing Christian nut-job Texan!

The law singles out one text as forbidden: The New York Times’s 1619 Project. Now a book, the special magazine issue attempted to place Black Americans and the consequences of slavery at the center of America’s narrative. The project — for which Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator, won a Pulitzer Prize — is hotly debated among historians and became an ideological piñata for conservative critics.

Thus, Runaway. There is much more, but since janrinok and his Anglo-white supremacist crew will just reject this submission, not really worth my time to quote them here.

Oh, dear!
Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
Makes me and Xenophanes sad.

Interesting recent intellectual history from Salon. What could have been, and how it all went terribly alt-wrong.

What once seemed like a bracing intellectual movement has degenerated into a pack of abusive, small-minded bigots

Yes, those guys.

It was inspiring — really inspiring. I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?

Yes, looked like the Enlightenment was back, Baby! But, then,

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

Fast-forward to the present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized. This may sound hyperbolic, but it's not when, well, you look at the evidence. So I thought it might be illuminating to take a look at where some of the heavy hitters in the atheist and "skeptic" communities are today. What do their legacies look like? In what direction have they taken their cultural quest to secularize the world?

Let's see if you can spot a pattern:

Just the first case study, you can read the entire fine article, if you are so disposed.

Sam Harris: Arguably the progenitor of New Atheism, Harris was for me one of the more entertaining atheists. More recently, though, he has expended a prodigious amount of time and energy vigorously defending the scientific racism of Charles Murray. He believes that IQ is a good measure of intelligence. He argued to Josh Zepps during a podcast interview not only that black people are less intelligent than white people, but that this is because of genetic evolution. He has consistently given white nationalists a pass while arguing that Black Lives Matter is overly contentious, and has stubbornly advocated profiling "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim," at airports. (When Harris believes he's right about something, it becomes virtually impossible to talk him out of it, no matter how many good arguments, expert opinions or hard data are presented to him. Like Donald Trump, he's pretty much unteachable.) Harris has also partly blamed the election loss of Hilary Clinton on "safe spaces, trigger warnings, [and] new gender pronouns," released a private email exchange with Ezra Klein without Klein's permission, and once suggested that New Atheism is male-dominated because it lacks an "extra estrogen vibe."

His primary focus these days is boosting the moral panic over "social justice warriors" (SJWs), "political correctness" and "wokeism," which he apparently believes pose a dire threat to "Western civilization" (a word that has a lot of meaning for white nationalists). Consequently, Harris has become popular among right-wingers, and the sentiment of solidarity appears to be mutual. For example, he's described Ben Shapiro as being "committed to the … rules of intellectual honesty and to the same principles of charity with regard to other people's positions," which is odd given that Shapiro is a pathological liar who routinely misconstrues his opponents in service of a racist, misogynistic, climate-denying agenda.

And to think, Sam started out in Buddhism? THE religion with awakening as a soteriolgical goal? Such a waste. The other cases are equally interesting, or damning.

The king SoC of ARM single board computers approaches.

Rockchip RK3588 datasheet available, SBCs coming soon

We had most Rockchip RK3588 specifications so far for the long-awaited Cortex-A76/Cortex-A55 processor, but at today’s Rockchip Developer Conference 2021, more information surfaces with impressive CPU and GPU benchmarks, and the Rockchip RK3588 datasheet has just dropped from the sky directly into my laptop, as such document usually does. At least two single board computers are expected to soon follow from Radxa and Pine64.

[...] I’m quite surprised they could use a Mali-G610 “sub-premium premium” GPU as it was announced together with Cortex-A510, Cortex-A710, Cortex-X2 Armv9 cores, but it also works in SoCs with older Armv8 cores so that’s good, and that’s why GPU performance is truly a big step, up to over 10 times faster, compared to Rockchip RK3399.

Rock5 Model B layout

Pine64 December update: a year in review

Lastly, Rockchip will finally be introducing the RK3588 on December 16th (which means I can’t write about it on the day the update goes live – sorry), which will most certainly be of interest to us. What I will say is that it will bring entry-level desktop-class Arm CPU performance and plenty of IO options; keep a lookout for press coverage of Rockchip’s event.

While the prospect of a high-end computational device is certainly exciting, it also isn’t at the top of our to-do list.

It's sad that this thing can be delayed by a couple of years and still look good in comparison to everything else on the market.

The only competitor (limiting "competition" to ARM SBCs) might be the Amlogic S908X, which has also been scarce.

Cannabis bill approved in parliament, in first for Europe

Parliament on Tuesday approved a cannabis law that will allow users to carry, buy and grow amounts of the drug, making Malta the first European country to introduce laws to regulate recreational cannabis use.

MPs backed the Responsible Use of Cannabis bill by 36 votes to 27. All Labour MPs voted in favour of the bill while the opposition voted against it.

The reform must be signed into law by President George Vella - a process that usually happens within days of parliamentary votes.

Vella, a doctor by profession, has faced calls from NGOs and lobby groups that oppose the reform plans to refuse to sign the bill into law.

Malta to become first country in Europe to legalize cannabis for recreational use

In October, Luxembourg announced it would legalize cannabis, however parliament has yet to approve the measure.

Italy will likely decide whether or not to decriminalize cannabis in a referendum next year, after campaign groups managed to gather the required 500,000 signatures required to force a vote.

And Germany's incoming coalition government also included plans to legalize cannabis in its vision for the country, which was published last month.