Friday, November 30, 2018

Helped A Homeless Person (maybe) Destroyed Two Relationships (maybe)

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I may have helped a homeless person today.  Maybe.  It was so clear that her current dilemma / nightmare was something she had caused.  She was totally able to get that and I think it makes things worse.   I think she will face a week of very challenging adversity and then be OK.  She needs an address to get her disability card, then get an ID and then find a place to live with her disability.  Its all doable, but its all challenging when you are homeless.

But this can be hard to do even when you are not homeless.  

And two other friends may have disavowed me.  This always makes me sad.  What is funny sad is that a friend thinks that I am all rage, and he cant take that.  I try to explain to him that rage and anger is my personality (along with a few other emotions) and he should just adjust to it, but he hates me for saying this because he thinks I dont acknowledge his feelings.  

What surprises me, and which I dont know how to process, is that this is something new?  Weird.  I have been like this for two decades.

There is also some interesting, insulting material about my medical issues, but its not something that can be discussed here.  I am such an idiot sometimes.


Let Me Explain Why You Are Going to Jail

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You are not going to jail just because you were part of the criminal organization of Donald Trump, although, admittedly, that should be enough.

You are going to jail because when Donald Trump became president, if he did become president, he did not grow into the job, but instead worked to be the most incompetent, the most dishonest, the most racist, the most idiotic fucking nutcase that we have ever had, in conjunction with nutcases like Ryan, Nunes, Grassley and McConnel.  Racist nutcases.  Assholes like the Koch Brothers and the Mercers.  Obvious criminals like Pruitt.  

You are going to jail because Trump put a rapist on the Supreme Court and a right wing nutty boy as well.

You are going to jail because people hate that fucking son of a bitch so much that they are even willing to enforce the law, something that we normally only do to poor people, not rich people.

That is why you are going to jail.


Thursday, November 29, 2018

What the Constitution Means to Me

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It means that Dershowitz and Kavanaugh can borrow a private jet from one of their rich Wall Street friends and go on a rape party in Georgia secure in the knowledge that there will be no fair elections and no legal reprecusions, then fly back to Washington and laugh at videos of political refugees being teargassed and beaten.

Thats what the Constitution of the United States stands for today.

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

In Response To Comments From A Wonderful Friend

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What a nice person you are to care.
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
Listening to the sound track of Repo Man.
And somehow it seemed appropriate.
I am not likely to suddenly become a nice guy.
I appreciate your words, your experience and your help.
But I advise you to limit your expectations.
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Only one, but the lightbulb has to sincerely want to change.

Saturday, November 24, 2018

When Some Moron Says Trump is Not Impeachable


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I dont have any pro-Trump friends any more, at least not on FB. I might have some friends in real life with whom I do not discuss politics who might be Trump supporters without my knowledge, and that is fine. But for those of you who have Trump supporters as friends, here is a nice concise response from the New Yorker about what to say when they say "What!? What has he done that impeachable!? Nothing!". When some idiot says that, here is at least one reply:



Over its first 20 months in office, this administration has produced what would have, heretofore, passed for a presidency-defining scandal on a near-daily basis. There is, of course, the president’s ongoing campaign to undermine the independence of federal law enforcement; his apparent use of U.S. military deployments as a campaign tool; ostensible violations of campaign-finance law; shameless profiteering off the presidency; gross violations of information-security protocols; use of mass child abuse as a tool for border enforcement; personal business relations with a Saudi government whose murder of an American resident he has enthusiastically apologized for; lackluster response to the hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico; and failure to so much as staff many key federal offices; among many, many other things. Meanwhile, just about every major Cabinet official has seemingly committed at least one major ethics offense.


From the New Yorker.


http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/house-democrats-trump-investigations-oversight-maxine-waters-moderates.html

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Real Clear Politics, Republicans and Georgia

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According to Real Clear Politics (a Republican news aggregator), Stacey Abrams hurt Georgia business because of "sour grapes" after a lost election.

You see, this is why Republicans are evil.  There is no thought in their twisted little minds that Kemp did not win the election, that Kemp is a racist who stole the election.

Are the Republicans really that stupid?  No.  They are just lying to steal the money, always have been, always will.

Lock him up. Lock Kemp up, period.




Things Learned On the Road to GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks)

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Miscellaneous things learned working with Tensorflow/Keras and machine learning to generate images.

1. Use Containers to install Tensorflow

Containers are virtual machines - lite, and it is the least annoying way to install tensorflow on Linux/Centos 7.5.  

2. For CNNs, the GPU is many times faster.

Its true what they say, at least in part.  For convolution neural networks, the GPU speeds things up by at least an order of magnitude and possibly two.  With containers, you only need to install the Nvidia driver on the base machine / OS and use a different container.

3. It is not at all clear how the CNN relates to real convolutions as we know them from image processing, but it does seem as though using larger filters as we increase resolution avoids the problem of the picture subdividing into lots of little squares.




Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Letter to My Congressman Salud Carbajal

Dear Congressman Carbajal

Congratulations on your re-election to Congress!  You're victory in these difficult times is a testament to your energy, your knowledge and your accomplishments.

I am new to your district and I am sure I will sound a little strident in this email, but I am extraordinarily unhappy with the events of the last two years as so many Americans are. 

Please do everything you can, and be as vocal as your position permits, and make it clear that (among other things) racism is any form is abhorrent to Americans, voter suppression is not acceptable, that the supreme court and federal judges must be ethically excellent individuals and not be right wing fanatics, and crime in the government must be investigated. 

Stand strong for us, sir, if you would.

Sincerely,
Michael Wahrman

The Democratic Response

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I want the Democrats, my party of choice, to make some clear statements.  At this time, at this place, now, not later but now.

Here is what I want them to say.

Racism is not acceptable in America, in politics, in how we treat each other, in how we vote.  Under any circumstances, it is not acceptable.  But most of all it is not acceptable in our public officials.

The people who are nominated to be a federal judge and especially the Supreme Court must be superior ethically as well in terms of their knowledge of the law and in their judgment.  They must represent all Americans, not just the extreme right wing and religious right, no matter how much they might wish it.  The abuse of this system by the Republican right has endangered our entire system.

Republicans need to learn that crime is wrong and will not be tolerated. You want to spend a year studying an email server, lets investigate racist motivated voting suppression, obstruction of justice, money laundering and treason.

Monday, November 19, 2018

The Democrats Must Stand Firm Or They Will Lose

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Being rewritten, please try back in a few hours!!!

This is what the Democrats have to do going forward.  And let me be clear, any failure to do this will mean that they Democrats will lose at the next election. They have one chance, in my opinion, to redeem themselves from decades of accomodation and of longing for an America that sadly no longer exists.

They must throw out any idea of "bipartisanship" but must stand firm and unyielding and execute a policy based on principles.

Forget legislation, legislation can be dealt with after the right wing Republican nuts have been exposed for the traitors and criminals that they are.

The American people have been subjected to an astonishing array of crimes against their government and the people of this country and of the world.  It is time for the Democrats to make clear that this behavior has to stop. 

Here is a short list of things the Democrats *must* do to maintain any credibility.

In the following I really dont want to hear any stupid whining about how "why bother to impeach if the corrupt Republicans will just turn their back on truth and justice.  Yes, the Republicans are corrupt and will betray America again, but that is not excuse for not  impeaching him.  Leave the Senate to the Senate, let the House execute its responsibilities for once.

In no particular order.

1. Trump must be investigated for his crimes, or at least a goodly number of them.  If appropriate, those crimes may be referred to relevant state departmens of justice for prosecution.  If appropriate, Trump must be impeached.

2. Kavanaugh must be investigated and if appropriate his crimes referred to proper authorities.  it may also be that he should be impeached.

3. Gorsuch is a right wing nutty boy.  He needs to be reviewed by the house, and also, if appropriate impeached.

4. Why was Nunes allowed to betray America and why was he not removed from his position as chair of the Intelligence Committee when the DOJ and FBI begged Ryan to do so.  This must be investigated.

5. Why have N. Dakota and Georgia been allowed to use obviously racist measures to disenfranchise voters?

6. Why has Florida failed to be able to reliably hold an election and count votes?

7. Why is the Senate continuing to approve right wing nutty boys for the judiciary as if that was acceptable?  The judicial system is being destroyed.

8. What was Pruitt saying behind closed doors for which no notes were kept and the American people are not allowed to know.  Let him testify under oath and let those he spoke to testify under oath and let them pay for their crimes.

All of these issues must be addressed before another budget is approved.  If that means the government stops then I am all for it.  Better we get this cleared up right now, first, before continuing some injustice or abomination.

There are other things as well.  Your list may differ.  This is all the House should do. If any of them are not dealt with, then as far as I am concerned we, the nation and the House has failed.

The nature of the crisis will be further discussed in a later post.



Why Group Sourcing is Obviously Stupid

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At various times people talk about "group sourcing" on the internet, or of learning from the internet from the sources that people provide for free or even for a fee, as if it will just be there.

This is not only wrong, it is stupid, it is even obviously stupid, as anyone would know if they had actually tried it to learn something seriously that way.

The reason is that the noise to signal is wildly out of balance.  And there is no way to judge noise from signal in the general case without a vast amount of time and effort.

Group sourcing is obviously not as good as a credible source with information that has been vetted.

Duh.

I guess the people writing about the Internet dont know what they are talking about or maybe they are just lying to steal the money.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

We Must Help Our Elected Representatives

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Our elected representatives need our help to understand what we want done. Figure out how to contact him/her and let them know.  I will be making a list on this blog.  You should do the same.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

How to Contact Glassner & Blinn

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To my astonishment, both Andrew Glassner and Jim Blinn are easy to contact, as they maintain web sites with a contact form.

https://www.glassner.com/

http://www.jimblinn.com/contact/

What Everyone Who Studies Intelligence Knows about Wikileaks

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Many Americans don't like what they think is the "intelligence" business.  There are good and bad reasons why this might be, but its sufficiently important that I think that people should know more about it so that they can make more accurate or possibly nuanced judgments about it.  It is, after all, *their* intelligence community and is genuinely working, for the most part, in what they believe is the nation's interest as ordered by the POTUS and the relevant committees of Congress.

Even though there is a lot we can not and will not know about the world of intelligence there are lots and lots of things that we can know by paying attention and knowing the history of these things.

And so, in light of this, here is one comment on current events.

It has been obvious for years, certainly at least a decade and possibly more, that whatever else Wikileaks may be, it is probably also a tool of foreign Intelligence.  From the material released and the timing of that release it is likely that Wikileaks has been chosen as the "public mouthpiece" of materials collected by foreign intelligence agencies that have collected the material from one source or another, and are looking for a way to get this material into the world at a time of their choosing to influence some political process ongoing in the West.  This has been completely obvious, and if it is not true, a lot of people will be surprised. But what does it mean?  What should we do about it? And what does it not mean?

It does not mean that the people running Wikileaks are insincere or believe that they are doing anything but what a freedom loving person of the world should be doing. They may be completely uncompromised in their goals.  Nor does it mean that they have necessarily committed any crimes, although they may have.  But even so, be aware that a crime in one country may not be a crime in another.   On the other hand, I think it is likely from what little I know that they very well may have knowingly committed some crimes that are in fact illegal in this country, but that is to be seen.

All I am really saying here is that you should not be so naive as to think that Wikileaks is a completly independent, do-good-for-the-world, totally disinterested organization.  They serve a very useful purpose for people who are not friendly to this country.  That said, they may provide a useful service for the rest of us, that would depend on your point of view on many other issues.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Notes on Building My Servers

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At the end of the day, I ended up with two servers.  One running Linux for rendering, machine learning, and other image processing.  The other for using the Samsung HMD for VR that my friend Ken Perlin sent me.  They are both running the Xeon Silver 4108 8/16 CPU with lots of memory.

Their were two major issues on this build.  I kept getting bad parts, many CPUs were bad and much of the early memory was bad.  Now I buy the memory directly from Kingston and whatever I was running into with CPUs seemed to be fixed.  I also had a bad PSU.  It was just endless.

At the end of the day, we settled on memory from Kingston, chassis from Chenbro from Newegg, power supplies from Supermicro directly, Samsung SSDs from Newegg, Nvidia GPUs from Newegg, and Supermicro motherboards from 3rd party vendors through Newegg.

From now on, always test a new power supply for a build, and stay away from two socket motherboards, always going for a single socket and a more powerful processor if necessary.

Never install Windows on a machine with any other kind of data or OS anywhere near.

The built in graphics on the Supermicro motherboards work great for consoles, and it is recommended you have a VGA display of some sort so you dont have to go through a VGA->HDMI converter.  All systems are still on the USB ethernet connection which works fine for what I need to do.  Ultimately, we will use the onboard ethernet.  All systems have a USB3 bay added to the front.

This is the first time I have had reasonable computing that is appropriate for the work in maybe 20 years.  It makes a difference.


Donald, Why Dont You Shut Up

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No one believes you Donald, so why dont you just shut up.  We are definitely into the next period of play.  I dont know what will happen but I doubt old Donald is going to make it.  At the end of the day he is not immune to all the laws of nature and politics although he thinks he is.  How this will play out, and how long it will take, and what it will take to fix it if it can be fixed, is of course a mystery.  It is for the Democrats and the Resistance to lose.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Lessons on the Path to Righteousness and the Installation of Tensorflow on Centos

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Tensorflow is one of the open source solutions to a machine learning back end.  That, with a Keras layer on top, is one of the more popular machine learning environments out there. Among other things, it supports both central and graphics processing on most operating systems.

As in so many things in life, a clever or lucky choice can achieve a goal with no effort, but a similar choice can result in weeks, years or even decades of hell.

There are a number of surprises involved in installing these packages on your operating system of choice, and this note is intended to help you, readers, avoid shooting yourself in the foot or the head as the case may be.

1. Never, never, never try to install from source no matter who advises you to.  It is perfectly possible to install from source on a bare metal machine without any virtual environments, or you could just hit yourself with a large hammer for a few weeks.  Who knew that there were so many different ways to install Python, or that there were so many Pythons?  And that is just the tip of a very nasty set of icebergs.

2. So whenever you are given an opportunity to isolate yourself from the real world by using a virtual environment, whether in Python or anywhere else, take it.  In particular, for the Windows 10 version, a choice of the python virtual environment and a precompiled version of Tensorflow/Keras will result in a cpu only version in an afternoon.  For some of you, you are done and can move on.

3. For those of us in Linux world, you now have to choose between a few specific versions of Ubuntu and everything else.  You who would compromise your integrity and have no aesthetic sense are welcome to use Ubuntu.  Go, it is there for you.

4. For the rest of us who might use an adult version of Linux, my operating system of choice is Centos / RHEL 7.5 which is the most recent version.  I thought I had to compile from source, but this turns out not to be the case.  What turns out to to one of the best paths through this jungle is to use the Docker (container) version as follows.

5. Install Docker by registering as a free user of the Community Edition.  Having registered, and installed the preferred package from the preferred repository, you are now eligible to use containers that have been registered with Docker.

6. Tensorflow creates a new version more or less every day in a variety of flavors (no GPU, GPU, etc) and puts them out on the Docker registry with such adjectives as "latest" or "stable" for example.

7. Using these magic words you can create the name of a container you want to run.  You use one of the magic containers and it loads that part of the container whose layers are not already local, and if you so specify, you are in a shell, in a container, in which you can go into python, load tensorflow and keras and you are off to the races in a cpu version of Tensorflow.

8. Of course, at this point you are now using containers and you will need to spend a day learning about container file systems and other nuance.  Its not too bad though.

9. For those of you who foolishly also want to use GPU acceleration, you have chosen a slightly more difficult path.  You will have to install a different version of the "docker" program from Nvidia and Github.  But once you do, and once you install the GPU driver on your Linux (a bird of a different feather) you can now use a container with GPU from that list mentioned above.

Good luck!

Friday, November 9, 2018

The Big Lebowski and Carter Burwell

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This will be old news to many of you, but it was new to me.

I am slowly developing an appreciation for the movie The Big Lebowski (1998) by the Coen Brothers.  I realize it has been out for a while and I am late to see its value.

What I had not realized was that computer music pioneer and composer Carter Burwell did the original music.  Carter is distant cousin to my friends Carter Emmart and Jimmy Carter, and its really nice to see just how well he has done.  He has worked on a movie that is sure to last as long as movies from our civilization last.




https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/

Monday, November 5, 2018

Its Nice to Know Where You Stand


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An old friend is taking the day off work to go walk the precinct for someone he claims is the first openly bisexual candidate in the history of the American Republic, which I doubt.  I think that is great, but do I really care if someone is openly bisexual? 

He has not had the time to visit me, or for me to visit him, once in the last 10 or is it 12, or more, years.

Its nice to know how much our friendship counts.

No Free Speech on Twitter


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Apparently only the Orange Moron is permitted to express their opinion on Twitter.  I am still keeping my account, but probably wont tweet much, too afraid of violating the rules.

Remember the Fifth of November


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Time to blow up Parliament.  Oh, too bad!  No patriots around here.  Just rapists on our Supreme Court! 

A First! A Browser Attack on Safari and the Mac

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Well, at least its a first for me.  Safari tried to tell me that I HAD A VIRUS and I HAD to do some stupid shit, etc, etc, you know the drill.

Our right wing FBI and Orange-Sack-of-Shit President is too busy putting rapists on the Supreme Court to try and catch these criminals.  Hell, the Trump-ola is probably making money off the scam.

Who is More Stupid, Democrats or Republicans

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Sure the Republicans are evil swine, but the Democrats never learn.  I read in the Daily Beast that if/when the Dems take the House they immediately should get in a fight over Nancy Pelosi (yawn) and then be nice to the Republicans.

OH, they say, dont dare go after the Republicans for their crimes.

Idiots, morons, swine.  Put the Republicans in jail.  All of them.  Start with the Orange Bag of Shit and his rapist justice.


Sunday, November 4, 2018

Holy Moly This Hollywood Bullshit Makes Me Mad

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Dear Friends, or not as the case may be.

I dont want your hopes and prayers.  I want the money you owe me for getting so much done which you based your enitre careers upon.

Thank you!

Saturday, November 3, 2018

What if We Met The Caravan with Open Arms


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What if it was all a joke and Trump means  to have the immigrant caravan met by the US Military with open arms, housing and humanitarian aid!? 

Then we would be the angel of the international scene and not hated (as much).

For those who say this is not practical, they are probably right.  On the other hand if this country had not welcomed immigrants, I would not be alive.


Oh That Hollywood Insincerity


Ha Ha!

Another example of a dear friend proving what a shallow and insincere person he/she is.  Who knows. Managing expectations is the key, and my expectations have been way too high.

Obviously.

Why do I even bother?

Friday, November 2, 2018

Election Predictions Midterms 2018

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What a clusterf*ck this has been.

It has been excruciating to read the mainstream press the last few months as they agonize over numbers that tell us nothing.  I have literally read every possible prediction contradicted by some pundit within days.

1. Dems take the house by 20 or so votes.  Anything more than that is a victory that makes it harder for the republicans to spin.

1.1 But the Dems need a minimum of 40 votes majority to spin it as a Blue Wave and who knows if they will get it.

1.2 The people who claim that young people will vote, will vote Dem, and who say that women will vote Dem as a block will be wrong.  The Women Vote will be mostly dead (except as a slight majority, not a block) after this election.  That is my prediction.  You will still hear about the youth vote and the women vote because there will be stupid lefties who cant get it out of their heads, but it isnt real.  Sorry.

2. Reps pick up at least one seat in the Senate, maybe two.  Beto is defeated by Cruz.

3. The Georgia race is too close to call.

4. Dems win Florida governorship for a net gain of several governorships.

5. Nunes and Hunter are reelected.

6. Trump declares victory and voter fraud in the House.  He uses that as an excuse to ignore subpoenas.

7. Dems in the House unleash hell but it does them no good, not really.

8. Because the Senate is firmly in Trumps hands and does his bidding.

9. Trump and the Senate continue to place stupid right wing thugs in the judiciary.

10. The Supreme Court starts fucking with our freedoms.

11. Violence increases.

12. The Trump revolution is pronounced real and not an aberration.

13. Most Americans still fail to understand that they live in a dictatorship and that most of the constitution has failed.

14. Mueller indicts Stone and the Wikileaks asshole but what he does beyond that is a mystery to me.

15. Voter Repression goes full force.  Right wing courts uphold most of it.  Voting rights, fuck that, this is Trump Country now.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Should I Alert the Humane Society

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A woman I know in Oakland sets traps for animals, castrates or neuters them, and then has them killed.  Should I alert the humane society?  Why bother?  They would just attack me for telling them about it. They approve of that kind of thing.