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
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
The Democratic Response
draft
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.
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
draft
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.
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
draft
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.
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
draft
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.
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
draft
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/
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
draft
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.
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
draft
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.
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
draft
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.
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
draft
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!
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!
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