if you’re depressed, open this

just because you can’t find your happiness today doesn’t mean you never will

maybe you had to go through darkness before you can appreciate the light

so far, you’ve survived 100% of your worst days.. this too shall pass

it’s okay to struggle, you’re doing better than you feel like you’re🙂

A tentative thread on the Biden speech

Adam Curtis once leaned heavily on the book 'Everything was forever, until it was no more' by Alexei Yurchak - a slightly odd book about the way that language in the Soviet Union slowly degraded.

Instead of confronting reality, the job of propagandists, indeed of all official discourse, was to stitch together a series of recognisable banalities.

Ideas that once were essential parts of the concrete social project of the Soviet Union - building a worker's state - were now invoked in whatever context needed.

Thus, you could praise the 'trenchant labour of the workers' when discussing the publication of a new edition of technical guidelines for building tractors.

The incredible brittleness of this cut-and-paste discourse meant that no-one in the Soviet Union was able to process, let alone alter, the decay of the Union and its increasingly unstable economic system.

A lengthy thread I wrote just to write. Feel free to ignore.

1/ The future of consumer GPUs is probably less ASICy than people think. I think we're nearing the end of growing non-general purpose compute/cache die utilization in consumer GPUs. Here's why:

2/ Real world RT core usage is far from peak theoretical perf. On Nvidia, they're cache starved. The way to improve performance for Nvidia is to add more cache to the die a la infinity cache. On AMD, it's just to improve their RT core design, which isn't great.

More importantly,

3/ real world RT core usage is very naive. It's often collect n sample per pixel with m reflections w/irradiance caching, & then run A-SVGF to denoise. This usually works well, but sucks w/moving objects, fine details like leaves on distant trees, and the combo of leaves in wind.

4/ But research already shows that you can get pretty drastic improvements w/adaptive sampling in that case.

Beyond that, adaptive sampling research usually focuses on general cases. But consumer GPUs use RT for e.g. games, Blender, etc. These aren't super general. The engines

5/ underpinning these applications have access to a lot of information. For example, developers can add hints to objects to suggest to the renderer that they be sampled more or less.

Better exploitation of temporal data and ray tracing statistics can make a lot of the rays cast

As part of our commitment to keeping our customers/community protected & informed, we are releasing a blog that shines light on transition between Stage 1 and 2 of #Solorigate/#SUNBURST campaign, custom Cobalt Strike loaders, post-exploit. artifacts, IOCs: https://t.co/b0ReHMa63u

Here are some highlights:
The missing link between the Solorigate backdoor and the custom #CobaltStrike loaders observed during the #Solorigate is an Image File Execution Options (IFEO) Debugger registry value created for the legitimate process dllhost.exe (ATT&CK ID: T1546.012).

Once the registry value is created, the attackers wait for the occasional execution of dllhost.exe, which might happen naturally on a system. This execution triggers a process launch of wscript.exe configured to run the VBScript file dropped by the SolarWinds backdoor (Stage 1).

The VBScript in turn runs rundll32.exe, activating the Cobalt Strike loader DLL using a clean parent/child process tree completely disconnected from the SolarWinds process. Finally, the VBScript removes the previously created IFEO value to clean up any traces of execution.

On the custom Cobalt Strike Loaders: we identified several second-stage malware, including TEARDROP, Raindrop, and other custom loaders for the Cobalt Strike beacon. During the lateral movement phase, the custom loader DLLs are dropped mostly in existing Windows sub-directories.

🧵THREAD🧵
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." - Reagan

The 1776 Commission Report has been removed. Not to worry, I downloaded a copy.

My prediction: the Biden era will be the inverse of Obama era. Obama was seen as a progressive in the last phase of the Reagan-Clinton era. Biden is a moderate in the beginning of a post-neoliberal era.

He will represent a transition between neoliberal hegemony and new ideas.

Let's give the devil his due: he's tireless. He has an iron constitution. . He wasn't just a politician; he was a desperate man, and from his desperation he drew the power to hypnotize vast crowds. 1/

He was never anything less than a finisher, which is what made him dangerous, especially down the stretch in an election. Even today, he couldn't do anything but try to make the sale, even to people who supposedly loved him. 2/

Even today, he couldn't think of anything to say to them but the classic kiss-off of a bitter man: "Have a good life." 3/

I give the devil his due in order to give the other character in this historic drama his due -- the character whose virtues his opponent could never understand. 4/

He is, after all, an old man. He did, after all, have a speech impediment. He failed, after all , in two previous runs for the presidency, the first time for ignominious reasons. 5/

THREAD on the Palestinian territories & the vaccine: The Israeli government is facing criticism from human rights groups & international organisations for not extending the vaccination programme currently underway in Israel to the millions of Palestinians in the WB and Gaza 1/

Let’s just deal in some facts. The Israeli government is embarking on an unprecedented drive to become one of the first countries to vaccinate its entire population, including Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians in East Jerusalem and in Israeli prisons. 2/

#Israel is receiving supplies from #Pfizer. In return, Israel has agreed to share its #vaccination data with the pharmaceutical company to help it ascertain how successful its COVID-19 vaccine will be in a real world environment. 3/

The argument from critics that Israel is carrying out “medical apartheid” is based upon Israel’s perceived international law obligations as an “occupying power” to vaccinate the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. 4/

However, the Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s by Israel & the Palestinians, moved the relationship between them beyond the default occupier/occupied legal paradigm by creating the Palestinian Authority (PA) and giving it a range of autonomous powers. 5/