Lion ponderings

 Hiring for us since the AI shift is now strictly in on-site QA testing, product management, & no more language based jobs.  https://www.youtube.com/@Lessononcoding  A guy who does nothing but reading case studies finds programming to now be good work if you can get it.  The rare paths above $500k get multiple offers paying much more than 2 years ago.  Positions from $100-$300k are just about non existent.  Manual testing, data labeling below $100k are in demand.  It's the same hollowing out as the day job & what we saw in every previous downturn. Anyone who previously had work delegated to them is basically gone while the delegators have moved up in value.  The current lease expires in summer 2027.  Lions would be surprised if they were still employed by then.  The move would need to happen in June, though there is an expensive monthly lease. Lions still find the language models hit or miss.  It's less certain how long...

 With inflation hitting 3.7% in September, the real yield has now been negative for 26 years.  No doubt the rate is going to 4% in 2 weeks, but still the way government works, they're only doing it because inflation is going to 4%. If there was any danger of an interest rate winter, the government would have surely raised interest rates above inflation at least once in the last 26 years.  To now be letting 3.7% inflation slide with only 3.7% interest, there's little chance of anything changing.  -------------------------------------------------------------------- So after biting the bullet & self pleasuring despite a nasty chafe, a most unexpected thing happened.  The lion kingdom woke up hornier than ever, after having a super erotic dream.  It goes against the traditional lore of self pleasuring defeating libido.  What probably happened was the imaginary imagery turning into a super horny dream.  Lions are never returning to teenage hormone ...

 Pondering how the Vanderbilt fortune was tragically spent away in 3 generations, lions also recognized the only reason anyone ever heard of the Vanderbilts was the mansions.  The 1st descendant grew the fortune.  Then the 2nd descendant converted it into the mansions rather than truly spending it away.  Similarly, Hearst was only remembered because of his castle & Carnegie was only remembered because of his institution.  If the vanderbilt fortune was kept intact, they would have sacrificed fame for wealthy descendants.  In the case of a lion, the fortune just isn't big enough to buy anything that would be remembered.  A house lions could afford might be remembered by the next owner, before millennials tore it down & turned it into a grey Frank Lloyd Wright.    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  For a good time, compared the 8 day forecast with the actual te...

Young lions were so intrigued by the dominant heroine in Spellbound, they actually bought the DVD.  26 years later, an HD print arrived.  Young lion initially saw only fragments while channel surfing.  The higher resolution definitely revealed a hazier, softer view of 1945.   Unsharp only worsens the grain.  The heroine's towering 5'9" tallness & dominance popped with young lion, but he didn't know it.  She was the superstar heroine from Casablanca.  Lions wonder if anyone that tall & dominant would become a superstar now. Young lion thought Hitchcock left it up to the viewer to decide if she was doing competent doctoring or succumbing to female hormones.  Young lion wanted to believe the former but the show in middle age definitely showed the latter.   Ingrid Bergman had affairs with all her costars, in an age before polyamory of the rich was the way intelligent life would survive.   Polyamory of a female zillion...

 More cinelerra bugs piled up, as lions continued doing more keyframe editing than usual.  Lions need to produce more movies that use all its features, though it has many alternatives at this point.  Constant keyframes didn't work in reverse playback & FloatAutos::automation_is_constant didn't work with constant keyframes at all.  The problem is get_prev_auto & get_next_auto return different values based on the direction.  get_automation_constant was an optimization in the days of 166Mhz to look up only 1 fade value for an entire audio buffer.  It might be overrated but it's technically correct.  It's used in a curious way inside VAutomation::direct_copy_possible because it's always true for a single frame of video.  It might be an artifact from when video was going to be processed in chunks, with pointers to arrays of pointers to frames.  Then we have multiple ways of getting the constant value:  IntAutos::get_automation_constan...

 Latest survey of consumer finances dropped.  The top 10% continued shooting upward while the rest stagnated.  The top 10% is the inflation of inflation targeting  & the bottom 90% is the deflation of inflation targeting.    The demographic under 35, gen Z & all the influencers bragging about getting rich actually lost a lot of ground.  35-44 or millennials gained some ground because they're famously rich & invested.  45-54 or generation X lost some ground because they're famously poor & made hail mary house purchases like mad in 2022.  Baby boomers are still living the dream.  35-44/millennials definitely lived up to their reputation as large living rich yuppies between the 2 forsaken ones. They replaced all the 70's ranch houses with frank lloyd wright airbnb's.  They repainted the world grey.  They started investing at the bottom in 2009 & rode the mountain of printed money up.  They became the...