Lion ponderings

 File previews came together rapidly, after the initial refactoring.  The mane unknown is how well PlaybackEngine::interrupt_playback is going to work when it's asynchronously receiving start commands.  Interrupt_playback is normally called with the window unlocked so it can wait for the tracker to finish drawing.  The problem is it's now going to get start commands when the window is unlocked.  It normally works around this by locking FilePreviewer::previewer_lock.  This causes a deadlock when interrupting playback so instead, it's locking the window. The file previewer has to call it with the window locked & the previewer_lock unlocked.  It seems to work as long as the tracker has an is_playing variable.  Instead of waiting for the tracker to finish drawing, the previewer can set is_playing to make the tracker ignore further draw commands. Lions are pondering making this the universal way of interrupting playback.  The key requirement is for all the trackers to do the

 The lion kingdom's strategy of letting its asset allocation grow stonk heavy isn't the generally accepted path.  The roth IRA grew to manely stonk over the last 24 years.  The other IRAs grew their stonk percentages well above what lions bought.  The 401k is the only account which requires a fixed asset allocation to be manetained.  It automatically sells stonk when the stonks go up. The conventional fixed asset allocation strategy is going to go away as interest rates stay permanently negative & stonks remane risky to buy all at once.  It isn't compatible with dollar cost averaging to have fixed allocations if they don't all grow at the same rate.  Fixed asset allocation only worked in a past time when fixed income & stonks yielded nearly the same amount. The 100% stonk portfolio has become the big thing & is eventually going to become the standard, but it's very risky to go in all at once.  The advantage with letting a stonk allocation naturally grow

 There's a desire to get rid of the subclasses for Tracking, make PlaybackEngine always create its own Tracking object & have the tracker call virtual functions in the PlaybackEngine. That area contains much history from a younger lion.  It still needs a Tracking object because it's a thread but the PlaybackEngine subclasses are barely being used while the Tracking classes aren't using polymorphism enough. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also noted a lot of bits were once saved with the EDL like the playback config.  The idea was to have multiple displays configured differently by each EDL.  That was all abandoned, but it's still in the EDL. There's still a concept of multiple video channels & coordinates for the different video channels.  Maybe it would have evolved into anaglyphs if the 3D craze lasted longer.   For file previews, the playback config had to be moved out of the EDL &

 Lions ponder why it took so long for IMDB to become a replica of every movie in stills.  The software for consumers must not have been around until decades after lions could do the job. Lions miss the days of sequels having numbers.  In honor of the 80's, the lion kingdom might go back to numbered sequels.  Lions didn't have a clue what was happening in Captain Heroine II or The Marvels but there were some good visuals. It looked like it was based on Who Heroine. It was obviously intended for a very young audience, millennials over 40, or confirmed bachelors.  The villain was a world class hottie.  The goofy musician alien world looks like it came from the ILM archive but it also was the kind of world lions would want to live in a simulation of, by wearing VR goggles all day.  There's a good chance an AI model could do the impossible task of generating a complete 3D modeled virtual world from photos in a movie & a map of the real world, complete with buildings, interio

      Closing on Sunday was not a recipe for success.  The days of running down to get fake leather are over.  The rest of their leather selection was long gone.  It was definitely a magnet for animals with home made sandals.  Now it goes back to being an Expo design center. Running past that place on frigid mornings, during the lion kingdom's killer commute, lions felt sorry for the hourly workers lined up waiting to go in.  Pondered the miracle that was the lion kingdom's evolution out of minimum wage jobs. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lions still have a soft spot for the short, stocky, & dominant while the mane prefers the skinny brunette for some reason.    She's got a Russel Crow accent.  Wonder if she sails wooden boats. She apparently left cargurus & now makes vijeos for Motorpoint.  https://www.instagram.com/rebeccajackson_uk/?hl=en https://www.youtube.com/@motorpoint/videos      ------

  Quantitative tightening ended right when the PCE managed to fudge a 2 handle.  It ended at 7.7 tril.  The fight now returns to creating housing inflation to offset the decline in chinese prices.  It always feels like you're missing out but lions are numerically as exposed to stonks as they intended.   The media loves to predict the end of easy money, but lions don't see how the easy money can ever end, based on how inflation targeting works. As long as China innovates, the government has to drive up housing prices to reach 2%.  The next big thing is chinese electric cars.  If chinese electric cars became available, no-one is going to afford a Tesla. The problem with buying now is the 401k automatically buys, prices are at a peak, & it leaves less cash to buy a dip.  Part of the FOMO feeling is because all the lion stonks are in IRAs while all the lion cash is taxable.  Cash has gone nowhere while stonks have lifted off.  1 experience selling a monster growth stonk in th

Unfortunately, 4876/4766 is just 2.3% for the last 3 years.  That's not great compared to even interest after taxes.  You might have done better by perfectly timing the dips, but most dip buying is on the sides of the dip. The index fund craze could have made them more volatile or it could have diluted the gains.  For now, it seems to have diluted the gains.  The S&P would have to be 6300 to hit the much hyped 10% annual average for the last 3 years.  Maybe it'll eventually double.  Those doublings tend to happen overnight.  1 way of looking at it is 6300 is where it should be right now & it's trading at a discount.  As long as the inflation target is an average, they're hitting 2% now.  Housing is rising a lot faster & microchips are falling. The forecast is for interest to drop to 3% by the end of the year so the S&P could easily hit 6300.  With the stonk market now at record highs, the lion kingdom is currently 54% cash, 37% stonk, & 9% bond funds

 More evidence the internet is a revolving door of 18-25 year olds that never ages.   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tried to salvage this phone cam by taking off the scratched glass.  Sadly, the flash doesn't work at all with this hot snot arrangement.  This could be a temporary solution, but it won't last.  The focusing mechanism is exposed & it has to be stowed in the truck facing the side. As was done with LG's, they need a dab of hot snot to keep the glass from scratching.  It also got run over twice.  Phone cams have proven better than the powershot & the DSLR in most cases, so there was no choice but to give the moto G pure an early retirement.  There's a big desire to leave the DSLR at home. The last 2 phones arrived in Nov 2021 so they met the traditional 1 year lifespan per phone. There's little more a lion can expect even without the car wrecks. https://growmane.blogspo

 Dreamed about having hip x-rays which revealed nothing abnormal.  Labrum tears are another horror story from running lore.   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The trick with the current bull market is it's driven by the Dave Ramsey movement, the end of pension funds, retirement accounts pouring money into index funds, 20 years of negative interest rates driving a fear of treasuries.  Long ago, they said baby boomers would suck the stonk market dry when they drew down their retirement accounts.  That didn't happen.   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The wall takes another 2.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While chopping up the file dialog for previews, the lion kingdom started seriously considering getting rid of all or most

    Weather forecasts still aren't precise enough to know, but the right move this time was to go south.  Atmospheric rivers are narrow enough to drive to the dry weather.                  

  No doubt about a taper to quantitative tightening now.  It's closing in on 7.5 tril.  Any dip is going to be a buying opportunity.  What lions bought in 2023 is way up.  What lions had before 2022 has gone nowhere. The lion kingdom's HSA made back everything it lost on fees after 2010.  Lions originally planned to burn it all on over the counter supplies before the amerikan people banned that.  Then came years of pondering burning it on dentists, contact lenses, LASIK.  In the end, decided not to spend it on anything since it's tax sheltered.    The smarter move was to spend after tax money on what the HSA is intended for & use the HSA for tax sheltered growth.  Nothing saved in a taxable account by burning the HSA on healthcare would have grown as fast as the money in the HSA.  It's another example of the system having the opposite effect of what was intended & sometimes doing nothing being better than acting. -------------------------------------------------

Just noticed the exaggerated Q in the Linux Libertine font when lions realized the Titler was broken again.  The text box is prone to non printable characters in the beginning of the string.  They cause the rest of the string to not print, so it often ends up appearing to not accept any keypresses.  Sadly, it's not easily reproducible. The titler can render horizontally overlapping characters like the Q but didn't have Linux Libertine.  It can't render characters overlapping vertically & it can't render a horizontally overlapping character if it's the last character.  It needs a concept of the maximum height of a line in addition to the line spacing & a maximum width of a line. The most challenging font is Scriptina.  Helas, freetype doesn't render the overlapping Q in Linux Libertine.  Freetype has a concept called variants of a glyph, but it's not clear how to select a variant based on whether the glyph is the last character in a line. The tricks w