Lion ponderings

 https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/monica-lewinsky-new-face-latest-fashion-brand-reformation-campaign   You know average fitness is going down when Monica Lewinsky is now considered a supermodel.   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lions could imagine the progress of the industrial revolution increasing the number of animals surviving purely from investments until everyone alive is surviving purely from investments & all productivity is automated.   The value of investments is pushed up by the decline in cost of production through inflation targeting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If that doesn't make you not miss the 80's.  There aren't enough side by side compositions showing where we came from.                  

 https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/sf-macys-close-18690200.php   The closing of Macy's in San Francisco is a big deal, but lions were surprised it lasted as long as it did.  There have been many stories about conversions of office buildings to apartments but lions have seen nothing of the kind.  Offices are being left vacant or demolished.  They're replaced by new multiplexes or retail. They're not releasing a list of store closings.  The big question is if the pain in the ass mall cop is getting his.  Never ever bought anything in Macy's but what a coincidence if he lost a department store the day after his career peaked. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Soaring number of Americans are now 401(k) millionaires Fidelity replays the same story every few days.  The fed says the wealth pop after 2020 was manely from home equity. Fidelity says it was from stonks.  Lions still think most peo

 Who knew when you 1st discovered the hell of using minicom to bring up a dialup connection in 1997, it would end up the staple of many day jobs.  It was a most unlikely destiny, as unlikely as a career centered around the UNIX guru universe was in 1997.    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Transitions got a wave of binge coding 2 years ago, but they definitely need help again.  Beyond previews, they need GUI redraws for undo.  The plugin GUI's got revamped long ago to stay open & redraw during undo. They need a revamp of the GUI close operation similar to what realtime plugins got.  Sadly, undo isn't capturing any tweeks in the transition GUI's.  Only the save operation is capturing the tweeks. Reverse playback of transitions is broken.  It's skipping the end of the transition.  This wasn't possible to test until the transition widgets started reflecting their length & clicking on the t

 It came to pass while upgrading swap channels that the ordering of the output layers in OpenGL mode was now non deterministic or reversed.  The same problem began affecting Overlay. Overlay no longer worked at all. The latest hackathon was so dependent on the gradient plugin, another wish was making the color pickers draw checkers to indicate the alpha level.  A general RGBA filled box is required since every color picker instance draws its own widgets.  The gradient also needs to draw min & max guides. Helas, the circular gradient doesn't work in opengl either. It would be best to not try to optimize the opengl routines but keep them as analogous to the C versions as possible.  There's no speed penalty.  The gradient was 1 effect where the opengl routines were optimized to a pinhead & particularly intractable. The checker size needs to be a theme setting, but it's made a lot of progress. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Anyways, a plan evolved to make the swap channels plugin have another column for source layers.  That's going to be thousands of times easier than slinging masks in Gimp.  Showing the names of the shared tracks in the plugin would be difficult but useful, lions believe. The problem with that is the names & number of shared tracks depends on the playhead position, what tracks are playable, whether it's a rendered effect or in an EDL.  The GUI could have to show no tracks if the playhead is over a section with no plugin.  There are cases where the number of shared tracks changes over time.  There could be assumptions that the shared tracks are always constant over the duration of the GUI instance of the plugin.   All the other plugins just specify 1st track, last track, or an ordering of tracks.  A track number up to some arbitrary limit seems to be the only useful way of doing it.  It's believed swap channels will never be shared with more than 2 tracks & only the a

 Another big drawdown in fed balance sheet accompanied by a big stonk market rally.  It's not the previous pattern.  It might be institutional buying, based on the point in the cycle.  Lions believe we're in the beginning of the next big expansion & the government statistically hid the last contraction either with inflation or the 2 headed economy.  300% growth is possible. Lions have pondered how much wealth is invested in stonks & how much is invested in housing, thus how much the neighbors make from a stonk market boom.  The headlines say most of the wealth of individuals is in their down payment & most of their income goes to monthly payments.  Most of their wealth beyond that is in rental properties.  They can't significantly benefit from stonks unless they borrow money. In the last 20 years, that might have changed as houses became rarer & more individuals became renters.  Changes in net worth have been more correlated with housing prices though.  The

The reruns continued with another run of Short Circuit. This time, it was all about the vintage electronicals & vintage graphics.           Of course, Astoria in summer still doesn't disappoint.  That's another candid shot of a normal day in the 80's.  The thing about these golden hour shots is they look uncorrected enough to look more real.  They more accurately resemble what lions remember. A summer home in west Oregon & a winter home in Fl*rida would be another ultimate setup.  Don't forget the Utah/FL*rida concept.  Maybe just hop long term rentals.     The golden hour shot was in Cascade Locks.       The graphics would have been SGI all the way, but what a challenge in those days.     Nothing with the through hole parts shown could be as smart as depicted.  Based on the UV roms & high density components, the robot brain came from an expensive confuser of the time.  You'd never have UV roms in that enclosure without covering the glass.  Noted the ROM

 Another stonk market boom & more hawkish hot air from the fed.  They were concerned about the stonk market boom raising inflation but we know it's just jawboning.  The fact is they just care about the headline number.  If stonks double & the headline number falls, they'll cut. The latest pop might have been from amazon.com replacing Walgreens in the index.  Indexes are managed funds no different from anything else except possibly lower commissions & slower trades.  They seek growth, not an agnostic measurement of stonk market performance. Stonk market performance might have been flat or just keeping up with inflation for the last 30 years while the indexes loaded up on meme stonks.  You'd never guess stonks would be where they are now, a year ago.  That's the game.  They'll take another dip on some good news.  Good new is bad. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kind of

 Are we ever going to get to a point where classical music can be programmed in MIDI rather than played by an animal?  Lions have pondered this since the journey began, in 1989.  There's so much nuance, even badly played classical pieces are still more bearable than MIDI.  The nuance in stringed instruments still requires animal players.  Synthetic orchestras have had a good run, for certain background music.  Lions wouldn't consider them listenable.  Fabien Tell's synthetic strings are listenable but mechanical.  The trick is they only work for background music with constant dynamics & constant tempo. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inflation  targeting is a nefarious thing.  Besides creating a 2 headed economy, it increases prices to offset declining wages.  It's actively fighting against supply meeting demand & stability.  Only the government could make a system that raised pr

 Forgive the lion kingdom for not knowing Tracy Chapman was a girl for the last 40 years.  Ever since the lion kingdom 1st heard her 1 hit song, as a backup cartridge on Terry Mcgovern's morning show in 1988, she sounded like a man.  "The playlist cartridge got botched so instead, I get to play this one.  Maavelous song.  Maavelous." It turns out she probably was always lesbian. The lyric "still ain't got a job" conveyed a lot more poverty with her imagined as a man but "I got a job that pays all our bills" is more shocking with her as a woman.  Lions never took anything for granted after that song.

    Squeezed in another one before the rain, to just hit 40 for the week. Helas, the rain didn't start for many more hours. Lions could have gone 20 miles.  The mane problem is not the weather but forecasting the weather.  There's enough time between the rain to fit in a lot more running.  The ability to harness all that time is unchanged from 40 years ago.  Radar is still pretty worthless. There hasn't been any improvement in weather forecasting from the AI boom, just toy art generators.  They all feel like battery innovations, all getting to a certain point, not getting any farther, then getting abandoned & replaced by the next toy at the same level.  The AI boom hasn't created any arousal, either.  Generative adversaries should be able to arouse us more than ever before.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Lions have pondered how much to emphasize personal projects compared to forma

  Under Seige ended up on the hard drive because of Szimanski.  Typical of its time, a fun beginning with a clunky ending.  Colonel Rhombus was the highlight, bringing scorched earth tactics to the battleship.  Nothing beats late 80's monochrome graphics. 2010 got its 1st screening in HD.  The big thing for lions was how the high resolution, flat panels of 2001 were replaced by inferior, low resolution tubes in 2010.  It was only passable because a lot of things got inferior but cheaper between 1968 & 1984.  Movie theaters got replaced by VHS. There were a lot of computer graphics.  While low in resolution & colorful like the 8 bitters, they were definitely on SGI.  The gradients were only possible on SGI & they wouldn't spend the money for the heroic programming required by an 8 bitter.  Stuff like drawing giant text was exciting only because it was hard. The scariest depiction of a haunted ship was the haunting of Discovery by the dead astronaut. Definitely more e