After a covid year off, Friendsgiving returned to San Marcos where we squeezed eight families into a not-particularly-code-compliant VRBO. The last part isn't all bad; it meant there was a 30' waterslide and we could play Danger Pong.


Erin booked the patio at Pure Project for her hubby's 40th, complete with drink poker chips and Urbn pizza.


Since FG landed on Halloween weekend, the kids carved pumpkins and trick-or-treated each of the bedrooms in the house.



We spent actual Halloween strolling the neighborhood with Mom. Since we missed the Cooley party, we kind of half-assed the costumes.


Jes's costume was borderline in poor taste, particularly for cycling enthusiasts such as myself. If this doesn't ring a bell:


Having a suit, sunglasses, and hair gel, I decided to celebrate another one of 2021's signature themes by costuming as the so-called WallStreetBets Fuckboy:


Well, I also have diamond hands, but needed to order a red tie and diamonds *for* my hands.


There were a few other WSB memes I considered - a Wendy's bag, an ape costume, an ornamental gourd - but I simply didn't have enough hands.


I made up for the lack of physical referential content by being as in-character as I could. Guh.

AnotherDegenerateFK

What if the stock market is a game set up by some old guy who used to enjoy trading when he was young?

On the subject of WSB...

A YOLO

Well, not really a yolo, more like an attempt to buy the hype. NPR had told me that this season's Supreme Court agenda has a lot of guns and reproductive rights. Investing in the latter isn't super straightforward, but in the case of the former, it looks like an NY gun group is suing to get universal CCW.

In their case heard Wednesday, the New York gun group argued that the language of the Second Amendment - securing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" - refers to two separate rights. To "keep" arms is to be able to own them, while to "bear" arms is to be able to carry them, they argued. The most recent major Supreme Court decision on guns came more than a decade earlier in District of Columbia v. Heller, when the court held in a 5-4 ruling that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to carry a gun for self-defense inside the home. Roberts said Heller's precedent would be the "first thing" he would look to when considering this case. "We, I think, generally don't reinvent the wheel," he said.

So, a couple things. First, I have a sinking suspicion the 'generally' qualifier was purposeful - like "we're gonna overturn Roe v. Wade" purposeful. Second, while the DC v Heller reference seems to indicate Roberts understands a distinction between self-defense in the home and in public, the rest of the article made it at least a toss-up.


Also, it's somewhat mind-boggling that the Constitution would protect the right to carry in public as critical self-defense but I can't, say, put an eight foot wall around my house. But I digress into what happens if this thing actually goes through.

Anyway, my YOLO was RGR, SWBI, and OLN. In the (investing) best case, SCOTUS says, "CCWs for all" and these tickers go to the moon. Either from hype or a real arms race. In the worst case, the perma-bull market keeps pumping. Well, that's the worst case in this market, in reality this news has coincided with RGR earnings which weren't so good for share price.

SEC report

Great to see the term "meme stock" appear in the SEC report on GME/Citadel/RH. Kind of disappointed they didn't mention stonks tho.

Disrupting

		TSLA makes no sense to my boomer brain.		Zac
		P/E is almost 400.
Chris	Inflation + meme value + years ahead of other automakers in electric.
	Still doesn't justify the cap.
	But that is the timeline we are in.
		I would like [employer] to become a meme company.
	Maybe you should be more Musky.
		We should just let Musk be our CEO.
	*memelord
		I'm sure he could do it part time and just say some crazy things to push the stock higher.		Zac
		And our actual CEO could continue running the company.
Chris	Seems like a great new model, CEOaaS.

Staying with some of the drama out of DC, I read through the WaPo investigation of the January 06 Boomerkrieg. It's not short and contains a lot of information that should be familiar to people who have followed this saga.

That said, the article offers some interesting perspectives from DHS personnel, DC police, and a few of the insurrectionists.


The Gentleman's Beer Exploration Society also returned to action at the Del Mar Sky Deck. It's a neat place for food and drink.


I bought the Smallrig rail system for the D850. It has a bunch of attachment mount points that are mostly used for video. Still, it's nice for off-camera flash and affixing the camera strap at the top and bottom of the right grip.

It turns out I needed to upgrade my DNG converter, but it took some looking to find older versions that work with Win7.


This one worked and it looks like based Adobe keeps them all in that directory.


The time came for the new Taco's first oil change under my ownership. I was a little confused when the K&N filter was just the filter element and some gaskets. I guess this model has a reusable filter housing. As usual, the last shop overtightened the filter.


Oh yeah, and changing the oil requires removing the skid plate. Never again, I ordered the TRD skid plate with oil change access.


Being OEM, the TRD plate went on without drama. The only thing that caught me out was that the TRD skid plate bolts don't attach in the same place as the stock plate. The TRD plate uses bolt holes that are already used to connect subframe pieces. No big deal, but one of the bolts was a bit tight and I kept worrying the frame piece was somehow under mechanical load. Probably just corrosion.

Oh yeah, folks on the forums stressed using lower-than-spec torque on the bolts. It's definitely better to be safe than sorry for this part.


My fantasy season peaked around week four.

Source.

There hasn't been much solo gaming or coding in the past couple weeks, but I used some nap/stroller time to go down wiki rabbit holes for generative art. Some bookmarks:

• The Processing language which I guess has libraries for major languages.
• The Hype Framework for Processing.
• Fractals: Lyapunov, Burning Ship, Julia Set.

It's rare to find deep learning samples that are representative of actual results, but Artbreeder demonstrates some cool GAN stuff.

On the subject of GANs (which I haven't yet tried), this guy had a post with advice on training them. To summarize:

• Use image color values from -1.0 to 1.0 (rather than 0.0 to 1.0) and tanh activation.
• Use max log(d) for generator loss.
• Use discriminator training batches that are uniformly real/fake.
• For downsampling: average pool, conv2d + stride.
• Upsample: PixelShuffle.
• Use soft real/fake values 0.7-1.2/0.0-0.3.
• Use DCGAN.
• Replay training sets for model stability.
• Discriminator - SGD, Generator - ADAM.
• Use gaussian noise in all generator layers.
• Use big (like 50%) dropout in the generator.

I hope I didn't screw any of these up when I transcribed them. Anyway, coding soon.


Getting the occasional construction session in.

Related / internal

Related / external