I think there have been enough Halloweens, sporting events, and E3s to post a costume roundup.

Source.

Elonbank, the SBF trial, two AI panics, and that Google memo about yayo.

Me	One purpose of installing Linda Yaccarino as the chief executive officer of Twitter (now called X) is that she can have basically normal conversations with investors as the banks try to sell the debt; investors will say things like "how's business?" and she will say things like "oh good, good, advertisers coming back, really good." As opposed to sending Elon Musk to those meetings and having him get bored and start trouble. "How's business," investors would ask, and he'd be like "you know what I've decided that debt isn't real".
	(Quoting Matt Levine, forwarded by Rob)
		Haha		Cattle
		When will they stop saying, "now called X" or "formally known as Twitter"
	https://twitter.com/TheBoondocks/status/464445727067099137
		They'll stop when it eventually is bought out and called twitter again		Anonymous
		What would be hilarious is if they let the Twitter domain name lapse because hubris and it brings down the entire site because of hardcoded references
Me	Your disdain for free speech is offensive.
		Haha

The key takeaway for the rest of this post is Cattle's annoyance with how the media is still clarifying that X used to be called Twitter.

BankX, formerly known as BankTwitter

Last year we talked about Elon's master plan for Twitter - renaming it X, instituting absolute-ish free speech, and eventually making it a western version of WeChat. At a 'leaked' all-hands, he said that the financial services aspect of the would-be megacorp would go live in late 2024 (I'll refrain from commenting about Elon and deadlines).

The Verge

He previously said the platform would offer high-yield money market accounts, debit cards, checks, and loan services, with the goal of letting users "send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real-time."

How disruptive. While it's not hard to understand the appeal of a business model that amounts to "have everybody's money", banking is a pretty crowded space. And as a consumer I'm not begging for innovation; it's remarkably not difficult to store, invest, borrow, and send money.

Perhaps he'll convince his financiers to let him buy Sofi and Robinhood so he can carry a sink around some more.

The Verge

Musk faces major challenges to get there, though. Convincing people why they need such a platform is one. Getting them to trust X with their entire financial life is another.

Crucially, you'll notice that The Verge just referred to the company as X. Also they raise a reasonable concern about how trustworthy the company is. Let's explore...

"Getting them to trust X with their entire financial life"

Possibly relevant to a discussion about Elon opening a bank:

Elon Musk

SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon's

I might not be XBank's target customer, but here are a few reasons I wouldn't give them all of my money:

• Let me put it this way, if BofA created a social media site that was rife with "Israel/Hamas facts" and posts about how "the Maine shooter is a glowie", I might just move over to Wells Fargo - a decision not to be taken lightly.
• The Silicon Valley aesthetic is to lose money and backfill with investment capital (Elon's already knocked this one out of the park). As they say, "move fast and if the thing you break is your own company, that's okay because liability is limited and there's always a new opportunity". Perhaps there is a recent cautionary tale about banking and Silicon Valley.
• "This is what it's like in China" isn't an especially compelling argument.
• There is a non-zero chance that Bank of X's customer support chatbot will reply to any query with a poop emoji. More concretely, Elon demolished everything at Twitter that resembled accountability and oversight. That's okay for a social media app where a user could simply just never log in again, not so for banking.
• And finally- this one deserves its own section, read on.

I'm going to keep this X/Twitter gag going and when I'm done writing I might just do a replace-all on the letter x (formerly known as the letter Twitter).

Source.

I enjoy a good scam/meltdown, see my watchlist, Lordstown, and Hindenburg posts. Other than a few mentions, I've largely ignored the FTX/Alameda/SBF/weasel saga since crypto scams aren't really my thing. It's growing on me though.

Madoff's paper trading algorithms were great, mark-to-market accounting was amazing, FTX's cocktail napkin bookkeeping? Chef's kiss.

Fly on the wall

Source. The linked tweet was some crypto bro wondering if he'd get rewarded for not pulling his money out of the exchange.

Almost as compelling as the above bullets is the tranche of FTX exec chats released by the prosecution (from the secret, encrypted app Signal - CNBC). Reading and loling led me to the Vox interview (this time over Twitter, currently known as X) that occurred shortly before SBF was taken into custody:

Source.

Like Elon and Gavin Belson and most other Silicon Valley celebrities, SBF projected an air of righteousness and vision that survived only as long as his ostensible financial success.

Advice of counsel

Apparently SBF was in court today dry-running his testimony before the judge (and no jury). One sticking point appears to be an 'advice of counsel' defense, something that's familiar to anyone following the various Trump prosecutions. The defense amounts to blaming one's lawyers for providing bad legal advice, like "sure you can maintain your balance sheet on a cocktail napkin" and "if you rally people to disrupt a vote count SCOTUS will let you off the hook.

Anyway, it's funny to see these two things in the news together: Elon announcing at timeline for his social media bank and SBF explaining to a judge why he's not to blame for a losing $8 billion.

Source.

WaPo did a story about a product review site called Reviewed whose parent company is USA Today and/or a media company called Gannett. The tldr is that writers for Reviewed noticed articles published on their site penned by authors they didn't know. The content appeared to them to be extremely generic and SEO-y, hallmarks of AI-generated text. The story isn't surprising or anything but the response has been funny and sad.

Washington Post

Gannett insists the articles weren't AI-generated. In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson said the articles - many of which have now been deleted - were created through a deal with a marketing firm to generate paid search-engine traffic. While Gannett concedes the original articles "did not meet our affiliate standards," officials deny they were written by AI.

To paraphrase, "we published marketing content designed to look like organic staff reviews but we assure you that the deceptive advertisements were created by a human and not a robot." I can see the issue with an art gallery displaying machine-generated works, but does anyone really care if a robot paints a billboard?

I glanced at the site to see if any articles were marked 'Ad' or 'Sponsored'. Nothing. So either Reviewed doesn't identify their embedded ads or they don't have any and the outsourcing was purely to improve their search rank.

Gannett's response continues:

Washington Post

"We expect all our vendors to comply with our ethical standards and have been assured by the marketing agency the content was NOT AI generated," the spokesperson said in an email.

Door number 1: Gannett's ad/review vendor has been instructed to fall on its sword.
Door number 2: The content is AI-assisted which is a split-hair's distance from "AI-generated".
Door number 3: Authoring the fake reviews is gig work (cause why wouldn't it be) and the contractors independently used AI to increase productivity.

Washington Post

Meanwhile, AdVon Commerce is open about its use of AI. On its LinkedIn page, the company says it uses "AI solutions for E Commerce." A Gannett spokesperson took issue with the Guild claim that the writers weren't real people, pointing to the LinkedIn page of one AdVon Commerce writer whose name appeared on a Reviewed article. At the top of his account, that writer touted his experience in "polishing AI generative text."

Could be all three doors tbqh.

Source.

From last month:

Malwarebytes

Ads can be inserted into a Bing Chat conversation in various ways. One of those is when a user hovers over a link and an ad is displayed first before the organic result. In the example below, we asked where we could download a program called Advanced IP Scanner used by network administrators.

Reviewed posts fake articles for referral/ad revenue and SEO but they're not alone, Microsoft's searchbot also links to paid content based on keywords. Since everything on the internet is an ad this shouldn't be all that concerning, though you'd expect Microsoft to have some standards in who they sell ad space to.

I won't clutch my pearls over this but I won't contest that AI assistants change the discussion about blurred lines between sponsored content and authentic content. AI has the potential to make embedded advertising much worse than hovertext with a tiny 'ad' icon next to it, e.g. Blenderbot.

Source.

Also from last month, in its antitrust trial against Google, the Justice Department released a memo where a company exec said the quiet part loud.

Ars Technica

Beyond likening Google's search advertising business to illicit drug markets, Roszak's notes also said that because users got hooked on Google's search engine, Google was able to "mostly ignore the demand side" of "fundamental laws of economics" and "only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales." This was likely the bit that actually interested the DOJ. "We could essentially tear the economics textbook in half," Roszak's notes said.

Silicon Valley and transcending economics, name a more iconic duo. The defense's response was that despite its truth, the document was simply a thought experiment. Some comments from the peanut gallery:

lsedgwick

They're saying these were notes for a speech for a "communcations class" where he was cosplaying Gorden Gecko and not presenting his true beliefs? That so hard to believe. These notes could not more obviously be an internal memo, filled with clear reasoning about balancing the needs and visions of different internal departments, meant to persuade and stimulate conversation about Google's strategy. I don't see how this "it was for a speech and I was being hyperbolic on purpose" thing isn't getting laughed out of the water.

giantrobot

Yeah their defense being "...in Minecraft" smells very much of bullshit.

(Ref.)

Another observation

Cory Doctorow

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses - like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones - with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars - enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year - to be the default search everywhere. Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers." For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us. But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it).

I ever tell you about the time Keith and I made fireworks? Now, I didn't know shit about chemistry, but Keith figured, "Gasoline burns, doesn't it?". Third degree burns over ninety-five percent of his body. Man, people in the next city over were calling to complain about the smell of burning skin.

?

A little bit of fresh air and some stale office air.


Derrick organized a Pizza Port trip, Jeff organized an oktoberfest GBES outing, and Dani got some new stickers. Then Mom came down and we hit a pumpkin patch and the zoo.



The board game crew wrapped up a very fun and story-rich Clank Legacy campaign. Through a combination of being in the right place at the right time and always getting back to or near the inn, my character Proposition Joe pulled Employee of the Month honors.


We've gotten our asses handed to us at the non-legacy Aeon's end a time or two, this one is similar in that regard. The legacy elements provide some customization and team compositioning, as you might imagine. It's not as impressive as Clank but deckbuilding is fun, even if it has the XCOM/Pandemic feeling of barely treading water.


I haven't gotten much PC gaming in aside from a few Gunfire runs with J (nightmare mode unlocked). I saved a lady and talked to a cow at Last Light Inn then snuck around Moonrise Towers when I think I just need to talk to the dude. I was pleased to find that the smoke bomb ability won't aggro NPCs (sometimes?) and allows you to have temporary invsibility.


And the lolbaters squad stole some paintings and didn't survive a bank heist.

CAW! CAAAW!!!

?

I must start by conceding I absolutely loathe that phrase and the bastardization of 'literally' but I can't think of a better response to "introducing our MotoGP-derived sport tourer". I assume they're just referring to the move to V4 and maybe some sportier suspension but, like, a MotoGP-derived Multistrada? Not only does Ducati make a dozen other bikes where track tuning is actually appealing but there are a dozen not-MotoGP racing formats that are what the Multistrada was designed for.

Are the targeting the demographic that's too tall for a Panigale but prefers the sportbike aesthetic?

I look forward to Mercedes's Formula 1-derived Sprinter and Toyota's WRC-inspired Sienna.

Finpost:

• Soft landing or ______ meltdown?
• How to lose money with a 5% yearly interest payment
• Wheeling TLT and terminal rates
• Buy-write ETFs, finally

Since Cattle likes to use Hindenburg Omen (and ad hoc variations thereof) as shorthand for technical analysis (astrology for traders), it was on the tip of my tongue as I reviewed my backlog of financial news. Since much of this news is 'crash incoming', it seemed like an apt title, even though I'm not expecting a repeat of September 29 any time soon.

There is plenty of reason to believe in a non-catastrophic market pullback, I previously mentioned the chorus of CEOs that predicted a late-2023 economic downturn. Interest rates are up and the real estate lobby is begging the FED to reverse, China isn't growing anymore, nobody cares about the next iphone or Galaxy, and there's massive debt hiding under every rock in the economy. So I'm thinking the moves are cash, inverse ETFs, and energy. Others might take short positions, buy puts, and invest in consumer defensive. With the decay associated with short positions, I've found it tough to find a good bear market strategy.

Black swans

Considering inflation, we seem to have actually gotten better with credit cards.

Slow decline? Boring. More exciting: "everyone is going to default on their 96-month auto loans, the repossessed cars will not cover the balance, the lenders will go bankrupt, and the dominos will keep falling". In the next breath, "but if you buy gold..."

I don't buy it. The pandemic was supposed to destroy the global economy but we printed our way out of it. SVB and company were supposed to bring the banking system to its knees but the Federal Reserve handed that rather deftly. The DoJ seems to be making an example of SBF, so the Jeff Skillings and Bill Hwangs of the financial system are officially on notice. It's hard to buy into any "imminent black swan", but they're fun to read about.

Fortune

"We are in the greatest credit bubble in human history. And that's not my opinion, that's just numbers," he said. "There is no question about the fact that we are living in an age of leverage, an age of credit, and it will have its consequences." To his point, total U.S. household debt hit a record $17 trillion in the first quarter, New York Fed data shows. And global public debt surged to an all-time high of $92 trillion last year, a 400% increase since 2000, according to a United Nations report released this month.

Place your wagers on the cause of the next global financial crisis...

• Consumer debt
• Commercial real estate and/or commercial mortgage-backed securities (2008 but with offices and strip malls)
• China property collapse (Evergrande, Country Garden, ponzi-ish structure systemwide)
• Yield curves crossing or double crossing or triple axling or whatever
• Banks having too many 1.5% treasurys and nobody wanting to buy them because new ones are 5%
• The Supreme Court rules the Federal Reserve unconstitutional (with other institutions not funded through appropriations)
• An invasion of Poland, Taiwan, Iran, ...

Timing the market > time in the market.

With that vague allusion to a bearish or risky investing environment, let's talk actual moves. One thing you can do when the major indexes are consistently red is buy bonds. They pay interest, you don't have to do anything, and they only go to zero if the company goes bankrupt (at which point you're higher on the creditor food chain than shareholders). There are some ins and outs, but that's the gist of it.

I like bonds. I like my 7+% Ford and Safeway bonds because I don't expect the companies to go bankrupt, they pay me twice a year, and when the bonds mature I'll get their face value back. I also might sell them for a profit if their resale value gets high enough. In contrast, I've historically not traded bond equities (TIP and TLT and IEF). They pay a variable dividend and fluctuate in value, for that kind of action I'd rather trade something that moves more.

The glaring exception to this policy is my 401k where, like many, my retirement contributions go to one of a few dozen buckets. A little while ago I moved a bunch of my 401k money into the brokerage's low risk funds, trading some potential upside to avoid a repeat of 2008. My intent was to wait for the pullback and then go wild on SPX and QQQ and VTI. It's a 401k, so I could afford to be patient and tolerate 5% annual gains + my contributions + employer match. It'd be considerably better than having another mortgage-backed securities disaster delete most of my retirement port.

My goal was temporarily limit downside but I admit I came in with the expectation of extremely modest gains. Low risk funds are mostly bonds, who can't make small gains on bonds?

So I was pretty annoyed to find that the ten-year performance of the MetWest Total Return Bond Fund was just about flat. In ten years it gained what a money market account would gain in a year. Anything I contributed before 2019 didn't go anywhere (see above) and anything I contributed during the pandemic lost value.


Wile I appreciate that -2.86% in one year and -3.49% in three years is low risk (especially seeing only a small dip in spring 2020), I put money into a bond fund hoping it'd mirror the underlying instruments and return small, steady gains. How do you even lose money on bonds?

The answer to my rhetorical-sounding question is the same as for any investment: "by buying high and selling low". ('Selling' isn't strictly accurate here because at the moment the losses are unrealized.) Interest rates were near zero for a full decade so bonds were expensive until the FED's inflation-taming rate hikes. Rates go up, values go down. And that's how you get the post-2021 drop in MetWest Total Return Bond Fund, probably.


But look at all of those 4-5% bonds. The interest payments on the fund's holdings seem to have been gobbled up by its retreating market value. I'm not sure why 20% of the holdings are a Thai seafood company, but maybe in Dec '23 there will be a big payout.

The smart thing would have been to pull my funds out of MetWest Total Return Bond Fund when it became clear that the president and FED were planning to address the whole money printer/inflation issue. With limited 401k options, I didn't have many risk-averse alternatives, so ???

Brokeragelink

I don't really need MetWest. I can lose 3.5% of my retirement fund value on my own and I don't even need three years to do it. My 401k allows equities trading if you click a bunch of acknowledgments.

Since I'm actually inclined to collect bond interest rather than have it disappear into some opaque fund, I can buy 7.75% senior notes from Ford Motor Company at almost par value. And in a few years when rates are low again, I'll be able to sell those notes for a tidy profit. Or hold them, because as Warren Buffet says, "compounding gains, amirite?"

Minor caveat: it turns out that I, in fact, need MetWest. Not because Ford is in danger of going bankrupt but because Fidelity won't let me pull completely out of their stupid funds.

Jupman

T-bonds are there to just beat the fact that you can't get shit in a basic savings account. If you want good advice, call your broker's Bond Desk they have nothing to do, and no one calls them.

(Since this comment was written, basic savings accounts started offering like 4% interest, for now.)

One more reason I don't like 'Target Date 2045 Fund'

Again, I'm not expecting to see Plunge Protection Team fastroping out of Black Hawks any time soon but having gotten into the 401k game in 2008 it's hard not to have my ears angled toward anything that sounds like catastrophe. From a 2021 post:

Me

[The China Hustle documentary] mentions that retail traders took the biggest hit in the initial round of RTO (reverse takeover) fraud and that estimates for pension fund losses were $14B. I'm inclined to believe my 401k has exposure to this kind of thing. QQQ certainly does. And so I feel a renewed emphasis to DIY my portfolio diversity rather than let institutions wash away these losses behind a wall of opacity and "Well Moody's rated these mortgage-backed securities as investment-grade so it's not on us if they go tits up".

I am more than happy to have control over my investments.

From WSB:

pareofdocks

Let's say you have $93,000 sitting in a broker account. You should be getting 4.5-4.9% interest on it. If you want, you can sell December 15th TLT $93 puts for $3.05. Sell 10 contracts for $3050. By December 15th, your cash will earn you about $1450 in interest, and if TLT is above $93, you keep the put premium. You made $4500 in about 4 months, which is over 14% ROI annualized. If TLT is lower than 93, you have to buy it at 93 and get stuck with a treasury ETF which pays 4.3% per year. You can now sell calls against your shares and boost that 4.3% to something higher. You only lose if interest rates go up substantially higher, which is pretty unlikely.

As /u/Zaros262 points out, this is just the wheel for an ETF that tracks the 20-year. Having wheeled NFLX and MSFT and OIH and NVDA, this interested me, so I did some homework in the comments section and elsewhere.

• While TSLA can bounce between $100 per share and $400 per share in six months, bonds don't move all that much. In two decades TLT has mostly swung between $80 and $120, though covid took it up to the $160s.
• The lack of volatility often means options premiums aren't all that great. Indeed, 3% for a three-month contract isn't much of a payout in thetaland.
• A month after the post, TLT is now below $85 so OP would be looking at owning 100k of TLT and taking that 4.3% per year.

devilsgospel666

If there's still upside to inflation (there is) and we get more hikes, could you sit with 100k in illiquid funds comfortably until rates are cut? Whenever that may be, with some expectations being years? If you can by all means go for it, but as someone else said before, this method of options trading almost ensures you will have to win much much more than lose. A drawdown on the underlying could easily be more than your premium gained from several spins of The Wheel and then once again your funds are illiquid until rates come down. That's where shit like opportunity cost comes into play.

Since rates will go back down, TLT will eventually come back up, but there's a lot of opportunity cost lost to a position that comes in $9,500 increments. Since an 18-month hiking regime to get from 0% to 5% was considered extremely quick, I don't think the interest rate downslope will be difficult to time. But when cheap financing returns there will be more profitable places to put your money.

Stormranger_jj

The pricing of options is calculated using a very complicated formula. I recommend googling "black-scholes formula." This formula isn't perfect however, so I believe market makers use variations of it to calculate options prices. With this said stocks where big moves are expected tend to have high implied volatility. This is a key metric in calculating the pricing of options. In short, I imagine TLT is one of these stocks. Even if it may seem like there's a small chance that the puts OP sells doesn't expire worthless, there is a significant enough chance to warrant pricing the option high enough to give OP a 14% yield over the time of the investment. Basically its like picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. With this strategy OP will likely get several wins at first, and a decent return. But one day a big downward move will happen in OP's underlying stock, wiping out all their returns. The options market is priced relatively efficiently. If this strategy would've worked, a hedgefund or big bank would of discovered it by now, and eat up all the profits available from the inefficiency in pricing.

And so it did.

Quantitative tightening

Richmond FED

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in early March 2020, the Fed quickly stepped in to limit the economic fallout. It reduced its interest rate target to near zero and purchased large quantities of U.S. Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) by injecting reserves into the banking system. As a result of these purchases, the size of the Fed's balance sheet more than doubled from about $4 trillion prior to the pandemic to nearly $9 trillion at the start of 2022.

Since the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is partially comprised of treasurys, their quantitative tightening regime probably means we have farther to go.

Source.

I'm not sure the time is right for OP's TLT strategy, but I am on board with writing covered calls as a way to make weekly profit on a stock I'd already be holding anyway. And so I was interested to learn of TLTW, 20+ Year Treasury Bond Buywrite Strategy ETF.

BlackRock

Last year, iShares launched the first ever ETFs to employ a bond ETF buy-write strategy, making it simple for all investors to add covered call strategies to their portfolios.

"But Chris, you just railed on bond funds because the interest payments go into the fund value, so you gain nothing until you sell." Not here:

Source. So 100 shares ($3,300) of TLTW paid $520 in dividends over the past year.

Of course, like its underlier, TLTW should decline until interest rates top out and QT is over.

Source. Those dividends don't cover a $600 decline in value but they aren't far off. I wouldn't mind if I almost broke even on my TSMC shares with dividends.

Others

Source. A corporate bond buy-write ETF, trades in the mid-$30s.

Source. An oil buy-write ETN, trades in the mid-$80s. For ETN caveats, check out the USOI and Barclay's OIL ETN tickers in March of 2020.

Source.

It's becoming a trend? There are new ETFs for Tesla and Apple and Netflix. QYLD tracks the Nasdaq 100 and PBP tracks SPX.

etrade

The investment seeks current income; exposure to the share price of the common stock of Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM), subject to a limit on potential investment gains is the secondary consideration. The fund will seek to employ its investment strategy as it relates to XOM regardless of whether there are periods of adverse market, economic, or other conditions and will not seek to take temporary defensive positions during such periods. The fund advisor uses a synthetic covered call strategy to provide income and indirect exposure to the share price returns of XOM. The fund is non-diversified.

While the name is rather descriptive, I looked up the formal meaning of 'synthetic covered call':

Steady Options

A synthetic covered call is an options position equivalent to the covered call strategy (sold call options over an owned stock). It consists of a sold put option. Synthetic options strategies use bought and sold call and put options to mirror the payoff, risks, and rewards of another strategy, often to reduce complexity or capital requirements. For example, suppose a stock, ABC, is trading at $100. Buying 1000 shares would be expensive ($100,000 or perhaps $50,000 on margin). The same risk and rewards can be achieved by buying an at the money call option (strike price 100) and, simultaneously, selling an at the month put option (exercise price 100).

I guess this is why 80% of XOMO is in tnotes.

Outlook

RaggedMountainMan

The TLT bagholder memes are out. Time to buy is near.

It's hard to be confident about any new financial product, though at least TLTW has been around for more than a year. I like the idea of setting a portion of my portfolio on autopilot theta gang and it's an even better option for my 401k where I can't sell calls/puts.

A brief recap:

1. I added a blog widget that automatically links similar posts on my site.
2. I said, "gee, it'd be neat to link to the rest of the web this way" and submitted a feature request to the ether.
3. I ingested a bunch of RSS and listed blogs with post titles/descriptions similar to my tag list.
4. Since tags, titles, and descriptions aren't much data, I started estimating similarity based post text. <-- You are here.

It's all chronicled by my meta tag, but the tldr is that I have my own static site generator with markup that I use to write posts. My Element abstract base type is inherited by text sections, images, galleries, tables, etc. So it was pretty straightforward to add getPlaintext() to this type and let the child classes decide what would go into a tokenization.

Hitting the markup was considerably easier than trying to tokenize the output html. And so each post object now has:


It's easy to find generic lists of stopwords ('a', 'the', 'therefore'...), I tailored mine by running getTokens() on every post and scrutinizing the top of the histogram.

So my earlier post recommender code became:



Since 'cowboy' means one thing, 'bebop' means another, and 'cowboy bebop' means yet another, I used words (1-grams), 2-grams, and 3-grams for the tokenize() operations mentioned above. Dumping the token intersections (above and below) shows reasonable results: most of the words have significance and can indicate two posts are alike.


Indeed, tags are really good data that shouldn't be ignored just because I have a more expansive dataset. While the tag dictionary is only a few hundred words long, they are words chosen specifically to label the subject matter of the post.

Plus the code is already there. So, what, like weight them 50/50?

I dumped some example data, here is the similarity calculator reporting new high scores as it iterates through all the other posts:


Happily, the values diverge quite a bit, so this isn't just a more computationally-intensive way to do what I was doing with tags. But since the tag similarity values tend to be an order of magnitude greater than the token ones, naively adding the metrics would give the tags a lot of weight. With a little extra code, I normalized each measurement (with its own maximum) and then weighted them equally.

Source.

Finding similar posts on other websites is conceptually the same as this but since it requires a lot of automated page visits, it's a post for another time. But I still have my rss/xml data that I previously compared to kilroy tags. Some of the token-based results:

Latest post	Similarity (pct)	Simliarity (nom)
wizardzines.com	0.113	817
mooreds.com	0.108	369
jhey.dev	0.107	112
zander.wtf	0.106	236
tonmeister.ca	0.099	453
vianegativa.us	0.098	499
usuf.fyi	0.097	370
engineersneedart.com	0.097	144

Clicking through them, it's not exactly like looking in a mirror, but then a lot of the match tokens looked like:


While 'game' and 'meme' aren't bland enough to qualify as stopwords, there may be more significance to matches on uncommon tokens/n-grams. That may something to add to the backlog, more immediately I need to grab the actual posts rather than rely on the descriptions.

For now, here's a fun cheat sheet from the list:

Source.

In this post: after trying Horizon Chase Turbo, Danielle and I adopt Stray as our new 'daddy game', the squad tries Payday 3, and I play a little more BG3 and FO76.


Danielle's activity requests are swing (30%), park (20%), tablet game (20%), draw/glue (10%), PJ Masks (10%), and daddy game (10%). Having beaten Astro's Playroom and a few 'Slay the Fire' (Slay the Spire) daily climbs, we tried Sonic, Wipeout, and Horizon Chase Turbo.

I recall Stray made a lot of GOTY shortlists a few years back. It looked like a puzzle game with a feline protagonist; exactly what a two year old would enjoy watching.


So far so good; we chased a butterfly and frolicked with our cat buddies.


Then our feline hero(ine) abruptly falls into the bowels of a cyberpunk ghost city inspired by the one in Kowloon. So, good lesson for the little one about playing on steel girders and irrigation pipes.

		Can we go see the other kitty cats?		Dani
Me	That's what we're trying to do, I think it's the central conflict of the game.

Since we're not yet at the age of being afraid of the dark or alleyways or dilapidated arcologies, Dani was pretty unconcerned by the damp corridors and neon lights.


Similarly, having not played Metroid or Half-Life, the headcrab-like 'zurks' were just little bugs. The Stray game mechanics are these:

• Social sections where you investigate the city and talk to robots.
• Puzzle sections not unlike Zelda temples or The Last of Us.
• Explore/fetch sections where you collect items from a small section of the city.

The cat gets a robot friend and interacts with the androids that inhabit the city - it's not the lonely gameplay experience you'd expect. My little copilot was interested in the dialogue, the jumping puzzles, and knocking over paint cans.


The lolbaters squad got a few Payday 3 runs in on launch day and, well, it's a lot like Payday 2. That's not the most flattering review considering it's been ten years but the same could be said for a lot of games. I can summarize Payday 2 in two bullets:

• Despite good gun handling mechanics, gun battles are fairly ho-hum due to endless stream of law enforcement that's more annoying for the stagger effect than anything else. (At high difficulty they're probably annoying for being very difficult).
• Stealth co-op. Stealth games are not for everyone. So when you consider the prospect of a stealth game where you have to rely/restart based on your comrades' performance, things get perilous. Payday 2 absolutely pulled this off and we had some legendary heist experiences.

In addition to the usual graphical upgrades and new/different content, Payday 3 improves upon its predecessor's police response mechanic. Instead of a steady stream of bad guys (good guys), they come in waves that have their own difficulty/characteristics.

So ultimately the game's funness comes down to how well-designed the heists are. I'll know more soon.



Slowly working my way through BG3. I think I might try to take this guy's lamp.



Due to timezones, me and J haven't played much Fallout.



Horizon Chase Turbo is basically Cruisin' USA.

Hey, you. You're finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.

?