1. I watch another finance film
2. Some contemporary scam companies meet the fate
3. A totally opaque web 1.1 change
4. Some quick house projects
5. PUBG vids cause what else are you going to do on server maintenance days
6. Thunder Road: Vendetta
7. Obligatory cuteness

I finally got around to ticking another film off my finance watchlist. Since Rogue Trader is freely available, I put it on while I slogged through the refactoring discussed below.

Turns out the refactoring was more interesting than the movie. The premise of Rogue Trader is solid - the true story of a guy who made a bank insolvent through ill-advised futures trades. But there isn't much more to it than that. The film spends most of its time beating the viewer over the head with Nick Leeson's (Ewan McGregor) gnawing guilt, unconvincing lies to his coworkers, and problems at home.

It secures the bottom spot on my running ranking of Wall Street/finance/scam films:

1. The Big Short (2015) A smart/funny drama that follows the handful of people that saw the 2008 Global Financial Crisis coming. This film excels in its explanation of the GFC both at a high level and through its ground-level stories. It also takes a refreshingly honest approach to the 'based on a true story' genre.

2. Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) Enron's rise and fall told in a documentary that will make your blood boil. E:TSGitR covers Enron's scammy accounting methods, Apple-like cultishness, and (with audio transcripts) Texan schadenfreude toward California.

3. Margin Call (2011) An unofficial counterpart to The Big Short, Margin Call tells the story of a Wall Street firm the night it realizes the bubble is popping. It isn't as heavy-handed in its condemnation of investment banks/bankers as you might expect; the characters are complex and personable.

4. The China Hustle (2017) Investment movie night finally goes abroad with this documentary about the reverse takeover (RTO)/Muddy Waters saga of the early 20-teens. The China Hustle describes short sellers' investigations into the hazards of speculating across sovereign borders.

5. Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis (2018) An unofficial counterpart to The Big Short and Margin Call, Panic is a documentary that focuses less on the causation of the GFC and more on the response. This might be dry to some, but it drips with intrigue if you're into macroeconomics and/or government.

6. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) Elizabeth Holmes once asked the question, "What if we did a Fyre Festival but instead of music and tents it was blood testing?" The answer was Theranos and it became an HBO documentary in 2019. She was convicted in 2022.

7. MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street (2023) Ponzis are the vanilla ice cream of scams but Bernie's had more scoops than anyone else. The Netflix docuseries isn't bad, but not as compelling as some of the competition.

Rogue Trader (1999) Dramatization of the Nick Leeson derivatives market blowup. More about guilt and lying than causing the collapse of a large financial institution.

In other news:

• I enjoyed reading "autonomous trucking company... has rebranded to CreateAI, focusing on [gen ai for] video games and animation." Lots of synergy there.
• Another truck company, meanwhile, rebranded from 'Nikola' to 'bankruptcy'. These dudes were famous for their "HTML 5 supercomputer" and gravity-powered vehicle.
• And the saga of that weird NJ deli scam finally concluded.

Looking at my Outer Web memory footprint, I decided it'd be a manageably-bad idea to try to cut my RAM needs in half by replacing instances of String with new types that aren't 16 bits per character. My code already does a UTF8 conversion on page data and things like URLs have to be ASCII, these can be represented as byte buffers.

I had a few concerns.

1. Strings are used a lot. Even if it's find and replace, it's a lot of find and replace.
2. I had no intention of implementing things like regexes in the new types. Converting an 8-bit string to a Java native string to use these operations would have a performance impact that would blunt the memory benefit to some unknown extent.

So I backed everything up, cracked a two liter of Shasta, fired up my all-Rush mixtape, and went to town.

It took a while, wasn't awesome, but ultimately worked out. The biggest pain was maximally reusing code up and down the class hierarchy...


... while avoiding downcasting and factory types.


Dani and I had a full day to ourselves so we went rogue and conquered some kitchen projects. The vent hood needed replacement and rewiring. The work was disproportionately not kid-friendly, so there was a lot of "dad, give me a job".


We've pretty much never used the light above the sink. The switch is well out of reach and it doesn't provide all that much light. But when I did the sink it occurred to me that a motion sensor would be good here. The light is recessed so it's unintrusive but helpful when doing dishes or wandering into the kitchen at night.

The fixture is not particularly common (see above). The cover - which was R.I.P. - attaches to the recess the same way bathroom fan grilles do. I browsed the Home Depot site a bit and found they added an AI assistant that reads product documentation.

It seems to know its own limitations.

The non-AI assistants in the store told me I'd have to go to a specialty shop. So for the moment it remains open and untrimmed.











The board game crew lost our Arkham Horror campaign and moved on to Thunder Road: Vendetta. The game reminds me of X-Wing Miniatures in that the movement and combat rules are well-designed, tactical, and balanced.


Because of the solid mechanics, the game lends itself well to expansions and is kind of dull without them. Drivers and upgrades make for a deeper, asymmetrical experience. We're currently duking it out in a vehicular thunderdome.


I'm going to claim there's some rogueishness here because Dani made Uncle Ted an Octonauts birthday card and Kwazii is pretty rogue.

Kajiit has wares if you have coin.

?

Elon tweets a lot, but after Friday's shitshow, he posted something dumb enough to preserve. He, of course, doesn't mean a word of it but is just doing PR for the president of at least one country. Still, it's remarkable how little he thinks of his own Twitter followers.


Some guy called Alfonso was quick to point out Musk failed to mention the other person who can stop the trolley. With full control of his military, Putin's path to the peace the White House says it seeks is considerably more direct than Zelensky's. Considering the administration has strongly condemned the loss of life and treasure as well as its relationship with the Kremlin, their "pursuit of peace" has been rather one-sided.

signature well-informed geopolitical commentary.

Elon's meme was entirely too wordy, a simple rail switch would do.

More than anything else, this was dumb. The president met Zelensky at the White House with the forgone decision to sabotage the mineral deal SecState had negotiated. And they didn't even really try to hide it.

• Trump proxies and nominees were unwilling to state one way or another about whether Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The democrats seem to have gotten wind of this and asked them directly. They weren't even allowed to claim it was provoked attack.
• The president called Zelensky a dictator (and not flatteringly like when he refers to Kim or Xi) and was somehow mum about the other guy.
• VP Vance was quite clearly given the role of escalating anything that could be perceived as a confontation.

The administration could have informed Zelensky of their decision behind closed doors but, probably, knowing that McConnell and others support Ukraine (and the American M-IC) they needed to make it seem like Zelensky provoked them. Unfortunately for everyone, Trump and Vance simply did a terrible job of making it appear authentic.

While plenty of media commentary has hinted at this, far too much of the discussion is about Zelensky wearing the same thing he's worn since (smirk) his country's borders invaded Russia's peaceful westbound tanks and infantry. The headlines have also fixated on "the controversy" where Zelensky described the global impact of a continental war as "feeling the effects", something Trump grotesquely spun into an assertion about the country's emotional state.

It was sad, it was a national embarrassment, but it's exactly what a electoral and popular majority asked for. The president's preference for Russia is as core to his persona as his occasionally charming, frequently tragic struggle with words.

I dipped into /r/conservative because, in the words of two contributors from the lesser of the drama subs:

/u/TwasAnChild Haven't gotten their marching orders from fox news yet, check in a couple of days and they'd have changed their tune on this

/u/skishface 1000%. They will have 24 hours of authentic reaction then they all fall in line behind a unified right-wing talking point. It's wild they call us the sheep.

This exchange was addressing the /r/conservative response to Trump Gaza #1 video, but I've found their observation to be generally applicable.

It's somewhat convenient to go to that sub to get an idea of the conservative mindset as well as a tldr of the GOP's official messaging - it has both. In response to Friday's theatre, there was understandably no shortage of "this is what I voted for" because, as I said, this is what they voted for. A few comments critical of the administration bubbled to the top (in both the Gaza video and the simulated negotiation). This cause of this is twofold:

1. Plenty of conservatives were raised before the GOP turned isolationist and doing the Neville Chamberlain routine offends them. Still others inexplicably expected diplomatic poise from Trump, perhaps thinking he might negotiate the deal back up to a $500B value. Instead they watched their leaders yell at a wartime president about integrity of an oval-shaped room.
2. Unless things have changed since I participated in Reddit many years ago, anyone can vote on any sub, moderators can only limit comments. And so non-conservatives follow or happen upon /r/conservative (e.g. when it hits the front page) and through upvoting/downvoting can impact the popularity and visibility of a comments.

And so these conservative-but-not-MAGA opinions are amplified by left-leaning passersby, much to the ire of the platform adherents. Some find this funny, others find it disgraceful, SCOTUS is due for a decision on the matter once it returns to them. For me, it just means my search for raw opinions and official taking points has to slog through indignant complaints about downvotes, the 'hivemind', and brigaders (brigadiers for autocorrect people).

Friday's incident was no exception:

UltraAirWolf

People are confused about downvotes. We need to understand this is the most brigaded sub.

It's gotten bad enough that there's now a sticky post in which the /r/conservative mods admit they are at a loss.

Jibrush

Addressing Brigading Hello verified conservatives! We are fully aware of the absolute state of the sub. We're taking some measures to deal this while we recruit and train new moderators...

Let me take a quick break from solving the internet to offer a solution to the mods of /r/conservative. First, yes, Reddit is predominantly left-leaning, they absolutely brigade /r/conservative, and there's no technical solution without a change to the platform. But pursuing a technical solution is both difficult and - let's be honest - what a liberal would do. 2025 is all about making a deal. Having a compromise mindset works in every context - business, geopolitics, even social media.

There's some bad news though, compared to the woke hivemind of Reddit, /r/conservative is very small and unable to independently combat the brigade, even with allies from the UFC and conspiracy subs. In transactional terms, /r/conservative don't have a lot of cards to play.

Luckily, Reddit is now an amoral corporation and beholden to shareholders and not than their purple-haired, keyboard warrior users. And Reddit understands brigading is bad for everyone, they even say so! It's just not enough of a problem to really matter. They shuttered popular subs like the_donald, so it's unlikely that /r/conservative's struggle will move the needle. There's an ocean of space between the /r/conservative downvote problems and anything that will hurt Reddit's engagement metrics and AI training copus profits.

So while it's admirable that the /r/conservative mods wish to have an independent place for conservative discussion, they're in an unwinnable position*. *Unless, say, the brigaders were oozing desperation, e.g. hiring North Korean downvote bots and taking out 20% APR loans.

Anyway, here's the deal. First, everyone in the sub should buy 100 RDDT shares - keeping in mind that simply using the service has historically cost Reddit precious server resources so they owe it. Once that is in place, it'd be best that every fifth post on the sub be a crosspost to some liberal subreddit. Sure, that'll mean /r/conservative will feature dogwalker manifestos and people criticizing Wayne Gretzky, but it's in everyone's best interest to seek peace. In exchange, the rest of Reddit will probably stop brigading the 'Flaired users only' posts.

Also I should say, it's very disrespectful that /r/conservative haven't thanked Reddit in recent memory. Moreover, I imagine many users have posted on Truth Social and Rumble and TikTok, almost like they don't even want Reddit's help. Very Disrespectful.

I recommend the mods submit this peace plan to spez when they are ready.