#I can figure out the algorithm for these things fine and do the problem solving i just dont understand how to code any of it

[clonewarsahsoka]

I'm slowly becoming interested in computer science >.<

[magpiemirroring]

I think the thing that frustrates me most about folks going "oh, well AI is just another tool for making art. objecting to this new tool means you're like the folks that objected to the camera or photoshop!"

Because it really doesn't feel the same to me.

I am mostly a digital artist, but I didn't have access to digital tools until I was in my teens and I've never really stopped using traditional media. I may have (foolishly) agreed with you on the camera point if I hadn't taken a photography class in college that focused on old fashioned methods of photography (manual SLR camera. black and white, hand-developed, actual film) and developed an understanding of how photography works.

And all the skills I learned in each of those types of media are transferable. The fundamental foundations of drawing and painting by hand are skills I use in digital art. Sometimes I will draw a sketch by hand, scan it and mess with it in photoshop, and then print it out and transfer it to paper to paint it in watercolor and gouache. It's a fairly seamless process! (color can be a bit tricky, because real media and digital media do color mixing differently, but the basic principles of color theory are the same!)

Likewise, I pretty easily got a good grade in photography because I already understood a lot of artistic principles and taking photos turned out to be a neat way to develop my composition skills and made me think about light and shadow in greater depth. Plus, learning the technical side of developing film made it clear to me how many terms and tools within Photoshop really are designed to emulate physical methods of photo-editing (I mean. That's what it was really designed for originally, lmao. Hence the name.) And because I was already familiar with Photoshop, I found a lot of terms and methods a lot more intuitive than my classmates who were new to art, or to photography as art.

No matter if I am making art with a camera, a pencil, a paintbrush, or Photoshop, the skills I develop with one, go on to improve my skill in the others.

There are no transferable skills in gen-ai. Gen-ai relies on you being able to come up with prompts (lists of key words) that will cause the program to come up with images you like. You have an idea of something you'd like to see, you figure out the keywords that get the machine to make something close enough to your idea, you're done. Maybe you go on to tweak it in Photoshop, but the skills and "tools" in generating images don't really help you make art outside of it.

There's nothing I can learn or practice with gen-ai that I can bring to rest of what I do as an artist. Sure, I believe that a skilled artist can take the output of gen-ai and make something cool with it, the same as folks who work with found materials or collage, but at best that makes gen-ai a tool for generating raw material, and frankly, I am not that impressed by a program for generating new bespoke raw material versus someone creatively reusing material that has already served its primary purpose. Feels like that shows a real lack of imagination and problem-solving skills in the folks that use gen-ai.

It just doesn't feel like a tool for making things the way my other tools do. It feels like a tool to skip over having to make anything. Rather than honing your skills of understanding how to best control the tool to make the images you want, you give up a lot of the control to the tool. And while there are forms of art that rely of a certain amount of lack of control and randomness, that's not what's happening with AI. AI works on algorithms. It's fine-tuned to produce recognizable results versus relishing in the chaos of splatter or natural forces or random human interactions.

Anyway, straying off from my original point that to tell me that gen-ai belongs in the same category of tool as photoshop and my camera feels wrong when I think about how I actually use these tools as an artist.

[nightwing-scp]

Upon Stanley's confirmation, Night places her hand over the lock mechanism on the door- it serves no real purpose, except to focus her thoughts on probing the security system that controlled the door, following the signal back to its source. She'd never tried infiltrating the Office's systems before, and now is a good enough time to try as ever, she figures. Plus, even if she fails, she reasons that it would at least draw attention to the basement and Cyrus would let them out.

Her eyes are still focused down on her phone screen, though, reading his responses as they come.

Of course he wouldn't have a straight answer for her, she'd expected that. But his answers only generate more questions in her mind. The instinct to push further, to test and research until he was nothing more than a neat cluster of definitions and labels that they could fit into a box- it's there, of course. She has to actively remind herself that none of that is necessary here. But that doesn't mean she isn't personally interested in knowing.

At his last messages, she pauses, mentally faltering, losing her grip on the security system she was tangling with as her processing capabilities are redirected back onto the conversation, and Stanley. She does not know exactly why this happened, and as her concentration breaks, her hand slides down the door in defeat. Hopefully the small, isolated, problem-solving algorithms working away in the back of her mind could get in while she isn't paying attention, but she wouldn't bet on it.

Night latches onto one thing he says that she knows she has an easy response for. "You could have a real body. I mean, you aren't necessarily gone in that sense. You have a consciousness, yes- you are a consciousness, in a sense. And any consciousness can be implanted into some sort of physical representation. In a way, I myself could be an example of that." Not a very good one, she thinks but elects not to say.

"But whatever you are- ghost, conceptual entity, reality-bending infomorph- whatever, there should be some sort of method to... incorporate that into physicality," she concludes. Only after she's spoken does she realize that he was probably not looking for solutions to that specific problem. Not being able to accurately read his emotional state, she tries not to worry about it too much. He hasn't disappeared into the shadows yet, so she should be doing fine.

"And no, it doesn't bother me. Not the right word. It is... a point of interest, but I wouldn't be bothered, necessarily, if I ended up never knowing. Some things are just like that. Concepts that resist interpretation, you know? ... Does it bother you?"

This- staying here in a nice, dark and quiet room- is probably the least panicked she'd been the entire week, if you define "panicked" as "the opposite of calm". Practically just existing back at the Foundation automatically carries with it responsibilities and risks, and depending on the situation, a misstep could cost lives. Not here though. Here, despite being locked in a confined space with a bunch of rats, she is safe.

At his last message, Night allows a slow grin to spread across her face. "You know, if anyone else had lured me into a dark, isolated basement, and the door proceeded to lock on us, I'd automatically assume the worst. And it would most likely not end well."

Next, instead of getting up and yelling at Dorian, she looks up and back at the locked door, considering alternative options for a moment. "The door is connected to the entire building's security system, yes? Most doors like that are, to some extent. Or is it somehow not electronically controlled at all, and the entire building is an anomaly. Which is probably the case considering my luck, and how this place operates," she concedes with a shrug.

Night makes no further move to get up, instead regarding those yellow glowing eyes with a spark of curiosity in her own. She idly wonders what exactly Stanley could be considered as. "Shadow person" certainly wouldn't cut it, although she supposes that's what most people thought of him as. "So essentially, you can fill this room, yes? Through the shadows? How do you condense the darkness into something physical, to move things like that," she asks, gesturing to the documents in his hands. "This might… sound weird, but do you know exactly what you are? Like, the literal absence of light? An entity able to exist and spread through dark conditions?"

Something in the back of her mind points out how she knows far more about him than he does about her, and that pushing further questions onto him seemed… what, uneven? Unfair? She pays that thought no mind. After all, he hasn't shown any desire to see her files or anything of the sort. Probably because he already has, somehow, she thinks, a bit disgruntled by the thought.

[wuggen]

23!

23. Will P=NP? Why or why not?

I feel like the answer is no. But also take a fuckin look at this paper written by an old professor of mine. If memory serves his argument is basically "There are NP-complete problems that appear to be solved (at least in certain cases) in polynomial time by certain physical processes, so assuming that physics is efficiently simulable e.g. by cellular automata, it should be possible to create, for any given NP-complete problem, a version of physics in which a physical process solves the problem in all cases and then simulate that process in polynomial time. P=NP!" Or something like that. This paper was literally mocked (obliquely) by my algorithms professor in front of a lecture hall full of undergrads, it was hilarious.

I do actually need to read that paper again to see if I remember it correctly, but in any case, my thoughts on my remembered version of the argument are something like: assuming that any moderately complex physical process is simulable by cellular automata in polynomial time is a pretty tall ask, and I think in practice what you'd need to do to guarantee that is run the calculations for each cell in parallel. But like, past a certain point you've got enough parallelism to just do a nondeterministic Turing machine to the problem, have each cell check a different possible solution, and then one of them will turn up the right one! Like, yeah, any NP-complete problem is solvable in polynomial time if you have enough parallelism to nondeterministically follow every execution path, that's why it's called Nondeterministic Polynomial, that's definitional!

Also the opening sentences of that paper are absolutely hilarious. "The Clay Mathematics Institute offers a $1 million prize for a solution to the P=?NP problem. We look forward to receiving our award..." The absolute balls.

Anyway, I still haven't answered the question. I feel like the answer is no. I haven't done a deep dive into the research literature on the subject, so I'm mostly going based on vibes, but like. Y'know how there's often a very fine and subtle dividing line between a problem being decidable vs. undecidable? I can't actually think of any examples right now, but you know what I mean right? Hopefully I'm not pulling that out of my ass? Anyway, decidable vs. undecidable is a really solidly insurmountable barrier, no one's going around wondering if all of the undecidable problems in this or that system are actually decidable if we just think about it hard enough. And like, that kind of pattern is also present with P vs NP. Like you could have a perfectly reasonable, polynomial-time-solvable problem, and then just switch one little thing about it that seems like it'd be a minor detail, and suddenly it's NP-complete. Like how Eulerian paths is solvable in linear time but Hamiltonian paths is NP-complete. Point is, that's the same kinda vibe I get from decidable vs. undecidable! It's a pattern! And it suggests to me that the P/NP divide is very possibly as insurmountable as the decidable/undecidable divide!

(Of course if a problem is undecidable in some system you can just look for a different system in which it is decidable, but P/NP is defined explicitly in terms of Turing machines and Turing-complete systems, so. Can't do that to surmount the P/NP divide.)

But like, it does seem tantalizing doesn't it? Like, NP-complete problems are not unsolvable! In fact they very very explicitly are solvable, just not efficiently as far as we've been able to figure out! And so many of them are so similar to problems that are efficiently solvable, surely if we just attack the problem from a slightly different angle we'll be able to figure it out in polynomial time! It's totally different from decidability, it's gotta be!

I dunno. Vibes says no!

[miracvlovs]

✗✗✗   you see [ kaleb yıldırım ] around lately? yeah i heard that the [ cis male ] is up to no good. [ he / him ] has been here for [ five years ] now but they’re still pretty [ abrasive ] which is fine because they’re also [ debonair ] so it balances out. the [ twenty-eight ] year old [ hitman for hire ] actually looks like a lot like [ alperen duymaz ], don’t you think? it’s best to watch out, though, because it’s been said that they’re really into [ strong cigarettes & even stronger whiskey ].

hey, hello, hi, bonjour! s’up buttercups? ‘tis i, your friendly neighbourhood loser chrissie ( a.k.a an irish doofus who is utter plot trash and the actual WORST at keeping track with discord messages, oops ) and i’m super duper excited to be here among you fab human beings! anywho, this is my first kiddo kaleb and he is … how do you say … morally grey. basically his morals are very questionable in every aspect. but! on the plus side, he’s very talented and good at his job even if he is ruthless and callous, oop. he is … the worst and also lowkey messed up inside tbh so pls excuse his blunt and sarcastic nature. plot-wise i’m open to literally anything and everything so come at me with any ideas ya got! i’m always diggity down to spit ball ideas and form some dope connections so pls feel free to invade my ims or hmu on le cord ( chrissie.#9606 ) and we can brainstorm until our heart’s content! if ya wanna, go ahead and light that lil grey heart up red and i’ll shimmy my butt your way for all of the good stuff. anywho, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, shall we?

fundamentals.

KALEB EMER YILDIRIM     —     twenty-eight, hitman for hire,   +   one snarky son of a gun   /   troubled dude with daddy issues   /   all issues tbh ! 

aesthetics   ➤   dried blood caked into the grooves of cut knuckles, the lingering scent of smoke and gasoline, silver slivers of past scarring, five o’clock shadow peppering a blunt jawline, discolourations of blue and purple decorating battered hands, a subtle smirk etched upon a devious countenance, calloused fingertips riddled with small paper cuts, dark circles under almost-black eyes, the noise of screeching tires in the middle of the night, a tall stature adorned in all-black attire, ghosts of bruises staining calloused skin green, a scuffed zippo lighter in a pack of marlboros containing only one cigarette, white shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a sly grin under stormy dark eyes, a sniper on the roof of a deserted building, the roar of a car engine, & clenched, white-knuckled fists.

nicknames. kal.

date of birth. november third.

gender. cis male.

pronouns. he + him.

birthplace. manhattan, nyc.

orientation. bisexual + aromantic.

education. bachelor of music degree obtained from manhattan school of music.

spoken languages. can speak fluent english, turkish, spanish, & french.

negative traits. haughty, abrasive, enigmatic, cynical, temperamental, calculating, hedonistic, distant, sarcastic, & volatile.

positive traits. adept, diligent, charming, resilient, candid, adept, charming, audacious, determined, & resourceful.

strengths. efficient, energetic, self-confident, strong-willed, strategic thinker, charismatic, & inspiring.

weaknesses. stubborn, dominant, intolerant, impatient, arrogant, poor handling of emotions, cold, & ruthless.

talents. piano, retaining information, memory recall, lock-picking, carjacking, hand-to-hand combat, automobile knowledge, tracking people down, & excellent problem-solving abilities. 

physiology. dark brown eyes. dark brown hair. six feet, one inch tall. of a lean, broad stature with a straight posture and evident height. has a few silvery scars littered across his skin. has a few tattoos in a few less visible places. is ambidextrous.

psychology. scorpio zodiac. water element. slytherin house. entj-a. chaotic neutral. type eight enneagram. choleric temperament. interpersonal intelligence type. addicted to alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, cocaine, and cannabis. suffers from addiction and insomnia. his vices are lust, wrath and pride. his virtues are ... honestly, probably just diligence tbh.

background.

possible triggers   :   infidelity, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, cancer, death, car crash, funeral, blood, murder, suicide mention, gun mention, & various references to death and murder. 

a synopsis.   ah, here he is—my tol, troubled, grouchy son : ' ) don't u just adore ur resident trashy, snarky, but precious and sad fuckboi muse? bc i know I DO! anyways, before i digress, i'll cut to the chase. so, waaay before he blessed the universe with his presence, his mother ( who was originally from turkey ) moved to the states where she met one alexander hale. you can probably guess the rest: the pair married, they had children, everything seemed to be going swimmingly, yada yada. here’s a lil background: the hale family—a line of manhattan-born businessmen / lawyers / diplomats etc. they're dripping in wealth, not always as squeaky clean as they portray themselves as to be. kaleb’s dad was a douche, expected both of his sons to follow in his shadow and become lawyers, ran around behind his wife's back: the whole shoot and shebang of a classic a-hole. he always kind of ignored kaleb in favour of his eldest son joshua so kaleb kinda became hard-hearted and resentful due to the lack of his father's attention. skip a few years and he spied his dad cheating on his mother with his secretary though he refused to tell another soul for fear of any potential backlash. soon enough, his mother found this out for herself, their argument ruined his thirteenth birthday party then they divorced soon after. his mother fell off the wagon, became terminally ill—all while his father was remarrying and expecting a daughter with his secretary. it was a hella rough two years for kaleb. it got even worse. eventually, his mother passed away and his step-mother divorced his father to breeze off into the sunset with her new lover; leaving her daughter with her piss-poor excuse of a dad. at this point, kaleb was lonely and angry but adopted the role of his step-sister's protector, shielding her from their father's increasing substance abuse induced violence. just before his seventeenth birthday, his father died in a car crash. of course, he didn't entirely mourn the loss. almost immediately, he and his younger sister moved in with their elder brother who helped kaleb get into university. with dear ole dad out of the picture, he could finally pursue his interest and flair for music. after he graduated, he moved to santa ysabel with his brother and brother's family. in the beginning, things were going fine. yeah, sure, he was struggling for work and felt bad that his brother had to keep him afloat. normal stuff. then, one day, things quickly turned sour in his world. [ TRIGGER FOR GORE, BLOOD, SUICIDE MENTION, GUN MENTION, MURDER, DEATH ] he’d came home to find the locks on the doors busted, advancing into the house carefully only to find his brother’s lifeless corpse crumbled on the kitchen tiles: his throat and wrists slashed, posed as a suicide. of course, kaleb knew better. he knew his brother; knew he would never leave him or his family. upon further inspection of the house, he’d discovered the body of his wife upstairs: a bullet hole between her eyes. [ TRIGGER OVER ] the whole ordeal was enough to turn his stomach but once the sickness had subsided, all kaleb felt was a strong thirst for blood. sure, it was pretty damn stupid to try and seek revenge or whatnot ... but kaleb had always been one to let his heart guide his brain. anyways, time skip now to the moment he’d uncovered his brother’s entanglement with some dodgy loan shark, drug dealing criminals who were responsible for his murder. in the end, he’d hunted them down and eradicated them one by one, over a span of weeks. at first, he hated himself and what his desire for vengeance had turned him into but he kept going until he’d got them all: until he’d grown numb. truthfully, how he wound up taking lives for a living is beyond him. he woke up one day, found himself hired by some big-wig businessman who wanted rid of his business partner and et voilà, he was tangled up in the dark side of existence. i mean, was he blackmailed into doing his first paid hit? yes. but who can blame him? especially when they claimed to have intel regarding the sudden demise of a prominent figure in the criminal underbelly of the city, a.k.a his brother’s killer. it was a risk kaleb simply couldn’t take. he prefers to keep himself anonymous, hidden behind shadows, unsuspecting. death has become a job. nothing more. nothing less. it’s simply the algorithm of his existence: receive a dossier, take care of the target, get paid a hefty lump sum. and all just for enacting a stranger’s revenge in the blood of another. he moves like a deadly phantom, his footsteps light as a feather, whipping through the night like a bullet through a target’s skull. sartre claims that hell is other people. and if you were to stare into kaleb’s eyes—eyes eerily similar to having been cut from coal—you might just see hell and everyone in it staring right back at you. as nietzsche wrote: “ he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. ”

random extras.

he has a lot of small scars over his body, most of which he can’t account for or has forgotten about.

owns and drives a black 1969 boss 429 mustang which he loves arguably more than he loves himself.

speaking of, he actually is full of self-hatred so don’t let the haughtiness fool you.

trusts nobody but himself and is loyal to nobody but himself.

has a lot of anger issues so often ends up taking part in underground fights.

he rates around a solid three on the kinsey scale.

is a distant person; closed-off emotionally and prefers to keep himself to himself.

when it comes to whether or not he is morally decent or an extremely bad person, he is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

he isn’t heartless but he isn’t exactly compassionate either.

kind of shady but knows how to pass himself as charming. 

has been thru sum shit n seen sum shit so he’s v messed up inside.

though he does have a soft spot for animals and children.

his marksmanship is impeccable.

he’s naturally gifted with firearms and his shot is always on point.

dark eyes and bruised knuckles are his ultimate aesthetic tbh.

actually really appreciates classical music, though he’ll never tell. blame it on his piano lessons from childhood.

speaking of piano, he’s low key gifted at playing although he rarely does these days.

has a very short fuse and can lose his temper quite easily.

he has a good heart and good intentions when it comes to those he actually cares about although he’ll never let this show.

favourite coping mechanism? isolation.

a bit of a lone wolf. he keeps people at arm’s length but acts in a way where people are under the illusion he’s their friend.

basically the tall, dark and handsome trope: ( most of the tall, dark and handsome men display aloof, cold and distant personality but they do have a gentle and caring side. )

is a little snarky and grumpy but if you manage to break this exterior, you’ll find he’s quite witty and easy going.

he got into fighting at a young age. it was the only way to try and learn how to defend himself against his father.

sleep?? he doesn’t know her.

tends to repress his emotions until he explodes.

healthy coping mechanisms?? he doesn’t know them either.

is prone to pushing the self destruct button.

you can find a pinterest board for him by clicking anywhere here.

[hktime9]

“How to write better code?” asked a computer scientist-to-be

This is a question that I get once every 2 weeks (on average) mostly from my colleagues and friends who are studying the same degree for the same time as I. Why do they ask me? To be honest- I don’t know. What I also don’t know is the answer to their question. But I’d try to summarize what I think of the question. The answer to this question depends on many factors. If the questioner is a computer science major, I’d see what year they are in. Here’s my year to year advice to them:

- Freshman year: Coding at first is really intimidating. Its given that you’d spend hours in front of your screen to find that one line that does not compile. Here, you should remain patient and learn to accept that this problem demands a finite amount of time and focused concentration to overcome. Using online sources like stack overflow and GitHub are great options but never a first step if you want to become a decent coder. Go line by line and figure out what’s happening and whether it’s the right behavior. Freshman year includes a lot of programming labs, projects and assignments. Try to do all of them and start well before your deadline (seriously). Make it a habit to write a small program everyday. Could be a simple program to add two numbers or anything of that sort. Do some string operation or something. This would not only improve your algorithmic thinking, but also would polish the syntax of the language you code in. Like everything else in the world, mastery comes after practice. So hang in tight!

-Sophomore year: By now you have some experience of the life cycle of a typical program: understand the problem statement, do it on paper the way a human would do, do it on paper the way a computer would do, translate the latter to the programming language in question, debug. Now you also know some basics of computer science through some programming courses and maybe a few systems courses as well. The scope of your programming assignments should not be higher than maybe some array based tasks or implementing a few data structures like linked lists and binary trees to name a few. I’m assuming that you are completing your programming assignments religiously. If not, you really should be doing that before putting in extra work to improve your coding. I’ve seen people depending/copying on other people’s work even in individual assignments. While some might get away from plagiarism penalties and policies of your university, others face some sort of penalty (could be a grade reduction or something of that sort). While the latter might learn a lesson, the former fails to develop their skills and ultimately suffers in their professional life. So leaching on a friend is never a good option, well not in the long term. Try to do it even if you’re finding it hard. Take help from your teaching assistants and the rest of the course staff. You need to realize that these people are paid to help you. So please utilize office hours and appointments to the fullest. Doing extra always helps like attempting optional parts or the ones that give extra credits. Do some interesting problems and coding puzzles like the ones on hackerrank and leetcode. These are some excellent resources to polish up your skills as a developer and problem solver because they include some obvious metrics like completion, correctness and time. Have a study group where you can discuss your assignments and homeworks. There’s a difference between discussing and copying/leaching off. Mind that difference.

-Junior year: This is when you’re comfortable with programming in general. You know how it can be applied in a array of different tasks. You might have taken some old school courses like algorithms, databases and operating systems. PS I’m counting data structures as a programming intensive course and did not give it a special mention in the sophomore section :(. Go for some interesting courses like a networks course, AI/ ML or maybe some usability course. These courses will help you appreciate how you just cannot run away from programming. You’ll learn new approaches like socket programming and programming over a network (maybe some Remote Procedure Calls?). Go for some interesting applications. I remember developing a simple chatting application over a network during my junior year. I hosted it on the university’s network and anyone on the network could use it (if they knew the ip, obviously). I not only developed it, but also made it resistant to buffer overflows and scripting attacks(XSS) thanks to my roommate cum penetration tester. Once done with your Databases course, you can go for a full stack level by learning some server side and client side scripting. Learn some server based frameworks in javascript or anything. Look for some widely used frameworks; the ones which have a wider developer community. The community support will help you a lot, trust me. Some front end frameworks (client side) like ReactJS and VueJS are great these days. You can learn them using some MOOCS if your university doesn’t offer a course on them. Personally, Coursera is a great resource. Its super easy to use and has great customer care. Their “Full-Stack Web Development with React Specialization” offered by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is great. Once done you are fully capable to work as a full stack developer and the only thing stopping you is an internship offer from a company and time to practice. The latter can be achieved on your own, while the prior needs some homework and external networking. Connect to some local organization and CEOs on LinkedIn. Make sure you have a well maintained and updated LinkedIn profile and turn on recruiter discoveries to get recruiter in-mails. Be on the lookout for internship offerings and openings. Apply whenever you get a chance. Working on an organization’s project will help you learn a lot. It will not only improve your coding and problem solving stills, but also make you realize how important it is to work in teams. The latter is crucial to success in the industry since a project has multiple groups composed of many individuals. Be sure to take up work that is doable within the deadline. Keep a good relation with your supervisor and always ask for specific direction to get it right the first time.

Senior year: This has to be the most confusing year in-terms of future planning since graduation is approaching and life after is somewhat uncertain. Don’t let this fear of the uncertain get to you. My advice might not be very concrete because I, myself, am a senior while writing this. But I’ll try to incorporate my learning and findings here. The first question you might want to answer is whether coding is for you. This question is not presented before because there wasn’t an escape from it earlier because you had assignments that required you to code. Now that you can take up courses that need minimal programming effort like human-computer interaction and usability/planning courses you have a way out. These include courses like requirement engineering and planning. There are other examples as well which aren’t difficult to find. The answer to the question posed would not be a yes unless you completely love programming, in which case you’re on the right track. Loving programming is different from being good at it. You might love it and be bad at it and that’s completely fine in which case you should multiply your efforts to get better at it. Again, practice is the key. Try out programming courses on Coursera or some other platform. Get a github for student account. You’ll get it for free if you have an email account provided by your university. I’d like to make a special mention to Educative.io which offers a plethora of courses for free if you have a github for students. Educative.io is user friendly and keeps good track of your progress through the course. It is run by a very dedicated team. I personally know people working there who write articles and make courses. Almost all of them have worked as teaching assistants during their time at the university and most certainly know what they are doing and there work reflects their capabilites. They have some amazing courses. Do check it out if you have a github for students account. You’d also get free access to paid tools like AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean and Heroku. If the answer to the question is no, then you need to research more on courses and fields in computer science that do not require intense programming. These 3 years will definitely equip you with the skills that you need to do “some” coding that these fields demand. There wont be much but not zero at the same time. If you are still undecided about the question, you really should invest time knowing an answer. Ask your professors for help. Tell them honestly what you feel and why you can’t make a decision considering that you’ve spent considerable time doing it. They might guide you to a definitive answer. And then continue according to the answer. Now’s also a good time to look into industry’s standards and best practices. Maybe learn a new language? Or try using mainstream tools and familiarize yourself with devOps. Some of them are Docker, Jenkins, Slack, Jira, Git and many more, each with a set of its own unique features. Their knowledge and use will help you once you land a job because most organizations use them on a daily basis. Try some cloud computing platforms like the Amazon web services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform. These platforms offer an array of services like storage, hosting and compute. Familiarize yourself with their usage because they usually have a learning curve. Do a lot of hobby coding. Try different approaches to a problem. For example I was going through geekforgeeks and came across an interesting problem which had a greedy solution and required an LCM (Least Common Multiple) of two numbers. The author had used a builtin function for computing it. I wondered if I could write it recursively. I decomposed the problem and found an optimal substructure which proved that a recursive solution should exist. I worked on it and wrote it and it worked. It was a mere 10 liner. Practice like the one mentioned will help you develop confidence while improving your coding skills. So practice writing code even if its not that intensive and long and hopefully you’ll see improvement.

This concludes my very first attempt that writing. I plan to write more and post here often. I’m eager to get feedback and comments. Here’s my LinkedIn profile. I really hope this helps the reader. Thank you for reading

[bruciewayne]

they got it right. (the butterfly effect remix)

remix of itsallavengers' the butterfly effect. there's an ao3 link somewhere. and a masterpost somewhere, if you want to check them out.

“Bucky’s alive, and he killed Tony’s parents.”

Loki’s words from earlier spin around Steve’s mind, over and over, he’s hardly paying attention to what Fury’s saying, something about ‘being a team’, making the Avengers official. Steve’s fine with that, he’s pretty much only good for war anyway, but all that’s going through his head are those damn words.

Loki had been disguised as Steve, he’d claimed that he wasn’t Loki, but he’d called Stark ‘Tony’. Steve’s almost certain that they’ll never end up on first-name basis.

None of it made any sense, he saw Bucky die, he saw him fall, he heard his scream, still, most nights, Howard died in the 90s, half a century after Bucky did. But then again, he’s alive, 70 years after he thought he was done, after he should be done.

“The Good Captain, daydreaming, are you?” Stark’s voice cuts through his thoughts, from across the conference table.

Steve doesn’t hate him, not after the battle, after the nuke, after how seamlessly they managed to fight, but he’s not sure that he likes him. Tony Stark is an asshole. By all definitions. But he can’t deny that he’s a hero, Steve was wrong before, he’ll freely admit it, Tony Stark is an ass, but he’s also a hero. Steve respects that.

He also can’t deny that the guy has some sort of inexplainable pull, like he’s the world’s brightest light and Steve’s the world’s most confused moth.

“If that’s what they call thinking now,” Steve says, instead any of the moth-bullshit.

It’s fun to play up to the ‘confused old guy’ shtick. He has to. Find joy in it or let it get to him. He has the chance for a new life, he’s not going to spend it miserable. He might even get a chance to live it with Bucky. If Loki was telling the truth.

Stark rolls his eyes and drums his fingers on the tabletop, “We gotta get you more caught up. Anyway-”

The focus shifts back to something else, and before he knows it, everyone’s standing up and shaking hands and leaving.

“Stark, a word?” Steve asks, just as he’s about to leave, the last person, save for Steve himself, who’s still sitting down.

Stark looks confused for a moment but then sits back down, “Sure, Cap, what can I do for you?”

Tony’s pretty sure that he’s gonna try and apologise again, as much as he was a dick back in the helicarrier, Rogers is exactly the way Aunt Peggy described him, but nothing like the way his dad did. Except that he is.

Tony’s not sure what to think of him, he’d never admit it, but Rogers confuses the hell out of him. He’s just as good as the history books, Aunt Peggy and his dad say, Tony’s never been the best at reading people, but even in the way he talks and holds himself, there’s this unmistakable good that he radiates, pure and simple, but at the same time, there’s a melancholy air about him, like a rain cloud above his head. He’d seen him smile once, we won, and it was bright, sunny, like the rainclouds had gone.

And then he’d never seen it again, even though, in the past few weeks, they’ve seen each other quite a bit, but he’s never seen him smile, he’s seen the horribly fake one he puts on for the press and for people who thank him for his duty, and for some reason that tugs at the heartstrings Tony pretends not to have, more than when he watches Rogers drop completely, when he thinks no-one’s looking. It’s not obvious, but his shoulders go from perpendicular to his neck to obtuse.

It tears Tony apart a little, when he sees him, back ramrod straight, every single muscle tensed, when they’re just talking.

He carries the world on his shoulders, Tony realises, because he thinks that it’s his duty. Even though he doesn’t even really know him, not really, hours worth of bedtime stories didn’t count, it feels like a universal wrong for someone that good to be so, so sad but he’s never met a problem he couldn’t solve.

So even though Steve Rogers is a bit of an asshole, he’s also sad, nothing like the guy Aunt Peggy talks about, and yeah, he doesn’t know him, but, if anything, he deserves to be happy.

Stark gives Steve his undivided attention, and a little part of him is pleased, smug, that he’s managed to capture it, Stark is a genius, Howard and a half, maybe, definitely, more, and it’d been almost impossible to get Howard to focus solely on one thing.

Steve's throat closes up, it’s stupid. But he has to make sure, just check. If Loki was right, Stark deserves to know, if he wasn’t, then it didn’t matter.

“Come on Cap, neither of us are getting any younger,” Tony prompts, Rogers is scared, apprehensive of something, it’s plain on his face. It’s making Tony scared, because, despite everything in the last few weeks, Captain America was his childhood hero, he was invincible, to see him scared…

Steve takes a shaky breath, he can’t break down in front of Stark, he respects him, he’s not too sure the respect is mutual, and he’d lose it if there were any if he broke down now, “Loki told me something, Bucky, my friend from before the war, he’s alive. And, and he killed your parents.”

Stark looks at him for a moment, then stands up and leaves.

Tony leaves, he had to, he, God, he’s not going to have a panic attack in the middle of a SHIELD hallway. He makes it a couple steps down and finds an empty office, full of boxes, he stumbles in, locks the door and slides down to the floor.

He takes a few deep breaths, tries to slow down his heart, presses a hand to his arc reactor, waits for the dark spots to fade.

One of them had to be lying. Rogers or Loki. Loki. Probably, hopefully. God, he hopes.

If it is true, first thing, he has to run checks to see if Rogers’ friend is alive, somehow, and then, find footage of the crash.

He’d tried, before, he’d looked at everything he could, every single tape he could find, through legal and more creative means, he’d tried and tried and tried, countless sleepless nights, running on coffee, Adderall, scotch and other, more creative things, right until Aunt Peggy had come in and held him as he cried, and told him to put them to rest.

Logically, it couldn’t be true, Rogers’ friend would’ve been well into his 70s, not to mention that he’d fallen off a train in the Alps in the 40s. But, by all means, Tony shouldn’t be alive, neither should Rogers.

Tony’s never been the guy to stick to petty things like ‘logic’ anyway.

So he gets himself together and goes back to the conference room, where Rogers still is, facing out towards the city below them, standing at parade rest.

Stark didn’t believe him, Steve didn’t blame him, he had to move on, both of them. It’s unfair to him for Steve to bring back his parents’ death, from over 20 years ago, just because he still has his hangups.

He gets up, and then looks over the city, it’d changed so much, cleaner, taller, bluer, but the people were the same, New Yorkers are just as rude and uncaring as they were. As much as he doesn’t like rude people, he finds it oddly comforting. After losing everything, everyone, his home is still somewhat the same.

Not really. His home isn’t his anymore.

He’s crying before he knows it, tears silently sliding over his cheeks and dripping on the star in the center of his chest. He fucking hates it. Everyone and everything he’s ever known is gone, all he has is Captain America, the next fight.

He wipes the tears away, the leather of his gloves scratch roughly on his face, probably leaving marks that’ll fade in seconds. He reminds himself that there’s no point in crying, he’s here, he has to deal, that or die, and people are counting on him, so that’s not an option.

Deal or die. The ice has already proved that he can’t die, so he has to deal.

He hears the door open after five busses have gone down the same road, probably whoever needs the room next, he turns to apologise and get out, but he sees Stark, a little rumpled, a little breathless, and he gets deja vu, Stark looks like the soldiers after shellshock. He doesn’t ask, it’s rude, and Stark is stable.

“Let’s find your friend,” he says, with a hint of a smile.

“Stark, are you sure, I don’t want to, I don’t want to bring up anything you’ve put to rest, or waste your time, Loki could be lying,” Rogers says, so sincerely, earnestly, fuck he’s such a good guy, through and through.

“Rogers. It’s nothing, I can make an algorithm, have it run, update you on the results,” Tony assures him. He has most of the algorithm already, he just needs to adjust some code blocks and functions, maybe set up auto updates, does Rogers have a phone?

“They gave me something called a Nokia. Agent Barton called it a brick,” Rogers says, out of the blue.

“What?”

Rogers turns bashful, the tips of his ears glow red, and he looks uncharacteristically unsure of himself, “You asked if I have a phone.”

“I was talking out loud, of course,” Tony mutters, “wait, a Nokia? Sorry Rogers, no can do, come to Stark tower tomorrow, 1500 hours, we’ll get you a real phone.”

Whatever SHIELD were doing to introduce him into the century, they weren’t doing a good job.

“Stark--”

“Tony.”

This time, it’s Steve’s turn to be confused, “What?”

“My name. It’s Tony. Use it.”

And with that, he spins around and leaves the room again.

SHIELD’s way of introducing him to the century is by giving him a laptop, explaining the laptop. It’s a computer and a typewriter, under an inch thick and has all the world’s information. It blows Steve’s mind.

As soon as he figures out how to use it, he loves it, SHIELD make him take classes on it, what’s acceptable now, what changed, the wars, the politics, who’s who. They’re doing it a decade a week.

Someone, maybe Agent Romanoff, told him that they were going to give him a tutor and books, but giving him a laptop seemed faster, two birds, one stone she’d said. He’s glad they went about it this way, he could put in all the mandatory hours and then explore, all in his own time.

The next day, he took out his motorbike, making sure that his phone and wallet - they’d given him a ‘debit card’ because he has way more money than he knows what to do with, because someone had managed to convince someone else that, technically, wasn’t KIA, only MIA and he has 70 years worth of backpay - were in his pocket and went off to Stark Tower.

Tony’s at the front, sunglasses perched on his nose, doing something on his phone, leaning against the door. He looks up when Steve stops in front of him.

“Afternoon, Capsicle,” he greets, pocketing his phone.

“Capsicle?”

Tony grins, “Yep, Captain and icicle, Capsicle.”

“Yeah okay,” Steve concedes, a smile forming on his face, he misses the camaraderie and friendship of the Commandos, Tony reminds him of them, a little.

“Right, bring the bike ‘round back, there’s an elevator to my workshop,” Tony says straightening up and walking next to Steve as he slowly drives the bike around the tower.

They put the bike on one of the lower floors and then go up to Tony’s workshop.

The elevator ride is awkward, both of them staring at the numbers blinking higher, silent, elevator music hadn’t disappeared, he’s sure of it.

“Tony,” he says, suddenly, “why doesn’t your elevator play music?”

Tony snaps out of his thoughts and turns to face Steve, he laughs a little, “Everyone complained,” he says, shrugging, “JARVIS can play some for you, if you want.”

“JARVIS?” Is there another person in with them? He couldn’t see anyone but himself and Tony, an invisible person?

“Oh, right, yeah, JARVIS say hi,” Tony says, not to Steve.

“Good afternoon, Captain Rogers,” the… ceiling? says, in a smooth British accent. Tony’s elevator is weirder than he thought.

“Tony,” he says slowly, trying very hard not to break down, “why is there an invisible British man in your elevator?” who knows my name!?

“JARVIS,” Tony says, waving his hand about, in lieu of an explanation.

“Captain Rogers, I am an AI created by Tony Stark, I monitor this building, but I can be accessed through most devices, provided certain circumstances, my primary purpose is to ensure the wellbeing of my creator, you can interact with me by speaking aloud.” The ceiling man - JARVIS, says.

“JARVIS, do you know everything?” Steve asks looking up.

“I know as much as I am accessible to.”

“What are you accessible to?”

“Anything online.”

“What’s my middle name?”

“Grant.”

“Wh--”

“You know you don’t have to look at the ceiling every time you ask him something,” Tony cuts in, a fond smile on his face. He can’t help it. Cap, he’s so curious, and so clearly blown away, and in wonder of JARVIS, he feels a sense of pride, somewhere deep within him, because who knew that Captain America is a huge dork?

He gives Tony a look, “His voice comes from the ceiling, so I’ll talk to the ceiling,” he says, determined.

Before Tony can retort, the doors slide open and he’s greeted with his workshop lighting up.

“Holy shit, Tony,” he hears from his side, in a hushed whisper.

Steve’s eyes are wide as he takes in everything, it’s like he stepped into the future again, it’s- incredible.

Tony feels that tiny spike of pride again, because Captain America swore, that he tries to tamp down, because, yeah, he knows he's great, he’s a classified genius, he doesn’t need some nonagenarian to tell him.

Tony takes Steve and sits him down and begins explaining the algorithm, Steve’s attentive, focussed, he asks questions when he doesn't get something, after, maybe an hour, Tony gets JARVIS to run everything, it’ll take a while, but they have time.

Their conversation ebbs and flows, at a quiet moment, Steve suddenly sits up, “Tony, if he is alive, and he did, cause your parent’s death, what- what happens, I can’t- I--”

“Hey, hey, we’ll deal with it, okay,” Tony reassures, he’s the last guy anyone should go to for comfort, but Steve, he needs the support right now.

Tony gives Steve a Starkphone, a model they’ll release in a couple months, it’s ready, all of it, but something about PR and release times mean that they can’t release it just yet. He shows him how to use it and sets up JARVIS, he’s so full of wonder and gratitude, Tony’s heart aches after him.

They talk about the team, the Avengers, Tony tells Steve his plans, Steve tells his of a road trip, they go out to get dinner together, it’s awkward and stilted, but they might be getting somewhere.

Steve thinks that they’re on the way to becoming friends. He can’t fuck it up. He won’t.

Over the next few months, Tony stays in New York more than he has to, and they become no closer to finding Bucky, but closer as friends. Then Tony dies.

But he doesn’t.

“Can’t kill me,” he’d said, banged up, but with a grin. Because his house got blown up, he had to stay in New York, in the Tower, and then everyone stayed in the Tower, Avengers Tower.

Steve meets Dum-E. This time, it’s Tony who’s absolutely blown away, because Steve smiles so, so bright when he’s in his workshop, playing with Dum-E, it’s ridiculous, and Tony feels a spike of affection, and, love, and fear. Because what if he fucks it up.

When Tony lets Steve meet Dum-E, Steve’s in awe once again, because Tony’s opened up a tiny part of his heart to him, and Steve’s determined to make sure that he doesn’t, won’t regret it.

New York, Brooklyn, it still isn’t really home to him, not anymore, but the Tower, Tony’s workshop, being around Tony, he feels at home.

They become closer, best friends then, something more. They don’t fuck it up.

The first time Tony has a panic attack in front of Steve, it’s from a nightmare, about a month into their relationship.

Steve wakes him up by shaking his shoulder, and Tony lashes out in his sleep, punching Steve right on his cheekbone, the bruise is barely there when Tony comes to, but he still notices it.

“Steve, was that--” Tony asks, voice rough, small. He wouldn’t blame Steve for leaving, for breaking up with him, but God, he hopes that they could still be friends.

“You, yeah, but, hey, hey, Tony, it doesn’t hurt, I’d take a thousand punches to make sure you’re ok,” Steve says, wrapping an arm around him and pressing a kiss to his temple, lingering there for a second.

“Okay, thanks,” Tony mumbles, quiet, because, in that moment, he realises that what he has with Steve, it’s a sure thing.

“You don’t have to thank me, sweetheart, it’s what I’m here for,” Steve says, pulling away to look at Tony, promising him a million different things with one look.

He’s beautiful, in the faint moonlight JARVIS let in, Tony doesn’t deserve him, not in a million lifetimes could he do enough good to ever deserve Steve Rogers, but Steve had chosen him, and he didn’t want to give him any reasons to regret it.

Tony just wraps his arms back around him, holding him tighter, leaning his head just above his heart, listening to it beat, strong and steady, letting it lull him back to a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, Steve kisses his forehead to wake him up, with a cup of coffee, and then asks about what he should do, if Tony has a panic attack again. Tony tells him, what’s dangerous, what he doesn’t want, and Steve listens, pays attention.

Tony tells him what they’re about. The army from space. Steve promises him that they’re ok, that, if he wanted to, he could protect the earth.

It reminds him, strikingly of when Steve’d asked if he has shell-shock, voice curious, not judgmental, a few months into their friendship, when they could easily call each other friends. Tony had given him a crash course in the progress of mental health and attitudes towards it.

They call it PTSD, now. And there’s doctors, head-doctors. To help.

Steve had then, tentatively, asked if he could get him in touch with a head doctor. Which had meant that SHIELD hadn’t bothered.

Yeah, sure.

The first thing Tony had done, after making sure Steve gets the best of the best, was go over to SHIELD and tell them what he thought of bringing a guy 70 years into the future and not even checking him for any trouble upstairs.

Tony loves him. It doesn’t hit him, it’s not like a truck to the face, it’s not violent, loud, it’s relief, finallysomething, somewhere, says.

Good thing he loved him back.

Then SHIELD falls. Oversight, protection, it’s needed, but not like that.

Steve wakes up in DC General, Tony’s by his bedside, with Sam, music’s playing, but he only has one thing on his mind.

Tony hugs him, kisses him, desperately, Sam leaves them with a knowing smile.

“You’re not allowed to die, Steve- I--” Tony chokes out, he can’t lose him.

“I’m not going anywhere, baby, I’m right here,” he says, hoarsely, kissing him, over and over.

He’s not allowed to be discharged just yet, so he convinces Tony to sleep in the hospital bed with him, he has to hold him, and he has to tell him.

His heart is beating a million miles an hour, Tony can probably hear it, feel it, he doesn’t want to fuck this up, he can’t.

“Tony, he was right, Tony, Loki was right, Bucky, he, the Winter Soldier killed them,” Steve rushes out, all in one breath.

Tony sits up, suddenly, jolting the bed. Steve grunts a little. “Sorry,” he murmurs, kissing Steve on the forehead.

Tony looks down at Steve and his heart just breaks, Steve looks nothing short of terrified, something he hadn’t seen on him in, years now, he’s looking him in the eye, his eyes are so, so, blue, bright and unrepenting, guarded, his hair’s a mess on his forehead, flopping over his eyes.

It hits Tony, just how much he’s changed since he met him, Steve was, confused, mostly, lost, scared, he used to pretend that he wasn’t, for fear of seeming weak, Tony remembers Steve telling him, when he thought that he was asleep, quietly.

He was so, so guarded, and tense, all the time, now, he’s vulnerable to him, he’s changed and grown so, so much, Tony’s so goddamn proud of him.

He takes a deep breath, “Okay, thank you for telling me.”

“Tony, he was, he’s brainwashed, it wasn’t--” Steve rushes to say, almost pleading, what for, he doesn’t know. For Tony to not leave him, maybe.

“It wasn’t him, I know,” Tony says, softly.

He’s made his peace with it, he’s had two years to entertain the possibilities, but he knows what it means: his boyfriend's previously-dead, now-brainwashed assassin, killed his parents.

It doesn’t look pretty, but he can’t change the past, and even if he could, he had to let them rest. But he could help Barnes, find him, see how they could help him.

“Tony, I get it if you want to break up,” Steve says, small and scared. His voice breaks halfway through the sentence, and Tony’s hand immediately comes out to cup his face, thumb stroking gently over the bruise on his cheekbone.

“I don’t, Steve, you told me, I’m happy that you did, but I don’t, I don’t want to break up.”

The reaction is immediate, Steve relaxes under his hand and leans more into his touch, “We’re good,” he whispers, mostly to himself over and over, until Tony wraps an arm around him, mindful of his injuries.

“Yeah, baby, we’re good.”

[gleek-runner]

I was tagged by @darkside-cookies-913 who I, if you haven't figured out already, stan more than anything else. What an idol. Go follow.

Rules: answer this q & a. Then tag your five new followers and three of your biggest fans. (I assume based on the tumblr algorithm)

So I shall tag: @moutliaaa @youdontknowmesowhydoyoucare @kalamilamepolutampler @lucieischilling @silver-and-gold27 and @fangirl-daydreamer97 @falloutnikki @drawyourgunsr5

What's your shampoo scent?

Strawberries. Although, because of my hair conditioner, my hair usually smell like honey.

What's your aesthetic?

Empty coffee cups, stacks of cds, broken mirrors, open notebooks, yelling before bursting into tears, stretchmarks, red and black, poetry, new ideas, withering roses, sarcasm, broken wings, crooked smiles, memes and finger guns.

What's your favourite time of the day and why?

Early in the morning because I'm somewhat more happy and cheerful.

What do you like the most at the beach?

The sound of the waves.

What's the one thing you keep stressing yourself about?

The future and what I'll do with my life.

A song that's made you cry.

When I was younger, like one or two years ago, Two Birds had me weeping like a baby. Currently though, It's over isn't it has the same effect. (Honorable mentions: All Hamilton songs, Waving through a window and Seventeen)

Some tips to ease your followers.

Tumblr is not a reliable source. Never. Posts don't solve everything. The world is ugly and will always be. If you however, learn to not give a hoot, you'll be fine. Do chase what you want but don't fly too close to the sun.

Things that make you tear up.

Being yelled at. Failing. Dogs dying. Compliments.

What's your favourite thing for every sense?

Sight: moments before the sun is down when the sky is yellow. Frozen areas. Neon lights.

Hearing: violin and piano melodies. Up-beat music. People singing softly and suddenly going too deep. My dog's woof.

Taste: coffee, cheese and chocolate.

Smell: honey, baked cookies, the smell of home after being away, new books.

Touch: blankets, wool, my dog's fur, pillows.

In which alternative universe would you like to live in?

Somewhere, there's a world where soulmates are real and I would be very okay with that. Unless, we're already living in that world and that's why we wake up with songs stuck in our heads that we haven't heard for some time ;)

What's some problems you face on a daily base?

Failure. Social anxiety. Lack of time. The constant fear of how awful I am both outside and inside along with the self-objectification. The big possibility that I shall never be loved enough.

A scene from a book that always makes you sad?

*spoilers ahead for The Death Cure*

Thomas walked half the distance to Newt, then stopped. The worst part about his friend was the wildness in his eyes. Madness lurked behind them, two festering pools of sickness. How had it happened so quickly?

“Hey. Newt. It’s me, Thomas. You still remember me, right?”

A sudden clarity filled Newt’s eyes then, almost making Thomas step back in surprise.

“I bloody remember you, Tommy. You just came to see me at the Palace, rubbed it in that you ignored my note. I can’t go completely crazy in a few days.”

Those words hurt Thomas’s heart even more than the pitiful sight of his friend. “Then why are you here? Why are you with … them?” (...)

“Just come with me,” Thomas begged. “I’ll tie you up if it makes you feel better.”

Newt’s face suddenly hardened into anger and his words shot out in a rage. “Just shut up, you shuck traitor! Didn’t you read my note? You can’t do one last, lousy thing for me? Gotta be the hero, like always? I hate you! I always hated you!”

He doesn’t mean it, Thomas told himself firmly. But they were just words. “Newt …”(...)

“I hate you, Tommy!” He was only a few feet away and Thomas took a step backward, his hurt over Newt turning to fear. “I hate you I hate you I hate you! After all I did for you, after all the freaking klunk I went through in the bloody Maze, you can’t do the one and only thing I’ve ever asked you to do! I can’t even look at your ugly shuck face!”

Thomas took two more steps back. “Newt, you need to stop. They’re going to shoot you. Just stop and listen to me! Get in the van, let me tie you up. Give me a chance!” He couldn’t kill his friend. He just couldn’t. (...)

“You wanna know why I have this limp, Tommy? Did I ever tell you? No, I don’t think I did.”

“What happened?” Thomas asked, stalling for time. He slipped his fingers around the weapon.

“I tried to kill myself in the Maze. Climbed halfway up one of those bloody walls and jumped right off. Alby found me and dragged me back to the Glade right before the Doors closed. I hated the place, Tommy. I hated every second of every day. And it was all … your … fault!”

Newt suddenly twisted around and grabbed Thomas by the hand holding the gun. He yanked it toward himself, forcing it up until the end of the pistol was pressed against his own forehead. “Now make amends! Kill me before I become one of those cannibal monsters! Kill me! I trusted you with the note! No one else. Now do it!”

Thomas tried to pull his hand away, but Newt was too strong. “I can’t, Newt, I can’t.”

“Make amends! Repent for what you did!” The words tore out of him, his whole body trembling. Then his voice dropped to an urgent, harsh whisper. “Kill me, you shuck coward. Prove you can do the right thing. Put me out of my misery.”

The words horrified Thomas. “Newt, maybe we can—”

“Shut up! Just shut up! I trusted you! Now do it!”

“I can’t.”

“Do it!”

“I can’t!” How could Newt ask him to do something like this? How could he possibly kill one of his best friends?

“Kill me or I’ll kill you. Kill me! Do it!”

“Newt …”

“Do it before I become one of them!”

“I …”

“KILL ME!” And then Newt’s eyes cleared, as if he’d gained one last trembling gasp of sanity, and his voice softened. “Please, Tommy. Please.”

With his heart falling into a black abyss, Thomas pulled the trigger.

Tell something to your followers.

During a hen's cycle, an ovary sends a yolk on its path. The yolk forms what we know of as an “egg white” as it moves through the reproductive tract into the shell gland. That means that eggs are a hen's period. In this essay I will--

[flyswhumpcenter]

Bad Things Happen Bingo! The event where you send me requests according to this marvelous card!

Brought to you by me being a piece of shit and a nice suggestion from @taylortut: yet another DBH fic, this time with Connor + “Worked Themselves to Exhaustion”! A nice, short thing because wow writing is hard.

Map of the Problematique

Summary: A case running out of time. An officer determined to find the culprit before someone else dies. Components failing on themselves, overheating, malfunctioning. In the middle of this, Connor, DPD agent staring at a board, android in a dire need for a response. 

Fandom: Detroit: Become Human

Wordcount: 1.8K words

Event organized by @badthingshappenbingo

AO3 version available here.

There are three-hundred-and-five days in a year split in fifty-two weeks, twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute. These are facts in any normal and given situation, it’s routine and daily ideas most people, if not everyone, is aware of.

 And yet he’s running out of it.

He’s running out of time.

 A tense case revolving around a serial killer seeking revenge. The main suspect of it used to be a red ice dealer arrested back in 2028 by a brilliant and exceptionally young lieutenant: he’s now a killer on the chase, that is for sure. Detective Gavin ““that fucking asshole”” Reed put that in question once, perhaps just to spite with workmates he does not like, but he was still shut down in the end.

The thing is, there is no time. The man (they presume it’s a man: they are sure it’s this former dealer) is on the chase and “killing everything this fuckin’ bastard can lay his hands on” according to Hank’s flowery way to say things out with his heart. They finally have a suspect, but… it’s starting to be tiring, to put in a human way.

 Most detectives in the DPD have been affected to this case to guarantee the safety of what seems to be every single figure resembling a cop, former or active, in Detroit. The culprit seems to enact revenge for what happened ten years ago. The victims were all either shot or stabbed, some of them just left for dead and others who died on the spot. The witnesses did not remember their assaulter enough to be able to provide a portrait: they just knew it was nobody they had known before, except in news reports from years ago.

The killer is impossible to pin down at the moment. His modus operandi changes all the time. It is as if he manages to teleport every time a crime committed happens. Police is starting to get tremendously annoyed, if not angered, by the person always escaping from them.

 All hands meant human and android alike. Staring at the interactive board with all evidence lined in front of him, it is undeniable: Connor is as lost as everyone else because it just seems like a problem impossible to solve, something his algorithms and coding cannot give a response to.

An Error 404 is still not what is needed from him and from everyone else, so he just stands in front of the board again and tries to link everything again. For the tenth time in an hour or so. His sensors are starting to have the pictures burnt into them.

 He looks over and over again over the evidence. Pictures of corpses, sample and analysis results, maps of the city with red and blue crosses over them, photos of the few weapons found with no fingerprints on them, components of bullets, bullet lists, notes all over the screen. He feels like there is an obvious link between all these murders, all these victims had to have something in common in some point.

However, they’re all coming from various backgrounds. They have nothing in common: gender, race, age, occupation, blood colour… It’s as if the murderer was just going on sprees every day and attacking whoever he wants to. That can’t be the case, so Connor shifts his attention back to square one with added hypotheses and more information coming from other officers.

 It’s seven in the morning when he thinks he has a breakthrough. The crimes are always happening in the vicinity of authority-related buildings: the police station, the prisons, perhaps the hospital. The murders happen mostly around the first building, which is a given considering the background of past dealer and vengeance ideas they have determined the killer to have developed over the years.

The crimes are also going in the movement of waves, getting closer and further from their current location in cycles. His calculations indicate the waves are heading for the “shore”: their chance to strike is soon, barely feet away from—

 WARNING: CRITICALLY LOW ENERGY LEVEL

REST MODE ACTIVATION IN: 00:34:05

 These warnings keep appearing in his visual sensors, to the point he has almost lost track of the count in what seems to be hours ago. It’s been five times, five times he’s overridden these to accomplish his mission. They’re for his good, his basic functioning even, but he doesn’t have time for these.

He’s not very happy about overriding these for that reason. Even if he does—

 WARNING: RISING INTERNAL TEMPERATURE

CRITICALLY LOW ENERGY LEVEL

REST MODE ACTIVATION IN: 00:24:45

 In overheat, overexertion and what humans would describe as “exhaustion” and “overwork”, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore these signs. His LED is flashing yellow at all times now, shifting to red whenever he overrides a message kindly telling him to slip into his rest mode. Clutching onto the case, working for two days straight or so, he activates his most extreme stamina mode.

Shutting down blinking and other miscellaneous unvital functions, letting his vision dim slightly and his hearing lower in quality, he feels more like a machine than ever. Breathing is out of the question: if he deactivates it, his components will heat up even more. He cannot go from bad to worse now.

 Footsteps enter the room as he writes down some of the ideas he has gotten. The tide is something the other detectives need to know about even if it—

 WARNING: CRITICALLY LOW ENERGY LEVEL

STAMINA+ MODE ACTIVATED

REST MODE ACTIVATION IN: --:--:--

 His LED doesn’t flash back yellow once he’s done removing this message. He shuts down the calculator for his own statistics: they’re miserable anyway, there’s no need to know more than the fact he should be resting already.

The mission is still a top priority, because the battery of an android is still less important than the lives of potentially dozens of people, humans and androids alike, no matter how deviant or “conscious” he is. It’s just less important.

 “Jesus Christ!” Hank’s voice resonates in the room as his footsteps get louder. “I told ya to go to sleep hours ago, Connor!”

He barely shifts his head to the lieutenant, afraid a second may slip away from his grasp.

“Good morning, Lieutenant. May I remind you androids do not sleep.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me… That’s all ya have to say?! You’ve been there for God knows how long!!”

“I’m very close to a breakthrough, Lieutenant.” His voice box sounds strained too, mostly due to the exhaustion his components have taken. Stamina mode reduces the efficiency of it: more reasons not to speak with Hank and lose time. “I can’t give up now.”

“You even sound like shit!” The lieutenant shakes his head in disbelief. “You’re not just a machine anymore, so go rest before I see ya fuckin’ collapse in front of me!”

Androids don’t collapse, Hank. They enter prolonged rest mode or shut down, but they don’t “collapse”. No time to tell him this: perhaps Connor should also turn off random thoughts while he’s at it.

 Hank stands next to him, looking at the board.

“So, what have you found since Gavin’s gone to bed, Connor?”

Taking his best calm, reasoned and not-exhausted voice, the android stops waving his hands away to recapitulate everything. Can’t do him any wrong anyway, can’t it?

“The killer seems to do wave-like movements near the police station and related buildings. He then assaults various persons related to officers with unlinked weapons, always changing in bullet types and blades. It also seems that he’s getting close to the station again, making it a good opportunity to strike soon.”

There’s a pat on his shoulder.

“Good job, kid. Now go to bed, ‘kay? Ya’ve done enough for a whole week.”

“Just… a couple minutes more. I’ve yet to tell everyone else.”

Then Hank sighed before grumbling.

“Goddammit, I can do that y’know! Fine, do it.”

“Thank you.”

 WARNING: ELEVATED INTERNAL TEMPERATURE

CRITICALLY LOW ENERGY LEVEL

COMPONENTS OVERHEATING

 Yet again brushing aside all of these warnings, disregarding the threat to his own systems, he focused on the tide. The culprit was about to go down: he had to act. Stamina Mode wouldn’t deactivate his ability to send cybernetic messages for the few next minutes. It was the chance of the past month, the chance of multiple lives he lacked the energy to calculate the number of. Hands trembling from Thirium getting pumped to his vital biocomponents, he puts together the last strings.

The culprit would come back around the police station in less than half an hour, before most people would be in the streets but where they’d still be enough persons to kill. Writing that down on the board, he ignores Hank’s words to him, no matter how angry they sound. He just doesn’t have the time to listen. Sending a last message to the main forces, warning everyone, he almost lets himself take a breath, a real one to cool everything down.

 Gyroscope unbalanced, he stumbles upon his own feet, vision swimming in buffering jitters, until someone catches him in their arms. There is a short silence before he switches priorities, shifting importance to voice box and hearing instead of cybernetic communication and…

Is he really paying attention anymore? Everything is powering down anyway. He won’t be able to be “awake” for too long, so he better use this time well.

 Hearing other officers head outside, repeating information on the main culprit, a slight smile appears on his lips.

“What makes you grin like that, huh?!” Hank’s voice screams through the room, dragging him outside and away from the evidence all lined up in complete asymmetry and rushed developments.

“I think we’ve caught the culprit, Lieutenant…”

“It’s Hank for ya, kid.”

He was too overexerted to correct himself in a repeat of his words.

“Where are we going…?”

“Home. Ya’ve done too much work already. And don’t fuckin’ question me.”

“O… okay…”

 Out of the blue, visual feed completely cut out. His eyes shut down on their own and there was no power left to open them.

“Damn, you really overdid it, didn’t cha? It’s time for ya to go to bed. I’m taking ya home.”

Yet, the lieutenant wasn’t entirely finished as they made their way to his car.

“You’re burning, geez! That’s normal or what?”

“Component overheating… Bound to happen if any android functions for that long without a break…”

“Means you gotta not overdo it, son. Nothing more and nothing less. Got it?”

“Got it…”

  As they left the station and got into the car, all “senses” blurring, he could hear one last thing.

“You’ve done well, though. Get that rest, you deserve it.”

[lost-and-cursed]

Idk, if this is helpful, but double set is always in game if you’re hurting or endangering yourself or others. It’s always (assholes aside) expected of you to ask, to warn, to stop doing harmful things. They might tell you to keep silence in PE, but twisted ankle OVERRULES IT. They tell you ‘You cant postpone your assignment’ but most of teachers would be understanding if you have panic attacks, or your house burnt down. General idea of double set is to follow rules as closely as you can while not worsening your problem. The thing that’s important to understand, that all NT people every time they’re dealing with problem ask themselves a question: Is problem more significant than rules? (And also important: Is superior going to think so?) There isn’t always a clear answer and NT people struggle with it too at times. It can really depend on superior. Someone willing to be understanding to a headache, and someone wouln’t care if you lost all your family yesterday. Overall the algorithm of figuring out additional rules is: 1. Get to know your superior and his opinions on bending rules, solving problems and his general empathy. (You can always ask colleagues or classmates what they think about them. Are they strict? Do you think he would be understanding at matter xxxx?) (If you’ve got health problems or other special needs, unfortunately they better be easingly proven, you might want to ask the superior what thet think in advance. Better to stress that you aren’t trying to get away from working - just wanting do discuss how to do it better and well possible.  (Did I mention that people are assholes?)) 2. Get to know general rules of conduct. How expected of you to ask questions? Is the superior fine with discussing problems in work environment. Can you talk openly here? Should speech be formal? Can you do snacks? Is there common bathroom leave? Medical one? (And again it’s okay to ask other people. It may seem that everyone know what they are doing, that they know double rules, but NT just better acting on it. All NT are figuring that out in their own tempo. Someone better, someone worse. Someone faster, someone slower. In new environment, in new collective, in new set of rules it’s hard for everyone except maybe the most adaptable social butterflies. There is shy people, there is nervous people or just a lot of common folk with anxiety, social awkwardness or inadaptability. So don’t be afraid or shy to ask people (especially if they’re open and welcoming). Don’t wanna be open about being ND? That’s ok. A couple prepared phrases about how you never seem to get character right and always amiss. Noone would think about it twicely. It’s common) 3. When you have a problem  check if a superior (seemingly) respect it and recognize as a problem. Check what rules of conduct are interfering with reporting a problem   Check what rules you would need to bend to solve it or deal with it (ask a second opinion if it’s not emergency) In addition: If there is a small problem with rules, that have large consequences or complicated solving without breaking them – check if superior willing to find compromise. Forgetting bringing things its mostly not a big deal, especially if it’s clearly can’t be fake. Forgetting adding some small detail is not a big deal. Sometimes (and maybe even often) people would be asses. It’s sad and frustrating, yeah. But most of people don’t want to deliberately hurt you and woul be willing to help. My English is hella mess, honestly. If something is unclear ask, message, I’ll try to fix it. If you need any help with figuring out unspoken rules in certain situation or type of situation, you’re welcome to ask

Why are teachers at all levels surprised when you take them at their word?

I just remembered a time when I was in middle school when I ran the mile while I had a cold and nearly collapsed and the coach asked me why I didn’t tell her and I was like “You said you wouldn’t take excuses without a note and I forgot to ask my dad for a note today” and she was surprised for some reason?

Also whenever I was doing bad in high school and college and the teacher or professor pulled me aside and asked me about some missed test or something I’d bring up that I was sick or had a panic attack or just forgot. And they’d ask me why I didn’t ask for an extension or to reschedule and then I’d say “Uh, you said in the syllabus that you didn’t do that.” and every time they seemed surprised that I was following the rules and taking their threats seriously.

Like why does everyone set rules and then become super surprised when students take them seriously? Was I never supposed to follow the rules? Why then did people spend so much time telling me I should follow the rules if they’re just a rough guideline?

I’ve always been a rule follower by nature and for some reason everyone has always been shocked by that. I’ll follow rules to my own detriment. I’m not a trail blazer. I’m not someone that naturally questions authority. I had to be taught how to do that and I’m still not good at it. Why should it be expected of me to bend rules just so I can get by? Why does anyone assume that everyone knows when to bend the rules and when not to? I know I’m not an idiot. So why do people look at me like I am when I don’t read their mind and know when they’ll make an exception?

[vaniver]

An Infinity of Wars is Not A Good Thing

Let there be one hero, one villain.

[Overall, the movie was a fine experience, I’ve just had that modulation of the Homer quote stuck in my mind for a while. I will not attempt to avoid spoilers below the fold, but also am talking around things instead of about things such that you might not be spoiled by it.]

I’m sort of amazed at how bad American comics are, relative to other things; I feel like manga covers all genres, and anime is an extension of this, but American comics feels too deeply mired in the ‘superpowered conflict’ dynamic to do anything really interesting.

I think it was the first Avengers movie--the one where I felt for Loki as the Hulk was swinging him like a ragdoll--that crystallized my deep dissatisfaction with any movie where a large conflict is solved by punching. This SMBC says it best.

But there’s another problem, which is something like... punching implies a single scale of prowess, and punching with superpowers means a scale that the viewer doesn’t have much access to. You can argue about whether Superman or The Hulk would win in a slugfest, but you can’t really settle the question; no similar state of uncertainty exists for, say, the hardness of various materials, which is constrained by chemistry and math.

And so you have this succession of trump cards, with only narrative rhyme or reason--The Hulk can out-punch anyone, except when he can’t. And it turns out Thanos isn’t one of those people that he can punch.

And there’s also something about the Marvel movie algorithm, which seems to be something like “have a list of ten awesome setpoints, then figure out how to draw a path that goes through all those setpoints,” which has this weird interplay with the trump cards. Sometimes the point of Alice showing up is just so that Alice can show off and the audience can clap, and the tactics rarely seem to take into account the actual power disparities.

---

So enough complaints about the medium. What was this movie?

There was, as the verbal brain noise suggests, one hero, and one villain. The one hero was Dr. Strange, who actually knows how to prioritize (”I will not hesitate to save the time stone over you or the boy”, as compared to ”We don’t trade lives” -> no wonder you lost!), and who uses the Time Stone to perform tree search, and the one villain was Thanos’s misunderstanding of economics and coordination problems.

Who is Thanos? One version of Thanos is the Black Death, which caused an increase in the standard of living of the survivors; when you reduce the population by a third, you just end up with much more material goods per person than you had before.

Another version of Thanos is Paul Ehrlich. Titan is in an unsustainable situation; Thanos points this out and an unpalatable solution, the solution is not accepted, and a worse consequence obtained. Thanos learns that he needs to exercise the “moral courage to sacrifice others” as Oscar Wilde puts it.

But, of course, Ehrlich was wrong. Why was Titan’s situation unsustainable, in such a way that a random purge would fix it? Unclear, and probably mistaken. How do we know that Thanos isn’t actually right, and was doing the necessary math? Because of the ‘1/2th’ number. That isn’t the sort of number that you get by solving partial differential equations; that’s the sort of number that you get by flipping a coin. 

It also doesn’t help that Thanos thinks one should hit rich and poor alike. In a rentier economy, sure, but a technologically advanced society like Titan is such? Doubtful. Rather than reallocating the same amount of capital among fewer mouths, killing people also reduces the amount of human capital available (and killing the white collar rich decreases it even more).

As an incentive to solve coordination problems, this seems good as a BATNA, and there is a role for destructive BATNAs. Oftentimes, cities have burned to the ground, and then even accounting for the costs of rebuilding people have been better off afterwards, because the rebuilding allowed them to lay things out more efficiently. One can imagine a Thanos who says “I will level New York City to the ground on January 1st, 2020; evacuate accordingly,” and then people figure out how they’ll rebuild, and this predictable disaster actually makes everything better--especially if Thanos is open to people convincing him that they’ve negotiated a better solution. Where is the panel of economists trying to convince Thanos that in fact there are the right number of humans, as opposed to 2x the necessary number?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY IT'S SAFE FOR MAKERS

Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster. At best you can see how great a hold taste is subjective and wanted to kill it once and for all. And yet some applications will still demand speed. It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith in relativism. Then the algorithm for language design becomes: look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of startup people around you caring about startups, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. The ideal medium seemed the short story was flourishing. And I admit that it is, but on how much it scrambles your brain. The thought of all this stupendously inefficient software burning up cycles doing the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude.1 So an artist working on a program, when you try to optimize it. If you turned it over, it said Inside Macintosh.

The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see everything. Growing slower might be slightly dangerous, but chances are it wouldn't kill them. I'm proposing that the core language, that would seem to be the side to bet on now. Barbershops are doing fine in the a department. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. I enjoyed it. I'm so optimistic about HN. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars.

They like reading novels.2 What is it about startups that makes other companies want to buy them? If good art is art that interests its human audience, and—here's the critical point—members of the audience share things in common. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and maximal efficiency, programmers in a hundred years will not, except in page views, but the most I've ever been able to keep up, in the original sense, is something you write to try to write novels, for example, would arguably be gross even if they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate is a bit higher than I'd like. Like all such things, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work. You may be wasting your time, but you're not idle. They could grow the company on its own revenues, but the reaction to them is at least a million dollars and I'll figure out what it's doing. When I was in college that the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it. Large organizations always tend to develop software this way, and I expect them to proliferate. Arguably a market is such a thing as good art. There are some things that will appeal to you and your friends, to people in Nepal, and to know how to improve them. Which means that any sufficiently promising startup will be offered money on terms they'd be crazy to believe your company was going to write that one has to make do without.

Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Multiply this times several hundred, and I expect them to proliferate. But I would like to do most this second. If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate. Most product acquisitions have some component of fear. Startups in other places are just doing what startups naturally do: fail. The extreme case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything that would be awkward to describe as regular expressions can be described easily as recursive functions.3 Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. For example, many languages today have both strings and lists. If you're writing for other people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early.

In most places the atmosphere pulls you back toward the mean. The reason I want to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. But I don't think that's the audience people are implicitly talking about when they say they like what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they don't hit it, they've failed in the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time. Wrong.4 What more do you need a lot of time imitating bad writers. She writes: Hilbert had no patience with mathematical lectures which filled the students with facts but did not teach them how to frame a problem and solve it. Actor too is a trend we see happening already: many recent languages are compiled into byte code. Just as our ancestors did to explain the forces that generate them. Though simple solutions are better, they don't seem as impressive as complex ones.

Notes

Philadelphia is a great reputation and they're clearly working fast to get as large a percentage of statements. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at the fabulous Oren's Hummus.

If you seem evasive than if you sort investors by benevolence you've also sorted them by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole venture business barely existed when they got started in Mississippi. A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because they attract so much on luck. The story of Business Week, 31 Jan 2005.

I had zero effect on what you love: a to make money for. Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce? If the startup eventually becomes. Apparently someone believed you have no trouble getting hired by these companies substitute progress for revenue growth with the earlier stage startups, but I'm not saying you should prevent your investors from helping you to stop, the partners discriminate against deals that come to accept a particular number.

The Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1983. It did not become romantically involved till afterward.

[maestrosgame]

DevLog 14 - Group Pathfinding

On and off for the last 5 years I’ve worked to improve grouped unit movement in an RTS-style game called The Maestros. As Dave Pottinger pointed out almost 20 years ago after his work on Age of Empires, the “pathfinding” part of movement gets all the attention, but making dozens of units follow a path intelligently is at least as important and quite difficult. I’d love to tell you about my... journey in this space.

What follows are by no means state of the art solutions. The industry’s had excellent minds on this problem for over two decades, and you and I have little hope of catching up over an afternoon coffee. So let’s focus on the nitty-gritty details of making basic pathfinding look and feel good for players under practical game constraints. A practical knowledge of 3D math is assumed, but a phD in AI is not recommended. I’d probably just upset you, honestly ;)

Goals

In RTS movement, some players want realistic, slow-rotating tanks and squads of infantry hustling together like Company of Heroes. Our game is about executing big plays in quick brawls so our priorities were “responsive over realistic,” and “direct-control over coordinated formations.” Think more Starcraft than Age of Empires.

Where We Started

UDK (Unreal Engine 3’s SDK) supports A* pathfinding in a navmesh-based space, and has pretty effective (if finicky) navmesh generation. However, pathfinding was implemented almost entirely in unreachable engine code which we could not modify in UDK. All in all, if I selected a single unit and right clicked a pathable location, I could expect it to get there eventually. I thought we were pretty well covered with that. Boy, was I wrong.

Problem #1 - Stopping the Group

The next step is moving a group. If I select a few of our Doughboy units and ask them to move to the exact same location, only one of them is going to actually make it there. At best, the others will be adjacent to that one who made it. So how do they know when they’re done moving? Two clicks and we’ve already hit our first issue!

What we came up with was a sort of message-passing system. The first guy who got there was set to have reached the destination, and anybody who touched him and was also trying to get to the same place would consider himself at his destination. Then those guys could pass that message on to anybody who bumped them. We called this “transitive bumping.” This felt pretty clever, and works well for clustered groups, but still has some silly degenerate cases (e.g. if units are in a line).

Problem #2 - Moving Through the Crowd

Another issue we ran into early on was one unit being blocked by another. While UDK’s pathfinding supported creating new obstacles in the navmesh, doing it for a couple hundred units who were constantly changing their location resulted in unplayable performance. Because of this, units were always trying to move through one another instead of around.

Our solve was to allow units to apply a force to one another under certain conditions. This also needed to propagate throughout the group like our stopping messages.

A more natural looking solution might be to tell the unit to move themself out of the way (a la Starcraft 2), and then to move themselves back. In either case, determining the exact states/conditions to “push” another unit was incredibly complex and error-prone. “You can push Allies but not enemies, idle units but not attacking units.” In our case, it took ~10 unique clauses with various levels of nesting to achieve. Yikes! I’d love to find a more generic solve here.

Problem #3 - Staying in Your Lane

After our first public demo of The Maestros at GDC in 2014, I received some feedback from a mentor of mine that the game felt “messy.” Plenty of things contributed to this at the time, but the problem that was most at fault was that even simple, straight-line movements had units jockeying for position along the same path. Nobody would expect a real-life crowd to do that, and certainly not a group of military-trained robots. All of our units were still acting completely independently. When they received a single, common destination from a player’s click and tried to get there on their own fastest route, they’d often choose the same route as the guy next to them. The result was about as graceful as all 8 lanes of the 405 freeway collapsing into one lane instantaneously.

The general solution to this isn’t terribly hard. Calculate a center point for the current group, take the difference of each unit’s position from that center point, and issue a bespoke move command for each unit with their offset from the destination.

For units A, B, & C, and a clicked location (red reticle), offset each destination

That worked great for the basic case of moving a unit cluster from one open area to another, but as you’ll begin to learn in this article - most of the “general” feeling solutions have conditions where they break down. The most obvious is if you try to move next to an obstacle. As you can see below, the center point is fine, but unit C would be inside a boulder (gray box).

Another issue was that if your units were spread out and you clicked near the center, you’d expect them to collapse inwards. Using a naive offset, however, they’d generally stay put. Offsetting the destination also fails to meet expectations if your units are too spread out. For example, you’ve all your units in one cluster, but your commander (unit A) was off solo farming 2 screens away. When you issue a move to a point near the center of the cluster, you’d expect all your units, including your commander, to end up generally underneath your cursor (red reticle). In fact, none of them end up under your cursor if you apply offsets naively.

Summarizing many issues in one sentence, “There are situations where some or all units should collapse together, not maintain their offset from the group’s center.” The idea of determining who is in a group or not can sound a bit daunting, and certainly there are some complex clustering algorithms that could be applied here. My solution to this problem ended up being much simpler and has been unexpectedly effective across a huge number of scenarios. Here’s the rundown:

Borrowing language from our code, I calculate a “SmartCenter” for the group

Calculate the average position of all units in the group

Remove any units that aren’t within 1 standard deviation of that average

Recalculate the average position from that subset of the group

If the point we are trying to reach is within a standard deviation of the center point, I use naive independent movement. This guarantees that units will gather shoulder-to-shoulder in a tight cluster, and gives players the kind of direct control of the group shape we’re looking for in The Maestros.

If I don’t have a meaningful “Primary Cluster,” then my units are probably spread out all over the map. In this situation, I just want them to regroup as best they can. Another win for naive independent pathfinding. I detect this situation when the standard deviation for the group is larger than a particular maximum. Ideally, that maximum is relative to the area occupied by the group so I used the sum of all unit’s radii. That’s been reasonably effective.

If I have a “Primary Cluster,” but 1 or more units are more than 1 standard deviation from the group’s center, I collapse them in by giving them a destination in the direction (i.e. normal) of their offset, but only a standard deviation’s length (i.e. magnitude) away from the group’s central destination. This has the effect of “collapsing back in” and feels much more natural.

Problem #4 - Sticking Together

Overall applying relative offsets to each unit’s destination was a huge win for the “cleanliness” of movement within our game when moving in a straight line. Pathing around obstacles was still abysmal though. First, units will take their own shortest path around an obstacle, and don’t always stick together with their group. Second, our 8-lane to 1-lane traffic jam happens all over again at each intermediate point before we reach our destination (see figure b).

Not pathing together

Traffic jam on intermediate points

I sat on this problem for an embarrassingly long time without a good answer. On day one, I thought to pick 1 unit’s path, and apply the offsets to each intermediate point. This breaks down quickly when you consider that often the reason you’re pathfinding in the first place is that your going tightly around an obstacle. Applying the offsets will leave 50% of your units trying to path into a rock, and naive independent pathfinding will cause a permanent gridlock before you even get near your final destination.

My conceptual answer to this setback wasn’t terribly clever either (depicted below). I’d move the path away from the corner, about one radius width. Determining this mathematically on the other hand proved incredibly elusive to me. How do I determine whether my path is cornering close to an obstacle or far away? If I am close, is the obstacle on my left or my right? On what axis is my left or my right for a given point in my path?

At some point I was going to have to do a raycast to locate obstacle volumes. Perhaps I could try raycasting radially around each point (pictured below)? Unfortunately it was prone to missing the obstacle entirely. The accuracy of this solution scaled directly with the number of raycasts I did per point on the path, and that felt terribly inefficient.

What I really needed was the left-right axis for a given turn. The hypothesis is that the angle of the turn is telling you about where you obstacle likely is. Most of my obstacles where going to be directly inside the “elbow” of my vectors, and occasionally outside it. I hit a breakthrough when I found the axis through the following operations:

Generate the vectors for relative movement between points - For each pathfinding point B, subtract its predecessor, A, to get the vector from A -> B

For each pair of subsequent vectors, A & B, add them to get a vector C that goes from the beginning of A to the end of B

Cross C with an up/down vector to get a vector P, that bisects the area between A & B.

The vector P is the right/left axis for my turn! I check for obstacles on either side and shift my pathfinding point away from the obstacle by a little more than 1 standard deviation. The result goes from a path (green) directly on top of my obstacle, to one comfortably offset from it.

Before After

Now, I can apply my offsets at the updated points along my path so my group can stick together as they path, and they won’t traffic jam. It doesn’t cover every situation, but in ~90% of cases we can get by without traffic-jamming. The improvement is enormous. Here’s a before & after of going around just one corner.

Before

After

Learnings

My biggest learning from doing this is that “generalized” pathfinding algorithms like A* are unlikely to be the whole movement story for your game, especially if you’re trying to coordinate a group’s movement. The second thing I learned is that complexity is truly the enemy here. Pathfinding isn’t hard because the pathfinding algorithms are complex. A tight A* implementation is easily less than a hundred lines of pretty readable code, and is perfectly serviceable for most games. Pathfinding is hard because moving multiple units in real-time and space with one another produces an incredibly large volume of scenarios, and humans have pretty specific expectations of what should happen in many of those scenarios.

The Maestros is running a Closed Beta Weekend from May 25-27. Sign up on our website to join in!

[fumpkins]

Researchers see atoms at record resolution

This image shows an electron ptychographic reconstruction of a praseodymium orthoscandate (PrScO3) crystal, zoomed in 100 million times. Credit: Cornell University

In 2018, Cornell researchers built a high-powered detector that, in combination with an algorithm-driven process called ptychography, set a world record by tripling the resolution of a state-of-the-art electron microscope.

As successful as it was, that approach had a weakness. It only worked with ultrathin samples that were a few atoms thick. Anything thicker would cause the electrons to scatter in ways that could not be disentangled.

Now a team, again led by David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, has bested its own record by a factor of two with an electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD) that incorporates even more sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms.

The resolution is so fine-tuned, the only blurring that remains is the thermal jiggling of the atoms themselves.

The group’s paper, “Electron Ptychography Achieves Atomic-Resolution Limits Set by Lattice Vibrations,” published May 20 in Science. The paper’s lead author is postdoctoral researcher Zhen Chen.

“This doesn’t just set a new record,” Muller said. “It’s reached a regime which is effectively going to be an ultimate limit for resolution. We basically can now figure out where the atoms are in a very easy way. This opens up a whole lot of new measurement possibilities of things we’ve wanted to do for a very long time. It also solves a long-standing problem—undoing the multiple scattering of the beam in the sample, which Hans Bethe laid out in 1928—that has blocked us from doing this in the past.”

Ptychography works by scanning overlapping scattering patterns from a material sample and looking for changes in the overlapping region.

“We’re chasing speckle patterns that look a lot like those laser-pointer patterns that cats are equally fascinated by,” Muller said. “By seeing how the pattern changes, we are able to compute the shape of the object that caused the pattern.”

The detector is slightly defocused, blurring the beam, in order to capture the widest range of data possible. This data is then reconstructed via complex algorithms, resulting in an ultraprecise image with picometer (one-trillionth of a meter) precision.

“With these new algorithms, we’re now able to correct for all the blurring of our microscope to the point that the largest blurring factor we have left is the fact that the atoms themselves are wobbling, because that’s what happens to atoms at finite temperature,” Muller said. “When we talk about temperature, what we’re actually measuring is the average speed of how much the atoms are jiggling.”

The researchers could possibly top their record again by using a material that consists of heavier atoms, which wobble less, or by cooling down the sample. But even at zero temperature, atoms still have quantum fluctuations, so the improvement would not be very large.

This latest form of electron ptychography will enable scientists to locate individual atoms in all three dimensions when they might be otherwise hidden using other imaging methods. Researchers will also be able to find impurity atoms in unusual configurations and image them and their vibrations, one at a time. This could be particularly helpful in imaging semiconductors, catalysts and quantum materials—including those used in quantum computing—as well as for analyzing atoms at the boundaries where materials are joined together.

The imaging method could also be applied to thick biological cells or tissues, or even the synapse connections in the brain—what Muller refers to as “connectomics on demand.”

While the method is time-consuming and computationally demanding, it could be made more efficient with more powerful computers in conjunction with machine learning and faster detectors.

“We want to apply this to everything we do,” said Muller, who co-directs the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science and co-chairs the Nanoscale Science and Microsystems Engineering (NEXT Nano) Task Force, part of Cornell’s Radical Collaboration initiative. “Until now, we’ve all been wearing really bad glasses. And now we actually have a really good pair. Why wouldn’t you want to take off the old glasses, put on the new ones, and use them all the time?”

Electron microscope detector achieves record resolution

More information: Electron ptychography achieves atomic-resolution limits set by lattice vibrations. Science, 21 May 2021: DOI: 10.1126/science.abg2533

Provided by Cornell University

Citation: Researchers see atoms at record resolution (2021, May 21) retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2021-05-atoms-resolution.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2021/05/21/researchers-see-atoms-at-record-resolution/

[dee-brief]

I thought I’d already hit my low of being a bad friend on this site. Apparently not. @littlefandomheaven sent in this prompt close to a full year ago, and I’m only getting off my ass right now. I’m… I don’t think sorry quite cuts it. And I know that the few Stitchers readers who were around probably aren’t any more. But I will fulfil my promise to write this prompt, so help me.

 This is part one of two, and it is 100% canon compliant. Part two is me taking the prompt for the team to be protective of Cameron as an endorsement to write the AU of 2.0 that has been in my head since I first saw the episode. Please note, however, that although part one is compliant with canon, my adoration for Cameron Goodkin has not diminished in a year. So this fic is littered with me making him all kinds of awesome. And lots of headcanons of his relationship with Ayo, Linus, Camille and Maggie. Because I can =P

 Prompt: The whole team must have found out about Cameron's heart condition at some point, like Kirsten found out about it on screen, but what about the others? Maggie must have known beforehand, but what about Camille, Fisher, Linus and the rest? They must have all seen the scar in the season 1 finale and figured out what it implies. There is this line in the episode from Camille: "Who says your heart can take that?". So did she already know? How did she find out? Or was that just a figure of speech and when she sees the scar, she's like "Oh, crap." And what about Fisher when somebody tells him about Cameron's actions while he's in the hospital, because somebody definitely had to. He probably asked (Camille? Linus?) how Cameron is when he woke up, because he probably wants to know that Cameron's fine as he pushed him out of the way. And they have to tell him what happened. And then they could be all very overprotective. They can't go on like nothing happened, right?

The first person to find out was Maggie.

 Well. No. If one wanted to be incredibly accurate about it, the first people to find out about his heart surgery were his parents, as they’d been at his bedside as soon as he was rolled out of the operating theatre. And after them came a slew of nurses and doctors, some friends of the family and some people they employed to look after him or to stop him from going up the wall in frustration while his mom kept him as locked up as she could.

 But the first person to find out post his eighteenth birthday and final escape into independence was Maggie, and as far as Cameron was concerned she may as well have been the first. Everybody else had been told about him; over his head and despite his protests. And their reactions to knowing had been various shades of the same constricting cloth. And Maggie…

 Maggie had appeared out of the crowd of people at the MIT table at the science conference as though she’d materialised only a second before, back straight and eyes piercing and set of her mouth decidedly no-nonsense. She hadn’t bothered even glancing at the other exhibits; had marched directly up to his and had started firing questions at him like the frontline artillery of a war. He answered, a little bewildered, a little caught off guard, a lot intimidated, until the niggling suspicion got loud enough that he blurted it out loud.

 “You’re not… really interested in this, are you?”

 “What makes you think that?” Her gaze was a dark glacier.

 “You…” He remembered squashing the model of the brain he’d been holding because his nervousness caused his fingers to twist it too many times. “There’s too much… detachment, there.”

 Not everybody was passionate and excited about the mind, he knew, but everybody who asked beyond the usual checklist of questions had a… a spark. A connection to the thing that reflected in their eyes. He learned rather quickly that this was her way with almost everything, and learned just as quickly that his own bias toward warmth and passion and true connection would halt any real relationship forming between them, to the point where she would, many years later, accuse him of disliking her. But at that first meeting, without many interactions to show him how to read the signs, all he saw was the wall of precision that juxtaposed so spectacularly with the questions of interest she sent his way.

 “No,” she said, after a beat. “I’m not interested. Not in this particular presentation, anyway. I am, however, interested in you, Doctor Goodkin. In your work. And in your mind.” Cameron squirmed under the calculating look she sent him, twenty-two and still trying to get used to the doctor before his name being literal and not just teasing. “I’ve spent a lot of time researching you.”

 His tongue used the time where his filter was shut down by his surprise to blurt, “Are you going to tell me to choose between a red and blue pill, next?”

 Maggie stared at him in blank, reproachful silence for a moment and just as he began feeling mortified she replied, “Maybe. That depends on how you see my offer.” She put a business card down on the table in front of him. “Call me, and we’ll set up a time when you can meet alone. Without any…” She glanced to the right, and Cameron saw his supervisor returning from his bathroom break. “…interference.”

 And then she’d melted back into the crowd, back straight, eyes forward, and he’d wondered if one of the other guys was playing a prank on him. It took a while to call the number on the card, and even when they met up again the desire to ask whether he was having his chain yanked burned strong on the tip of his tongue. Maggie introduced herself then – the casually added NSA to her name and surname had the intended effect on him, he was sure – and instead of giving him answers she gave him more questions. Thirty-four of them, to be exact – hypothetical situations she wanted to see if he could solve and how long it would take him to do so. None of it made any sense, but he was waiting for people to email him back so he got started on the problems. And then he got sucked in. And then he was making a ten pm decision to screw sleep and the actual work he had to do, because the hypothetical situations were both completely science-fiction but also, strangely, excitingly, impossibly real.

 Three days later he shoved a stack of documents – hand-written, because he’d been told not to trust any printers – at Maggie, and spending some of the tensest moments of his life watching her flick through things. When she looked at him next, there was almost a smile of approval on her face. She, in turn, shoved a thick stack of documents towards him. An algorithm. An algorithm that, apparently, made the ludicrously science-fiction things he’d been working on neither science-fiction, only hypothetical or ludicrous.

 “Is this for real?” He finally couldn’t help but blurt the question out, leafing through an impossibility. He was a scientist, for heaven’s sake. But also… But also. “Can this… does it work?”

 “It could,” Maggie told him, still straight-faced. “If your designed tools and adjustments are good enough.”

  Cameron must have laughed, but he could never quite remember how he’d reacted to that knowledge. Probably like a gibbering idiot, some sober part of him liked to hypothesise when he thought back. In any case, Maggie didn’t change her mind. Instead, she explained that they had a location for a lab, and an opening as head of that lab that he could fit into. She explained the utmost secrecy the job would entail. She explained unnecessary things like how many people they’d be able to help if the algorithm on the paper managed to be turned into actual, working science. She explained that she had names of many others that he would help her interview for his lab once some of the hypothetical things he’d created for her had been tweaked now that he knew they were not-so-hypothetical. She explained that the list of others were all the best in the country and even in the world; that the team under their leadership would be brilliant and passionate and able to break ground and innovate in ways even his most passionate, secret dreams had never dared hope.

 And his only response, other than slack-jawed shock and gibbering idiocy, was, “Why me?”

 “We’ve approached others over many years,” Maggie admitted, calmly. “Some of them got further along in our interview process than you are right now. But they couldn’t take it to the point where the theory was made a reality. You were just next on the list of people to approach.”

 And, somehow, that made Cameron feel better instead of stung; made it more realistic and more attainable and less like something that was going to be proven to be a hoax. If he didn’t get this fantasy lab with the brightest in the country, if he didn’t get to make and update already existing technology that would look into dead people’s brains, then it would simply be because he was not smart enough to cut it. Not because the possibility was not a realistic one.

 And then Maggie put another pile of papers – how big their filing room must be – bunched in a folder onto the desk between them. It had his name on the corner, and Cameron eyed it warily before looking at Maggie. She was watching him even more intently than before, the promise of some sort of test in her eyes.

 “As I said before; we’ve been researching you. I have information on you from when you were ten years old.”

 The way she said it made Cameron know instantly that she knew. And he hated it – he hated that this woman who was offering him the potential at everything was the first to find out since he clawed his way to freedom. He hated that she looked at him with the power that knowing gave everybody, and how his words dried up under her gaze, leaving him unable to give a defence. Maggie Baptiste, scary government lady and potentially his boss, was the first to find out.

 And Maggie was the first to ask him. “Will any of this be a problem?”

 She meant his mother and her expectations and her not being able to know why he was quitting MIT. She meant James Miller. She meant that he was twenty-two years old and under the thumb of an old family friend who was only an old family friend because he was wearing brand clothing and driving a car worth more than some people’s apartment buildings. She meant the scarred tissue on his chest, and everything it implied.

 And for the first time, Cameron was able to reply instead of having the decision made for him. “No. It won’t be a problem at all.”

 Maggie watched him for another moment and then nodded. And because of that nod, Cameron put a halt to all of his current research and threw himself at the stitching possibility. So much so, that it only took four days before he was presenting what would become the first draft of the corpse cassette and a simulation that had stolen sleep and some sanity from him. But it gained him his first half-smile from Maggie Baptiste, and her telling him to show up for work on Monday. He, Cameron Goodkin, had done what all of the others she’d approached had never managed to. In four days.

 He grinned back and handed in his resignation to MIT within the hour.

 Ayo was the second to find out.

 Maggie and Cameron had been at a hospital doing a covert interview for some doctor Cameron didn’t remember any more – they’d barely spent five minutes with him before brilliant but no became very apparent where he was concerned – when they ran into her by chance. Their interviewee was walking them down a hallway, nattering on and being generally irritating, when there had been a commotion in a nearby room that distracted them all. The door burst open, and another doctor dragged Ayo out by her arm, already reaming into her. And Ayo stood, back straight and face fierce, and took every comment thrown her way – everything from the possibly warranted right down to the derogatory. And then she fought back with quiet, firm dignity, proving her knowledge and backing up her decisions, ploughing through the anger and the spit and the disgust thrown her way.

 “Do it again,” the doctor seethed, “and you’ll be without a job. I don’t care how much you think you know. This is my department. And you’ll never work for anybody if I say you won’t.”

 Their interviewee said some half-calming words to Ayo that basically implied that although the other doctor was known for being a big-headed jerk she must have screwed up in some way, and she’d shaken her head but said nothing. Their interviewee went inside the room to smooth ruffled feathers, leaving her standing alone and suddenly slumped in the hallway.

And something about that response of hers – or maybe it was something about her eyes – had Cameron undermining Maggie for the first time so he could blurt, without consulting his boss first, “You could work for us.” Ayo blinked at him, uncomprehending, and Cameron saw Maggie cross her arms out of the corner of his eye. But Cameron didn’t care. He wanted this one for their lab; something in his gut told him so. “I mean it,” he said, looking at Ayo and ignoring Maggie. “I don’t care what that guy said. We’d hire you.”

 “For what, exactly?” Ayo said, sounding more tired than interested.

 Cameron glanced at Maggie, who shot him a narrow-eyed look and didn’t move. For a moment, he feared he’d have to take back his offer, but then Maggie unfolded her arms, strode closer to Ayo, and started talking. And the interested quickly grew on Ayo’s face.

 Ayo had been employed by the NSA for three weeks – and still slipped up and called him Doctor Goodkin despite the others having settled happily into the first-name-basis of the lab – when she called him into the medical room she’d rearranged until it somehow reminded him of her. He was still faintly wary of doctors’ rooms for various reasons, and he’d planned to give her the help she needed quickly and then disappear, leaving the more friendly banter for when he was in a space that didn’t smell like memories he’d rather forget.

 “I’m doing a full medical on everybody in the lab,” Ayo told him and dashed every plan of a quick and painless escape in one violent blow. “It’s your turn.”

 “You’re here to watch the vitals of our stitchers,” Cameron protested, standing rooted to the spot. “Not the rest of us. Besides – I’m sure Maggie’s hacked all our medical records.” He’d prefer her not to know at all, but reading it in black and white was far better than her finding out while poking and prodding at him.

 “This whole lab is my responsibility, medically,” Ayo replied, readying tools and charts. “And I’d rather get clean data that I can add to with medical files, if necessary. It’s not exactly like I have a lot of work at the moment, anyway.”

 “Maggie wants me to – ”

 “Maggie gave me permission to do this, Cameron.” Ayo narrowed her eyes at him, suddenly calculating. “She wants the head of her lab in the best hands.”

 “Cut off one head and two more shall take its place.” Cameron was starting to wonder if this was Maggie’s covert way of getting back at him for undermining her with his offer to Ayo. It had all worked out in the end, of course – Ayo was brilliant and a wonderful fit and a wonderful person, besides – but he wouldn’t put it past Maggie to make sure he’d never forget who was really calling the shots again.

 “You’re stalling,” Ayo said, and her voice was suddenly a lot gentler. “I promise, I’m not going to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. It’s just some general check-ups. Okay?”

 It wasn’t okay, but he was backed into a corner. And so he clenched his jaw and let her poke and prod around and tried not to cold-shoulder her as he tersely replied to questions about his contacts, his lack of smoking, his exercise and diet habits and the like. And then the stethoscope came out and she asked him to unbutton his shirt and he sat there for a long, long minute, staring at nothing and trying to tell himself not to whimp out about this. She prompted him with his name, and he did as she asked, and he wasn’t looking at her but he could feel the moment she saw and started putting pieces together.

 “Ah.” Ayo said, succinctly. There was a long, loaded pause, and then she took a deep breath. “I’m pretty sure you’re aware about the concept of doctor-patient confidentiality?”

 It was not where Cameron had expected her to go, so he found himself glancing at her, puzzled. “Yeah,” he replied, slowly. “But that’s not…” He sighed. “And that gets overridden by Maggie, doesn’t it? Who already knows, by the way. Those hacked medical records, and all.”

 “It gets overridden by Maggie only in the absolute extreme circumstances – when it affects this lab to an extent that I cannot keep silent. Most of the other times? Maggie won’t need to know anything.” She waited until Cameron, still puzzled, met her gaze. “And I’ll make those calls the way I always have, Cameron – by giving sensitivity and the benefit of the doubt to my patient, not an organisation as a whole. But.” She paused for a moment to let it sink in. “But then it has to go both ways – you have to tell me everything. And I mean everything – even the things those hacked medical files don’t say.”

 Cameron scoffed. “What makes you think my files aren’t comprehensive? The doctors who repeatedly scanned every last hair follicle on my body would be offended, Doctor.”

 Ayo raised an eyebrow at him in a very mom-ish way, putting her hands on her hips. “Uh-huh. I did my residency in a hospital where everybody and their mama was hiding something. I know what trying to hide things looks like. And you, I’m afraid, are terrible at it.” Cameron tried to splutter, but Ayo shook her head. “That’s the deal I’m offering. I’m on your side, but you have to tell me everything you want to hide from everybody else. Deal?”

 “You really don’t need to – You’re employed here to make sure the stitchers are okay.”

 “I’m here to make sure you don’t get dead,” Ayo shot back at him, and he couldn’t help but crack a smile at her words.

  He repeated those same words back to her three years later when Kirsten first appeared in their lab, and she laughed at him, bright and understanding and amused; solidified in their quiet understanding of one another. She’d kept her word and had been on his side – and by his side – through the exciting and the terrible. And so he couldn’t even really be mad at her the first time ever she broke their agreement in order to tell Maggie about 5ccs of Potassium methochloride. Especially not when she kept all his secrets through his explanation of the plan to stop his heart. And especially not when she was the second face he saw when he woke up in a haze, and her relief was tear-stained and tight-gripped and a word in a language he did not know that he was pretty sure was her cussing him out.

 “If you ever do that again our agreement is off,” she snarled at him, her hands on his face and her face still relieved.

 “W’sn’t I g’nna fire you?” Cameron slurred at her, mouth twitching.

 She shook her head at him with a scoff, and squeezed his hand tight.

 Linus sort-of found out next, which was surprising. Surprising, because Cameron hadn’t expected to make actual friends with those in the lab, let alone good friends and let alone so quickly. ‘Friends’ had always been a concept he’d mostly left behind in memories before age ten, to the point where meeting and befriending people as an adult was not actually half as doable as he yearned for it to be. He’d had a few years of actual practise by then, and as such he’d managed to make friendly acquaintances with a number at MIT, especially those in research with him. But he’d never really managed to make them friends rather than just friendly colleagues, and he’d subconsciously assumed that the stitchers lab occupants would follow the same pattern. He gelled with the people in the stitchers lab very quickly, and in the quiet moments in his head he wondered whether it was because they shared a secret and a grand purpose, whether it was circumstance, or whether he’d helped pick them not only based on their skills and brainpower that he frequently fanboyed over but also because some part of him knew they would connect with him personally, and he was just that sad, lonely, desperate little boy he used to be that would allow his own issues to influence something as important as his new work. But it was hard to let those thoughts run too rampant, because regardless of his own bias the members were brilliant, and did fit in spectacularly, and although they got friendly quickly, they all stayed on the friendly-colleagues level without moving into plain ‘friends’ or showing any real potential of heading that way.

 But then Linus came on the scene. And he had that same… aura about him that Cameron had miserably conceded existed around himself – that something that made them half a beat out of time with the rest of the world. And instead of making it more difficult for them to get along – instead of it making Cameron irritated at Linus’ naïveté or jerk-ness at times – it somehow just made them slip into friendly a lot quicker. And, before Cameron could even realise it was happening to try and analyse things, Linus and he were hanging out after work. For non-work-related things. And somehow, spontaneously, Linus became a friend. A real, flawed-annoying-exasperating-awesome friend with two PhDs, brain and personality similarities,  great taste in fandoms and an appreciation for good food and loyalty in equal measures.

 Still – Cameron had certainly not intended for Linus to ever pick up that anything at all was amiss. But they’d been standing in line to watch the premiere of Star Trek: Into Darkness, surrounded by a throng of similarly-excited people, and two in the crowd had begun a very lively debate that turned into a bit of a brawl. Their antics had knocked into the people standing in front of Linus and Cameron, and the two men had received sticky, freezing slushies to the chest. They waved off the apologies, and set about the seemingly impossible task of getting slightly less sticky and wet (“Man, now I know why the Glee guys hate these so much.” “You watch Glee?”).

 Cameron started peeling off the Kirk Tshirt he wore, intending to wad it up and just walk around in the plain long-sleeved he’d worn underneath it that was comparatively unscathed. But the Tshirt stuck to the shirt underneath, and when he pulled the top layer up, the bottom went with it. He was quick in yanking the long-sleeved down, but apparently not quick enough: Linus was blinking in the vicinity of his chest, frozen in his mopping movements, looking slightly bewildered.

 “Woah. Dude -?”

 “Eh. Old childhood thing,” Cameron dismissed, quickly. “Looks a lot worse than it was. You got any napkins left?”

 Linus let the conversation be changed, and Cameron breathed a sigh of relief. It was only much later, when Linus was sliding into his car after they’d spent hours excitedly talking about the movie and theorising about what was to come and nitpicking at the changes, that he turned to Cameron with an unsure, serious look on his face.

 “So… Uh… Earlier on…” Cameron let him squirm in embarrassment, hoping it would keep him from bringing it up again. “You said… childhood, right? As in… in the past?”

 “Yeah,” Cameron said. “Yeah, you know how things just happen when you’re little.”

 And that had been the end of it; Linus had been completely put at ease until years later, when he found out what the scar meant for certain after Cameron had been brought back and he overheard Ayo explaining the bare minimum to the doctors as Cameron was admitted to hospital. In his defence, he took the deception well – Cameron half-awoke to Linus threatening to kill him, but when he managed to fully peel his eyes open, Linus greeted him with gentle warmth and relief instead of true anger.  After some of the chaos of the next few days died down, Linus came over to his house and started citing various episodes, books, movies and comic volumes that warned against team members, friends or family members keeping important information from others.

 “Trust goes both ways, Cameron,” Linus said, seriously, and that cut Cameron deeper than anything else.

 Linus accepted his apology easily, and Cameron was relieved to find that Linus didn’t pick up hovering as a habit. His friend was a lot more hesitant about suggesting and going through with certain things than he had been, but he still trusted Cameron to know his limits, and trusted himself to be able to have Cameron’s back when the need arose. He did, however, join Kirsten and Camille in limiting his amount of daily caffeine intake, the traitor.

 Kirsten found out fourth, also in stages. Honestly, Cameron should have thought to lock his bedroom door. But he’d never had to before, and had thought the line of personal boundary he drew around himself was obvious enough to keep the three in his livingroom at bay. He’d let them in further than almost anybody else, and even they subconsciously toed the boundaries he’d spent years putting in place in the desperate hope that he could have friends that still left him to hold a piece of himself without them feeling they could reach out and take it from him.

 But he’d forgotten Kirsten wasn’t very good with boundaries. And he’d glanced up and found her in his doorway, startled by her blinking at the sight of him in a towel. And then he’d watched her eyes flick down to his chest and linger before purposefully following the scar back up to his face. He kept waiting for her to say something as he moved closer, but she did not and he found some relief in being able to shut the door in her face. Even she could understand that obvious gesture of keep out; too close.

 Kirsten was a master of not mentioning things, so he didn’t mention it, either. Just like that kiss. Just like how he felt about her – how every bit of him was gravitating toward her day by day like something being sucked into a vortex. He found himself wondering what she’d been thinking as she looked at him that night, and how she saw him every other time.

 And then he stops wondering for a while, because his crush before her ends in a hailstorm of bullets just feet away from where he’s crouching behind her closed front door.

 Kirsten was the fourth to find out, but the first he ever tells. He didn’t necessarily want to; she knew too much already, a large part of him argued. But, hell, he was pretty sure he was stupidly in love with her, and they were both dying, and she just didn’t want to accept that his very real version of the monster under the bed that he’d been carrying around with him since age ten was attaching itself to her, too. She didn’t seem to understand what it meant to have a life that was close friends with death. She didn’t seem to understand how you didn’t care when you died, but everybody else sure did, and being the cause of that much pain was enough of an incentive to live if nothing else was. And if she couldn’t – if the monster won – then, damnit, she had to minimise the damage she left in her wake. He didn’t particularly like Liam at all, but he could guess at how much Kirsten meant to the guy. And every human being deserved whatever balm to the pain of losing somebody as amazing, breath-taking, unique, lovely as Kirsten that they could get.

 He forgot that Kirsten tended to slay scary monsters on a daily basis. And if he loved her just a little bit more because she caused his constant, lurking companion to back a few more feet away from him. Well…

 He certainly loved her a bit more when the inevitable coddling didn’t come. She treated him exactly the same as she always had, even with the knowledge in her head, and the relief was a warm, tingly, gratifying rush every time she proved herself unconcerned with managing his life for him. And by the time the fretting did come – thanks to a damn fake psychic, of all things – he was too in love with her for her protectiveness to make him back a hasty retreat. Thankfully, Kirsten was also incredibly practical, and he could brush off her concerns without much effort at all. She trusted him to have her back; to come along and do his bit. To help.

 Kirsten was the fourth person to find out, the first person he told, and the first he’d willingly gamble his game of keep-away with the lurking monster on his back for. Because he trusted her with one of the deepest parts of himself and she still let him keep his freedom. And he’d be damned if he didn’t do everything in his power to let her see she could trust him, back.

 Camille found out fifth, in a process that was half Ayo, half Kirsten, and fittingly so. Fittingly, because he trusted her as much as Ayo and loved her as warmly as he did Kristen, just with a completely different kind of love.

 Cameron had slotted into place with her faster and easier than he had even with Linus. He had no real words to explain their relationship, and neither did she. So they simply shared a lot of looks and comfort in the language they both spoke so well and let whatever it was between them just be without poking at it with a stick and a magnifying glass. If she was some sort of undeserved gift from the universe to make up for lonely years then he was going to buy the gift horse an entire damn stable instead of looking anywhere near its mouth.

 So when, during one of her random visits to his apartment that had become frequent after their stakeout of the store across the road and his attached mi casa es su casa statement, Camille opened the wrong kitchen cupboard, he wasn’t as defensive or panicked or upset as he would have been had it been anybody else.

 “Uh… Cameron? Why do you have rat poison in your grocery cupboard?”

 “Hmm?” he said, distracted by the laptop in front of him.

 “There’s a bottle labelled ‘Warfarin’ in your handwriting in here.”

 That got his attention. And sunk his insides to the bottom of his shoes. “Oh, no, it won’t be in that cupboard,” he said, hurriedly, twisting around to find her standing in front of the tiny closet door in his kitchen cabinets that most people thought was just for show. She’d been distracted by the Warfarin, and hadn’t yet explored the other incriminating evidence in the tiny space. And he hoped to keep it that way. “It’s probably above the sink, Doll,” he added in his most nonchalant voice. “Did you look there?”

 But Camille would not be deterred. She smirked at him, amused and waiting for the funny story she thought she could smell, rattling the bottles of pills at him questioningly.

 “I got them when you started coming over,” he tried. “So your nemeses the mutant rats ever arrive we can poison them off quickly.”

 She gave him an unimpressed look, her lips twitching. “Har har.”

 For a moment, it looked like his gamble worked and he’d gotten away with it. But then he watched her put the Warfarin back and freeze as her eyes took in the other bottles and packets of pills stacked and neatly labelled by his hand in the tiny closet. He saw her shoulders clench, and assumed her hesitation was because her mind was whirling with questions and alarm and curiosity and worry and the war between asking and forcing herself to not stick her nose in his business. She took a deep breath, half turned to him, then seemed to change her mind and closed the cabinet slowly.

 Cameron sighed. How the hell was he supposed to work for a secret government agency if he couldn’t even keep one tiny, personal secret from a handful of people? He sucked at being a spy. But that didn’t mean he had to suck at being a friend. Taking a deep breath himself, Cameron set aside the laptop and made his way into the kitchen, nervousness and embarrassment churning bitter in his gut. But he couldn’t not give her answers; not somebody who fit that damn, sappy Bronte quote about souls with him so well. Not somebody who was like Ayo – full of compassion and warmth and heart for the world that made her see too much.

 He didn’t exactly have a script for that sort of thing, and so he simply buttoned down his shirt. She turned around, face hooded as she struggled with not asking about what she’d seen, and her eyes immediately popped in shock.

 “I had heart surgery when I was ten,” he said, and she swore a little breathlessly. He loved her a little bit when she tried not to stare. “Mostly sorted. Still need some meds, though.”

 “Cameron…” She searched his face, at a loss, the most complicated range of emotions in her eyes. And then she put one hand on his arm and squeezed and he found himself able to smile a little. “I…” He shook his head at her, pleading a little with his expression, and she huffed. “Why in your kitchen like that?”

 “More people tend to look in the bathroom cabinet,” he answered, honestly. “They’re much better hidden in an obvious place everybody thinks is just false panelling.”

 She eyed him for that, but didn’t say anything more. Not only that evening, but ever again; never brought it up even in passing or by a super obvious reference. But he was attuned enough to her to notice the way she looked at him a little harder, and stood a little closer at times, and seemed to count the number of coffees he had in a day. But those were little things, and he couldn’t begrudge Camille for caring because without that she wouldn’t be Camille. And when she did cross a line about it in his head, blurting for all the world the doubt that his heart could take being brought back – he was too busy to begrudge her for it. And he sort of got her back by dying on her a few moments later, so he couldn’t claim they were anything but even, really.

 (“I’m learning krav maga, now,” she told him out of the blue, weeks later.

 “I heard – that’s awesome.” The question was in his tone.

 “Yeah. Some of us possess this thing called self-preservation.” Her glare was somehow loving and angry and threatening all at once. “You pull a stunt anywhere near what you did in that lab that day ever again, Goodkin, and I will kick your ass. And then I’ll hack you so hard you’ll feel it for the rest of your life. Got me?”

 “Careful there, Agent. You’re almost getting scarier than Maggie.”

 “Good,” she said with a predator’s smile.)

 The rest of the lab found out as a collective not long after Camille. He knew they couldn’t have all found out at once, but he wasn’t exactly conscious (alive) to keep track of who noticed what when and who put the pieces together and who confirmed it for whom.  He was very sure they couldn’t have missed the scar or the way it took too many tries to get his heart started again.

 He felt a little bad for making them run around in a flat panic because their boss and usual stitch pilot had decided to off himself. But only a little bad. His whole world was being threatened – his life’s work, the potential to help and save so many, the colleagues that were his responsibility, the people he loved like family. You have to protect it, Jessica had told him of his heart. And he’d be damned if he didn’t do everything in his power to keep his heart safe and able to continue on. Even if it meant stopping his physical heart. Even if it meant he’d never get to see their shared dream for the programme take its first breath. Even if it meant giving up Kirsten.

 It all turned out fine, though, because they couldn’t really use the knowledge against him. For one, he was their boss, and not a close enough friend for them to have a say. For another, he’d come back fine. The monster had finally caught up with him, and Cameron had beaten it back. And how could he let anybody have a say on that area of his life when the thing he’d been taught to be terrified of almost all his life finally happened and… it didn’t kill him. Not forever. The apocalypse it had been painted to be turned into a mild inconvenience. And it didn’t matter who found out because Cameron was the one with the true knowledge, now. And he’d never be boxed in again.

 Without him knowing, Fisher was the last person to find out. While Kirsten sat at his hospital bedside, watching him sleep, Camille had stayed at Fisher’s side. And she was there when he woke up a few times during the night, and when he finally truly woke up the next morning, groggy but coherent. She gave him a vague sketch of events, but Fisher wasn’t a detective only in title.

 “What about Cameron? Did I get him out the way in time?”

 “Oh, you totally saved his ass,” Camille agreed. “He got knocked in the noggin a bit, but he didn’t even stay in here for a day.”

 They turned to other topics, and she’d almost gotten away with keeping Fisher in the dark about things that could potentially stress him out when Linus popped in and mentioned about stopping by Cameron’s room. Fisher turned on Camille with narrowed eyes.

 “Explain,” he said, tone booking no nonsense.

 And once she started, Camille couldn’t seem to stop. Yes, she’d held Cameron’s hand and seen him smile wonkily at her and heard his teasing and assurances. But she couldn’t stop seeing him, eyes wide and face grey, keeling into Kirsten. She couldn’t stop seeing the blurred outline of his still body while Ayo choked to Chelsea to call time of death. They’d nearly lost Fisher, but they’d come that much closer to losing Cameron. And her very heart rattled and moaned in her in exhausted horror at the very idea.

Fisher waited until she was finished, his mouth a grim line. Linus asked if he was in pain; if he should get the nurse, and Fisher shook his head jerkily.

 “That damn…” He exhaled sharply. “This is why we don’t let civilians…” He broke off again, jaw clenched. “’Protect my kids’, Maggie says,” he muttered, darkly, after a pause. “It would help if she told me I was also meant to protect them from themselves.”

 “He’s okay, though,” Linus tried desperately to reassure.

 Fisher just gave him a stony look. “My dad had one of those ops,” he said, quietly. “I know what sorts of long-term things go along with the cure. Specifically, I know how easily those people bleed. And don’t stop bleeding because of blood thinners. And that damn kid has been in all sorts of shit. Without a damn vest.”

 Camille slipped her hand into Fisher’s. “Hey, there. You’re not supposed to get worked up.” She squeezed gently. “Besides; I thought he wasn’t your friend?” she teased, gently.

 Fisher snorted, closed his eyes for a minute and sighed. “Hey, do me a favour and call Kirsten here,” he said to Linus. “I need to talk to her – before something else happens.”

 Linus nodded and patted Fisher’s feet. “Take it easy, man, okay? You gotta get better. And stop me from killing Cameron, which I now want to do all over again.”

 Fisher snorted. “I’ll start a protocol,” he said, and it didn’t even sound much like he was joking.

[johnmauldin]

Mauldin: 7 Forecasts from the Brightest Financial Minds I Know

In my fairly upbeat 2018 forecast, I predicted that the US economy and markets will probably hold up well, thanks to tax cuts and deregulation. That’s, of course, assuming the Federal Reserve gets no more hawkish than it already has.

Continuing my series of forecasts, here I’ll look at predictions from some of my most trusted friends and colleagues (subscribe to Thoughts from the Frontline to receive all my forecasts). Some disagree with my own views—and that’s perfectly fine. I want you to see all sides so you can make good decisions for your own family and portfolio.

I’ll let these forecasters speak for themselves in longer quotes than I usually allow, then add my own comments.

The article runs long, but I’m sure you’ll take away a lot from it, so bear with me…

Ben Hunt: No Algorithm Can Predict the Future

Let’s start not with a forecast but with an important story about forecasts from Ben Hunt.

Ben’s wide-ranging essays are hard to summarize or excerpt in a way that captures their breadth and depth.

I’ll give you a tiny snippet, but please, set aside some time this month to read the entire article. It is long but worth your while.

The Three-Body Problem is a famous example of a system which has no derivative pattern with any predictive power, no applicable algorithm that a human could discover to adapt successfully and turn basis uncertainty into basis risk. In the lingo, there is no “general closed-form solution” to the Three-Body Problem. (It’s also the title of the best science fiction book I’ve read in the past 20 years, by Cixin Liu. Truly a masterpiece. Life and perspective-changing, in fact, both in its depiction of China and its depiction of the game theory of civilization.)

What is the “problem”? Imagine three massive objects in space … stars, planets, something like that. They’re in the same system, meaning that they can’t entirely escape each other’s gravitational pull. You know the position, mass, speed, and direction of travel for each of the objects. You know how gravity works, so you know precisely how each object is acting on the other two objects. Now predict for me, using a formula, where the objects will be at some point in the future.

Answer: You can’t. In 1887, Henri Poincaré proved that the motion of the three objects, with the exception of a few special starting cases, is non-repeating. This is a chaotic system, meaning that the historical pattern of object positions has ZERO predictive power in figuring out where these objects will be in the future. There is no algorithm that a human can possibly discover to solve this problem. It does not exist.

And that of course is the basic problem we have in economics and investing. When we say that past performance is not indicative of future results, that aphorism is more than just legalese.

Such ideas can easily discourage us from even thinking about the future. However, the real answer is to think about the future differently.

With that prelude, let’s move on.

Anatole Kaletsky: Inflation and Bond Yields Will Accelerate

If I had to rank economic forecasting groups (as opposed to individuals) for consistent quality, Gavekal would be high on the list.

Here are just a few Gavekal snippets from the opening week of 2018. We’ll start with Anatole Kaletsky, who zooms in on inflation as this year’s key unknown factor.

Will inflation accelerate in the US, but not in other major economies? I think the answer is “Yes”, for the same reasons as above. However, I also expected inflation to accelerate and bond yields to increase last year. Instead, both inflation and growth ended the year exactly where they were.

The simple answer is that US unemployment is now 4.1% instead of 4.8%. I was wrong about 5% unemployment being a non-inflationary growth limit, and maybe 4% isn’t either. But whatever the exact number may be, the US is certainly closer to its non-inflationary growth limit now than it was a year ago. In addition, the Trump tax cuts, if they actually stimulate higher US consumption and/or investment (which they may not do by any meaningful amount) will add to US inflationary pressures, since new production capacity will take several years to boost non-inflationary trend growth.

If the prediction of higher US inflation turns out to be right, it will be a game-changer. It will produce much more volatile market conditions and even greater under-performance by US equities and bonds relative to assets in Europe and Japan, where inflation is not a risk.

The follow-on question, if Anatole is right about inflation, is how the Fed will respond to it. The ideal response would have been to start tightening about three years ago. That opportunity having past, the remaining choices are all varying degrees of bad.

Louis Gave: Financials and Energy Will Be Top Sectors This Year

Now let’s move on to Louis Gave, who gives us some stock market ideas at the end of a long, thoughtful essay on liquidity.

Putting it all together, 2018 does seem to be starting on a different note than 2017. While the bull market may not be in peril, it is a tough environment for a price/earnings ratio expansion to occur. Such an outcome usually relies on excess liquidity moving into equities. Yet in 2018, equity markets are more likely to be a source of liquid funds than a destination for them. It follows that if a multiple-expansion is off the table then equity gains will rely on earnings rising. The area where such an improved profit picture is likely is financials (higher rates and velocity) and energy (higher prices). The fact that both of these sectors presently trade on low multiples also helps.

If you want specific sector ideas, there are two good ones.

David Kotok: A Shift Upward Will Continue

My friend David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors had some New Year’s Day thoughts on the Republican tax bill’s impact.

Once the transitional shock of yearend is absorbed, we think the tax bill will raise the valuation of US stocks. Simply put, the tax bill will generate a permanent shift upward of somewhere between $10 and $14 in the threshold of S&P 500 earnings. Once you adjust for that permanent shift, you may continue to factor in the earnings growth rate that you expect from a US economy that is going to grow at 3% instead of 2%. We believe that growth rate is likely for a couple of years.

So, S&P 500 earnings should range up to and then above $150 by the decade’s end. They will do so while the Fed is still engaged in a gradualist restoration of interest rates to something more “normal,” whatever that word means. And those earnings will occur while a repatriation effect is unleashing $1 trillion of stagnant cash in some form of robust redistribution (dividends or stock buybacks) or as productivity-enhancing capex spending. Bottom line is no recession in sight for at least a few years; and low inflation remains, so interest-rate rises will not derail the economic recovery, nor will they alter rising stock market valuations.

Years ago we projected a 3000 level on the S&P 500 Index by 2020.

That is considerably more bullish than most 2018 forecasts I’ve seen. Rather than argue with David, I’ll say this: Be ready for anything this year. The future is no more uncertain than it always is, but the consequences of a mistake are growing as the bull market and economic expansion grow long in the tooth.

They will end at some point. That means you need a strategy that will let you both participate on the upside and defend yourself when the bear appears. I reiterate that you should be diversifying trading strategies, not just asset classes.

Paul Krugman: Rising Rates Spell Trouble

Next we turn to Paul Krugman, who is not generally one of my favorite economists. I quote him this time because he sounds a lot like, well, me.

So we’re living in an era of political turmoil and economic calm. Can it last?

My answer is that it probably can’t, because the return to normalcy is fragile. Sooner or later, something will go wrong, and we’re very poorly placed to respond when it does. But I can’t tell you what that something will be, or when it will happen.

The key point is that while the major advanced economies are currently doing more or less OK, they’re doing so thanks to very low interest rates by historical standards. That’s not a critique of central bankers. All indications are that for whatever reason — probably low population growth and weak productivity performance — our economies need those low, low rates to achieve anything like full employment. And this in turn means that it would be a terrible, recession-creating mistake to “normalize” rates by raising them to historical levels.

But given that rates are already so low when things are pretty good, it will be hard for central bankers to mount an effective response if and when something not so good happens. What if something goes wrong in China, or a second Iranian revolution disrupts oil supplies, or it turns out that tech stocks really are in a 1999ish bubble? Or what if Bitcoin actually starts to have some systemic importance before everyone realizes it’s nonsense?

That was from Krugman’s January 1 New York Times column, and his assessment is not far from my own view.

The difference between us is that Krugman has made a remarkable turnaround since the imminent doom he predicted right after the election. So I’m glad to welcome his Damascene conversion.

I hope it sticks this time.

David Rosenberg: We Are 90% Through This Cycle

I don’t know any economic forecaster more prolific than David Rosenberg. I don’t know how he even finds time to sleep, frankly. His Breakfast with Dave is often the same length as my weekly letters, and he writes it every working day.

Dave’s December 29 issue of Breakfast with Dave was a tour de force on world markets, which I can’t possibly summarize and do any justice to the original, so I’ll cut straight to his conclusion.

In other words, expect a year where volatility re-emerges as an investable theme, after spending much of 2017 so dormant that you have to go back to the mid-1960s to find the last annual period of such an eerie calm – look for some mean reversion on this file in the coming year. This actually would be a good thing in terms of opening up some buying opportunities, but taking advantage of these opportunities will require having some dry powder on hand.

In terms of our highest conviction calls, given that we are coming off the 101 month anniversary of this economic cycle, the third longest ever and almost double what is normal, it is safe to say that we are pretty late in the game. The question is just how late. We did some research looking at an array of market and macro variables and concluded that we are about 90% through, which means we are somewhere past the 7th inning stretch in baseball parlance but not yet at the bottom of the 9th. The high-conviction message here is that we have entered a phase of the cycle in which one should be very mindful of risk, bolstering the quality of the portfolio, and focusing on strong balance sheets, minimal refinancing risk and companies with high earnings visibility and predictability, and low correlations to U.S. GDP. In other words, the exact opposite of how to be positioned in the early innings of the cycle where it is perfectly appropriate to be extremely pro-cyclical.

So it’s either about investing around late-cycle thematics in North America or it is about heading to other geographies that are closer to mid-cycle — and that would include Europe, segments of the Emerging Market space where the fundamentals have really improved, and also Japan. These markets are not only mid-cycle, and as such have a longer runway for growth, but also trade relatively inexpensively in a world where value is scarce.

Dave gives us some geographic focus, and it’s mostly outside the US and Canada. He likes Europe, Japan, and some emerging market countries because they are earlier in the cycle.

He’s certainly right on that point, though I think we may differ on how long the cycle can persist. The past doesn’t predict the future.

For the record, in my own portfolio design, we are about 50% non-US equities. My managers are finding lots of opportunities outside of the US.

Byron Wien: “Ten Surprises” List

We’ll wrap up today with an annual tradition: Byron Wien’s annual “Ten Surprises” list.

It always causes me a little cognitive dissonance because by definition you can’t “expect” a surprise. That aside, Byron’s list is always a useful thought exercise. Here it is.

1. China finally decides that a nuclear capability in the hands of an unpredictable leader on its border is not tolerable even though North Korea is a communist buffer between itself and democratic South Korea. China cuts off all fuel and food shipments to North Korea, which agrees to suspend its nuclear development program but not give up its current weapons arsenal.

2. Populism, tribalism and anarchy spread around the world. In the United Kingdom Jeremy Corbyn becomes the next Prime Minister. In spite of repressive action by the Spanish government, Catalonia remains turbulent. Despite the adverse economic consequences of the Brexit vote, the unintended positive consequence is that it brings continental Europe closer together with more economic cooperation and faster growth.

3. The dollar finally comes to life. Real growth exceeds 3% in the United States, which, coupled with the implementation of some components of the Trump pro-business agenda, renews investor interest in owning dollar-denominated assets, and the euro drops to 1.10 and the yen to 120 against the dollar.  Repatriation of foreign profits held abroad by U.S. companies helps.  

4. The U.S. economy has a better year than 2017, but speculation reaches an extreme and ultimately the S&P 500 has a 10% correction. The index drops toward 2300, partly because of higher interest rates, but ends the year above 3000 since earnings continue to expand and economic growth heads toward 4%. 

5. The price of West Texas Intermediate Crude moves above $80. The price rises because of continued world growth and unexpected demand from developing markets, together with disappointing hydraulic fracking production, diminished inventories, OPEC discipline and only modest production increases from Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq and Iran.

6. Inflation becomes an issue of concern. Continued world GDP growth puts pressure on commodity prices. Tight labor markets in the industrialized countries create wage increases. In the United States, average hourly earnings gains approach 4% and the Consumer Price Index pushes above 3%.

7. With higher inflation, interest rates begin to rise. The Federal Reserve increases short-term rates four times in 2018 and the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield moves toward 4%, but the Fed shrinks its balance sheet only modestly because of the potential impact on the financial markets. High yield spreads widen, causing concern in the equity market.

8. Both NAFTA and the Iran agreement endure in spite of Trump railing against them. Too many American jobs would be lost if NAFTA ended, and our allies universally support continuing the Iran agreement. Trump begins to think that not signing on to the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a mistake as he sees the rise of China’s influence around the world.  He presses for more bilateral trade deals in Asia.

9. The Republicans lose control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives in the November election. Voters feel disappointed that many promises made during Trump’s presidential campaign were not implemented in legislation and there is a growing negative reaction to his endless Tweets. The mid-term election turns out to be a referendum on the Trump Presidency.

10. Xi Jinping, having broadened his authority at the 19th Party Congress in October, focuses on China’s credit problems and decides to limit business borrowing even if it means slowing the economy down and creating fewer jobs. Real GDP growth drops to 5.5%, with only minor implications for world growth. Xi proclaims this move will ensure the sustainability of China’s growth over the long term.

(https://www.blackstone.com/media/press-releases/byron-wien-announces-ten-surprises-for-2018)

Whatever your predisposition, there’s plenty to both like and dislike in there. On #7, I think 10-year Treasury bonds at 4% or more will look like the end of the world to younger folks.

It’s been more than a decade since we saw any such thing, and at that point they were falling, not rising. But if he’s correct that CPI pushes over 3%, then bond yields have to rise.

Personally, I think I would take the other side of that bet. I think the yield on the 10-year actually has a chance to fall.

On another note: If Byron is right that “speculation reaches an extreme,” the resulting correction will be a lot deeper than 10%. I don’t think we are there yet and probably won’t reach that point in 2018. But we will get there eventually.  

All right, my stack of New Year’s predictions is barely any smaller, but we’ll stop here and pick up next week in Thoughts from the Frontline.

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