JohnC

Software Dude @ Akamai.
Opinions are mine and I am a work-in-progress, please don't get me fired.

[JohnC @johncamelon]

100%. Things lose their cohesion. Multiply that by many contributors and the amount of blind spots likely grows.

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

https://t.co/jKCIAEzai7

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[😈 @turtlekiosk]

when you watch a movie and some catastrophic failure happens in some system and the computer says like "containment breached" and you're like well how bad could it be if the UX has a specific error state for that flow

[JohnC @johncamelon]

@grok @TRPdecoded_ @twlvone @ericweinstein @grok how will AI resources be abundant and accessible?

[JohnC @johncamelon]

@pwm2vape @NoLore I believe we will.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

256 Tb/s data rates over 200 km distance have been demonstrated on single mode fiber optic, which works out to 32 GB of data in flight, “stored” in the fiber, with 32 TB/s bandwidth. Neural network inference and training can have deterministic weight reference patterns, so it is amusing to consider a system with no DRAM, and weights continuously streamed into an L2 cache by a recycling fiber loop. The modern equivalent of the ancient mercury echo tube memories. You would need to pipeline a bunch of them to implement modern trillion parameter models, but fiber transmission may have a better growth trajectory than DRAM does today, so it might someday become viable.

Much more practically, you should be able to gang cheap flash memory together to provide almost any read bandwidth you require, as long as it is done a page at a time and pipelined well ahead. That should be viable for inference serving today if flash and accelerator vendors could agree on a high speed interface.

[JohnC @johncamelon]

It is amazing how divided we are in a time when so many balls are up in the air geopolitically.

[Jeffrey Rath @JeffreyRWRath]

We look forward to meeting with US Treasury officials next month to discuss our feasibility study regarding a 500 Billion USD line of credit to support the transition to a free and independent Alberta.

[Jeffrey Rath @JeffreyRWRath]

We look forward to meeting with US Treasury officials next month to discuss our feasibility study regarding a 500 Billion USD line of credit to support the transition to a free and independent Alberta.

[Nicholas Burns @RNicholasBurns]

On 9/11, Canada was first to suggest NATO invoke Article 5 to defend our country. As U.S. Ambassador that day, I’ll forever be grateful that the Canadians and Europe had our back. How is it now in our interest to drive those same friends away?

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

@rdstrick777 @AOC I love @AOC - she will be President one day. I’ll be there for her when she’s ready.

[JohnC @johncamelon]

Sad about Anne Burrell. 'Worst Cooks In America' was one of my family's favorite shows and she was only 55. Make the most of the time you have everyone.

[JohnC @johncamelon]

@fesshole Did you eat it over the sink with bare hands like a 20yo bachelor?

[JohnC @johncamelon]

You need to train your calves more Ryan. Obviously!

[Ryan Petersen @typesfast]

Rode my electric bike home from work today and at peak speed pedaling as fast as I could with 750 watts of added power I was still 4 mph slower than Usain Bolt’s 27.4 mph top speed.

What am I doing wrong?

[JohnC @johncamelon]

I am a futurist and a fan of AI but OMG the security model for these agents makes my Spidey sense tingle

[JohnC @johncamelon]

@eastdakota What specifically has gone wrong in Portugal? I know that there are a lot of depressed aspects economically but that should drive costs down for Cloud flare?

[JohnC @johncamelon]

I got to go and see what @kanyewest is up to today, it keeps changing day to day and I didn't tune in yesterday.

But I beg you all to think of the bigger picture. We are more alike than different. Ideas, even if you disagree with them, are great for discussion. Be open.

[JohnC @johncamelon]

People ask me why I am still on here.

I am not here for enjoyment or amusement. I am here to watch how we as a species adapt to this phase of our evolution.

/1

[JohnC @johncamelon]

What made is unique as a species was our ability to use tools, build things, work collectively and believe in larger ideas. I fear we have lost the last parts.