defcon

🔴It is almost 4 am here. New forced displacement orders for the city of Tyre under threat of death.

@mattystoned @dc_mma Bro wrote it in CTEnese

@dc_mma I can’t be the only one reading this confused as fuck

Guys, I need help on this if you have two people that make a bet on something. For an amount that the other person doesn’t possess. But based on the result of the event in which they believe they will win they make a bet that they don’t necessarily have the money to pay. Are they able to make that bet?

Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2 hour hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.

@ABC Holy shit

NEW: Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California, has been charged with acting as an illegal foreign agent for China, the Justice Department announced on Monday. Wang agreed to plead guilty, the Justice Department said. abcnews.link/IntbpBy

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.

@RyanOttley Goat spreads. We're all better off for the creative arguments that led to these. Extremely detailed background elements too. What % of your time do you think you spent on the background details and do you think AI could be a reasonable way to reduce that burden in the future?

The 4 double page spreads from the Viltrumite war that definitely made the issue late when it came out. More figures, means more time. Trying to figure out how these scene will work visually was me calling Robert and arguing with him constantly. Because writing a scene is always different that creating the visuals for a scene. I’m the one that has to do the work to make it make sense visually, so there was a lot of back and forth until I could make it work. I like my art feeling authentic and practical, I want readers to see it and it instantly make sense. I’m not always successful at it? But that’s the goal for every page. Now watch Viltrum explode in 4 images!

BREAKING: Traders placed a series of bets worth $430 million on a drop in crude prices just 15 minutes before U.S. President Donald Trump ​said he would extend a ceasefire with Iran. It is the third ‌time this month, and the fourth in total, that large, well-timed directional bets on the oil price have been made shortly before major announcements on the Iran war. The traders gained millions. Unusual.

Guy wants to slash and "traumatize" federal workforce, which is peanuts in govt spending compared to defense spending. Defends this obscenely grotesque budget instead. $2.2T??? WHAT HAPPENED TO MANAGING THE NATIONAL DEBT, GOP??

@DudespostingWs @AvoidThePuddle they just made irl soul calibur

Japanese engineers developed a “Sword Tip Visualization System” for the Fencing World Championships, and it makes fencing look absolutely incredible to watch.

@Acyn Remember when he was a media darling back during his campaign against Dr. Oz? I wonder how much his stroke turned him coocoo for Israelipuffs and how much he was always naturally just a GOP dude in disguise

Fetterman: Someone asked me who is the leader of the Democratic Party? I said that's TDS, Trump derangement syndrome. Every single Democrat should be fully supportive of Israel. They have the kinds of values that we want in our country.

@Anna_Giaritelli "Banks’ behavior was said to have been investigated by Customs and Border Protection officials twice, including last year, but the investigation ended abruptly while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in office, leading to more questions." 🤦

EXCLUSIVE — Border Patrol chief Michael Banks hit with prostitution allegations by agents washingtonexaminer.com/news/investiga…

Why House Democrats are waiting until mid-April to force an Iran war powers vote trib.al/lfS7p7W

@kenklippenstein Needed some sort of baseline to compare the highlighted numbers to. 7M subs still seems really high (BP is still at <2M).

Insane how much Ben Shapiro fell off

@Anna_Giaritelli What's the ☕ on this? Any outlets actually launder her screeds?

If I was a political appointee at DHS who left amid massive scandal and hated the career officials who got in my way, I probably wouldn't plant a third hit piece aimed at said officials by giving it to the same news outlet and reporter that I gave the last two pieces to. It's like Groundhog Day.

@unusual_whales At least he's showing some spine somewhere. Three whole MEUs of his brethren are on standby to get into the stupidest, most preventable, self-own war that the US has ever stumbled into. Id hope that he can get pissed about it.

VP Vance told Netanyahu in a "difficult" call on Monday that several of Netanyahu's predictions about the war had proved far too optimistic, like the prospects of a popular uprising to topple the regime, per Axios

@Anna_Giaritelli Would be cool if you could interview some of them. Ntina Cooper and Andrea Bright were (principal) assistant secretary equivalents who got dismissed.

“[Corey Lewandowski] is constantly threatening to fire people,” one person said. “His go-to is, ‘I’ll just fire your ass.'" He and Noem pushed out 15 CBP officials, which sources said targeted senior staff who pushed back on or weren't quick to implement extreme policy and operational moves.

@_royszn_ They should add an option to turn off heat and see how the community responds.

I’m not defending the state of T8 but I need people to understand how unreasonable it is for the dev team to remove Heat right now. The best we could pray for an overhaul.

@fandompulse Not a very self-aware clickbait, Sumeet

Neil Gaiman on why fans abandon popular franchises: "The fan base are fans. And they like the source material because it's the source material they like. So if you do something else, you risk alienating the fans on a monumental scale. It's not Batman if he's now a news reporter in a yellow trenchcoat with a pet bat." Do you agree with him?

@Reuters Iran at Trump rn

Iran launched multiple waves of missiles at Israel, the Israeli military said, after President Trump postponed a threat to bomb the Islamic Republic's power grid because of what he described as productive talks with Iranian officials reut.rs/4rOIrmw