A beauty pageant sounds like good clean fun, doesn’t it? Get all the gals fired up and onto a stage, with Our Vending Hero supplying fashion magazines and makeup to give His Best Girls an edge, and keep things light and fluffy.

Until they end on an ominous note by having Our Shoe Fetishist run off deep into the dungeon in the middle of the night after learning the secret origin of some Very Special Shoes. Really? You had to pull that shit?

Verdict: could we just have a fun episode? Is that too much to ask?

(my Pixiv archives really had nothing tagged with shoes or boots; the few things that turned up were about socks, which not only seems to be the more popular fetish in Japan, but the word for shoes, 靴, is part of the word for socks, 靴下, so they’re kind of inevitable in a search)

Dungeon Chibis Bluray is out!

This doesn’t uncensor anything, since it isn’t that kind of show, but there should be the usual quality improvements over the broadcast release. As a bonus, it won’t just disappear from my library like streamed shows eventually do.

(chibi Zelda is unrelated, but I’ve already used all the good fan-art from this show…)

Loner Harem Bluray soon

October 21, to be precise. This was a whole lot more wholesome than the horny-porny novels. In a good way.

(pony gals are unrelated)

Wishing for useful wish lists

Once upon a time, Amazon wish lists displayed release dates. This was handy for organizing my book purchases, so naturally it was removed. Now I have to open each book in a tab to find out its release date, then drag books into order using their flaky Javascript tiling code.

And then every time I visit the list, I have to remember to manually switch it back from “most recently added” to “custom” sort order. Every fucking time I load the page. Because their first-class H1B-or-AI developers don’t give a fuck.

(“the new South Pole remote development team is so much cheaper than hiring Americans!”)

Fuck Youtube

I’m really getting tired of clicking on a “video” by an established “channel” to find that it’s not only an animated clickbait listicle based on stolen content from a random website, but the “narrator” is just an AI-synthesized voice, with the inhuman affect that comes from not really understanding the sentences it’s converting into audio. And of course these “creators” never seem to get demonetized.

(and by “getting tired of”, I mean “these days I refuse to watch anything but official anime promo videos and Critical Drinker reviews”)

Jun Amaki jiggles your martini

Our Great (Hot) Detective’s plan is revealed, as Our Wannabe-Sucker Hero confronts her and lays out the evidence. Unfortunately he didn’t plan for the aftermath.

Verdict: it was nice to see Nazuna go Maximum Effort and prove that Anko/Kyoko’s vampire-fighting tactics only really worked when her opponent wasn’t serious, neatly subverting the waif-fu girlboss stereotype that’s so common. She can’t beat a vampire in a straight-up fight, no matter how clever she is.

Text generation in Qwen Image

The majority of my failed attempts to generate text have been with relatively-rare words (“harem”, “Hornblower”, etc), so I was a bit surprised when it failed 90% of the time at the word Babies (as in Sugar), while Baby always worked. Then I found an article explaining that the way they got improved text generation in both Latin scripts and Hanzi/Kanji was to explicitly train it with tons of images of words rendered in specific fonts.

In other words, it will almost never produce correct results for words outside of the training set; it would need to integrate a text-rendering engine the way the big boys do. Given that they already bolted a full LLM into it to parse the prompts, that’s doable, but they’d probably have to open up their license to use something like Freetype or ImageMagick. This may be something where I end up creating automated vocabulary LoRAs with a Python script, or asking a high-end LLM to generate masking templates for the image generator and ImageMagick command-lines to composite the text onto the results.

Anyway, I was thinking about that social-media “boys don’t read” kerfluffle, and decided the thing to do was create some things that might stimulate their sense-a-wunda…

BTW, this is not what I had in mind when I asked for “glowing alien symbols”…

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So it turns out that not only does conflict build character, but it works the other way around, too. The Power Of Friendship wins the trial, and in the process we get a pretty-well-incorporated flashback that fills in some more details on Our Mighty Tsuntail’s mom. Pity she wasn’t there for it, but at least she shows up for a minute or two, continuing the offscreen path of “I must get stronger”.

Verdict: if this weren’t so good, I’d really hate the trope abuse.

(“🎶 1. cut a hole in a box 🎶”; unrelated, of course)

Power sucks

My MacBook Air is running out of power while plugged in, despite not even being warm to the touch. The Anker dock, on the other hand, is blistering hot. The CPU is barely ticking over, and Apple’s battery monitor even claims “No Apps Using Significant Energy”.

The culprit, of course, is “AI”. I’ve got LM Studio running a prompt-enhancement prompt with qwen2.5-7b-instruct, taking the output of my dynamic-prompt-generation script and improving it (which it’s actually pretty good at). I had to find the much-higher-wattage original Apple charger, which I’ve never needed to use before. It turns out there’s an “energy impact” field reported in Activity Monitor, but it doesn’t charge GPU/NPU usage to the correct app.

Apple’s so excited about moving fast and breaking things with “AI” that they can’t spare the engineering talent to update their tools to even report how much power LLMs are using on their products.

In fact, when you sort Activity Monitor by “energy impact”, LM Studio is at the top despite having a “score” that’s less than 10% of what Activity Monitor claims for itself. The only field that seems to be honest is “12 hr power”, which puts LM Studio an order of magnitude above the rest. But only because it’s been running for several hours, sigh.

(like an iceberg (or “Apple Intelligence”), 90% of Froppy is underwater…)

More “stimulating” covers…

“We want YOU to join the Star League!”

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(…that’s not another season of Frieren or Apothecary Diaries)

The World’s Strongest Rearguard anime

I consider this to be one of the best cheat-power isekai light novel series. Our Ass-Guardian Hero reincarnates into a fantasy world that basically forces all the newcomers into dungeon crawls without any real choice or training, but while he’s being railroaded by a hot chick with big boobs, he accidentally chooses a rare class. Everyone else is trying to be things like “valkyrie”, “soldier”, “forager”, “tennis coach”, etc, but hearing that parties are always looking for someone to take the rearguard position, he just writes down “rearguard”.

And he gains the ability to buff any party member who is in front of him. It should come as no surprise that he ends up with a party of gorgeous gals, but it might be surprising that he is a complete gentleman who doesn’t so much as stare at the asses he’s guarding. He’s not oblivious to their (mostly-underage) charms, but he never, ever goes there.

What makes it work is that despite him being potentially and eventually overpowered, he and his party have to work for every fight, and their trust and teamwork keep them alive just as much as their skills. His power gives them an edge, but his decency and kindness have just as much of an impact on the world.

Add to that that every not-quite-haremette has a distinct personality and goal, and you have something that I’m begging the animators not to screw up.

The buried lede in this article is that book nine is finally coming out after a four-year wait. Book 8 wrapped up a major story arc, but left a lot of character arcs unresolved, so woo-hoo!

(Our Hero is in the background, with His Formerly Abusive Former Manager on the left, Our Terrifying Teen Swordsgal on the right, and Our Best Girl Rescue Lizardgal in the middle; and the butterflies are seriously bad news, with their presence suggesting two cours)

Just-Outta-Time Logistics

I bought an HDR monitor on Amazon, which was supposed to arrive Monday. At 4pm, they announced that for unknown reasons it never left an Ohio warehouse, and it would instead arrive Tuesday. Three hours later, that message disappeared, and the order status reverted to arriving-Monday-but-not-shipped-yet. It stayed like that until after 10pm, when it went to “delayed, not shipped” again, with no further explanation.

In the wee hours of the morning, Amazon’s entire order-history system apparently went offline, and all status was unavailable.

As of 8:30 AM, it is allegedly across town, waiting to get put on a truck. Unless they erase that status update.

Unrelated,

FedEx grudgingly coughed up an approximate delivery time for Tuesday’s signature-required package (not from Amazon), which is good, since I have to pick up my niece after school, and I’d hate to have to go chase down the package at their nearest office after the truck returned to base.

Amusingly, when I asked for details, they offered two confirmation methods: SMS to my (correct!) cellphone number, or email to a masked address that I didn’t immediately recognize. It would have reached me anyway, since I own the domain, but it took me a moment to figure out that they’d decided that the email address associated with my physical address was the one I’d created specifically for B&H Photo.

Because they shipped me a CompactFlash Express card (fastest storage for my 4k-video-capable Sony A7SIII) via FedEx a while back.

Mistral Small is gaaaaaaaay…

Given the following picture of Yuzuha Hongo:

And the relatively-capable vision-enabled LLM mistral-small-3.2, we get the following caption and tag set that contain a rather serious error:

A young woman with long brown hair, straight hair style, and a slim body type is standing in a bathroom. She has fair skin, small breasts, and is wearing a pink floral bikini top with thin straps. She has a slight smile on her face and is looking directly at the camera. The bathroom features white tiles, a shower head, and a towel rack with towels hanging on it. Water droplets are visible on her skin.

Tags: young woman, long brown hair, straight hair style, slim body type, fair skin, small breasts, pink floral bikini top, thin straps, slight smile, direct gaze, white tiles, shower head, towel rack, hanging towels, water droplets

(ran it a few more times, and got completely different results every time; sometimes it correctly handled her boobs (coughcough), other times it decided her nipples were visible, several times it hallucinated a towel rack with towels, occasionally it remembered to mention “Asian facial features”, etc, etc; honestly, I trust the output so little that I’m tempted to have my script loop over the same picture N times and keep only the tags that show up at least 50% of the time; I’m also going to borrow the styling of the Qwen prompt-enhancer below)

Enhanced dynamic prompting

With my new still-in-progress dynamic prompt collection, I’m turning this:

__style/photo__ of a __var/prettygal__ with __skin/_normal__ and __hair/_normal__, with a __mood/_normal__ expression. __pose/sexy__. Her location is __place/_normal__. __scene__.

into prompts like this:

4k, crisp, high budget, highly detailed, intricate, ultra textured. Create a photograph of a average height, beautiful, ethnic American, adolescent woman with supple figure, Steel gray eyes, softly-curled lobe ears, Angular Nose, V-Shaped Chin, Strong Jaw, Angular Cheeks, Angular Forehead, Triangle face shape, Natural “no-makeup” makeup with healthy Sun-Kissed-Tan skin and Natural Gray hair, Low twist with braids, creating texture and detail, with a warm expression. Standing with weight on one leg, other foot planted flat, arm crossed over chest, wrist aligned, chin up. Her location is Grand Baie, Mauritius. Rainy glow, close framing, layered reflection, muted palette, melancholic ambiance.

Then using LM Studio’s Python API to pass it through qwen2.5-7b-instruct, with this (taken from the demo code in their repo):

And getting enhanced prompts like this:

4K resolution, crisp and highly detailed, with a high budget aesthetic that emphasizes intricate texture. Create a photograph of an average-height, beautiful ethnic American adolescent woman with a supple figure. Her steel gray eyes sparkle softly, and her ears are gently curved. She has an angular nose, a V-shaped chin, a strong jaw, angular cheeks, and an angular forehead, forming a triangle face shape. Her natural “no-makeup” makeup highlights healthy sun-kissed tan skin, while her naturally gray hair is styled in a low twist with braids that add texture and detail. She stands with weight on one leg, the other foot planted firmly, and her arm is crossed over her chest with wrists aligned. Her chin is lifted slightly, giving a warm expression. The setting is Grand Baie, Mauritius. The photo captures a rainy glow, using close framing to create layered reflections in the background, maintaining a muted palette that evokes a melancholic ambiance.

Now, let’s see what sort of picture that produces…

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Everyone on the Left, raise your hand if you’re not a murderous savage. Now look around your peer group and count the lack of hands, then come over and rejoin civilization. There might still be time.

Those who didn’t raise your hands? Do not expect civilization to protect you any more.

(no cheeky anime picture, out of respect for the victims)

(we now resume our regularly scheduled randomblogging, until the next slaughter of innocents by Left-wing domestic terrorists)

Boxxo Or Bust 2, episode 11

This is really not a good week for the show to go grimdark, revealing Our Shoe Fetishist’s bloody, revenge-fueled path. I’m just not going to watch it right now.

Here’s something wholesome instead:

Warner Bros wants to be the Broadcom of streaming

CEO insists HBO Max should be priced like diamonds. Six customers are so much easier to support than six million.

Not a fan

I bought a new unmanaged 10Gb switch, because my existing one only had 2 10Gb ports with the rest being 2.5Gb. Three years ago, the price of a switch with 8 10Gb RJ45 ports was a bit too spicy, but now it’s just annoying.

What really hurts is when a desktop switch has a fan loud enough to be heard from the next room. And I need it to be in the same room. For comparison, I barely notice the Synology NAS that’s on the same desk, even when it’s doing a RAID scrub. For the sake of my sanity and productivity, I guess I’ll be building the switch a padded crib…

New Monitor(s)

The new monitor is an “ASUS ZenScreen Duo OLED 360° Foldable Portable Monitor (MQ149CD)”, which is quite a mouthful, but the TL/DR is that it’s two 1920x1200 HDR panels that can be used separately or together, portrait or landscape. To use it as two separate monitors, you need to use two cables, but despite the one-inch gap between the panels, you can still get good use out of it as a single 1920x2400 display.

I’m using the 1/4”-by-20 tripod screw to mount it higher than the kickstand, and despite all claims of portability, yeah, you have to plug it in to drive it properly (1 of the 3 USB-C ports is power-only). Right now I’ve just got it hooked up with HDMI, because my current dock was low on free USB-C ports, but once I get things rearranged I’ll separate them, because Lightroom’s window layout is a bit inflexible, and the one-inch gap is bad for photo editing. Better to use the application’s “secondary display” support.

This does make me want a vertical 20+ inch 4K HDR portable monitor, though. I just don’t want it to be from a company I’ve never heard of before, which is what’s all over Amazon.

“Shared memory and fancy NPUs are no match for a good graphics card at your side, kid.”

While I’m discussing new toys, I’ll mention that I also picked up a refurbished M4 Pro Mac Mini, which in theory has much faster “AI” performance than my M2 MacBook Air. With 64 GB of RAM, it can run mid-sized offline LLMs at a decent pace, and even do quick image captioning if I downscale raw images to a sensible resolution.

What it can’t do is more than very basic image generation. It’s not the memory, it’s the cores: not enough of them, and not fast enough. This matches what I’ve heard about the insanely-pricy Mac Studio and the merely-way-overpriced systems built on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395. Their performance comparisons are based entirely on running models that simply don’t fit into a consumer graphics card’s VRAM. “Our toaster is much faster at running this 48 GB model than a 24 GB Nvidia 4090!”

The Mini is a huge speedup for Lightroom and Photoshop, though, which made it worthwhile for me. Any “AI” playability is a bonus.

(I have never seen a human being hold a camera this way)

Related, “Dear Draw Things programmers”

Come back when you discover the concept of legibility. Dipshits.

Accidental Disney Princess

I was testing a few more LLM-enhanced dynamic prompts, and one in particular stood out: a series of very consistent images of a fresh-faced young gal who could make Bambi’s woodland friends sit up and beg.

4K resolution, crisp and highly detailed, create an illustration that exudes a high-budget aesthetic. Depict an average height, lovely ethnic Egyptian woman who is 18 years old with a petite figure. She has deep blue eyes, lobed ears, a straight nose, a wide chin, an U-shaped jaw, dimpled cheeks, and a flat forehead. Her heart-shaped face highlights her gentle features. Her skin is healthy and alabaster white, with festive holiday makeup that complements her almond-shaped eyes and full lips. Her hair is steel gray, styled in a cybernetic pixie cut with metallic edges and glowing circuit-like patterns. The woman has a happy expression as she stands with one arm raised, bathed in luminous waves of light. The background features a lush jungle filled with singing flora, glittering with raindrops under the radiant colors of a rainbow sun. Subtle dawn light filters through, creating an aerial perspective with open framing and pastel tones that evoke a gentle awakening. The composition highlights her graceful form against the vibrant greenery, capturing a dreamlike atmosphere.

Sadly, the prompt that worked so well in Qwen Image was… less successful with other models that don’t have an embedded LLM to parse complete sentences sensibly, and failed completely with a few that couldn’t handle the combination of the Beta scheduler and the Heun++ 2 sampler (I may redo those with their defaults).

It’s not that the others all failed, they just didn’t produce consistent characters who looked like my princess and/or lived in her enchanted forest.

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Call Of The Night 2, episode 11

Well, something just happened. With one episode to go, they really can’t deeply explore this new development, but at least everyone will live to see another Night.

Verdict: plot, with occasional animation. You know the conflict is over when they drop last season’s OP song into the mix.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 9

Our Mighty Tsuntail is back! Only in a supportive supporting-character kind of way for now, but this is a combination “must get stronger” and “everything’s better with friends” episode, in which Our Monstering Hero reconnects with his comrades and his childhood crush, while the world goes mad with the results of Naughty Number Nine’s latest efforts.

Dungeon Chibis rewatch

Crush-chan is less annoying the second time through. Naginata Gal is Best Girl by a huge margin. If new seasons keep sucking, I’ll be doing a lot of rewatches like this for a while.

Speaking of which, the three seasons of Dog Days never got a US Bluray release, but subbed Bluray rips are still torrentable. This is another show where everyone involved clearly loved what they were making.

(“pet me, you stupid hero”)

There would need to be explanations…

…if these showed up in the background of a Zoom meeting:

My office just got bigger

The one at home, that is, which was overcrowded with the old Ikea 31-inch-deep tables I brought from my old place and finally replaced. I didn’t use them as desks in my California house, but the desk set I had there went to Goodwill instead of onto the truck, so the tables were pressed into service.

I hate to just hand out a “that’s what she said” opportunity, but it’s amazing the difference seven inches makes. The room just feels so much bigger with 24-inch-deep tables. Also Ikea, but the tops are solid bamboo plywood instead of the old veneer-over-particle-board. They’re also 7 inches longer than the old tables, so there’s more room to fit between the legs. (coughcough)

I also picked up two bamboo side tables (1, 2) for a printer stand and a spare workspace. All of it had typical Ikea assembly hardware, but the bamboo is head-and-shoulders above their usual construction material. Pity they didn’t have the matching bamboo monitor stand in stock, because I’d have bought two of those to free up even more desk space.

Sadly,

My M2 MacBook Air simply does not support 2 external monitors at once. Can’t be done without buying a DisplayLink adapter and installing their software driver (remember DisplayLink? Turns out that’s still a thing). So I can either use the really nice dual HDR portable monitors as one display with a 1-inch gap in the middle, or move them over to the M4 Mini. Since I want the HDR displays for photo editing, that means moving all my photo archives and workflows over sooner rather than later, but not today; between emptying the office, scrubbing it floor to ceiling, hanging pictures, assembling furniture, and moving everything back last night, I’m just a tiny bit tired and sore.

The day Google AI Overview actually worked

I feel it necessary to call this out, because it’s been wrong so many times that I usually automatically scroll past it. I only read it today because it was 6:30 AM and I hadn’t had any caffeine yet.

Anyway, after upgrading to MacOS “Sequoia” recently, I discovered the annoying new system-wide Ctrl-Enter keyboard shortcut. Because my fingers have decades of training in Emacs keybindings in the shell, I often repeat the previous command by hitting “Ctrl-P, Enter”, but my pinky often stays on the Ctrl key. Now Ctrl-Enter pops up a “contextual menu” everywhere, unless you disable it in Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard -> “Show Contextual Menu”.

I was astonished that Google actually gave me a correct answer for once. Shame they didn’t credit the web site they stole it from.

(actually, everything on this particular panel should be disabled, IMHO, and quite a few others as well)

Qwen Image LoRAs not ripe yet

I’ve yet to find one that works as advertised. Either they visibly degrade image quality, or they just do… nothing at all.

My Cyber Princess Waifu continues to amuse, though.

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I’d rather find a second waifu than write about evil right now…

(I found her in a bulk-wildcard-testing run where I set it to use the default sampler/scheduler, CFG=3.5, Steps=37, which took 1.5 minutes/image; cranking the steps up to 60 and using Heun++2/Beta improved quality at the cost of taking 6.75 minutes; refining it at 40% and upscaling it by 2.25x with 4xNomosUniDAT_bokeh_jpg eliminated the artifacts and significantly improved detail, but took 25.75 minutes. Worth it?)

(trying to do a 4x upscale ran out of memory after 45 minutes…)

Fiverr lays off 30% of employees…

…to focus on AI. Meanwhile, Fiverr freelancers are making a bundle cleaning up after AI.

🎶 🎶 It’s the cirrrrrrcle of liiiiiiife 🎶 🎶

Wow, Your Forma was worse than I thought…

Some reviewers made a fuss about the chemistry between the two leads being due to their voice actors being married in real life. Not any more.

Maybe she wasn’t willing to do the Sylphy voice in bed… 😁

(official art from the light novels, where she’s a busty little chibi; I’ve already used up all the fan-art, and I didn’t have any luck with the LoRAs)

Now that’s a knife dock!

OWC is selling a Thunderbolt 5 dock with 3x USB-A 3.2 ports, 1x USB-C 3.2 port, 4x Thunderbolt 5 ports (1 used for upstream), 1x 2.5Gb Ethernet port, and 2x 10Gb Ethernet ports with link aggregation support. For those who need their Mac Mini to have multiple 8K monitors and serious NAS bandwidth.

It’d be kind of wasted on me, so I’m thinking I’ll settle for the CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 dock: 4x Thunderbolt 4 (1 upstream), 4x USB-A 3.2.

Out of context

“Reasoning” models tend to do better at prompts like “give me a list of N unique action poses”, except when they dive up their own assholes and start generating reams of text about the so-called thinking process they’re following faking. I’ve had them spend 10+ minutes filling up all available context with busywork, without ever returning a single result. If they do return something, the list is often non-unique or cut off well before N.

But the context is the real problem, because if you only got N/2 results, you’d like to coax it to finish the job, but there’s a good chance that the “thinking” has consumed most of the context, and most models do not support purging context in the middle of generating a response.

It would also be useful to copy the setup of a known working chat and generate a completely different kind of list. I definitely don’t need the context of a search for poses and lighting setups when I ask for festive holiday lingerie ideas.

You can’t just reload the model with larger context and continue the chat. You can’t fork the chat into a new one; that preserves the context, too. What you want is to wipe all answers and context and preserve the settings and your prompts, so you don’t have to set up the chat again. In LM Studio, this functionality doesn’t seem to exist.

So I wrote a quick Perl script to load the JSON conversation history and remove everything but your prompts.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.020;
use strict;
use warnings;
use JSON;

open(my $In, $ARGV[0]);
my $json = join(' ', <$In>);
close($In);
my $conv = decode_json($json);

# remove token count
$conv->{tokenCount} = 0;
# rename
$conv->{name} = "SCRUBBED " . defined $conv->{name} ? $conv->{name} : "";
# remove all messages not from user.
my $out = [];
foreach my $msg (@{$conv->{messages}}) {
    push(@$out, $msg) if $msg->{versions}->[0]->{role} eq "user";
}
$conv->{messages} = $out;
print encode_json($conv);

This dumps a fresh JSON conversation file to STDOUT, which can be given any filename and dropped into ~/.lmstudio/conversations.

Why Perl? Because I could write it faster than I could explain the specs to a coding LLM, and I didn’t need multiple debugging passes.

(BTW, 32K context seems to be a comfortable margin for a 100-element list; 16K can be a bit tight)

Digits and Shadows

It’s kind of amazing how the “state of the art” keeps advancing in AI without fixing any of the known problems. LLMs hallucinate because they must, and image-diffusion engines can’t count fingers or recognize anatomical impossibilities because they don’t use anatomy. All the alleged coherence you hear about in AI output is either sheer accident or aggressive post-processing.

Let’s examine a few types of Qwen Image failures:

“Thumbs, how do they work?”

Trying to put your own hand into a position seen in a generated image can be awkward, painful, or simply impossible if it’s on the wrong side.

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Boxxo Or Bust 2, last two episodes

I never felt motivated to watch last week’s grimdark horseshit episode, but I might as well embrace the sunk-cost fallacy and get to the end. Here goes…

Shoe Fetishist acquired his peculiar hobby because he was looking for the boots that turned up as the prize in the recent competition. He’d bought them for his childhood friend and adventuring partner, only to wake up after losing a fight to find her mutilated corpse, with legs and boots missing. Yeah, that’s a great story that fits right in with slapstick comedy and lighthearted cheesecake.

Naturally they find the villain responsible without any difficulty, and he and his pals come right out and confess while twirling their metaphorical Snidely Whiplash mustaches. It’s “not well written”.

Basically both episodes are full of near-constant whiplash and expository lumps, right up to the final post-credits scene in which they announce that they’ll continue telling the wrong story in a future season.

Verdict: yeah, no; the people responsible for this mess don’t deserve any eyeballs for another season.

Speaking of ‘bust’,

Miri Hanai in a cowkini:

Tag-a-licious

One thing that’s annoyed me with my blog is that I gave up manually tagging posts with keywords several thousand posts ago, and now I sometimes have trouble finding the quote or reference I’m looking for. So I’m letting an LLM chew on the problem. Specifically, seed-oss-36b, which has been doing a bang-up job inventing color-coordinated cheesecake pin-up costumes and poses, without the annoying wokescold moralization that Google and OpenAI’s offline models ram past your tonsils and gag you with just for using the word “sexy”.

The code is trivial; all the fun is in the system prompt and the user prompt:

Examining the “reasoning”, it clearly separates the TOML metadata header from the body content and parses both as requested, and creates output in the correct format. I don’t necessarily want to use all the tags, but by writing them out to a separate file for each blog post, I can go through with another script and pull out the most common and the most distinctive tags.

When it finishes. Which at ~2 minutes/post on the Mac Mini is going to take about a week. The 4090 would be faster… if the model fit. 20GB on a 24GB card is a bit tight.

Tagged ‘delicious’

Let’s see what sort of poses and costumes seed-oss-36B has been giving me to use in my wildcards. I started out at the usual 1024x1600 resolution, but since I’m making pin-ups, I quickly switched to a Playboy-centerfold aspect ratio at 896x1920.

But not before it fabricated a waifu pic I found so tasty that I not only ran it through the refiner and upscaler, I then ran it through the commercial Topaz Photo AI tool for even more cleanup and a 4x upscale (that did not run me out of memory!), bringing the final result to a silly-resolution 9216x14400.

I might even print her out as a real poster; she could hang on the not-Zoom-visible wall in my office:

(10 megapixels, 132 megapixels)

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(classical reference)

Dear Apple,

Please provide fine-grained controls for disabling “data detector” overlays in text and images. It’s really annoying to look at a picture that clearly contains no text at all and have a translucent pulldown menu show up when you mouse over the image that offers to add a random string of digits to your contacts as an international phone number. Note that it doesn’t let you copy the string; it’s so insistent that it’s a phone number that it only offers options to use it as one.

It’s one thing to be able to open an image in Preview.app and deliberately choose the OCR text-selection mode (which is quite good, even at vertical Chinese/Japanese), but having it turned on system-wide for all images is intrusive and dangerous bullshit. I don’t want every image processed by a text-scanning system that has opaque privacy rules and no sense. And of course interpreting random digits in text as phone numbers and converting them to clickable links is also dumb as fuck; remember when a bunch of DNA researchers discovered their data was corrupted by Excel randomly turning genes into dates?

(Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Live Text -> offdammit)

(I didn’t even specify an Apple product, just “silver-colored laptop”; training data, whatcha gonna do? I did have to add a table and ask for a big downward swing of the axe, but the flames were free, thanks to a generous interpretation of the term “fire axe”)

Vibe Me Wild

(classical reference)

There is an executive push for every employee to incorporate generative AI into their daily workflow. I’m sure you can guess how I feel about that, but the problem is that they’re checking.

We have licenses for everyone to use specific approved tools, Which I Will Not Name, and VPs can see how many people have signed into the app with SSO, and at least get a high-level overview of how much they’ve been using it.

So I need to get my Vibe on. The problem is, it’s just not safe to run tool-enabled and agentic genai on my work laptop (especially while connected to the VPN), because I have Production access. The moment I check the boxes that enable running commands and connecting to APIs, I’d be exposing paying customers to unacceptable risks, even though there are passwords and passphrases and Yubikeys to slow things down. All it needs to do is vibe its way into my dotfiles without being noticed. I don’t even want the damn thing to read internal wiki pages, because many of them include runbooks and troubleshooting commands. And of course there’s incidents like this, in which an OpenAI “agent” is subverted to exfiltrate your email.

But I need to show that I’ve used the damn app to produce code.

So I wrote up a detailed design document for a standalone Python script that implements my five-star deathmatch image-ranking system. And before handing it over to the work app, I fed it to offline LLMs.

First up, seed-oss-36b, which has been giving me good creative results and tagging: it ‘thought’ for 20+ minutes, then generated a full project that ignored about half of my requirements, including the one about persisting the state of the rankings to disk. I didn’t even try to run it.

Next, gpt-oss-20b, which ‘thought’ for 30 seconds before spitting out a complete, self-contained Python program that almost worked. When I told it that the /images route and the /api/images route worked, but that the main / route displayed nothing and none of the key bindings worked, it ‘thought’ for 25 seconds, realized that it had written syntactically invalid Javascript for the key bindings (multiple case statements on one line), and corrected the code.

At this point, I had basic functionality, but found three flaws in testing. I listed them out, and after 2 minutes of ‘thought’, it corrected them. Sadly, it also deleted the line import os from the code, breaking it.

I told it to fix that, add a new keybind to reset the display filtering, and fix a newly-discovered bug in the image-zoom code that prevented scrolling. A minute of ‘thought’ and it took care of those issues, but deleted the Flask import lines this time.

A mere 7.5 seconds of ‘thought’ convinced it to add that back, and then I had a fully-functional 413-line self-contained app that could let me quickly rank a directory full of image files and persist the rankings to disk.

All in all, ~20 minutes of me time to write the design doc, 4 minutes of ‘thinking’ time, plus ~4 minutes each pass to generate the script (I’m getting ~5 tokens/sec output, which types out the code at roughly twice human speed), plus ~20 minutes of me time for source control, testing, and debugging. Both models used about 18KB of context to accomplish their task, which means that additional enhancement requests could easily cause it to overflow the context and start losing track of earlier parts of the iterative process, with potential loss of functionality or change of behavior.

With tested results, I’m now willing to present the revised design doc to the licensed tool and let it try to write similar code. While I’m not connected to the VPN…

(I suppose HR would take offense if I pointed out that the Vibe in Vibe Coding should be replaced with a more intrusive sex toy…)

With apologies to The Beatles…

I once had a vibe
    Or should I say
It once vibed me
    It wrote all my code
Then gave away
    API keys

It asked for my keys
    and it said they’d be safe in the vault
Then I looked around
    and I found them shared on ServerFault

I called for support, waited online
    wasting my time
I talked myself blue, tech support said
    “I’m off to bed”

He told me his shift had just ended
    and started to laugh
I emptied my wallet
    and crawled off to sob in the bath

And when I came out, my app was gone
    my credit blown
So I set a fire
    at their HQ
and watched them burn

…and that’s a wrap. Nothing much happens this week, as everyone discusses recent events and finds closure. The closest it gets to action is Our Hungover But Still Hot And Clingy Detective threatening to puke on Our Halfbreed Hero. Nice touch ending with the first-season ED song that inspired the manga.

Verdict: a lot of budget-saving tricks on the animation, but the art and voice acting were good, and the story was interesting despite the cover-our-asses suicide-prevention-hotline PSAs.

(unrelated vampire has ways of making you fall in love with her…)

🎶 Baby, you can vibe my code 🎶

As expected, adding additional features to the small, self-contained Python script took several passes, which took it past 32KB of context, then 48KB, and by the time I had the functionality just the way I wanted it, it was up to 59KB. And it took hours to get to that point, running on a not-exactly-cheap (even refurbished) Mac Mini. As its final task, I ordered it to write a revised design document reflecting the final state, which came in just under the 64KB limit.

For a single file of Python code with just over 500 lines. The maximum context setting for this model is 128KB. This does not scale to real coding projects.

Note that I said the functionality was as I wanted it. The LLM couldn’t fix CSS issues for blood or money, and still took N minutes to try and fail. At the moment, I need to fix all the button sizing and layouts, restyle the text to make it less hideous, and see if I can coax the zoom feature to scroll horizontally as well as vertically. And fix the display of the help pop-up, which got busted in one of the passes (I just need to find it in source control and paste the correct version back into place; which is why I put even the most trivial of projects under source control…).

(AI-upscaled XKCD…)

More LLM Coding Fails

• magistral-small-2509: never got it to display an image, or make any progress figuring out the error messages I fed it.

• qwen3-coder-30b: just could not figure out how to display a new image after navigating, despite the code being more than twice as long.

• qwen3-32b: excellent at parsing error messages to fix syntax errors in Python and Javascript; also excellent at making syntax errors in Python and Javascript. Complete waste of time. The only nice thing I can say about it is that it didn’t make me watch while it retyped the whole program after each change, but even that was undercut by it losing the indentation when telling me to replace a buggy block of Python with a new one.

Haven’t tried it with the licensed cloud-y tool on my work Mac yet…

Fall Season Falling Down

With only a few weeks to go, presumably most of the fall shows have been announced and have their web sites and promotional videos up, right? Meh, kinda.

Setting aside the Nth seasons of shows I didn’t watch N-1 of:

• A Gatherer’s Adventures In Isekai: wow, they managed to make that sound completely generic. NO

• Alma-chan Wants To Be A Family: sort-of Nuku-Nuku as an emotionless loli, with a side order of Sekirei? NO

• A Mangaka’s Weirdly Wonderful Workspace: just NO

• A Star Brighter Than The Sun: tough girl in love with pretty boy. NO

• A Wild Last Boss Appeared: player wakes up in MMO world as her OP character. NOT AGAIN

• Chitose Is In The Ramune Bottle: popular kid tries to coax hikikomori into coming back to school. NO

• Dad Is A Hero, Mom Is A Spirit, I’m a Reincarnator: ohhellNO

• Don’t Touch Kotesashi: generic dorm-harem porn game. NO

• Dusk Beyond The End Of The World: Like World’s End Harem, only more derivative. NO

• Forget That Night, Your Majesty: teaser trailer promises barely-animated shojo-manga romance with chins that could cut glass. NO

• Future Kid Takara: trailer mixes lightly-filtered 3D CGI with real-world footage to mash-up Doraemon with Captain Planet. ohhellNO

• Gachiakuta: future world is divided between floating-city elites and ground-bound garbage-pickers, an idea that’s been done to death. NO

• Ganglion: villain/mook gag show; that’s gag as in “choke”, based on the trailer. NO

• Gintama - Mr. Ginpachi’s Zany Class: ‘wacky’ spinoff of a show I never watched. NO

• Gnosia: serial-numbers-filed-off clone of Among Us, and therefore sus. NO

• Hero Without A Class: Who Even Needs Skills?: pretty sure Starless Tamer did it better. NO

• Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota: high-school romance in which (gasp) opposites attract. NO

• Isekai Quartet 3: this would be a lot more interesting if all the shows were, y’know, current. The first season of Tanya The Evil aired in 2017, and the still-missing second season was announced in 2021, but all we’ve gotten was the (admittedly hilarious) Desert Pasta one-shot, also in 2021. So putting the cast in a new season of this sketch comedy is just rubbing salt in the wound. NO

• Latair The Earth: the promo art is enough for me to say NO

• Let’s Play: official blurb includes the phrase “a comedic, romantic, and all-too-real story about gaming, memes, and social anxiety”, which is a giant ohhellNO

• L’il Miss Vampire Can’t Suck Right: surprisingly, not a porn game adaptation. Unsurprisingly, trailer is full of suck. NO

• May I Ask For One Final Thing?: more ‘villainess’ shit. NO

• Mechanical Marie: robot/maid/assassin/guardian, with the twist being that her master is robosexual but she’s only pretending to be a robot. NO

• Monster Strike: Deadverse Reloaded: game adaptation. NO

• My Awkward Senpai: bitchy sexpot office lady acquires bishie subordinate, and you’ll be stunned to learn she falls for him. NO

• My Friend’s Little Sister Puts It In For Me: oh, wait, that’s “has it in for me”. $10 says it ends up my way, though. NO

• My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha: Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, I’m Out for Revenge!: ohhellNO

• My Status As An Assassin Obviously Exceeds The Hero’s: another whole-class-gets-isekai’d-and-I’m-way-OP show. NO

• Ninja Versus Gokudo: not even going to look at the trailer. NO

• Swallow My Monster Meat, Milady: er, “pass the monster meat”, which sounds like something you’d need laxatives for. NO

• Plus-Sized Misadventures In Love!: NO

• Potion, Wagami wo Tasukeru: love how the “saved by potions” title isn’t even being translated. TL/DR: another “potion loli” show, this one with bonus excitable elf bishie. NO

• Puzzle & Dragon: do not watch the trailer. NO

• Sanda: whoever decided to release an English-language trailer with a flat-affect AI voiceover chose… poorly. NO

• Shabake: Edo period shop owner with weak constitution who’s surrounded by helpful spirits spontaneously goes all Jessica Fletcher as people start being murdered every time he leaves the house. Somebody rolled percentile dice to generate this one. NO

• Si-Vis: The Sound Of Heroes: low-effort ripoff of Kpop Demon Hunters? ohhellNO

• Solo Camping For Two: like “hanging out for hermits”, I guess. NO

• Style of Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH: another AI-generated English voiceover? Kill me now, please. NO

• Sylvanian Families: Freya no Wonder Days: no synopsis or trailer is available, which automatically makes it better than the ones with AI voiceovers. Still NO

• The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest: oh, good, I was hoping there would be a “gonna be the strongest” “kicked out of the hero’s party” show this season, said no one ever. NO

• The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess: NO

• This Monster Wants to Eat Me: not porn, just something-something yuri death-wish romance something. NO

• Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider: NO

• Peach Versus Ogre: (er, “Tougen Anki”) the descendents of the folk-tale hero Momotaro are still fighting oni, which sucks when you find out you’re an oni. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this will suck. NO

• Touring After the Apocalypse: didn’t they just do like five of these shows? NO

• Wandance: dance like no one’s watching, at high school. I also will not be watching. NO

• Watari-kun’s ****** Is About to Collapse: somebody please spoil the ****** for me so that I don’t have to type it again and get the backslashes right so the Markdown processor doesn’t turn it into bold and italic. Or don’t. NO

• With You, Our Love Will Make It Through: chick wants to fuck her furry classmate. NO

• Yano-kun’s Ordinary Days: chick wants to fuck her battered classmate. NO

To sum up, NO. Maybe rock-service and shadow-healer can kill some time while I wait for more Frieren in January.

Wallpaper fail

I added a few hundred non-lingerie clothing sets to my wildcards and made some gals in a 9:16 aspect ratio to potentially share the wallpaper rotation with RedWaifu on my new 27” 4K HDR vertical monitor, and this was one of the first to show up:

“No, no, I didn’t say she can’t dance, I said she’s got two left feet!” 😁

Related, I have to go through the clothing wildcards and remove any reference to “crossbody” purses. They end up with literal crosses attached to them. Sometimes, they have straps.

Last show standing, and since it started late, it’s got two one more episodes to go. [sigh; it's only 11 episodes, so things are going to be rushed next week]

This week, all hell breaks loose, kicking off an episode of Back-Seat Kaiju!, in which our cute glasses-wearing Operations gal’s sanity is tested. Basically, everyone gets to debut their new kaiju skinsuits, with Tsuntail exploding out of the gate in her mom’s hand-me-downs, Vice-Captain playing tsukkomi to #10’s boke, and Super Sidekick… not appearing this week. Good thing we’ve got two captains on deck.

Verdict: two one more episode, and I have no idea what they plan to end it on. I have a hunch Naughty Number Nine has been built up too much as a long-term antagonist, so maybe they’ll just Save The Country For Now and try for a third season? Ratings apparently support the idea.

(time for Tsuntail to go axe-crazy!)

Diffusion Image Evaluation Checklist

1. Count the limbs.
2. Count the fingers.
3. Count the toes.
4. Side-check the thumbs.
5. Side-check the big toes.
6. Count the navels.
7. Check for crazy eyes.
8. Check for consistent skin tones.
9. Check skin texture.
10. Check for texture patterns in background.
11. Watch out for overtrained default clothing.
12. Check all four edges for cut-off objects.
13. Check for giants and tinyfolk.
14. [update!] Check for melting.

Now you can apply standard advice about composition, like rule-of-thirds, division of negative space, not cropping people at joints, etc. If there’s anything even vaguely naughty about the pictures you’re generating, you’ll also want to check the apparent age of all human figures…

GenAI coding: the definition of insanity

devstral-small-2507:

It was quick, and friendly, and the code was half the size of the working one I got from gpt-oss-20b, and it ran the first time. It didn’t do anything, of course, and I spent N passes nit-picking every place where it did something stupid or simply ignored the spec, but as I blew past 24KB of context, my checkin comments started to get snarky. After all, I’d only just got it to finally display the bottom-bar buttons onscreen, without scrolling, and it still refused to actually make them work as buttons, or display the correct contents.

But it was quick, and friendly! Worst thing was that it actually styled the web GUI nicely; it just couldn’t make it meet the spec. I finally had to give up, because it started “fixing” bugs without changing a single line of code.

more...

Despite its many flaws, I really think this is the most promising model to play with, because the bolted-on LLM parser significantly improves your ability to lay out an image and add text.

This image came out almost exactly as requested. I ran it multiple times to select the best variation on the theme (sexy pin-ups, size and style of dice, length of liquor shelf, facial expressions, contents of character sheets, etc), but they were all correct.

The exact prompt was:

A gritty, realistic fantasy RPG illustration set in a tavern, with a large central table around which are seated five bearded dwarves wearing leather armor, with axes slung on their back. On the table in front of each dwarf are RPG character sheets, polyhedral dice, and wooden tankards filled with ale. The wall behind them has shelves full of liquor bottles with rune-covered labels, and pin-up posters of sexy goblin girls. The center dwarf is speaking, and the speech bubble contains the words “Okay, now make a shaving throw…” in a handwriting font.

Naturally, the speech bubble works with my usual sort of imagery as well…

(I didn’t specify maid lingerie, but I did ask for “elf maidens”, so call it a lucky accident)

Dear Microsoft,

I just had to email a plain-text attachment as a ZIP file from a Mac to a Mac to keep Outlook from mangling UTF-8 into random garbage. Fix the little shit before you shove your “AI” into every app, m’kay?

Coding with ChatGPT…

End every request after the first with the following words. You’ll thank me later.

Please fix ONLY this issue, and write out the complete corrected program, without making ANY unrequested changes to the code.

This is pretty much the only way to get readable diffs of your iterations. Otherwise there will be random changes everywhere. Comments added/deleted, code collapsed onto one line or expanded to multiples, functions renamed or reordered, regressions created, etc, etc.

Final ChatGPT Deathmatch

This is version 18.5; ChatGPT was still offering me additional enhancements, but we’d far exceeded my patience, even without the four-hour delay while my free credits recharged. The last two revisions were fixes for bugs that only emerged in final QA, where ranking/flagging an image with a value that was currently filtered out of the display list double-advanced, skipping over a still-valid image. Since the whole point of the method is progressively assigning ranks to every image, skipping one was a nuisance.

The “.5” comes from me not wanting to make Yet Another ChatGPT Pass to fix two lines of Javascript that were easily located in the file. The LLM had argued its way into violating the spec at the last minute while fixing the final bug.

It’s GenAI code, so by definition it can’t be copyrighted; if you have any use for it, knock yourself out.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys, os, threading
from pathlib import Path
from flask import Flask, send_file, request, jsonify, render_template_string, abort

app = Flask(__name__)

BASE_DIR = Path(sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else os.getcwd()).resolve()
RANK_FILE = BASE_DIR / "_rank.txt"
state_lock = threading.Lock()
files = []
meta = {}

# ------------------------------------------------------------
# Load/save ranking state
# ------------------------------------------------------------
def load_state():
    global files, meta
    files = sorted(
        [f.name for f in BASE_DIR.iterdir() if f.suffix.lower() in (".png", ".jpg")],
        key=lambda fn: (BASE_DIR / fn).stat().st_mtime,
    )
    meta = {}
    if RANK_FILE.exists():
        for line in RANK_FILE.read_text().splitlines():
            parts = line.split("\t")
            if not parts:
                continue
            fname = parts[0]
            rank = int(parts[1]) if len(parts) > 1 and parts[1] else 0
            flags = set(parts[2].split(",")) if len(parts) > 2 and parts[2] else set()
            meta[fname] = {"rank": rank, "flags": flags}
    for f in files:
        if f not in meta:
            meta[f] = {"rank": 0, "flags": set()}


def save_state():
    with open(RANK_FILE, "w") as fp:
        for fname in files:
            entry = meta.get(fname, {"rank": 0, "flags": set()})
            flags_str = ",".join(sorted(entry["flags"])) if entry["flags"] else ""
            fp.write(f"{fname}\t{entry['rank']}\t{flags_str}\n")


# ------------------------------------------------------------
# Routes
# ------------------------------------------------------------
@app.route("/")
def index():
    return render_template_string(INDEX_HTML)


@app.route("/image/<path:fname>")
def get_image(fname):
    if not fname:
        abort(404)
    target = (BASE_DIR / fname).resolve()
    if not str(target).startswith(str(BASE_DIR.resolve())):
        abort(403)
    if not target.exists():
        abort(404)
    return send_file(str(target))


@app.route("/api/state")
def api_state():
    with state_lock:
        safe_meta = {
            fname: {
                "rank": entry.get("rank", 0),
                "flags": sorted(entry.get("flags", [])),  # sets → sorted lists
            }
            for fname, entry in meta.items()
        }
        return jsonify({"files": files, "meta": safe_meta})


@app.route("/api/update", methods=["POST"])
def api_update():
    data = request.json
    fname = data.get("file")
    if fname not in meta:
        abort(400)
    with state_lock:
        if "rank" in data:
            meta[fname]["rank"] = data["rank"]
        if "toggle_flag" in data:
            fl = data["toggle_flag"]
            if fl in meta[fname]["flags"]:
                meta[fname]["flags"].remove(fl)
            else:
                meta[fname]["flags"].add(fl)
        save_state()
    return jsonify(success=True)


@app.route("/api/reload", methods=["POST"])
def api_reload():
    with state_lock:
        load_state()
    return jsonify(success=True)


# ------------------------------------------------------------
# HTML/JS template
# ------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX_HTML = """
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<title>Five-Star Deathmatch</title>
<style>
body { margin:0; font-family:sans-serif; display:flex; flex-direction:column; height:100vh; }
.topbar, .bottombar { background:#eee; padding:4px; display:flex; justify-content:space-between; font-size:20px; }
.central { position:relative; flex:1; background:#999; display:flex; justify-content:center; align-items:center; overflow:hidden; }
.central img { max-width:100%; max-height:100%; object-fit:contain; }
.central.zoom { overflow:auto; justify-content:flex-start; align-items:flex-start; }
.central.zoom img { max-width:none; max-height:none; width:auto; height:auto; display:block; }
#help { position:absolute; top:10px; right:10px; cursor:pointer; border:1px solid #666; border-radius:8px; margin:2px; padding:6px; background:#f9f9f9; text-align:center; }
#helpPanel { display:none; position:absolute; top:40px; right:10px; background:#fff; color:#000; font-size:16px; padding:10px 15px; border-radius:10px; box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); }
#helpPanel ul { margin:0; padding-left:20px; }
#helpPanel li { margin:4px 0; }
.bottombar { flex-direction:column; font-size:14px; }
.row { display:flex; flex:1; }
.cell { flex:1; border:1px solid #666; border-radius:8px; margin:2px; text-align:center; padding:6px; cursor:pointer; display:flex; flex-direction:column; justify-content:center; align-items:center; background:#f9f9f9; }
.cell.active { background:#ccc; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="topbar"><div id="filename"></div><div id="rankflags"></div><div id="pos"></div></div>
<div class="central" id="central">
  <img id="mainimg"/>
  <div id="help">❓</div>
  <div id="helpPanel"></div>
</div>
<div class="bottombar">
  <div class="row" id="rankrow"></div>
  <div class="row" id="flagrow"></div>
</div>
<script>
let state={files:[],meta:{}};
let index=0;
let filters={ranks:new Set(),flags:new Set()};
let zoom=false;
const mainimg=document.getElementById("mainimg");
const filenameDiv=document.getElementById("filename");
const rankflagsDiv=document.getElementById("rankflags");
const posDiv=document.getElementById("pos");
const central=document.getElementById("central");
const help=document.getElementById("help");
const helpPanel=document.getElementById("helpPanel");

function fetchState(){ fetch("/api/state").then(r=>r.json()).then(js=>{state=js; render(); buildBottom();}); }
function buildBottom(){
  const rr=document.getElementById("rankrow"); rr.innerHTML="";
  const ranks=[-1,0,1,2,3,4,5];
  let counts={}; for(let r of ranks) counts[r]=0;
  let total=0;
  for(let f of state.files){ let m=state.meta[f]||{rank:0,flags:[]}; if(m.rank>-1) total++; counts[m.rank]++; }
  for(let r of ranks){
    let icon=(r==-1?"❌":(r==0?"⚪️":"⭐️".repeat(r)));
    let pct=(r>=0 && total>0)?Math.round(100*counts[r]/total)+"%":"";
    const d=document.createElement("div"); d.className="cell"; if(filters.ranks.has(r)) d.classList.add("active");
    d.innerHTML="<div>"+icon+"</div><div>"+counts[r]+(pct?" ("+pct+")":"")+"</div>";
    d.onclick=()=>{ if(filters.ranks.has(r)) filters.ranks.delete(r); else filters.ranks.add(r); render(); buildBottom(); };
    rr.appendChild(d);
  }
  const fr=document.getElementById("flagrow"); fr.innerHTML="";
  const fls=["A","B","C","D","E","F"]; let flagCounts={}; for(let fl of fls) flagCounts[fl]=0;
  let unflagged=0;
  for(let f of state.files){ let m=state.meta[f]||{rank:0,flags:[]}; if(m.flags.length==0) unflagged++; for(let fl of m.flags) flagCounts[fl]++; }
  for(let fl of fls){
    const d=document.createElement("div"); d.className="cell"; if(filters.flags.has(fl)) d.classList.add("active");
    d.innerHTML="<div>"+fl+"</div><div>"+flagCounts[fl]+"</div>";
    d.onclick=()=>{ if(filters.flags.has(fl)) filters.flags.delete(fl); else filters.flags.add(fl); render(); buildBottom(); };
    fr.appendChild(d);
  }
  const d=document.createElement("div"); d.className="cell"; if(filters.flags.has("UNFLAG")) d.classList.add("active");
  d.innerHTML="<div>🚫</div><div>"+unflagged+"</div>";
  d.onclick=()=>{ if(filters.flags.has("UNFLAG")) filters.flags.delete("UNFLAG"); else filters.flags.add("UNFLAG"); render(); buildBottom(); };
  fr.appendChild(d);
}
function filteredFiles(){
  return state.files.filter(f=>{
    let m=state.meta[f]||{rank:0,flags:[]};
    if(filters.ranks.has(m.rank)) return false;
    for(let fl of m.flags){ if(filters.flags.has(fl)) return false; }
    if(m.flags.length==0 && filters.flags.has("UNFLAG")) return false;
    return true;
  });
}
function render(){
  let list=filteredFiles(); if(list.length==0){ mainimg.src=""; filenameDiv.textContent=""; rankflagsDiv.textContent=""; posDiv.textContent="0/0"; return; }
  if(index>=list.length) index=0;
  let fname=list[index]; mainimg.src="/image/"+encodeURIComponent(fname); filenameDiv.textContent=fname;
  let m=state.meta[fname]||{rank:0,flags:[]};
  let rankDisp=(m.rank==-1?"❌":(m.rank==0?"⚪️":"⭐️".repeat(m.rank)));
  rankflagsDiv.textContent=rankDisp+" "+m.flags.sort().join("");
  posDiv.textContent=(index+1)+" / "+list.length;
}
function nextValidIndex(oldfname){
  let list=filteredFiles();
  let i=list.indexOf(oldfname);
  if(i==-1){
    if(index>=list.length) index=list.length-1;
  } else {
    index=i + 1;
  }
}
function updateRank(r){
  let fname=filteredFiles()[index];
  fetch("/api/update",{method:"POST",headers:{"Content-Type":"application/json"},body:JSON.stringify({file:fname,rank:r})})
    .then(()=>fetch("/api/state"))
    .then(r=>r.json())
    .then(js=>{
      state=js;
      nextValidIndex(fname);
      render(); buildBottom();
    });
}
function toggleFlag(fl){
  let fname=filteredFiles()[index];
  fetch("/api/update",{method:"POST",headers:{"Content-Type":"application/json"},body:JSON.stringify({file:fname,toggle_flag:fl})})
    .then(()=>fetch("/api/state"))
    .then(r=>r.json())
    .then(js=>{
      state=js;
      render(); buildBottom();
    });
}
document.addEventListener("keydown",ev=>{
  let list=filteredFiles(); if(list.length==0) return;
  if(ev.key=="ArrowLeft"){ index=(index-1+list.length)%list.length; render(); }
  else if(ev.key=="ArrowRight"){ index=(index+1)%list.length; render(); }
  else if(ev.key=="ArrowUp"){ index=0; render(); }
  else if(ev.key=="ArrowDown"){ index=list.length-1; render(); }
  else if(ev.key=="x"||ev.key=="X"){ updateRank(-1); }
  else if(ev.key>="0"&&ev.key<="5"){ updateRank(parseInt(ev.key)); }
  else if("ABCDEF".includes(ev.key.toUpperCase())){ toggleFlag(ev.key.toUpperCase()); }
  else if(ev.key=="r"||ev.key=="R"){ filters={ranks:new Set(),flags:new Set()}; render(); buildBottom(); }
  else if(ev.key=="z"||ev.key=="Z"){ zoom=!zoom; if(zoom){ central.classList.add("zoom"); central.scrollTop=0; central.scrollLeft=0; } else { central.classList.remove("zoom"); } }
  else if(ev.key==" "){ fetch("/api/reload",{method:"POST"}).then(()=>fetchState()); }
});
help.onclick=()=>{ 
  helpPanel.style.display="block"; 
  helpPanel.innerHTML="<ul>"
    +"<li>← / → : Previous / Next image</li>"
    +"<li>↑ / ↓ : First / Last image</li>"
    +"<li>0–5 : Set rank</li>"
    +"<li>X : Rank -1 (❌)</li>"
    +"<li>A–F : Toggle flags</li>"
    +"<li>R : Reset filters</li>"
    +"<li>Z : Toggle zoom</li>"
    +"<li>Space : Reload state</li>"
    +"</ul>";
};
helpPanel.onclick=()=>{ helpPanel.style.display="none"; };
fetchState();
</script>
</body>
</html>
"""

# ------------------------------------------------------------
if __name__=="__main__":
    load_state()
    app.run("127.0.0.1",5000,debug=True)

The odd mix of inlining and formatted blocks is how it went from 700+ lines to 268: every revised version made new formatting decisions in unrelated parts of the file until I started adding The Magic Words. Areas being updated in a revision got clean formatting, because it showed them in the explanation of the change, while “unchanged” areas got compressed onto one line.

I fed it the spec, and it created a multi-file project, with a separate HTML template file, a cleanly-formatted README.md containing a quite reasonable summary of the purpose and function of the program, a requirements.txt file containing the dependencies, and a Python program that worked on the first try.

In testing, I identified four issues: two of them were arguably ambiguities in the spec, the other two were related to correctly displaying images larger than the window. After checking in the initial version, I went through the “approve changes” dialogs, where it showed me each change in a clear, clean diff. The resulting code passed all my tests.

For the third pass, I told it to package the whole thing up for distribution with the Python Poetry toolkit. It did. I’m done.

I did not allow $LICENSED_TOOL to run commands, even git checkins (which other IDEs can do without handing over the reins to an AI), because I’m not stupid. Still, the experience was so much better that I’d consider paying the $15/month fee if I had a lot of projects just lying around waiting to be written.

This is my shocked face; there are many like it, but this is mine:

(I’m not nearly this fat, and I haven’t had a sugared Pepsi in over a decade; the rest is 100% accurate 😁)

The gals show plenty of diffusion bleed; the pin-ups are human gals with “cat ears and cat tail” (because “catgirl” makes disturbing furries), and the t-shirt gal is just an elf, with no mention of an apparently-detachable tail. It took several tries to get even one pin-up gal without elf ears.

Codellama-34B

I was chatting about this at work after sharing my positive experience with $LICENSED_TOOL, and someone asked DuckDuckGo which offline coding LLMs to use. It recommended WizardCoder and two variations of Codellama. I grabbed the largest versions of them (~34GB each on disk) and fed them the spec.

Codellama wrote me a short story about how it would write the program. Just the story, no code.

I followed up with “write the program”. It wrote a sequel to the story.

I followed up with “where’s the code?”, and its answer was, I shit you not:

I uploaded my code on Github as well - https://github.com/akshat-raj09/CMPE15M_A3

I’m gonna need a bigger shocked face.

(also, those models all have a maximum 16KB context limit, so even half a dozen passes will blow it out; deleted)

Unrelated,

Amazon’s recommending bibles this week. Gosh, what could have happened recently that shifted the algorithm? Like the motives of a left-wing Antifa terrorist who was fucking a furry tranny, I guess we’ll never know.

Even more unrelated,

I was briefly deeply disturbed by the Chinese furniture manufacturer that has chosen the brand name Goaste. Read it wrong the first time…

Dear ANN reviewer,

I really don’t care about your trans journey, or how you feel it was reflected in the final episode of Call Of The Night 2. Allow me to introduce you to the concept of TMI.

Batch Gals

SwarmUI’s wildcard support isn’t completely random. Buried in the “Swarm Interal” section of the parameters is the “Wildcard Seed Behavior” param, which defaults to “Random”. Changing it to “Index” will loop through the wildcards file in order.

So I used my latest wildcard set to generate 250, piped that through the LLM prompt enhancer, and turned it loose.

Not all of the fails were due to the enhancer. Missing limbs and off-by-N finger counts are old hat, so let’s stick to novel fails.

more...

Okay, now that I have a (half-dozen implementations of a…) well-tested image-ranking Python script, how do you use it?

1. Download deathmatch.py

2. Install Flask:
   pip install Flask

3. Run the script with a single argument, the name of a directory full of PNG and/or JPG images:
   python deathmatch.py /Volume/galparty/fresh

   and open a browser window to http://127.0.0.1:5000, You should see a status bar at top, the first image in the directory by modification time, a help button in the upper right, and two rows of buttons at the bottom.

4. The first row of buttons are rank. All images start at 0, and can either be promoted by pressing 1-5 or rejected by pressing X. This will update the matching buttons at the bottom and advance to the next image.

5. The second row of buttons are flags. One or more can be selected by pressing A-F; this will not advance to the next image, so you can flag a picture before ranking it. Flags mean whatever you want them to, and are there so you can easily mark images that are interesting for reasons other than quality (“family”, “funny”, “disturbingly similar to that girl from Frozen”, etc). The far-right button matches images that do not have any flags set.

6. Clicking on any of the buttons excludes matching images from the display.

(pretty sure there’s no giant office complex in Red Rock Canyon…)

Ranking and flags are stored in the same directory in a file named _rank.txt. The fields are separated with tabs. This file is updated every time you change a rank or flag, so your progress is automatically saved.

Running a deathmatch

1. Run the program in a directory full of images and click each of the following buttons: X, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, filtering the list to show only rank 0 images (all of them the first time).

2. Starting with the first image, press either X or 1. Make this a very quick pass that just takes out the trash. Out of focus, picture of lens cap, shakycam, AI gal with three arms, etc. When you’re done, you’ll have no images left at rank 0.

3. Click the 0 and 1 buttons, so that only rank 1 images are displayed. Make a pass across all rank 1 images, promoting exactly one-third to 2. The easiest way to do this is just have your fingers on the 1 and 2 keys rather than using right-arrow to skip the 1’s. Be brutal; you’re picking your best. If a picture is interesting, flag it with A-F.

4. (Optional: walk away for an hour or a day, and come back fresh) Adjust your filters and make a pass across all rank 2 images, promoting exactly one-third to 3.

5. Rinse and repeat two more times, until 1/81 (1.2%) of your original rank 1 images are ranked 5.

Since this isn’t a full photo-management app, there’s no convenient way to package up your selected pics for printing or editing, but you can copy-paste the filename from the top-left corner, or make a copy of the _rank.txt file and edit it down to just the ones you want.

[Update: I cleaned up the code and added a simple export: press L to copy the current visible list to the clipboard, one per line]

There are five six additional commands available:

• Up and Down-arrow, to take you to the beginning/end of the list
• Z for zoom, to see images at full size with scrollbars
• R for reset, to turn off all active filters
• L to copy the list of visible images to the clipboard
• SPACEBAR to reload the image list from the directory, in case you’ve got an AI actively generating images in the background, as one does.

Unrelated,

The new Dr Seuss LoRA for Qwen Image doesn’t really work for illustrating Red Sonja.

No new anime, words that I’ll be saying for the next three months, so it’s time for more “AI” cheesecake. Maybe I’ll dig into my real cheesecake archives for contrast as well.

Today’s randomized babes are based on SFnal settings and costumes provided by Claude AI. It had no difficulty grasping the concepts of “vivid, exotic sci-fi locations” and “sexy retro-futuristic costumes for women”, generating detailed descriptions that Qwen Image was able to run with.

More importantly, it didn’t fall down on the unique part. It didn’t take forever to generate 100 results, and they were truly distinct, not just slight wording variations. Most importantly, it did not scold me for requesting “sexy”, or refuse to do my bidding. Although I haven’t asked for lingerie sets yet…

Qwen has recently released updated versions of some of their models, so I hope they get around to revving Image soon. I can cope with the usual finger-counting and the giantism, but I really hate seeing a great image ruined by a missing leg or wrong-side foot, something that’s really common.

more...

Or more precisely, “cheesecake by deathmatch”. Hey, I’ve got the silly thing, might as well use it to speed up processing my dusty pile of saved girlie-pics. While playing with “AI” tools, I downloaded Windsurf, ordered it to clean up the code for maintainability and then add a new function to export the currently-visible list to the clipboard (press L). Now I can quickly rank the images, use a flag to split them into NSFW and less-NSFW, and then toggle the flag to get two distinct export lists to pipe to my cheeseblogging prep scripts.

(Windsurf took me so seriously I ended up with a multi-file distribution package, but I had no difficulty reassembling it into a single file for simple downloading)

But first, a message from our sponsor, Qwen Image:

(the hardest part of this was getting it to render a “standard” onigiri rice ball; first it wrapped the entire thing in fresh green seaweed, then it made it huge, then it added additional wrapping on top of the nori strip, etc)

This is a selection from “stuff I downloaded in April, 2019”.

more...

[Last show! Until I dip into the reserves from previous seasons!]

Last week, the shit hit the fan, with kaiju springing up all over the place and forcing the good guys to pull out (almost) all the stops to defeat them. This week, it’s more like the shit hit a nuclear bomb, and we see all the major players on Team Good Guy individually targeted by bespoke kaiju while Our Monster Hero obeys orders to keep his head down. Until he doesn’t.

Verdict: cliffhanger! no season 3 announcement yet! Platoon Leader Cutie survived!

(Platoon Leader Cutie got the most screen time she’s ever had, so I’ll celebrate with an Esil)

Dear Interwebs,

Stop trying to make “clankers” a thing. It would be more correct to refer to generative AI as “crankers”, “hallucino-gens”, or “shittoasters”. “Clankers” implies a physical presence that they do not possess, and falsely implies that the “AI” features touted in physical devices are more than marketing buzzwords. I’ve mostly settled on “genai” by analogy to “genie”, although more the Aladdin type than the I Dream Of Genie variety (which I wouldn’t lock up in a server room…).

(I need to make this gal reproducible for future use; right now, she’s just “skinny, nerdy-cute young woman wearing big round glasses with thick lenses”, but that may not produce consistent results in other contexts, even though Qwen has some very strong face preferences)

genai fail

Qwen Image does not know what a “knife switch” is, even if you use the Chinese term that reliably returns images of the right thing (电源闸刀). Also, even in the successful image, I called it a switch, not a Big Red Button. It’s a bit iffy on the concept of “rack of servers”, too, doing better with “server rack”. Also, I asked for a “redneck genie”, and all it got out of that was the color.

“What’s that do?” is of course a Buffy reference.

The robot-adjacent term also suggests a degree of autonomy that does not exist outside of Sam Altman’s febrile imagination. Which is also a steaming pile of marketing buzzwords; look how his fluffers describe the reinvention of cron jobs.

Okay, one more…

Just because she’s actually pushing the button this time.

Please tell me that Ruri gets less shouty and annoying, because the lush-bodied rock-jock with a war hammer is aligned with my interests. Also, the music is a touch too dramatic, but the scenery is pleasant (not just Nagi). Her soothing Raphtalia voice is just a bonus.

Perhaps it’s coincidence, but when I stopped by the grocery near my parents’ house, I saw a woman walk by who could have been Nagi’s slightly-older sister. Took me a moment to remember what I went there for, especially with the crossbody purse strap highlighting the resemblance.

Verdict: please grow up fast, Ruri; and I don’t mean in the need-more-fanservice way. That’s more than covered, and I haven’t even seen the busty glasses gal yet.

(fan-art count for the series: 1,500+, and less than 500 are R-18+; not that there aren’t plenty of suggestive pieces outside the filter…)

Seven years later…

…Tim Berners-Lee is still trying to make “Solid” a thing. And after spending half an hour reading the current website (the original Github repo was abandoned without any code ever being checked in), I still don’t know what it’s good for. If he’d taken that long to invent the web, we’d still be living in caves.

Thanks for calming down a bit, Ruri. Please don’t feel that you need to make up for it with fan-service; Nagi’s got that covered.

(…and if there was gold in them there hills, we’d all be rich…)

This couldn’t possibly end badly…

ChatGPT can now buy directly from Etsy. I’m sure Sam Altman will guarantee refunds when it accidentally purchases 1000 handmade small-batch organic vegan jam jars (Made In China) instead of 1 blender cozy.

(I recently saw a nice little “handmade-in-California” bamboo desktop drawer set on Etsy, for only six times the price of the exact same Chinese item on Amazon…)

Dear Topaz,

A while back, I purchased a standalone, perpetual license for Photo AI. It said there was an update to download. This turned out to be a new product named Photo. Subscription-only. Yeah, no.

And every time I launch the old app, there’s a prominent “upgrade” button, and a splash screen with the words “your perpetual ownership and active license make you a Topaz Founding Customer, giving you access to the new app at no extra cost.”

… except the $199/year subscription, which currently has a $100 discount for the first year. Clearly they’ve been studying the cable-tv & Internet pricing model.

There’s also a strong push to get a “special” subscription that costs even more, but includes more apps that I have no use for.

Dear Apple,

This morning, I deleted 200 GB of data from my Mac laptop. Hours later, it still hasn’t noticed and insists that the disk’s nearly full. It doesn’t even show up in the “purgeable” field on the Get Info window. There is no way to determine how much space is actually available.

Well, there is, but it’s poorly documented: disable Time Machine backups. This quickly updates the “purgeable” space to the correct value.

It doesn’t do anything with that space. That requires a separate command:

sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data 20214748364800 1

That’s 200GB in bytes, because of course that’s the unit you should use on a device that ships with hundreds of gigabytes of storage.

And don’t forget to turn your backups back on after the cleanup. It will never remind you.

(the data in question was my Lightroom photo archives, which I copied over to the much-faster Mac Mini yesterday; once I had confirmed backups on both ends, I nuked the old copies)