I’ve decided that the goofy transforming-robot boss-fight bit in the OP is meant to be symbolic conquest of the stress that led to his death, with the gals fighting for his slow-life happiness.

Setting that aside, last week’s crisis is resolved quickly, making room for Our Besotted Busty Blonde to show up and give Our Shopping Hero the stick for running off, followed by the carrot cherry. Once they’ve sealed the deal, she moves in, despite some friction with the catgirl, the loli, and the cat. Nice to have two hot gals fighting to get into your bed and your tub, but the cock-blocking loli is a problem.

Verdict: time to expand the house with another bedroom and some soundproofing. Maybe some nice asbestos and a sprinkler system.

Fun with emergency dentistry…

The fix for my post-op gum infection was to drill a hole in the back of the temporary bridge, clean it out without anesthesia, and then send me home with antibiotics and a syringe to flush out the hole three times a day until my next appointment in two weeks. Shame the bridge only lasted one week before breaking into tiny pieces thanks to the hole, sending me back in on Wednesday to get another one. Everything was healed up enough for them to make a 3D scan for the permanent bridge, but not enough to install it until the end of March, so I have a new temporary. Without a hole in it. For now.

Naturally while the doc was fixing me up again, it snowed enough to make it difficult to get up my driveway.

…and another batch of snow overnight, sigh.

Apple Intelygenz

The only device I am currently capable of running the alpha-test “Apple Intelligence” feature (ApplAI? iAI? I’ll just call it Applint) on is my iPad Air. I could upgrade the OS on my Mac to get it, but I like my main computer to be reliable, and Apple’s shoddy QA the last N years has led me to stay at least one major release behind for as long as possible.

Anyway, Applint shares a feature toggle with Siri, a feature I turned off 14 years ago and don’t want back, so the first thing I had to do was manually disable all the methods of activating Siri. Then I had to manually toggle off “allow Siri/Applint to learn from” for each and every app installed on the device, one by one.

It’s opt-in by default, y’see, so I’ll have to manually disable it for any new apps I install after today. If I had it on more than one device, I’d have to repeat the same remarkably tedious process there as well.

With that out of the way, I was left with one new piece of functionality: the Playground image-generation app. TL/DR: it’s toy garbage.

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I asked it to make a picture of a sexy catgirl. It refused.

I asked it to make a picture of a catgirl. It refused.

I asked it to make a picture of a pretty young woman wearing cat ears. It generated a homely man with long stringy hair and plastic cat ears.

Until you click done, it will keep generating alternatives. I let it generate around 10 images. Several of them had beards. About a third looked like women. None of them were young. Or pretty. Or, frankly, good pictures. Why did most of the women look like men? Because the “select a person by appearance” button defaults to gender-blender, and you have to guess from the tiny unlabeled animated thumbnails that the options are supposed to represent different “gender expressions”.

When I started over after selecting the feminish option, my request for young women produced images of old women, middle-aged women, horse-faced women, badly-racially-stereotyped women, only-mildly-trans women, etc, all with poorly-composited hair and plastic cat-ears.

When I tried to be more specific, prompting “a pretty young red-haired woman with freckles and cat ears, smiling at the viewer”, it was rejected with “Language not supported” (not censored, just not understood). I had to delete clauses one at a time and retry to discover that it couldn’t parse the word “red-haired”; I had to change it to “with red hair”. This suggests that in addition to being heavily censored, the tokenizer is crude and obsolete.

The first image didn’t have freckles, the next one had the pox, then gray streaks and wrinkles, then a man with a wig, then one that was young and could have been cute if drawn better, then one that was pushing fifty, then a housewife with a bright-orange dye job, then an asian brunette with a few red streaks, then another man with a wig, etc, etc. Trying an assortment of age-related incantations did not reliably affect the output.

This was the best that Applint gave me:

I’ve enjoyed playing with other image-generators, but not only does this one have censor-happy guardrails, the results are both woke and crappy. There was just nothing to suggest that it will get better at generating images any time soon.

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