[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.

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