Remember that three-week-old order that was never shipped? Yeah, USPS reports that it still hasn’t shipped, and while Amazon’s fully-automated and AI-degraded customer support “chat” system believes the data that’s in the system, it was finally willing to process a refund Friday… over the next 24 hours or so. So they’ve had my money for most of a month, which if you multiply it by the number of unhappy customers who were fucked over for the holidays, adds up to a tidy sum.

Perhaps it’s just more profitable than “shipping goods to customers”.

(and, yes, literal peanuts were involved; from the other recent negative reviews of the marketplace dealer, it looks like “Virginia Diner” took December off)

(as a special bonus, I had to manually search for it on the order page, because the pretense that it had “shipped” (which is an obvious misinterpretation of the USPS status code) kept it from appearing in the convenient “Not Yet Shipped” tab, and absent any action on my part, it would eventually just end up at the end of my order history…)

Chinese fabrication

Speaking of Amazon, I bought an espresso tamping station, and it arrived Friday. Take a good look at the pictures, and you’ll see that there are no photographs of the product. They’re all 3D renders with composited accessories. The wood frame was fine, but even with rubber feet on the bottom it didn’t sit quite level, and more importantly, the black acrylic insert was CNC’d ever-so-slightly oversized for the CNC’d wood.

So the worker simply slathered the bottom with glue and pounded it into place, which lasted long enough to get it into the box and ship it. Looking at the reviews, I’m not the only one who discovered this quality workmanship when the glue failed and the center of the insert bent up. I sanded down the edges until it fit, then used gap-filling superglue and a bunch of woodworking clamps to reattach it.

So, good design (swiped from another company), shoddy assembly, and zero QA. I’d have bought a better one for twice the price, but this was the only one that would arrive by this weekend…

(it was surprisingly difficult to get ZIT to grasp the concept of “pounding a square peg into a round hole”; if it made the peg at all, it was almost always undersized, and at least half the time the hammer was held upright, pounding with the base of the grip)

Random test image

As I’ve added functionality to my SwarmUI cli, it’s gotten kind of crufty. In particular, I had two different methods of creating images in JPG format: server-side during generation, and client-side batch conversion. The problem with the first one is that I also added client-side cropping and unsharp-masking, which added more compression artifacts.

So I gathered up the code for cropping, resizing, sharpening, and format conversion, abstracted them into a “process” class that applied them in a well-defined order, and set the server to always generate PNG. Took a while to get everything working, but it makes it possible to clean up the code and make all the processing options available to multiple sub-commands.

(I needed a quick regression-test image to confirm that everything worked, so I used the very simple prompt “a catgirl”. Most of the time this produces a dull photograph of a girl with cat-ears, but this one time the model hit it out of the park)

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