Show, don't tell
Magilumiere 2, fin
Opened with a recap of the premise of the series? Check.
Replayed the last minute or two of the previous episode? Check.
Threw in a quick flashback to explain the real plan? Check.
Sudden crisis of confidence taking Our Emotionless Magical Hottie out of the game at a critical moment? Check.
With a lengthy flashback to her childhood trauma? Check.
Saved by the power of friendship and shared childhood anime? Check.
Honestly, the one thing I wasn’t expecting was Our Entire Magical Gal Gang suddenly adopting a Vividred Operation-style combat climax moment (without the crotch shots).
Verdict: pacing and storytelling were not their strengths this season, with way too many lengthy flashbacks deliberately interrupting dramatic moments. The final girl-bonding rescue-kitten triumph was fine, but would have had more emotional impact if the buildup to it hadn’t been broken up across so many episodes.
(wrong magical girl, I know)
Wild Last Boss 2, episode 1
The recap is limited to 2 minutes, and takes the place of the opening credits, which is a blessing. After that, the story picks up where it left off, with the primary flaw being that it’s mostly panned stills. Well-drawn stills, but they don’t spend a lot of budget this week until they get to the new bikini villain, who gets a reference-heavy CGI space battleship fight.
Verdict: promising to be as fun as last season.
(no new fan-art, and I already used most of the old stuff, so here’s a completely unrelated pic of Chiharu-chan’s Keyboard Cleaning Service)
The saga continues…
(space princess is unrelated; I’m tinkering with another series of book covers, this time with a retro-sf style; the tentative series title is Star Angels Detective Agency)
Dupe De Dupes
LLM creativity is often limited to MadLibs-style template substitution, so asking for N unique things often produces results that aren’t byte-for-byte identical, but so similar they might as well be. So I iterated on the problem with an LLM (possibly Google’s search, which can sometimes write working Python on the third try), and came up with a script that performs well at scales up to ~100,000 lines, which is more than I need for this task.
Essentially, I used a small LLM trained on sentence structure to vectorize each line in the file and then locate clusters of similar items in vector space. Saving each stage of the process as JSON allowed me to debug it and tune the cutoff so that it didn’t decide that every MadLibs string was the same. Because even good prompts are a lot more similar than normal prose paragraphs.
All the work was done by the people who wrote the Python libraries and the example code that was scraped by the AI to glue them together. I just cleaned up the results and added real CLI support. If I had a lot of really large prompt files to dedupe (like Juan’s huge prompt datasets), I’d have to throw it at Claude to add support for storing the vectors in a real DB (and run it on a machine with a proper GPU).
Dear Powerline,
Your ad network is completely blocking the ability to read your site if any form of ad-blocking is detected, even false positives, repeatedly throwing up a browser modal dialog box that can even prevent someone from navigating to another site in some browsers.
The solution is to block Javascript on your site. This is probably not what you wanted.
Dear Amazon,
What is this for?
Seriously, what’s in it for me? Even setting aside the awkward phrasing of “my usuals” and “on deal”, how do I actually benefit from having an “agent” (cron job) periodically add things to my cart and hit me up with random notifications? Your recommendation system keeps pitching me toys for autistic toddlers and Oprah-recommended books, and I’m supposed to believe you know what I want to buy?
This is on top of the way you’ve broken your search engine with LLMs. Seriously I just searched my order history for “Karres”, as in the James Schmitz novel and the inferior pastiches assembled under the heavy hand of Eric Flint. What was the first item in the search results?
“Potable Aqua Water Purification Tablets”
Picture Is Unrelated
I just feel like there’s a story here…
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