This week, Thicc Girls goes double platinum. Can’t wait for the world tour. Poor Imari really got thrown in the deep end, though; “Oh, we’re not panning in the river today, we’re taking these boulders to the mountains!”

Alya Sometimes Hides The Salami: In Russian

New explicit video from Maplestar. (there are some known errors in this version that will be fixed soon; none of them affect the “thrust” of the story…)

(Patreon link to full video)

(he gets her in the end; also, she gets him in the end)

Windsurf goin’ down

Yesterday’s attempts at app enhancement foundered on the rocks of “Model provider unreachable”. It still charged me “credits” for trying, but didn’t do anything. This would be annoying if these weren’t free trial credits, but it still brings me closer to running out. Pro tip: don’t keep trying when you hit this error…

Dropping from the preview of Sonnet 4.5 to standard Sonnet 4 might have reduced its “intelligence” a bit, but had the advantage of actually running. I hadn’t switched to 4.5 anyway; it did that for me to promote the new one, charging less credits to do… less.

Today’s original-requirement-finally-implemented is all-day events. I think I have just enough credits left in my trial to add a user-prefs page with defaults and password changes (“using best practices for security”), session cookies (“using best practices for security”), and deep-copying an existing project into a new one.

Once I run out of credits, then I decide if it’s worth $15/month to throw more of my dusty old projects at it. Alternatively, since Windsurf is mostly just a custom VS Code skin connecting to third-party models (with some secret sauce in the system prompts and context handling), and it’s been suggesting the Claude Sonnet models, I could download VS Code and the Claude extension and pay them directly, since I’ve gotten good creative results from the free level of Claude.

It also appears that you can run Claude’s coding assistant inside a Docker container and just export your repo directory into it, allowing it to run commands on a completely virtualized environment without network access to anything but their LLM API (once it downloads its CLI tool, which of course is written in node.js, sigh).

(Will I release the final project? Sure, why not; it’s not like I wrote it…)

It’s always surprising when they mention that Ruri’s in high school, since she often behaves like a much-younger girl. This week, they add a reminder in the form of a classmate who can stack up next to Our College Gals. Also a future partner-in-rock-crime who’s slowly being nudged in front of the camera.

The mineral-of-the-week is itty-bitty little grains of sapphire, slowly being traced up-river by tedious visual inspection of individual grains of sand. My back hurts just looking at Ruri leaning over a microscope; there’s a reason professors pawn this sort of work off on grad students, and that Nagi pawns it off on Ruri…

Honestly,

I expected more from Ai Shinozaki’s first tentacle video.

Lost in translation: Isekai Twink In Butchland

Seven Seas has announced new translated manga titles, including Let’s Run an Inn on Dungeon Island! (In a World Ruled by Women). This is softcore porn featuring a runty little guy who gets transported to a world where big buff women dominate, and as they wash up on his deserted island, he alternately bangs them silly and endures cliché role-reversed sexual harassment. Alternate title: Cocksman of Reverse-Gor. Of course he also has OP cheat magic.

New toy: Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-310

I haven’t owned an honest-to-Ansel photo printer in a very long time. I had one of the original 4x6 HP PhotoSmart printers with the lickable ink, and I had a rather finicky dye-sub printer for a while, but both were back when I was shooting on film and scanning slides with a color-unmanaged SCSI Nikon scanner that had an unreliable automatic slide feeder, which would be 20+ years ago.

It’s been on my mind for a while now, and the cleanup of my office made room for one, but I managed to talk myself out of buying a big one, settling for Canon’s A3+ (13” x 19”) model. Mostly because of sticker shock over the cost of ink cartridges for the A2/B3 PRO-1100.

Color management has come a long way over the past 20 years, to the point that every print I’ve tried has come out exactly as expected, including my genai gals and memes. And the ecosystem around fine-art printers is stable, with third-party paper companies publishing ICC color profiles that smoothly integrate into the workflow, so that you can pretty much just click “print”.

The only significant advance in framing technology, on the other hand, is the widespread availability of non-reflective coated glass at framing shops. You’ll still get a lot of glare on premade frames, but if you can afford professional framing, your stuff will be a lot more viewable.

Heartbreakingly expensive, though. Even with the fortunately-timed 70%-off sale at Michaels, my last framing batch was the size of a mortgage payment. Filled up a lot of wall space, but still not something to do lightly.

If I stick to commodity gallery-style frames in standard sizes, the PRO-310 will pay for itself, the ink, and the paper by filling just one wall of my living room with my Japan pics. The only trick is that for many common frame sizes, I need to print multiple images on one sheet of paper and cut them apart with a rotary trimmer, but I have one of those, and Canon’s software allows you to save custom multi-image print layouts and quickly drag images into them.

(and, yes, I printed Red Waifu)

Wallpaper Waifus

Speaking of which, I made a batch of 500 retro-SF dynamically-prompted pin-up gals in 9x16 aspect ratio to serve as rotating wallpaper on the vertical monitor, then deathmatched them down to 18, and while one poor gal spontaneously grew an extra finger during the refine/upscale process, it should be fixable with a bit of variation seeding. Later; at 33 minutes/image to refine and upscale, I’m done for the day.

I usually just post full-sized images and let the browser scale them down, but 18 2160x3888 images is a lot of mumbly-pixels, even lazy-loading them, so click the preview images to see the big ones (no, not Nagi).

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Our second adult fan-service provider has entered the show in the form of a busty underrim-glasses-wearing bookworm, Imari. Could this show get any better? Well, yes, but jello-wrestling probably isn’t on the schedule.

This week, everyone falls in a hole in order to stumble across the Mineral Of The Week. Nagi is not only the voice of reason, but also the voice of A Proper Mentor, getting Imari out of her comfort zone and advancing her career path.

Verdict: thicc is apparently justice.

Windsurf stays on my mind…

My deathmatch project was quite small and self-contained, and even offline LLMs were able to wrap their tiny little “minds” around it, more or less. For my next attempt, I used the free trial of Windsurf to build something more elaborate: a vacation planner that mixes the categorized lists of Trello with the easy drag-and-drop of the Planyway plugin. That is, jettison all the other crap in both apps, and just have a bunch of events that can easily be moved around both between days and within days, so you can lay out an itinerary for the day and quickly update it on the fly. The real bonus is getting timezones right, which Trello still doesn’t do; it always edits and displays events in the web browser’s local time zone.

This time the experience wasn’t so smooth. I’m a dozen passes in, and it’s deferred the implementation of all of the drag-and-drop features because that’s apparently hard. The basic framework is there, but despite being part of the original specs, a fair number of features required multiple attempts to implement at all, much less correctly. Timezone issues required multiple screenshot uploads with detailed explanations. On the bright side, the screenshots and explanations actually worked.

In other words, it required a very detailed set of specifications, didn’t implement all of them, and would never have made any progress at all without extensive human testing and debugging experience. Even though this is still a tiny application (~1,000 lines of Python, ~1,000 lines of Javascript, and ~800 lines of HTML/CSS), it couldn’t be “vibed”.

Interesting note: it never occurred to the LLM that the color used to display text on a colored background mattered. I had to invoke the magic words “best practices for accessibility” to restrict the background color palette, and “strongly contrasting color” to ensure legibility. It then used actual Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I’d required best practices for security and authentication, but did not add the same wording to each other section of the specs…

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)

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.

[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.

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.

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…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.