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.

Boxxo Or Bust 2, last two episodes

I never felt motivated to watch last week’s grimdark horseshit episode, but I might as well embrace the sunk-cost fallacy and get to the end. Here goes…

Shoe Fetishist acquired his peculiar hobby because he was looking for the boots that turned up as the prize in the recent competition. He’d bought them for his childhood friend and adventuring partner, only to wake up after losing a fight to find her mutilated corpse, with legs and boots missing. Yeah, that’s a great story that fits right in with slapstick comedy and lighthearted cheesecake.

Naturally they find the villain responsible without any difficulty, and he and his pals come right out and confess while twirling their metaphorical Snidely Whiplash mustaches. It’s “not well written”.

Basically both episodes are full of near-constant whiplash and expository lumps, right up to the final post-credits scene in which they announce that they’ll continue telling the wrong story in a future season.

Verdict: yeah, no; the people responsible for this mess don’t deserve any eyeballs for another season.

Speaking of ‘bust’,

Miri Hanai in a cowkini:

Tag-a-licious

One thing that’s annoyed me with my blog is that I gave up manually tagging posts with keywords several thousand posts ago, and now I sometimes have trouble finding the quote or reference I’m looking for. So I’m letting an LLM chew on the problem. Specifically, seed-oss-36b, which has been doing a bang-up job inventing color-coordinated cheesecake pin-up costumes and poses, without the annoying wokescold moralization that Google and OpenAI’s offline models ram past your tonsils and gag you with just for using the word “sexy”.

The code is trivial; all the fun is in the system prompt and the user prompt:

Examining the “reasoning”, it clearly separates the TOML metadata header from the body content and parses both as requested, and creates output in the correct format. I don’t necessarily want to use all the tags, but by writing them out to a separate file for each blog post, I can go through with another script and pull out the most common and the most distinctive tags.

When it finishes. Which at ~2 minutes/post on the Mac Mini is going to take about a week. The 4090 would be faster… if the model fit. 20GB on a 24GB card is a bit tight.

Tagged ‘delicious’

Let’s see what sort of poses and costumes seed-oss-36B has been giving me to use in my wildcards. I started out at the usual 1024x1600 resolution, but since I’m making pin-ups, I quickly switched to a Playboy-centerfold aspect ratio at 896x1920.

But not before it fabricated a waifu pic I found so tasty that I not only ran it through the refiner and upscaler, I then ran it through the commercial Topaz Photo AI tool for even more cleanup and a 4x upscale (that did not run me out of memory!), bringing the final result to a silly-resolution 9216x14400.

I might even print her out as a real poster; she could hang on the not-Zoom-visible wall in my office:

(10 megapixels, 132 megapixels)

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Call Of The Night 2, episode 11

Well, something just happened. With one episode to go, they really can’t deeply explore this new development, but at least everyone will live to see another Night.

Verdict: plot, with occasional animation. You know the conflict is over when they drop last season’s OP song into the mix.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 9

Our Mighty Tsuntail is back! Only in a supportive supporting-character kind of way for now, but this is a combination “must get stronger” and “everything’s better with friends” episode, in which Our Monstering Hero reconnects with his comrades and his childhood crush, while the world goes mad with the results of Naughty Number Nine’s latest efforts.

Dungeon Chibis rewatch

Crush-chan is less annoying the second time through. Naginata Gal is Best Girl by a huge margin. If new seasons keep sucking, I’ll be doing a lot of rewatches like this for a while.

Speaking of which, the three seasons of Dog Days never got a US Bluray release, but subbed Bluray rips are still torrentable. This is another show where everyone involved clearly loved what they were making.

(“pet me, you stupid hero”)

There would need to be explanations…

…if these showed up in the background of a Zoom meeting:

My office just got bigger

The one at home, that is, which was overcrowded with the old Ikea 31-inch-deep tables I brought from my old place and finally replaced. I didn’t use them as desks in my California house, but the desk set I had there went to Goodwill instead of onto the truck, so the tables were pressed into service.

I hate to just hand out a “that’s what she said” opportunity, but it’s amazing the difference seven inches makes. The room just feels so much bigger with 24-inch-deep tables. Also Ikea, but the tops are solid bamboo plywood instead of the old veneer-over-particle-board. They’re also 7 inches longer than the old tables, so there’s more room to fit between the legs. (coughcough)

I also picked up two bamboo side tables (1, 2) for a printer stand and a spare workspace. All of it had typical Ikea assembly hardware, but the bamboo is head-and-shoulders above their usual construction material. Pity they didn’t have the matching bamboo monitor stand in stock, because I’d have bought two of those to free up even more desk space.

Sadly,

My M2 MacBook Air simply does not support 2 external monitors at once. Can’t be done without buying a DisplayLink adapter and installing their software driver (remember DisplayLink? Turns out that’s still a thing). So I can either use the really nice dual HDR portable monitors as one display with a 1-inch gap in the middle, or move them over to the M4 Mini. Since I want the HDR displays for photo editing, that means moving all my photo archives and workflows over sooner rather than later, but not today; between emptying the office, scrubbing it floor to ceiling, hanging pictures, assembling furniture, and moving everything back last night, I’m just a tiny bit tired and sore.

The day Google AI Overview actually worked

I feel it necessary to call this out, because it’s been wrong so many times that I usually automatically scroll past it. I only read it today because it was 6:30 AM and I hadn’t had any caffeine yet.

Anyway, after upgrading to MacOS “Sequoia” recently, I discovered the annoying new system-wide Ctrl-Enter keyboard shortcut. Because my fingers have decades of training in Emacs keybindings in the shell, I often repeat the previous command by hitting “Ctrl-P, Enter”, but my pinky often stays on the Ctrl key. Now Ctrl-Enter pops up a “contextual menu” everywhere, unless you disable it in Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard -> “Show Contextual Menu”.

I was astonished that Google actually gave me a correct answer for once. Shame they didn’t credit the web site they stole it from.

(actually, everything on this particular panel should be disabled, IMHO, and quite a few others as well)

Qwen Image LoRAs not ripe yet

I’ve yet to find one that works as advertised. Either they visibly degrade image quality, or they just do… nothing at all.

My Cyber Princess Waifu continues to amuse, though.

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So it turns out that not only does conflict build character, but it works the other way around, too. The Power Of Friendship wins the trial, and in the process we get a pretty-well-incorporated flashback that fills in some more details on Our Mighty Tsuntail’s mom. Pity she wasn’t there for it, but at least she shows up for a minute or two, continuing the offscreen path of “I must get stronger”.

Verdict: if this weren’t so good, I’d really hate the trope abuse.

(“🎶 1. cut a hole in a box 🎶”; unrelated, of course)

Power sucks

My MacBook Air is running out of power while plugged in, despite not even being warm to the touch. The Anker dock, on the other hand, is blistering hot. The CPU is barely ticking over, and Apple’s battery monitor even claims “No Apps Using Significant Energy”.

The culprit, of course, is “AI”. I’ve got LM Studio running a prompt-enhancement prompt with qwen2.5-7b-instruct, taking the output of my dynamic-prompt-generation script and improving it (which it’s actually pretty good at). I had to find the much-higher-wattage original Apple charger, which I’ve never needed to use before. It turns out there’s an “energy impact” field reported in Activity Monitor, but it doesn’t charge GPU/NPU usage to the correct app.

Apple’s so excited about moving fast and breaking things with “AI” that they can’t spare the engineering talent to update their tools to even report how much power LLMs are using on their products.

In fact, when you sort Activity Monitor by “energy impact”, LM Studio is at the top despite having a “score” that’s less than 10% of what Activity Monitor claims for itself. The only field that seems to be honest is “12 hr power”, which puts LM Studio an order of magnitude above the rest. But only because it’s been running for several hours, sigh.

(like an iceberg (or “Apple Intelligence”), 90% of Froppy is underwater…)

More “stimulating” covers…

“We want YOU to join the Star League!”

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