PyPI: litellm compromised

Thoroughly hacked. Detected on the same day, fortunately, but if it got pulled in as a dependency for something you run:

Assume any credentials present on the affected machine are compromised: SSH keys, cloud provider credentials (GCP ADC, AWS access keys, Azure tokens), Kubernetes configs, API keys in .env files, and database passwords.

Crunchyroll announces one show I might watch

plus some others.

Fridge waterfail

So, turning the fridge off for 12 hours solved the temperature problem, but it also somehow broke the seal on the water filter for the ice maker and water dispenser, so that when I went to fill the kettle, the filter leaked as much water as it passed, and since it’s located directly above the top shelf, the water went everywhere.

Once I finished cleaning up and reseated the filter, it stopped dispensing water at all, with the status screen (finally) showing LEAK and refusing to dispense water. Replaced the filter, no change; power-cycled the fridge, and the message changed to ERR. No water.

So I guess there’s going to be a service call after all.

Dark patterns

Network Solutions continues to spam me daily after buying my email provider. I click the Unsubscribe link. It takes me to a page with a checkmark for that specific type of spam (only), and a submit button.

The box is pre-checked. Clicking submit keeps me on that mailing list.

Before making the service call for my way-too-cold fridge, I emptied everything into coolers, powered it off, and waited 12 hours for it to come to room temperature.

Seems to have solved the problem, but I’ll definitely spot-check it for a while. It never hurts to have thermometers in both the fridge and freezer compartments, and my old ones didn’t record high/low range, so I threw a new set into my latest Amazon order.

I can’t even muster up a shocked face…

Crunchyroll major security breach:

“Crunchyroll may be facing a security breach through its ticketing system, which is outsourced through Telus in India”

Space Merc & Harem

Coming in the fall, and pretty much every episode unless they tone it down a lot. Our Hero gets isekai’d into his favorite space game with his OP custom ship, and quickly makes a name for himself as a first-rank mercenary and horndog. The teaser trailer gives a decent look at Mimi and Elma, the first two haremettes.

I’ve been enjoying the light novels, so I hope this gets handled competently. Our Hero Hiro’s voice actor is perhaps best known for Benimaru in Slime, first gal was the lead in Emotionless Robo Waifu, second gal has had mostly small roles, and Our Hot Blonde Ally is best known to me as Class Rep in Loner Harem, although some might recognize her as a certain Princess who deals with “torture”. The director has done some porn OAVs as well as a lot of individual episodes of various shows. Animation production by the studio who did Hoe Harem and the awkwardly-named She Professed Herself Pupil Of The Wise Man; they do have a lot of CGI experience, at least, and they’re gonna need it for this one.

(picture is unrelated. pity)

Figure Facts

That Haruhi-bunny pic I posted recently? I’d unpacked it just before taking the picture, and it wasn’t until I went to put it on a shelf that I realized she’s wearing fishnet seamed stockings. Made of fabric. Somewhere out there, a factory worker had to go to the trouble of actually pulling on her stockings before boxing her up.

Low temperature yesterday: 19°F.

High temperature Sunday: 78°F.

Solo Leveling manga tease

The recent volumes of the SL manga have been labeled “side stories”, and are the bridge between the original series and the sequel, Ragnarok. They include snapshots of Our Hero’s post-victory life, but also a brief glimpse of A Brighter Future.

I’m referring to Best Girl Esil, of course.

Wokalizing Gushing 2?

There are reports that the translation for the upcoming second season of Molesting Magical Girls will be done by one of the opinionated woke localizers who’s been butchering other series. Really hope that doesn’t happen; season 1 exceeded all rational expectations.

Summer: Retired Soldier With Horny Waifu

I read enough of the source material to recognize all the characters in the trailer, and while he definitely acquires a white-haired dark-skinned teenage oni waifu, there’s a touch of bait-and-switch in the setup, as the story gradually adds past events that make him more and more important. I mean, his feats in the present were enough to win the girl, and what more can a man ask for?

(unrelated Best Horny Waifu… and Other Best Horny Waifu)

Workday failed to pass the buck

They argued that the hiring discrimination they got caught doing for their corporate clients was just “the algorithm”. A federal judge just called bullshit and said they’re on the hook for illegal discrimination against protected classes (in this specific case, over-40 applicants).

Given that I’m one of the many applicants who would apply on a Friday evening and be rejected before sunrise on Saturday, I hope this decision holds up and eventually restores some slight sanity to the job market.

Also, cancel all H1B visas and eliminate the program. It’s a clear case of regulatory capture, overwhelmingly benefiting Indian nationals at the expense of American citizens.

(I suspect that eliminating H1B would also end the careers of a lot of Indian execs and senior managers, far too many of whom are reported to be taking kickbacks from their visa-hostage workers)

Learn from my fail!

Something that I hadn’t seen on previous trips to Japan is places advertising curry as カリー (“karii”). The more common romanization カ レー (“karei”) is used for Japanese-style curry, which outside of restaurants is generally made with solid blocks of commercial roux; I can usually find Vermont or S&B blocks at US groceries.

The other is for Indian-style curry, which is not what I want to eat when in Japan. Actually, not a big fan of it anywhere, although I will usually order curry in Thai restaurants.

My plan for this weekend is to make a relatively thick Japanese-style curry with finely-chopped ingredients and bake it into my dinner-roll recipe, using the technique from Alton Brown’s recent sloppy joe bun video. I’m in the habit of buying curry bread at Japanese bakeries, but those are usually deep-fried, and most of the ones I had this trip had too-flaky crusts that made terrible hand-held food.

Illegal Truckers Of The Amazon

While driving to Chicago for the flight to Japan with my sister, I passed a jackknifed semi carrying an Amazon trailer, which had failed to navigate a quite generous highway onramp in broad daylight in good weather. In the distance, I could see the Amazon warehouse it had just left.

Given what we’re (finally) hearing about grossly unqualified illegals getting commercial drivers licenses and “operating” big rigs with no qualifications and no ability to understand English, and Amazon’s notorious cheapness, I strongly suspect that the notable increase in broken delivery promises is directly tied to shipments being scattered across the landscape when their “drivers” crash.

In other news, the item that was promised for same-day delivery on Tuesday by 10 PM was last seen on the other side of the state on Tuesday at 4:15 PM, and no longer has an estimated delivery date.

Interestingly, this is one where I don’t have to wait a week to cancel, and in theory, I could do so and reorder the product with the promise of next-day delivery…

(Frieren 2 episode 6 was delayed a week…)

Still not outta snow, eh?

At least I’m not getting what NYC is getting. I’ve had enough of real snow shoveling for the year.

Ei-en Flux

I’m taking a sterile laptop with me to Japan, with all my credentials securely stored in 1Password and just enough of my usual environment that I could do things like, y’know, blog if I wanted to. Or sign up for a free trial of Amazon Prime in order to buy things they won’t ship internationally.

Note: Amazon’s adult-goods hider is really annoying: if at any time in a session your VPN drops, visiting a single Amazon Japan URL will detect this and flag you as outside Japan, so you can no longer see any “sensitive” products, and searches will come up empty without explanation, making it look like actresses, models, and entire categories of products simply do not exist. I had to log out and back in to reset it. The reverse is also apparently true, so that briefly opening a VPN while in Japan will flag you as a dirty foreigner and pretend that K-cups are only for coffee…

Anyway, I decided to make some fresh safe-for-airline-security wallpaper for the travel laptop.

I used an LLM to generate a list of scenic locations in Japan, and added a list of artists and styles that someone else generated with an LLM. I ran the combination through my dynamic-prompts randomizer, then fed just the random scenes through another LLM for enhancement (better results than feeding the style and location through in one pass), then fed the completed prompts through an LLM instructed to just perform cleanup and QA.

Then I ran the batches through Flux.2-Dev and did a quick pass to eliminate the terrible and the goofy. That produced about 550 images that were good enough to look at for 5-10 seconds. For blogging purposes, I deathmatched it down to a more sensible list. Size is a modest 1440x900, since Flux2 is almost too big to run on an RTX 4090.

more...

Went to look at the weather forecasts for Chicago, since I’ll be visiting my sister there soon. Based on the past several weeks, my primary concern was snow and ice on the drive over. Instead, they’re promising warm dry weather with high winds and a chance of firestorms.

Guess I’d better pack a water type…

A village is missing their idiot…

Ilya Somin is perhaps the most reliably wrong commentator in what can laughably be called the “libertarian” gang at Reason, but this one takes it to a new level:

“If, as Musk says, the U.S. was all about English/Scots-Irish culture, there would have been no need for the American Revolution. The British Empire was dominated by those groups.”

Jaw-dropping ignorance from someone who claims the authority to lecture on law and liberty.

Apple, on the other hand, has plenty of them

Years ago, someone at Apple broke the keyboard shortcuts for switching between windows in Terminal.app. My suspicion has been that it had something to do with adding tab support and setting the app to default to using those shortcuts for tab-switching by default.

Someone finally filed a bug with a simple, clear repeat-by: hide the app. That’s it. Hide the windows just once, and they all lose their shortcuts. And I’m sure that the tiny handful of QA testers left for MacOS have never tested non-default behaviors.

In which Frieren does the meme, and then gets sentenced to 300 years hard labor.

I’m guessing there’s an AI behind this…

Dear Apple,

A while back I bought the recently-updated AirPods 3 Pro. They worked fine with my phone, tablet, and laptop, but Apple’s “find my” service couldn’t see them. At the time, the explanation was that I hadn’t yet upgraded my devices to the “Liquid Ass” OS v26. Since I wasn’t traveling much (indeed, I often don’t leave the house for days, especially the way this winter has been going…), I didn’t worry about it.

Now that they have a mostly working 26.3 release, and they’ve added back some of the legibility that was abandoned in the pursuit of random UI restyling, I updated my phone and tablet (not the Mac; that needs to work). To no surprise, the AirPods did not magically start working correctly in “find my”; they were detected, but it insisted that setup was incomplete and they could not be located.

Clicking on the error message took me to a support page, where none of this worked. At all. There’s yet another screen where you have to completely disassociate the device from your Apple account and then reconnect.

(flux2 is a lot slower and more memory-intensive than Z-Image Turbo, but it’s better at text, styles, and prompt following; there’s a lot I can’t do with it because my graphics card only has 24 GB of VRAM, but for simple one-off pics without refining, upscaling, or multi-image editing, it’s great; I’m thinking about setting up SwarmUI on Runpod with a better card, for the times when I want precise prompting)

Amazon Japan gets clean

Unless you have an active VPN connection with Japanese servers, you can no longer view adult books and videos on Amazon Japan. Searches pretend there’s nothing there, and direct links to products throw up an error page as if the page doesn’t exist. Items in wishlists appear normally with their title and picture, but you can’t click on them or move them to your cart.

(the accurately-rendered poster titles come from the collection of dirty-book covers I acquired some years back as part of my collage-wallpaper project)

How to spot the hero in a harem anime…

If you’re cold, they’re cold…

Saki is politely baffled

Eight years ago, I blogged this picture:

This week, it appeared on xTwitter again in a new context, and she linked to it, asking “WTF?”.

A number of people made an attempt to unpack the layers of bullshit, but I don’t think they were successful. What I found most interesting about wading through it all was that not a single person ever brought up the little joke she was making in the original picture. They were too busy grinding axes for one side or the other.

Perspective, forced

Choose wisely

(pity they all look like mass-produced emotionless fembots fresh off the assembly line…)

“Go Fish yourself”

(not sure how I feel about someone hijacking the Amelia meme to build their social-media engagement; at least it’s not some Leftist weenie trying to subvert it)

Not every baffling picture is AI…

(amusingly, when I used several edit models to try to restore and colorize this photo, they all gave Godzilla a dog head unless I specifically called it out as “a picture of Godzilla”; so, yeah, beware invented details in “AI-enhanced” photos)

Days Of Future Past

「記憶を残したまま小学生（何年生でもいい）に戻れる」

My translation:

(had to go all the way up to Flux.2-Dev to get the text to render accurately, which took 3 minutes to render; Klein and Qwen Image Edit’s text rendering ranged from “passable with terrible spelling” to “complete gibberish inked in a random font”)

I knocked together a quick prompt based on the Last Rose of Albion version.

Original Amelia wore a darker jacket:

After my earlier text-rendering adventures, it didn’t surprise me that Z-Image Turbo couldn’t render “whoso” (whoro, whojo, whoyo, whobo, …), but I was annoyed that it kept changing “hammer” to “hommer”, and I could see it start off right and then mis-correct it; also, more often than not, the sword was not in the stone.

The new hotness is rendering with ZIT and then doing style edits with Flux.2 Klein; this is easy to set up in SwarmUI thanks to Juan’s Base2Edit extension. Same pic, with style set to “colored-pencil sketch with precise linework”: