(Answer: currently in New Orleans)

The best part of the World Cup (well, only part, really) is watching Europeans gaze in awe at the America we take for granted.

From shouty Appraiser to shouty Maid

The trailer for Isekai Saint Maid, from the same original author as Shouty Appraiser, is quite shouty.

There’s a lot of experienced voice talent in the cast, which is promising. Our Mighty Magical Maid was recently indoors-y rock-jock Imari, for instance. First-time director, though, and the series composition is by the person responsible for both Log Horizon and Metallic Rouge, which means it could go either way.

“What is it now?”

Homebrew just switched the behavior of “brew upgrade” to include:

Do you want to proceed with the upgrade? [y/n]

Yes, you fucking dolt, that’s why I typed “brew upgrade” after typing “brew update”. Given that they added a bunch of emoji to the output a while back, I suspect they’re into vibe-coding, which is not what I want to see in my package manager, especially given all the recent high-profile supply-chain attacks.

(turning this off requires setting a new HOMEBREW_NO_ASK environment variable)

I was in Buc-ee’s last night and found the 2024 Betty Crocker Found Recipes cookbook, promising “beloved vintage recipes worth sharing”, with a blurb saying they’d been selected from over a century of American favorites, “found in the Betty Crocker archives, dusted off and so delicious you’ll love them on today’s table”.

I opened it to a random page.

The recipe was from 1997.

“Vintage”.

Claude Envy

Windsurf just changed its name to Devin.

An overused trope has been distilled down to its bare essence, with the announcement of an anime version of 「え、社内システム全てワンオ ペしている私を解雇ですか？」= “What, you’re firing me, the person who single-handedly manages the company’s internal systems?”. Short-name is ワンオペ解雇 = “wan-ope kaiko” = one-person operation + dismissal.

I’ve been convinced for quite a while that this real-life experience is the origin of the “kicked out of the hero party” genre.

In other news,

For those of you interested/worried, the fines will be karyo (過料) not karyo (科料).
(Law in Japan explains the new ¥2000 littering fine in Shibuya)

So, same pronunciation, different kanji, and the first one is just a fine while the second is a criminal charge. Given the lack of trash cans in public in Japan (mostly removed after a terrorist attack in the Nineties), it’s an important distinction.

(picture is unrelated but has been gathering dust so long that it’s no longer available on Pixiv…)

Texting a GenAI Gal

Edit-capable image-generation models solve a lot of problems; the early ones tended to change unrelated parts of the image way too much, but things have improved a lot. The various Flux.2 models do a good job at adding text, removing backgrounds, etc, and the paid models can do a lot more. Like “take this painting of dogs playing poker, replace the dog on the left with the character extracted from this French poster, replace the dog on the right with the guy from this painting, replace the dog in the middle with this picture of my sister in a renaissance dress, replace the remaining dogs with penguins, and render the result at 4K”. We’re still tinkering with the details, but Nano Banana Pro (via the Runpod public endpoints API) did the right thing on the first try, flipping the characters around and changing their poses to seat them at the table.

Adding the text to this was trivial by comparison, and took Flux.2-Klein-9B a few seconds:

(I’ve pretty much given up on doing nudity with Flux-based models; it can, on rare occasions, produce plausible bare breasts, but it mostly doesn’t, and none of the available LoRAs and customized models I’ve tried has done more good than harm)

…that most image-generation models have no idea what spin-the-bottle looks like, and neither do prompt-enhancing LLMs. Not even just the part about spinning a bottle.

Jumping under the bandwagon…

I still haven’t done anything with GenAI video, but I finally broke down and made a song using my parody lyrics. The tune and rhythm aren’t anywhere close to the original song, of course, but this was a lot closer than the first eight attempts (several of which were wasted by having to phonetically spell certain words).

[Update: okay, this one is better, at least for pronunciations.]

(Grandpa Snazzy is unrelated, and cleaned up surprisingly well, given that I used Flux.2-Dev to restore and upscale him based on a PDF scanned from a 1932 Ecuadorian art/culture newspaper)

Today’s illustrations are brought to you by “crossing the streams”. I used a vision model to extract categorized descriptions of the elements in ~5,000 pictures (roughly half GenAI, half Japanese cheesecake), then selected random lines from each category, ran them through a prompt enhancer, and fed them back into SwarmUI. Many of the results were “more chaotic” than usual…

The Register was not terribly helpful

So I’m reading an article about an actively-exploited Nginx security hole that’s apparently been around for many years (since version 0.6.27), and while they mention the CVE in the article, they don’t bother to link to it or even vaguely describe the exploit. Or mention the mitigation steps.

The workaround?

To mitigate this vulnerability, use named captures instead of
unnamed captures in rewrite definitions.  
For example, the following rewrite directive uses unnamed PCRE
capture groups, $1 and $2:  

rewrite ^/users/([0-9]+)/profile/(.*)$ /profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2 last;  

To mitigate this vulnerability for this example, replace $1 and $2
with the appropriate named captures, $user_id and $section:  

rewrite ^/users/(?<user_id>[0-9]+)/profile/(?<section>.*)$ /profile.php?id=$user_id&tab=$section last;

Unrelated,

Pizza Hut sued for requiring AI in stores.

Among its flaws is granting DoorDash drivers way too much info about the store’s internal operations, including orders other than the one they were sent to pick up. A popular trick is picking up one order, then waiting around in the parking lot because they knew other orders were coming out soon, with the result that the first order is delivered late and cold.

At least when I was working the ovens at Domino’s in the Eighties, we could smack a driver who tried to “optimize” his trips this way.

Cloud Save And Die

Something I’m seeing pop up on xTwitter recently is complaints from people whose Google/Microsoft/Apple accounts have been permanently closed because they turned on cloud backups. No explanation, no warning, no recourse. (example)

Why? Because your cloud storage is scanned for various categories of “objectionable” material, the (increasingly “AI-driven”) scanners are fallible, the process is fully automated, and the providers have no customer service to speak of.

Because these accounts are monolithic, you don’t just lose your cloud storage, you lose email, calendar, purchases (excuse me, “licenses”), etc. Not for sharing the detected material with anyone, simply for possessing it.

Several of the people complaining have been manga artists, and it’s easy to see how common material legally distributed in Japan could trigger an AI trained in California or China.

Inventory not found

Eric Raymond has whipped his captive AI into creating a new project that assembles the output of (almost) every package manager on your Unix/Linux system. It doesn’t do Python’s pip, however, apparently due to the simple fact that none of the pip tools will report the description of the package. To be fair, doing so looks something like this:

for i in $(find $(pip list -v --no-index --format=json 2>/dev/null | 
    jq -c -r '.[]|.location' | sort -u) -type f -name METADATA | sort) ; do
    echo $(TZ= stat -f %Sm -t %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ $i) \
        $(awk '/^Name:/{n=$2}/^Summary:/{$1=""; s=$0}END{print n,"pip",s}' $i |
        tr -d '\015')
done

(it ended up about 65 lines in Python, so I sent him a patch)

Oh, why not?

More random gals after the jump.

more...

On the bright side, the 24 hours of thunderstorms dropped the temperature by 15°F.

“Welcome to the party, pal!”

An announced feature in iOS 27 (which I thought was going to be the “stability-focused” release) is the ability to use the currently-laughable GenAI “Image Playground” app to make… wallpaper.

Ten bucks says it’ll suck until Apple finally buys somebody else’s image-generation app.

(the one time I tried this app, it absolutely refused to draw a catgirl; Apple’s just been phoning it in on AI and Siri since the beginning)

Speaking of wallpaper…

When I ask Klein to generate SF-ish wallpaper in widescreen format, around 10% of the time it reveals that its training material included a lot of watermarked screenshots and promo pics from games, including Korean and Chinese games.

So I use the base2edit SwarmUI extension, telling Klein to perform the following edits on every image: “Remove all watermarks, logos, and signatures from the bottom edge of the image. Remove all black borders from the edges of the image.” It seems to work pretty well.

I really need to run a large batch of cheesecake with “Remove all extra limbs. Add all missing limbs. Ensure each human hand with visible fingers has four fingers and a thumb on the correct side, and that each human foot with visible toes has five toes with the big toe on the correct side.”

Mostly to see if it actually works, or if it’s just one of those magic-feather things. 😁

(I can get Klein to generate a fantastic futuristic scene, but it still populates it with contemporary cars, sigh)

Laser-focused on security…

A new Windows zero-day exploit is based on a security hole Microsoft claimed they fixed six years ago. Not clear if they accidentally reintroduced it due to incompetence, or simply never fixed it, also due to incompetence.

Dam furriners!

Seems someone wanted to blow up a dam in Alabama.

(I have no idea what species this gal is, but… I’d hit that)

On the bright side…

Even the village idiot joined this 9-0 Supreme Court decision that freight brokers who use shady illegal trucking companies can be prosecuted sued for the damage and injuries they cause.

(the big-eye look doesn’t always work out…)

The obvious solution!

It never occurred to me until just now, but if you buy a robot waifu in Japan and she gets broken, of course you repair her with kintsugi!

Linux Of The Day: Pop!_OS

First things first: the Macbook’s wifi just worked in the live-boot environment. Crazy, I know. Of course, the GUI started out in dank dark mode with tap-to-click enabled, but both settings were easily fixed in the control panel, and I didn’t even have to reverse the scrolling direction on the touchpad. They offer a variety of options for menu bar and app launcher, but the default was an obviously Mac-derived menu at top, dock at bottom.

Even in “light” mode, the default (and only installed) color scheme for the terminal was black text on a medium-gray background. Opaque, fortunately, so I could read it despite the skittle-text.

Since the live-boot environment looked promising, I launched the actual installer, selected a standard install, and hit “Go”. It exited.

TL/DR, it dumps core while trying to find a disk to install on (despite the GUI and CLI tools allowing me to partition and format the drive). There are no command-line options. Google found nothing useful.

[Update: the root cause of the core dump was that the Macbook has two NVME devices. This didn't bother any other distro, but the PopOS installer probed the second one, didn't find a valid partition table, tried to create one, and failed. Because the second device was only 8K in size. So I opened a terminal window and ran sudo rm -f /dev/nvme0n2. The installer no longer saw the mystery disk, and proceeded normally. Now to find out if they correctly handle sleep!]

[Update: no, they do not, which I expected. Still, this is pretty much the most successful desktop Linux install on this hardware, so I'll stop for now.]

Another day, another kernel patch

Linux server up to date after the latest privilege-escalation vulnerability? Nazzo fast, Guido.

“He chose… poorly.”

Farm Harem Never lead actor:

When we were deciding on direction with this series with the director, in the original source material, the harem aspect with the girls was strongly pushed in the manga. In the anime, we decided that we should try to pull back from the harem aspect and focus on the slow life aspect of the series so we can make it a more easy-to-watch experience.

Unrelated, I swear

I sometimes wish Amazon would tell me which of my purchases it thinks a recommendation is related to…

Yet Another Linux Distro: Bazzite

This one is optimized for gaming, which means proprietary driver support. So, while it couldn’t load the Mac-specific wireless driver in the install environment, it worked once it was finished. Oddly, though, the USB ethernet adapter does not work. It’s detected as a network interface, but NetworkManager wants nothing to do with it, and there isn’t a real network control panel in the KDE GUI environment. I can do this shit from the command line (Fedora-based, by the way), but “less-sophisticated users” cannot.

Also, defaults to dark mode, and the terminal had dark tinyfonts on a translucent dark background, and switching to a black-on-white theme did not change the automatic text-color-coding, so much of it was unreadable. This does nothing to dispel the stereotype that Linux developers live in dark caves and feed on the flesh of the Eloi. I do not want Skittle-text in my terminal windows. Ever.

For even more fun, the flatpack app-manager Bazaar that’s installed by default on the toolbar does not work. The icon bounces a few times when you launch it, and then it silently fails. Manually running sudo /usr/sbin/bazaar works fine, and got Brave and 1Password installed.

The most annoying thing, though, was that it was configured to try to sleep after N minutes, even plugged in. Which causes it to lock up when it wakes and can’t read the disk. Sigh. Easy to disable from the control panel, at least.