The best argument for censoring AI image generation is sites devoted to hosting models. Huggingface, in the news for the fact that Nvidia is willing to spend $13 billion on them, hosts a lot of the stuff, but is so notoriously unsearchable that people don’t bother putting their more lurid work on it.

No, that stuff ends up on Civitai.red, which is also notorious, for both hosting and censoring tons of kink. Often it seems like the closer something is to straight and vanilla, the more likely it is to be censored; the gayer and freakier stuff stays. I find the only way to search for new LoRAs is to frequently hit the “hide content by this user” button for every “original character”, “influencer”, etc, as well as for all the over-specific personal fetishes.

90% of what’s left will be anime characters and art styles, and for most recent models, most of the style LoRAs either do nothing useful or break the parsing, anatomy, and/or faces of the base model. With Krea 2 in particular, only a handful of them have produced anything like they promised when I try them, but one that does work is Pixel Art 16-Bit Style.

Naturally I used it to retrofy a batch of my scantily-clad battle maidens…

(amusingly, someone recently released a “finetuned” version of Krea 2 claiming they’d added furry content, which should come as quite a shock to anyone who’s seen my recent animal-gal pics where I had to reject a lot of pics that were too furry; like most of the art styles people claim to add, that stuff’s built-in)

more...

I’m really liking the results of the current LLM-enhanced sword/outfit/background wildcard sets, fed to Krea 2 Turbo. Apart from the occasional GenAI glitches (multiple hilts, multiple blades at different angles, etc), I’m getting a lot of great wallpaper out of it.

Daze Of Future Passed

In David Starr, Space Ranger, Asimov includes a foreword discussing that he based the conditions on Mars on 1951 science, acknowledging that by 1970 it was known that the red planet had a much less forgiving environment. Subsequent volumes contain the same sort of update about the asteroid belts and the surface of Venus.

Anyway, in chapter 1, in the year 7000 AD, the population of Earth is 5 billion, and it cannot possibly produce enough food, so it is utterly dependent on supplies from the offworld colonies to survive more than a few weeks, and most people still ended up eating fake food from yeast vats. Kind of a pity he didn’t revisit it again before his death to acknowledge the Malthusian assumptions that were so common in SF of that era.

File under peculiar that the blurb for the current re-releases claim the stories have been “out of print for 75 years!”, which is obviously contradicted by the 1970 forewords. I mean, I read the Del Rey paperbacks printed in the Eighties, and apparently there were book club editions in the Nineties as well.

Somebody else’s PoS

Went into a local store yesterday to pick up one of two items I ordered a few days ago. They called me to say it was in, they had it, and the label on the box matched the receipt in my hand, but the in-store system showed a completely different item at the exact same price. In fact, it showed that as the only thing I’d ever ordered through them. Pulled up their web site, and it showed both orders, plus correct history.

Unfortunately, their inventory controls would not allow him to just hand it to me, because he couldn’t reconcile it in the system. He had to send email to their helpdesk and mark it urgent, which means he’ll hear back from India today. Or maybe tomorrow.

Apple cut the price!

…on their $19 screen-cleaning cloth. It’s now only $9.

In other news, pre-orders are now open for the new M5/M6 Mac Mini and Mac Studio. Gold bars are the preferred currency. If you like surprises, you can use the new “Apple Upgrade” plan to lease one for 2 or 3 years of monthly payments instead; the final buyout price is not disclosed.

“Alexa, get your shit together!”

My mother’s lamps stopped working when “Alexa+” was released. All of the lights it discovered through the Philips Hue app work fine, but the Amazon Smart Plugs that are visible and controllable through the Alexa app on her phone are not visible to the Echo device that’s synced to the same account. Even reverting to the less-quirky “standard” Alexa didn’t fix it; the service is just hosed.

Not-At-All-Coincidentally, launching the Alexa phone app fills her phone screen with a chat interface for Alexa+ that can’t be disabled or hidden. It’s an extra set of swipes to see anything else in the app, which is a great experience for someone with Parkinson’s, thanks. Disabled Alexa+, restarted the app, and… it filled the screen with the same chat panel, now labeled “Alexa+ Preview”.

Fuck you with a rusty tire iron, Amazon.

So I ordered a bunch of Philips Hue wall plugs, and we’ll just throw out all the useless Amazon-branded ones.

Everybody gets to play!

Somali pirates seized a US-sanctioned, Eritrean-flagged oil tanker that’s part of Iran’s shadow fleet and managed by a UAE company. Gosh, that’s too bad.

Host: Mac Mini (2024, M4 Pro, 64 GB)

Model: google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat (MLX, 4-bit quantization)

Performance: ~60 tokens/second

Prompt:

Create a list of 100 unique, creative image-generation prompts describing scenic locations that present a high-fantasy adventure aesthetic. Do not use names of real places. Do not include people. Do not include art style, medium, or depth of field. Describe only the visual elements of each location in concrete terms, as a self-contained paragraph of 25 to 75 words. Do not number the list or include any text formatting.

Now, let’s see what sort of “thinking” process led to these results…

more...

GenAI’s come a long way since it recommended using glue on your pizza toppings. You still can’t trust it not to write instructions that will kill us all and destroy the world, but you can at least ask nicely.

I happened to have on hand a bunch of Ghirardelli chocolate melting wafers, which I use in colder months to produce delicious hot chocolate in my Nespresso Barista machine (still one of the only milk/coffee/etc frothers to be able to handle chunks of chocolate and ice).

Unfortunately, I buy it in 5-pound bags, and it’s been “a touch warm” recently, and I don’t think I’ll be drinking hot chocolate for a while. So I fired up Claude and asked it for instructions to make a chocolate sauce topping suitable for ice cream and tiramisu, using melting wafers and espresso. I made a half-batch that turned out quite nice, and it works well in a squeeze bottle right out of the fridge:

(I had to clean up the instructions, because they were over-literal and repetitive, and I reordered the ingredient list to match the order they’re used; highlighting the ingredients in the instructions is a personal preference that I could tell Claude to do, if I were to build a recipe layout “skill” at some point)

A flaw in the Pexar

Out of the box, it turns off the display at 11 PM and stays off until 7 AM the next day. So, what happens if you’re loading a big batch of images from a USB stick when the clock strikes?

You wait until morning to finish the import. Seriously. It’s completely unresponsive until then.

(I’d say those aren’t Best Lizard Girl Theresia’s snacks, except they look delicious…)

It’s up into the nineties outside this week, something I only experience during the brief walk from my air-conditioned car to air-conditioned stores, before returning to my air-conditioned home.

Speaking of hot things, the image-analysis processing is over 103,000 images now, just finishing up a big batch of Hello!Project photobooks (the primary virtue of which is that their usual stylists were locked out of the room). After that is ~7,000 magazine pics to extract from ZIP and RAR archives, and then at some point I’ll do the ~35,000 pornsite pics.

Unrelated, my Macbook Air lost track of its storage again, requiring a hard power-cycle. Seems to happen when it’s been up about three weeks and I do a lot of SMB traffic to the NAS (like extracting all those RAR and ZIP archives…).

Number 1 in logistics!

Amazon: we think UPS lost your package, so we’re going to claim “delayed in transit” and make you wait another week before you can apply for a refund.

UPS: um, the truck arrived in Ohio 18 hours ago, at a depot about a two-hour drive from your house, and it’ll be delivered by noon.

Every Tuesday is Patch Tuesday

Have you noticed how frequently Microsoft is pushing Office updates recently? Like last month where they had to quickly fix basic functionality in Outlook, and then another today?

Jiraporn

Better than Bugzillaporn!

(the photo shoots are terrible, and the site is NSFW and ad-infested, but I’d still file her tickets)

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Witch Hat Atelier season 2 has been announced.

Bruce Campbell’s new book

Reconcile, a Western novella.

(I told Krea2 Turbo that I wanted to play Cowgirls & Indians…)

Oh, dear, more 1girls

While finishing up my batch image-analysis, I stumbled across several more archives. One is a small number of fairly low-resolution images from a late-Eighties/early-Nineties mail-order fashion/lingerie catalog called Mello Mail. They released a screensaver with a bunch of their pictures, and my friend Carmen was their star model.

Then I found a series of scanned photobooks featuring my favorite fashion disasters, the girls of Hello!Project.

And then I found myself wondering what ever happened to all the stuff I downloaded from a certain paid adult website nearly 20 years ago, and eventually I located ~35,000 images in ZIP archives on the NAS. It’s a bunch of under-edited semi-pro shoots with mostly-amateur models, but it offers a wider selection of ethnicities, as well as details not available in pictures legal to distribute in Japan. I think I’ll keep it as a separate dataset, though, since pretty much everything in it has to be tagged NSFW.

NSFW

(to my surprise, that site still exists, and claims to be actively updating; wonder if they’ve gotten better at it over the years…)

Bought a Lexar Pexar (dexar, flexar, rexar, sexar…)

I’ve owned or gifted half a dozen digital photo frames, and I decided to see if there was one out there that I could fill up with GenAI gals without involving an app or a cloud, but that still had a good-quality screen. They’re basically Android tablets with a large bezel and no battery, and even the really low-end ones seem to be tarted up with Google/iCloud/subscription services that must always be active in order to display anything, which is the exact opposite of what I want.

Lexar’s Pexar can operate completely standalone with internal storage and images transferred on SD card or USB stick, or you can hook it up to wi-fi and use a sharing code to allow people to send you photos from an app. The people they licensed the software from, Frameo, make extensive promises on their site that pictures are encrypted end-to-end, and their content cannot be examined in transit.

Out of the box, that’s it: copy files to it directly, or use a phone app to send pics to a frame that you have been given a unique, time-limited sharing code for.

The app has an optional $2/month subscription fee that offers remote management of a frame (keeping it up to date for Grandma, basically) and encrypted-at-rest cloud backup. Again, they promise that they cannot examine your pics in any way. Like for AI training, for instance.

I like the screen, and while the “frame and mat” are plastic, it looks nice from viewing distance. The first major flaw is that Frameo is terrible at managing large picture collections. If you copy 1,000 images from an SD card or USB stick, you can’t directly import them into an album; you have to tap-and-drag to select them out of the “all photos” list after the import. The second major flaw is that it crashed twice on me while I was doing this. Apart from the stability issue, the UI is actually pretty clean and responsive, just a bit limited.

The third major flaw, for most people, is that the display on the 11-inch model has a 3:5 aspect ratio (1200x2000), which matches basically no camera ever made, so most pictures have to be scaled, cropped, or displayed letterboxed. Either that or you switch to the “collage” mode.

This doesn’t matter to me, since I’m using my SwarmUI CLI to generate the images at 1216x2048 with auto-crop, so everything is precisely the correct size. The frame handles WEBP cleanly, so the 32 GB of storage can hold plenty of these ~124 KB pics. (it also does video, but I haven’t even looked at those models)

(for reference, Krea2 Turbo at 10 steps with 2 refiner steps takes ~32 seconds per gen on my 4090, and I let it run overnight so I’d have plenty of initial test pics to put on the frame; “upcycled redheads of college age”)

Minor flaw? I’m not convinced that the “shuffle” mode isn’t just “random”. I’ll need to set up a test album with numbered pics. It should be able to do it properly, since it can sort the slideshow order in various ways, and a shuffle is effectively just a bad sort that gets re-shuffled when you hit the end.

(note that Lexar just released an updated version of the 11-inch frame that uses their own software stack, which suggests that they plan to stop licensing Frameo)

I may have to skim through the first season of Skeleton Knight to remind myself what’s going on; it’s been a while, and the light novels stopped rather abruptly.

As for Tan Teen Oni Waifu (officially, “The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects”), I just hope it’s good enough for me to make it through the season. I mean, it’s not an isekai, not a harem, the hero is an honorable man and proven warrior who looks his age, the twin lolis are completely unsexualized, and the stakes are modest.

And in a departure from recent tradition, there will be other things to watch!

Keeping the arse in Ars…

Detailed analysis of hominid bones supposedly revealed that the pre-humans:

“…had a concept of gender as a part of an individual’s identity”

No, you clod, it means that they could tell the difference between boys and girls at a glance. Yeesh.

The trouble with Supergirl

One thing I haven’t seen in the (apparently quite justified) criticism of this movie is that in the graphic novel it’s based on (for some definition of “based”) Supergirl isn’t the main character. I’d describe it as “how my coming-of-age road trip with Supergirl changed my life”. Not exactly a summer blockbuster of a plot, which would have made it a poor choice even before the extensive rewrites and reshoots.

Anyway, here’s another bit of Krea2 cheesecake

The Krea 2 Turbo model is much more stable than Klein-9B when it comes to anatomy. I’ve had a very small number of extra fingers, and exactly one extra arm out of a few thousand gens. One gal was missing half an arm, but she was a robot, and these things just happen to robo-gals.

more...

(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)