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)

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)