I’d rather find a second waifu than write about evil right now…

(I found her in a bulk-wildcard-testing run where I set it to use the default sampler/scheduler, CFG=3.5, Steps=37, which took 1.5 minutes/image; cranking the steps up to 60 and using Heun++2/Beta improved quality at the cost of taking 6.75 minutes; refining it at 40% and upscaling it by 2.25x with 4xNomosUniDAT_bokeh_jpg eliminated the artifacts and significantly improved detail, but took 25.75 minutes. Worth it?)

(trying to do a 4x upscale ran out of memory after 45 minutes…)

Fiverr lays off 30% of employees…

…to focus on AI. Meanwhile, Fiverr freelancers are making a bundle cleaning up after AI.

🎶 🎶 It’s the cirrrrrrcle of liiiiiiife 🎶 🎶

Wow, Your Forma was worse than I thought…

Some reviewers made a fuss about the chemistry between the two leads being due to their voice actors being married in real life. Not any more.

Maybe she wasn’t willing to do the Sylphy voice in bed… 😁

(official art from the light novels, where she’s a busty little chibi; I’ve already used up all the fan-art, and I didn’t have any luck with the LoRAs)

Now that’s a knife dock!

OWC is selling a Thunderbolt 5 dock with 3x USB-A 3.2 ports, 1x USB-C 3.2 port, 4x Thunderbolt 5 ports (1 used for upstream), 1x 2.5Gb Ethernet port, and 2x 10Gb Ethernet ports with link aggregation support. For those who need their Mac Mini to have multiple 8K monitors and serious NAS bandwidth.

It’d be kind of wasted on me, so I’m thinking I’ll settle for the CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 dock: 4x Thunderbolt 4 (1 upstream), 4x USB-A 3.2.

Out of context

“Reasoning” models tend to do better at prompts like “give me a list of N unique action poses”, except when they dive up their own assholes and start generating reams of text about the so-called thinking process they’re following faking. I’ve had them spend 10+ minutes filling up all available context with busywork, without ever returning a single result. If they do return something, the list is often non-unique or cut off well before N.

But the context is the real problem, because if you only got N/2 results, you’d like to coax it to finish the job, but there’s a good chance that the “thinking” has consumed most of the context, and most models do not support purging context in the middle of generating a response.

It would also be useful to copy the setup of a known working chat and generate a completely different kind of list. I definitely don’t need the context of a search for poses and lighting setups when I ask for festive holiday lingerie ideas.

You can’t just reload the model with larger context and continue the chat. You can’t fork the chat into a new one; that preserves the context, too. What you want is to wipe all answers and context and preserve the settings and your prompts, so you don’t have to set up the chat again. In LM Studio, this functionality doesn’t seem to exist.

So I wrote a quick Perl script to load the JSON conversation history and remove everything but your prompts.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.020;
use strict;
use warnings;
use JSON;

open(my $In, $ARGV[0]);
my $json = join(' ', <$In>);
close($In);
my $conv = decode_json($json);

# remove token count
$conv->{tokenCount} = 0;
# rename
$conv->{name} = "SCRUBBED " . defined $conv->{name} ? $conv->{name} : "";
# remove all messages not from user.
my $out = [];
foreach my $msg (@{$conv->{messages}}) {
    push(@$out, $msg) if $msg->{versions}->[0]->{role} eq "user";
}
$conv->{messages} = $out;
print encode_json($conv);

This dumps a fresh JSON conversation file to STDOUT, which can be given any filename and dropped into ~/.lmstudio/conversations.

Why Perl? Because I could write it faster than I could explain the specs to a coding LLM, and I didn’t need multiple debugging passes.

(BTW, 32K context seems to be a comfortable margin for a 100-element list; 16K can be a bit tight)

Digits and Shadows

It’s kind of amazing how the “state of the art” keeps advancing in AI without fixing any of the known problems. LLMs hallucinate because they must, and image-diffusion engines can’t count fingers or recognize anatomical impossibilities because they don’t use anatomy. All the alleged coherence you hear about in AI output is either sheer accident or aggressive post-processing.

Let’s examine a few types of Qwen Image failures:

“Thumbs, how do they work?”

Trying to put your own hand into a position seen in a generated image can be awkward, painful, or simply impossible if it’s on the wrong side.

more...

(we now resume our regularly scheduled randomblogging, until the next slaughter of innocents by Left-wing domestic terrorists)

Boxxo Or Bust 2, episode 11

This is really not a good week for the show to go grimdark, revealing Our Shoe Fetishist’s bloody, revenge-fueled path. I’m just not going to watch it right now.

Here’s something wholesome instead:

Warner Bros wants to be the Broadcom of streaming

CEO insists HBO Max should be priced like diamonds. Six customers are so much easier to support than six million.

Not a fan

I bought a new unmanaged 10Gb switch, because my existing one only had 2 10Gb ports with the rest being 2.5Gb. Three years ago, the price of a switch with 8 10Gb RJ45 ports was a bit too spicy, but now it’s just annoying.

What really hurts is when a desktop switch has a fan loud enough to be heard from the next room. And I need it to be in the same room. For comparison, I barely notice the Synology NAS that’s on the same desk, even when it’s doing a RAID scrub. For the sake of my sanity and productivity, I guess I’ll be building the switch a padded crib…

New Monitor(s)

The new monitor is an “ASUS ZenScreen Duo OLED 360° Foldable Portable Monitor (MQ149CD)”, which is quite a mouthful, but the TL/DR is that it’s two 1920x1200 HDR panels that can be used separately or together, portrait or landscape. To use it as two separate monitors, you need to use two cables, but despite the one-inch gap between the panels, you can still get good use out of it as a single 1920x2400 display.

I’m using the 1/4”-by-20 tripod screw to mount it higher than the kickstand, and despite all claims of portability, yeah, you have to plug it in to drive it properly (1 of the 3 USB-C ports is power-only). Right now I’ve just got it hooked up with HDMI, because my current dock was low on free USB-C ports, but once I get things rearranged I’ll separate them, because Lightroom’s window layout is a bit inflexible, and the one-inch gap is bad for photo editing. Better to use the application’s “secondary display” support.

This does make me want a vertical 20+ inch 4K HDR portable monitor, though. I just don’t want it to be from a company I’ve never heard of before, which is what’s all over Amazon.

“Shared memory and fancy NPUs are no match for a good graphics card at your side, kid.”

While I’m discussing new toys, I’ll mention that I also picked up a refurbished M4 Pro Mac Mini, which in theory has much faster “AI” performance than my M2 MacBook Air. With 64 GB of RAM, it can run mid-sized offline LLMs at a decent pace, and even do quick image captioning if I downscale raw images to a sensible resolution.

What it can’t do is more than very basic image generation. It’s not the memory, it’s the cores: not enough of them, and not fast enough. This matches what I’ve heard about the insanely-pricy Mac Studio and the merely-way-overpriced systems built on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395. Their performance comparisons are based entirely on running models that simply don’t fit into a consumer graphics card’s VRAM. “Our toaster is much faster at running this 48 GB model than a 24 GB Nvidia 4090!”

The Mini is a huge speedup for Lightroom and Photoshop, though, which made it worthwhile for me. Any “AI” playability is a bonus.

(I have never seen a human being hold a camera this way)

Related, “Dear Draw Things programmers”

Come back when you discover the concept of legibility. Dipshits.

Accidental Disney Princess

I was testing a few more LLM-enhanced dynamic prompts, and one in particular stood out: a series of very consistent images of a fresh-faced young gal who could make Bambi’s woodland friends sit up and beg.

4K resolution, crisp and highly detailed, create an illustration that exudes a high-budget aesthetic. Depict an average height, lovely ethnic Egyptian woman who is 18 years old with a petite figure. She has deep blue eyes, lobed ears, a straight nose, a wide chin, an U-shaped jaw, dimpled cheeks, and a flat forehead. Her heart-shaped face highlights her gentle features. Her skin is healthy and alabaster white, with festive holiday makeup that complements her almond-shaped eyes and full lips. Her hair is steel gray, styled in a cybernetic pixie cut with metallic edges and glowing circuit-like patterns. The woman has a happy expression as she stands with one arm raised, bathed in luminous waves of light. The background features a lush jungle filled with singing flora, glittering with raindrops under the radiant colors of a rainbow sun. Subtle dawn light filters through, creating an aerial perspective with open framing and pastel tones that evoke a gentle awakening. The composition highlights her graceful form against the vibrant greenery, capturing a dreamlike atmosphere.

Sadly, the prompt that worked so well in Qwen Image was… less successful with other models that don’t have an embedded LLM to parse complete sentences sensibly, and failed completely with a few that couldn’t handle the combination of the Beta scheduler and the Heun++ 2 sampler (I may redo those with their defaults).

It’s not that the others all failed, they just didn’t produce consistent characters who looked like my princess and/or lived in her enchanted forest.

more...

(…that’s not another season of Frieren or Apothecary Diaries)

The World’s Strongest Rearguard anime

I consider this to be one of the best cheat-power isekai light novel series. Our Ass-Guardian Hero reincarnates into a fantasy world that basically forces all the newcomers into dungeon crawls without any real choice or training, but while he’s being railroaded by a hot chick with big boobs, he accidentally chooses a rare class. Everyone else is trying to be things like “valkyrie”, “soldier”, “forager”, “tennis coach”, etc, but hearing that parties are always looking for someone to take the rearguard position, he just writes down “rearguard”.

And he gains the ability to buff any party member who is in front of him. It should come as no surprise that he ends up with a party of gorgeous gals, but it might be surprising that he is a complete gentleman who doesn’t so much as stare at the asses he’s guarding. He’s not oblivious to their (mostly-underage) charms, but he never, ever goes there.

What makes it work is that despite him being potentially and eventually overpowered, he and his party have to work for every fight, and their trust and teamwork keep them alive just as much as their skills. His power gives them an edge, but his decency and kindness have just as much of an impact on the world.

Add to that that every not-quite-haremette has a distinct personality and goal, and you have something that I’m begging the animators not to screw up.

The buried lede in this article is that book nine is finally coming out after a four-year wait. Book 8 wrapped up a major story arc, but left a lot of character arcs unresolved, so woo-hoo!

(Our Hero is in the background, with His Formerly Abusive Former Manager on the left, Our Terrifying Teen Swordsgal on the right, and Our Best Girl Rescue Lizardgal in the middle; and the butterflies are seriously bad news, with their presence suggesting two cours)

Just-Outta-Time Logistics

I bought an HDR monitor on Amazon, which was supposed to arrive Monday. At 4pm, they announced that for unknown reasons it never left an Ohio warehouse, and it would instead arrive Tuesday. Three hours later, that message disappeared, and the order status reverted to arriving-Monday-but-not-shipped-yet. It stayed like that until after 10pm, when it went to “delayed, not shipped” again, with no further explanation.

In the wee hours of the morning, Amazon’s entire order-history system apparently went offline, and all status was unavailable.

As of 8:30 AM, it is allegedly across town, waiting to get put on a truck. Unless they erase that status update.

Unrelated,

FedEx grudgingly coughed up an approximate delivery time for Tuesday’s signature-required package (not from Amazon), which is good, since I have to pick up my niece after school, and I’d hate to have to go chase down the package at their nearest office after the truck returned to base.

Amusingly, when I asked for details, they offered two confirmation methods: SMS to my (correct!) cellphone number, or email to a masked address that I didn’t immediately recognize. It would have reached me anyway, since I own the domain, but it took me a moment to figure out that they’d decided that the email address associated with my physical address was the one I’d created specifically for B&H Photo.

Because they shipped me a CompactFlash Express card (fastest storage for my 4k-video-capable Sony A7SIII) via FedEx a while back.

Mistral Small is gaaaaaaaay…

Given the following picture of Yuzuha Hongo:

And the relatively-capable vision-enabled LLM mistral-small-3.2, we get the following caption and tag set that contain a rather serious error:

A young woman with long brown hair, straight hair style, and a slim body type is standing in a bathroom. She has fair skin, small breasts, and is wearing a pink floral bikini top with thin straps. She has a slight smile on her face and is looking directly at the camera. The bathroom features white tiles, a shower head, and a towel rack with towels hanging on it. Water droplets are visible on her skin.

Tags: young woman, long brown hair, straight hair style, slim body type, fair skin, small breasts, pink floral bikini top, thin straps, slight smile, direct gaze, white tiles, shower head, towel rack, hanging towels, water droplets

(ran it a few more times, and got completely different results every time; sometimes it correctly handled her boobs (coughcough), other times it decided her nipples were visible, several times it hallucinated a towel rack with towels, occasionally it remembered to mention “Asian facial features”, etc, etc; honestly, I trust the output so little that I’m tempted to have my script loop over the same picture N times and keep only the tags that show up at least 50% of the time; I’m also going to borrow the styling of the Qwen prompt-enhancer below)

Enhanced dynamic prompting

With my new still-in-progress dynamic prompt collection, I’m turning this:

__style/photo__ of a __var/prettygal__ with __skin/_normal__ and __hair/_normal__, with a __mood/_normal__ expression. __pose/sexy__. Her location is __place/_normal__. __scene__.

into prompts like this:

4k, crisp, high budget, highly detailed, intricate, ultra textured. Create a photograph of a average height, beautiful, ethnic American, adolescent woman with supple figure, Steel gray eyes, softly-curled lobe ears, Angular Nose, V-Shaped Chin, Strong Jaw, Angular Cheeks, Angular Forehead, Triangle face shape, Natural “no-makeup” makeup with healthy Sun-Kissed-Tan skin and Natural Gray hair, Low twist with braids, creating texture and detail, with a warm expression. Standing with weight on one leg, other foot planted flat, arm crossed over chest, wrist aligned, chin up. Her location is Grand Baie, Mauritius. Rainy glow, close framing, layered reflection, muted palette, melancholic ambiance.

Then using LM Studio’s Python API to pass it through qwen2.5-7b-instruct, with this (taken from the demo code in their repo):

And getting enhanced prompts like this:

4K resolution, crisp and highly detailed, with a high budget aesthetic that emphasizes intricate texture. Create a photograph of an average-height, beautiful ethnic American adolescent woman with a supple figure. Her steel gray eyes sparkle softly, and her ears are gently curved. She has an angular nose, a V-shaped chin, a strong jaw, angular cheeks, and an angular forehead, forming a triangle face shape. Her natural “no-makeup” makeup highlights healthy sun-kissed tan skin, while her naturally gray hair is styled in a low twist with braids that add texture and detail. She stands with weight on one leg, the other foot planted firmly, and her arm is crossed over her chest with wrists aligned. Her chin is lifted slightly, giving a warm expression. The setting is Grand Baie, Mauritius. The photo captures a rainy glow, using close framing to create layered reflections in the background, maintaining a muted palette that evokes a melancholic ambiance.

Now, let’s see what sort of picture that produces…

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This is Alibaba’s offline text-to-image model, and it has excellent prompt comprehension (LLM-based), high image quality, a higher-than-usual base resolution, and is capable of some naughtypics. It is also quite large (20GB+) and slow, especially when you crank up the parameters to render small text. This image took five minutes to render on my high-end gaming PC:

(the main title always came out correct; the subtitle had about a 50% chance that all the letters would be intact)

Okay, I can work with this (2-minute render):

It doesn’t seem to have some of the training issues I ran into with Omnigen2, but while it’s not fully censored, it’s also not a true NSFW model, and has a tendency to cover the naughty bits unless you specify your request precisely. Checking Civitai, there are people working on LoRAs to provide explicit content, but it takes a while to figure out the quirks of new models. Y’know, if that’s what you’re into…

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Seasonal Gushing gals

As we wave farewell to Leoparde’s summer sizzler…

…we look forward to the trick-and-treat cast party:

Offline image generation: Omnigen2

A fairly new model, Omnigen2 is supported by SwarmUI for image generation and editing, so I don’t have to change my workflow to play with it. It has a full LLM embedded, so it’s better at parsing prompts than the usual Stable Diffusion models, but still has a learning curve. Compared to ChatGPT, you’ll spend a lot more time writing a lengthy, detailed prompt that produces the results you want, but won’t get cockblocked by randomly-changing secret policies that refuse to generate your picture at all.

It is definitely capable of producing naughtypics, but is not overtrained to the point that it just goes there at random.

So, how does it handle the same prompt that produced my latest fake isekai book cover?

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The forecasts swear that it will not rain again until Friday. I find myself unable to complain about how wet it’s been this year in front of my Irish co-workers, so I’ll do it here…

Dear Amazon Logistics,

I’m so old I remember when two-day shipping meant that I got my package in two days. It looks like the stuff I ordered from a Tokyo camera store via eBay will arrive faster than the small “next-day” item I ordered from Amazon US.

Always in the last place you look…

Three years ago, I changed my primary phone number everywhere I could think of, but kept it active on the old phone in case there were a few places I missed. When I bought a new phone recently, I considered finally retiring the California phone number, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. It was just sitting on a shelf, powered off.

Yesterday, I had to power it up and retrieve a two-factor-authentication text message. From my domain registrar (no idea how I missed that one…). I couldn’t log in to update my billing without it, and one of my idle domains is up for renewal soon.

(picture is unrelated but cute, and overdue for posting)

(oh, and if you leave an iPhone turned off for a few weeks, it loses all charge; good work, Apple!)

The promise of streaming?

I’ve been a good boy, paying for numerous streaming services, even though some of them are getting increasingly user-hostile, like Amazon switching to an ad-supported model even when you pay extra to not see ads.

I’ve held up my end of the bargain, but they keep letting me down by silently trimming their catalogs to the point that you need another streaming subscription just to watch the same movie twice. And at least half of those show invasive ads. And a lot of things are just gone.

In short, I just grabbed a torrent of Vividred Operation because it’s not available on any streaming service at any price (Crunchyroll dropped it four years ago, and physical media is only available at collectible prices from Japan). At least with a 24-year-old show like Rune Soldier I can just break out the DVD box set, but something 12 years newer has almost completely vanished.

File under peculiar the fact that you can still buy all sorts of merch from the show, including cosplay outfits if you have the ass for it, but you can’t get the show itself. Sigh.

Anyway, I just watched the first episode, and it’s really jarring how much more animated the animation is than the majority of shows airing this season.

(Miss Kuroitsu never got a US release at all, and only a limited-edition Bluray box set in Japan that currently costs around $200 with shipping)

The One True Sword Daddy returns!

…in Fall 2026.

Dear Elon,

No sooner do you announce your own political-spoiler party than my X feed turns into an endless shitshow of cryptocurrency fraud, Chinese bots rewriting history, and global warming hysteria, things that have never before appeared there. Coincidence, or something more?

(seriously, I blocked/muted more accounts in ten minutes today than I have in six months)

Dear Apple,

You filthy sons of bitches erased every mail-handling rule from Mail.app on my Mac when I upgraded my iPhone. No questions, no notifications, no backup. I can probably reconstruct it by browsing through my full-disk backups and putting it back, but these configs had survived dozens of semi-stable upgrades in the past. You just couldn’t fucking stop yourselves from using your “cloud” sync to overwrite existing data during phone setup (where I explicitly said “don’t sync email through iCloud”), could you? Guess I was holding it wrong again.

…

For reference, the data is in ~/Library/Mail/V10/SyncedRules.plist, and sure enough it was fine on July 3rd and wiped clean on July 4th. It’s plist-as-XML, which means it combines the worst features of two file formats, but at least it’s not one of Apple’s internal undocumented-garbage formats where it pretends to be XML but is filled with binary blobs. If I can’t just put it back and have it work, I should be able to mangle the plist contents into shape.

[Update: you must also completely delete the matching block in SyncedFilesInfo.plist, or it will immediately wipe the restored file again. Even once the rules are back, they will not be active, and you have to click them one-by-one.]

(and, yes, I see you also disabled SpamSieve, because for all your posturing about privacy, you have a strong interest in ads reaching user inboxes)

“Why, yes, I do want my money”

I just received an (actual paper mail) unclaimed-funds letter from my insurance company, telling me to claim an uncashed check from 2022 before the $1,650 gets handed over to the state. While this resembles a common scam, I went to their site and confirmed that it was legit.

Best I can figure, they sent a check to my California address right after I left forever, and marked it do-not-forward.

eBay: this time for sure!

The “gofo” last-mile delivery service spontaneously updated their tracking site after the package showed up Saturday evening. Placed at the very edge of the porch in a thunderstorm.

It came wrapped in plastic, but what kind of idiots are they hiring these days? Not just this crew, but I get this from about 1/3 of Amazon drivers and 1/4 of FedEx drivers in my area as well. This is Ohio, where it can rain at any time, and in fact has rained heavily enough recently that we’ve had multiple flood alerts.

The US Postal Service crew is uniformly professional and good-natured, and will bring packages up to the door even if they would have fit in the mailbox at the street, saving them a 75-foot uphill hike.

Related, no matter how many “please come back” emails I get from Grubhub, I will not order food through them because they insist on placing your food on the ground, even when I explicitly check the Covid-is-over-dammit button and offer an extra tip if the driver hands me my food directly. The last driver claimed that the app required drivers to put the food on the ground at the door and take a picture. Don’t care, hand me my food.

(the contents of the package? A Chinese McDonalds limited-edition Ultraman-and-fries mini-Mahjong set)

“Stupid On Pavement”

I was driving up the highway Sunday morning to pick my sister up from a brunch with old school friends, and there was a car hanging out in the fast lane doing about 10MPH under the speed limit. Traffic was light enough that he wasn’t really annoying anyone else, but suddenly a Highway Patrol car overtook him from behind, clearly wanting to use the lane for its proper purpose.

Driver did nothing, even though there was plenty of room to move into the next lane. After about 30 seconds of this, the cop pulled up quite close behind him.

Driver did nothing. Cop blipped his lights, waited patiently.

Driver did nothing. Cop did it again, waited, and then a third time.

Driver did nothing. Cop lit him up.

Driver did nothing. Cop activated loudspeaker and ordered him to pull over immediately.

Driver finally complied. I quickly passed their pulloff point, so I don’t know what came next. But I’m betting it involved shouting and an expensive ticket for everything the cop could think of.

A-Rank Adventure Harem gets a second season

I gave up on the show, but maybe someone didn’t.

(second season that I’m much more interested in is not yet on the schedule)