Disturbingly accurate, but also deeply wrong

Still going…

New DOGE recruiting poster

Google AI: always confidently wrong

I searched for “otagiri history”. Random facts were merged together:

It does link to its sources, but fails to provide any reason to connect them in this way.

Actual facts, which can be derived by completely ignoring the prominent “AI” summary and reading through the buried search results:

1. Otagiri is a mildly-collectible brand of handmade dinnerware, made by a variety of Japanese kilns from the late Fifties through the mid-Nineties. Several American designers were hired to provide Hallmark-ish designs (not for tiki mugs). It’s widely available on Etsy and eBay at reasonable prices, and every once in a while new old stock turns up in Japanese warehouses, often from patterns that never made it to the US (Umami Mart used to sell coffee mugs they found in the warehouse of Kenzan Ceramics, some of which had Otagiri branding).

2. They also imported ceramic tiki mugs, chickens, turkeys, houses, music boxes, etc, as well as some decorative laminated platters.

3. The importer has no documented connection to anyone by the name “Otagiri” (小田切 = “small field” + “bounds”).

4. Further down under “other connections”, it finally says “Otagiri was also a well-known dinnerware company, particularly for its pottery, known for its firing and glazing techniques”, not recognizing that it’s the same company.

5. It also cites a phony book on Amazon that clearly exists just to sucker people who search for the word.

6. Finally, it links to the Wikipedia article for Otagiri Dam, which qualifies as “otagiri history”, but has no known connection to any of the others.

Why do I know any of this? Because a while back, my mom was sorting through stuff that’d been in boxes through multiple moves, and she handed me a small lidded crock and said, “I think you’ll like this, it feels very Japanese”. I turned it over, saw the name and country of origin, and googled the sticker. Then I checked the labels on the coffee mugs I’d previously bought from Umami Mart, and sure enough, one of them had the same Otagiri sticker.

Later I found a few nice-looking affordable pieces in the same pattern (Bittersweet) and bought them. I now have a number of their more decorative plate designs on the wall in my dining room, as well as a slowly-growing collection of that pattern. I was briefly tempted by a very complete dinner set of Bittersweet, but you had to pick it up in person in Monterey and I’d just left California forever.

I also discovered that there are a number of “Otagiri-like” patterns for sale online, almost all of them unlabeled, and based on the similarity in design, I suspect there were other importers working with the same Japanese kilns.

These, for instance, have the exact same size and shape as Otagiri soup mugs and bread plates, but don’t match any known set:

One reason a lot of Otagiri pieces are unlabeled is that the importer initially used a gold sticker on the bottom for their branding, and people often removed it or washed it off. The only reason we have official names for most of the patterns is that they later switched to stamping/painting the details on the bottom (likely when they filed their US trademark in 1980). I’ve also seen it claimed that the stickers were only added once the crates were unpacked in San Francisco, but the mug I got from Umami Mart had it applied in Japan.

By the way, Kenzan Ceramics doesn’t make coffee mugs and dinner plates any more; they’re strictly high-end wall and floor tile. I guess the export business got them through some lean years while they were establishing their business.

Maomao’s going to have to stay in spoiler limbo for another week, because this week’s episode was apparently bumped. This would be less annoying if there were other good shows to watch.

Smoke-Signal Flag Day

Traeger has announced that you must update the firmware on your Internet-connected smoker by the end of September, or it will no longer be Internet-connected. Something-something-cloud-services.

BroadcomBot fixed it!

I have now successfully downloaded VMware Fusion 13.6.3. It even worked.

Yes, I saved the installer on my NAS, “just in case”.

No, they did not send the promised email; I had to keep checking.

Metaphor alert!

Vegan Toilet Bowl Cleaner. To put the sustainable organic cherry on top , it’s rhubarb-scented.

How to raise a busty waifu

Ina Enohara shows how it’s done: you feed them, you water them, they grow!

VMware (not) update

Finally advanced my VMware Fusion download failure to “Account verification is Pending. Please try after some time” (yes, I manually edited the page to enable the field, changed my one-letter name to a three-letter name, and overrode the disabled submission button; the fourth time it worked). Managed to get a chat window to connect me either to an Indian call center operator or an AI pretending to be one, who just sent me a link to the same download page that didn’t work.

Schrödinger’s chatbot claims to have escalated the ticket to “the concern team”, who will email me an update in the next 24 hours.

Those are definitely not noodle arms…

The text reads “Father’s a man”. Transphobic before it was hip!

Eighties Viagra

There’s an old cartoon that I think was in Playboy. Can’t find it online at the moment, but a man was walking past a construction site for a brothel, and the sign read, “soon you too can be erected on this site”.

Amazon proposes…

… J disposes. Latest recommendation for a novel was something called Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff, which the blurb promises will be a cozy-but-eldritch mystery with a bit of romance. Oh, wait, it promises to be “Queer, cozy, and with a touch of eldritch horror mixed in just for fun”. With added boldfaced queer romance just in case you didn’t read the blurb to the end.

And to really make sure it appeals to a broad audience, the Kindle edition is $16.99. Yup, that’ll just fly off the virtual shelves. I liked the cover art, at least.

This isn’t the weird part…

spoiler

It’s the sniffing.

Things you never want to hear from the director who’s adapting a novel into a movie or series:

“I thought this work could be condensed to explore modern themes and social issues”

I’m not really seeing how that translates to “skip the first novel but constantly reference it”. When I watched the first episode, I liked that the characters were presented as a pre-existing partnership, rather than having to go through their Odd Couple meet-and-greet, but then we were expected to just accept an emotional connection that we were never shown or told about.

Now we find out that the director isn’t really even interested in adapting the novels, he’s pissing in the whiskey to make his own story. Blech.

Dear Google Maps,

When I search for “Sonic near Miamisburg”, why do you take me directly to the page for the one that’s permanently closed (for just under a year now)? Interestingly, searching for “Sonic Drive-In” with the map zoomed on the closed location returns all the still-existant locations within about twenty miles.

Related, why does your “AI” answer to the question “when did the Miamisburg Sonic close?” give completely wrong information? Oh, wait, I know that one: “because AI is bullshit!”

The Sonic in Miamisburg, Ohio, closed in January of 2019. The restaurant was temporarily closed for remodeling and was expected to reopen in the spring, according to a post on their Facebook page, reports Dayton Daily News

The article is a roundup of restaurant closings, and mentions two completely different Sonic locations in other cities with no dates, but the quoted claims refer to an unrelated sub shop in Miamisburg.

This is what “AI” does; this is how it works.

Related, the Dolly’s burger joint ain’t great

These popped up very suddenly in the area. The food is based on Big Boy. The name is based on an old comic strip published by Big Boy.

I linked the background in the sidebar already, but “Dolly’s” is temporary branding, because despite being unable to pay their bills, the franchisee that has the rights to run Big Boy restaurants in Ohio (Frisch’s) refuses to allow the Big Boy franchisee who bought up all their closed locations to use the Big Boy branding. Big Boy.

(just checked, and there’s still a Big Boy in Kyoto, near Ninna-Ji; recent reviews suggest it’s not as good as it was 10+ years ago)

Robo-Ho’s getting a dub?

Previously-unheard-of bottom-tier hentai streaming site OceanVeil has announced an English dub for The Busty Gal I Like Turned Out To Be A Horny Sexbot Trained On Censored Gay Porn, And Ever Since She Moved In She’s Been Trying To Stimulate My ‘Prostate’ Without Knowing What Or Where It Is (aka Kakushite! Makina-san!!).

The dub cast has the shortest list of credits I’ve ever seen. Only one of them has actually performed in more than one show before this. So, one step above “AI” dubbing, I guess.

(“find a love who looks at you the way Animalia looks at Emul… not”)

I liked the L’il Esils so much that I decided to make more, adding the challenge of putting them to bed without the model turning it into loli porn. Careful use of negative prompts managed to produce usually innocent pictures of L’il Esil with innocent sleepwear, stuffed animals, and non-sexy poses, but the attempt exposed another common problem with generative AI: it doesn’t understand how rooms work or how people fit inside them.

The basic prompt was: “<lora-trigger> wearing black and red frilly pajamas and fuzzy slippers. sfw, happy, flat chest, child height, child body, child face. indoors, girl’s bedroom at night, evil stuffed animals in background” (and, yes, despite the lack of nudity and sex keywords, I had to add “cum” to the negative prompt; in one pic, the teddy bear had a puddle of white stuff leaking from its crotch, sigh).

A human being would interpret “child height” in relationship to the typical sizes of common bedroom objects, like doors, chairs, dressers, and beds. Generative AI sometimes seems to get it right, but it’s really the user deciding between equally-likely alternatives.

So for fun, here’s a whole bunch of L’il Esils, and the challenge is to notice how many things are not-quite-right about the images.

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Just for fun, I decided to make some L’il Esils. This is mostly a matter of adding “child height, child face, child body, flat chest” to the prompt, but the way people train models, you’re likely to find yourself rapidly filling the negative prompt with things like “nsfw, nude, naked, topless, nipples, crotch, upskirt, sideboob”, etc; if they can go NSFW, they will, often in ways that you don’t want stored on your computer. Even mentioning skin color can be enough to trigger nudity.

Dear Amazon,

A clear plastic bag is not a shipping container for a breakable item. TL/DR: it broke.

Programming jobs: still safe

I asked ChatGPT to write a Bash script that toggles the blocking status of a Pihole, using the REST API. It wrote (broken) code that used the API that was valid from version 3.x through version 5.x. However, a completely different API was introduced for version 6.x, and there’s no backwards compatibility. I didn’t know this. ChatGPT didn’t know this. Even pointing ChatGPT at the updated API page, which it dutifully pretended to retrieve and analyze, did not change its answer.

So I asked again, this time specifying “v6 api”. It immediately rewrote the script to use the correct authentication method and API calls, but it didn’t work. After editing the script to dump debug data, I informed it that the call to get the current blocking status returned “enabled” or “disabled”, but the call to set the status required true or false, while still returning enabled/disabled. This is kinda dumb, but pretty typical of cheesy REST APIs.

It took several more passes to produce working code, but ChatGPT was absolutely confident that it was Right every time, insisting that the latest-but-still-broken version was “corrected and fully tested”. Despite having no ability to, y’know, test.

All this for a single page of code that does something that’s completely fucking trivial. Tell me again how this horseshit is replacing 90% of Real Software Engineers at Big Tech companies. And then pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

Dear Pihole devs…

On the other hand, there’s a special level of Hell reserved for devs who write update code that fails to check if the new version will still be supported on the current OS before breaking the existing install. Spoiler: it wasn’t.

So now I have a new Pihole running as a Docker container on my Synology NAS, and a Raspberry Pi to reinstall from scratch, with whatever the current release of the GPS-hat NTP stratum 0 package is.

But wait, there’s more!

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