End of an era

Mrs. Toia, my kindergarten teacher, has passed away. It would be difficult to estimate how many children’s lives she impacted, but the simplest metric is this: every kid who passed through her classroom in ~40 years remembers her name.

Teams sucks, reason #UTC-5

After I got back from Chicago, I noticed that the Mac version of Microsoft Teams refused to notice the timezone change until I restarted it.

Now that’s just crazy talk!

I am not making this up: it’s Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

Only 60%? Those are rookie numbers.

Generative AI fakes 60% of citations.

Best Girl Mania

There are now 23 Esil LoRAs. There are characters with quite a few more, like Asuna from Sword Art Online (I counted 75 before giving up), but most of those are lead characters who showed up in a lot more episodes and manga volumes…

(IllusionBreed with this LoRA produced excellent ears, without the weird artifacts some other combinations have created; it does have a tendency to go NSFW without prompting, not that there’s anything wrong with that)

Kids today just don’t know…

New LoRA titled “natural breasts Illustrious”. Almost every sample picture supplied by the creator shows really obvious cheap boob jobs.

nsfb

You can lead AI to writing…

Driving back from Chicago, I was thinking about the quality of prose I’ve seen from AI, both the pricy pay models and the home game, and came up with a good example of what’s wrong. As we know, LLMs are basically just weighted-random sentence generators loaded up with massive amounts of data and trained in specific query-response patterns. There is pre and post-processing to hide some of the artifacts and try to separate the false hallucinations from the accidentally-true ones, as well as add censorship and bias.

Something I played with a bit with ChatGPT was asking it to write scenes from novels. By default, the prose is completely bland and colorless, representing the statistical average prose fiction, but you can customize your queries with phrases like “in the style of Roger Zelazny”, and that’s the specific example I thought about in the car.

more...

Just got a phone call from someone claiming to be Amazon Customer Support, trying to confirm recent purchases. This was suspicious not because of his random phone number and strong Indian accent, but because he claimed to be Amazon Customer Support, a group that is slightly less mythical than the Easter Bunny.

I asked him what the email address associated with this Amazon account was, and he carefully spelled out “outdoorlimited@…”.

So I hung up, changed my password at Outdoor Limited, and contacted their customer service to let them know they’d been hacked.

Update

...and another one today. Oddly enough, they hung up before I could.

FYI, if you want to wrap Chick tracts in a Christmas card and send them to complete strangers in another state, choose a card that is not covered with loose glitter. They may still hate you, but you won’t inspire the rage that comes from forcing them to spend the next week vacuuming and wiping down every surface between the mailbox and the recycling bin.

Amazon Fragile™

Looks like I’ve got another two-day Prime delivery that’s going to take more than a week, as the bamboo garden stand I ordered was rejected by the carrier for damage and sent back. Switching from reliable delivery to dirt-cheap delivery is not a great long-term strategy, but it must be giving someone a quarterly bonus.

To add insult to injury, the notice that “Unfortunately, a problem occurred during shipping” is accompanied by a “Buy again” button. They should replace that with a “Buy somewhere else” button.

Another day, another data breach

I’ve never done business with Progress Software or used their MOVEit Transfer software, and neither did the credit union holding my HSA account, but their banking-services vendor Sovos did, and therefore I’m one of the 60 million people whose personal and financial information were compromised.

I think this is the third of fourth time I’ve been given free credit monitoring and identity theft protection due to some asshole’s sloppy coding practices.

This week or next…

Crunchyroll hasn’t announced the start date for S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, but it turns out that the previews claiming it’s this week are for one specific “premium” network, and everyone else in Japan gets it next week. Which means that Crunchy probably gets it next week. Sigh.

If that’s the case, it looks like Frieren will be the season opener for me.

(note: this is the most popular fan-art of the title character that does not involve cock; seriously, Pixiv?)

Interviews With Monster Girls manga ends

In translation, that is; it ended in December in Japan. The anime was terrific, but I’ve always had trouble writing about it because I can’t help wishing Steven had lived to see it; I think it would have pushed all of his buttons, not just the one about the gorgeous virgin succubus wearing red under-rim glasses.

I don’t think the post-anime source material would have held together for a second season, but it did at least bring an appropriate conclusion to the growing feelings between Our Iron-Willed Hero and Our Age-Appropriate Heroine.

Sunday: spend half an hour coming up with a solution for JWZ’s font-rendering problem, earning his gratitude.

Monday: get banned from commenting on JWZ’s blog for gently mocking a bullshit pro-abortion publicity stunt.

Well, shit, we’ve lost another good one. More later.

1. You have to show ID.
2. You have to show up in person.
3. You can only do it once.
4. They don’t count boxes of vaccines that are stored under tables and pulled out after everyone is sent home for the night.

Just sayin’.

If you receive an unsolicited “membership card” in the mail informing you that your free prescription discount service has been activated, and almost every single Google search result contains nearly-identical boilerplate text insisting that it’s not a scam? It’s a scam.