“It was not an act of hate. My mom called me a terrorist. It wasn’t terrorism; it was activism. It was for a cause…”
— Dustin Dzuck, age 17, explaining why he spray-painted a swastika on a pro-Bush yard sign. He'll fit right in at Berkeley.Paradoxies
So, AI is consuming all memory production in the world while simultaneously being unable to remember which commands destroy data. I’m sure it’ll all work out fine.
“Alexa, exit Alexa+”
How much do we want AI everywhere? Instead of the original plan to make it an add-on paid service, Amazon is rolling out the new “AI” “enhanced” Echo “experience” to Prime customers by default. To opt out and restore the old dumb “by the way, did you know that I’ll keep talking until you swear at me to shut up?” behavior, use the above command. Which will probably work as reliably as switching away from the “for you” feed on X…
(took about 20 tries to get the speech bubble to come from the drone, sigh; fortunately it only took 4 seconds per try)
“Package delayed in transit”
Oh, Amazon, you and your bullshit.
- Dec 10: marketplace order placed, “may arrive after Christmas”.
- Dec 11: “Package left the shipper facility”
- …
- Dec 26: “Package delayed in transit”
- Actual USPS site, Dec 11-27: “Shipping label created, USPS awaiting item”
- Amazon status: “Estimated to arrive by January 1”
The best part is how Amazon now adds text insisting that the information on the order status page is the same as what’s available to their customer service agents, (implied) “so don’t bother contacting them”.
(fortunately it was just a present for myself…)
Skeleton Knight 2 announced in January
No, not announced for January, just that there will be an announcement for the second season in January.
(I’ve already used almost all of the decent non-porn fan-art from the first season…)
Santa’s School For Naughty Girls
Just helping them get their start…
(ZIT’s having some scaling issues today; must have had too much ice cream and pudding for Christmas (classical reference))
Post-Christmas Clearance Sale
Everything must go!
Glass Bottom Boat
She has my sword…
GenAI Gals after the jump
Unexpected presents...
Amazon Interstellar
Childhood’s End
No, not that one. This one. Of the many pop-culture references from the Seventies that have been converted to LoRAs, this is not one I intend to pursue.
Blackout
My patience is rewarded, as the 15-year-old overpriced Connie Willis novel finally drops below $10 on Kindle.
Merry Christmas from The Cheesecake Faptory
Tear off the wrapping paper and enjoy!
[Update: just realized I made the "-small" versions full-4K as well, which was silly. Page should load a lot faster now...]
Note that my new workflow is built around my SwarmUI
CLI, which
now correctly preserves metadata even when generating to JPG, so the
large images have the full parameters embedded in the EXIF User
Comment field, making it possible to drag them back into SwarmUI or
just view the prompt and other settings with exiftool:
exiftool -b -usercomment cheesecake.jpg | jq .
Lazy meme day
Same vibe
The M in M1911 is for…
Last Christmas
Peak Japan
Related,
Modern dating
Life goals
Life lessons
Hope for the future (seasons)
A Wild Last Boss Returns!
Season 2 announced. Clicking on the video initially used the English dub, and it’s so bad that I not only couldn’t tell what character it was supposed to be, but couldn’t even be sure it was someone speaking in character.
Kaiju No. 8, too
“conclusion arc” and side story.
And Magical Working Girls makes three
(wrong magical girls, but these have a lot more fan-art)
“Lucy, you ignorant LUT!”
Fallout Season 2, episode 1
“Let’s set up an entire season of convoluted plotting all at once!”
IMHO, Walton Goggins is the only thing holding this together, and spacing it out so you have to watch one episode per week like our primitive ancestors did does not enhance the experience. I’d prefer to just rip off the bandaid and get it over with, but that won’t be possible until February.
Maybe I’ll watch the rest then.
(I did not use the word “alien” to describe the creature, because that word is strongly associated with a very specific overused image of a pop-culture alien, just like asking for “alien symbols” gets you an Alienware logo; creature, monster, pretty much any other word is a better choice with most models)
(also, this is probably the best-looking pistol I’ve gotten out of ZIT, and it’s even in a decent “holstered” position)
LUT-shaming
Random image is random; I’m experimenting with adding a LUT post-processing pass to my SwarmUI CLI, to fix Z Image Turbo’s slightly flat colors. The output looks fine on its own, but when I mixed some of its cheesecake into the wallpaper rotation, you could really see the difference.
If anything, the pics from Qwen Image were too saturated, but for some of them that was part of the “vintage airbrush pinup” look I was going for with them. My first pass at cleaning up the ZITs was doing a basic auto-level-ish command with ImageMagick:
magick $file -contrast-stretch 0.15x0.05% new/$file
Worked great, but it would be nice to have it run server-side, before
JPG compression, and the recommended method is to apply a LUT. There’s
a whole suite of post-processing
tools available
as a SwarmUI extension, and plenty of free LUTs online
(1,
2,
3,
etc). You can also copy .cube files from any professional imaging
software you happen to have a license to, such as Photoshop, where
they’re usually named by the film/camera look they apply.
Raw from ZIT:
I think the Fuji Sensia LUT pops the colors a bit without going overboard:
(best part: applying a LUT adds basically nothing to rendering time, and generating a comparison grid of every installed LUT at different strengths takes seconds, since the server can reuse the rendered image and just apply each transform in turn)
Another pair of cats dancing…
Okay, they were both pretty cool cats, but not quite what I had in mind.
It's beginning to look a lot like Shipmas
…although with Amazon having forgotten most of what they ever knew about logistics, Shipmas is a bit like Schrödinger’s Cat Box, with things never showing up as trackable until two days after they were promised for delivery, which is always fun to explain to kids.
Fun(?) with Liquid Ass
iOS 26.2 is out, so one could hope that other customers have done the basic release QA for Apple by now. I wanted to see what the legibility looks like, to see if it’s safe to upgrade my mom’s phone yet. So I installed it on my old California phone, which doesn’t tie into any online services (do not upgrade a device that uses iClown until you’re ready to upgrade everything; they test cross-version compatibility even less).
TL/DR, no, doesn’t look like they’ve finished tuning the UI to restore readability. It’s better than the initial “release” (beta), but still not good for anyone with less-perfect vision than an Apple design team.
Synology pivots to “AI”
Their latest device is BeeDrive, an “AI-powered Portable SSD”. Not to be confused with their BeeStation “private cloud”, which is not to be confused with their NAS products. As far as I can tell, none of the Bee-thingies has any data protection, although the Station offers a free trial of “storing bits of your private cloud in their public cloud”.
TL/DR, both product lines appear to be external drives that come with backup software, which is a pretty crowded market. On the plus side, they didn’t roll their own, and licensed Acronis True Image (“formerly Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office”, signaling that they’ve (partially) recovered from their childish phase of labeling everything “cyber”).
On the minus side, they’re bundling an offline LLM to do text-scanning, image-scanning, and inference on everything you store, for Deep Search(TM). So when the local authorities decide they don’t like your memes, they can sieze your backup drive and quickly find additional double-plus-ungood thoughts to charge you with.
I mention this for the benefit of those living in Australia, the UK, Canada, the EU, and other regimes hostile to free expression of disapproved thoughts.
I also suspect their LLM is going to produce hilarious results when fed a typical Internet user’s hard drive. Most common search result:
(primary difficulty on this one: getting separate speech bubbles with one of them coming from the computer; maybe six tries total)
Definitely not a “1-minute walk”…
A Kyoto “tourism site” describes access to the Sannenzaka shopping district with the words “A 1-minute walk from Keihan Railway’s Gion-Shijo Station”.
Google’s walking instructions suggest they left off the first digit, and it’s not a “1”…
Given how sparse, generic, and monolingual the content of the site is, I suspect it’s AI slop. Which is why I’m not linking to “kyoto-to-do dot com”.
Speaking of slop…
My phone is now getting computer-filtered 50% Medicare/Medicaid fraud and 50% home-improvement fraud. I need to answer the phone for unknown numbers while I’m expecting service providers to show up, so I can’t just let them go to voicemail (and even legit numbers often don’t leave messages any more).
I say “yes” to get to whatever operations center in India is taking the calls today, and then ask them a simple question: “what’s my name?”. If they have even the cheapest possible call list, then they have some name associated with my phone number.
But none of them can answer, and they stop talking immediately and hang up.
GenAI Girl Trouble
This week’s SwarmUI Discord theme is food. Z Image Turbo nailed the concept on the first try, but I made a few more until I had one where she was carrying the pepperoni in both hands.
(the first time I tried to upscale this, I got a bunch of extra extra-tiny people scattered around the image. Turned out that the “refiner do tiling” option was on (legacy of a more memory-intensive model), and it was generating additional people on each tile, at the appropriate scale; first time I’ve seen it do something like that)
Captions, on the other hand…
The “New Yorker” look was easy, given the artist name and a style description, but getting every word right remains a challenge for diffusion models, even when you avoid rare words. Part of the problem is that for all its virtues, the turbo part of Z Image Turbo means that it does 90% of the work in the first pass, which doesn’t leave as much room for variation and refinement. It took 10 tries to get 2 correct captions, one of which was rendered even smaller than this one.
The WWWA Central Computer says “get off my lawn!”
Dirty Pair 40th anniversary merchandise.
