Dear Rally’s,

I pulled up to the drive-through and placed my order with your automated system (not that I had a choice, once I was in line).

J: Number 1 combo, please.

A: would you like to upgrade that to a large for 40 cents? What’s your drink?

J: Yes. Coke Zero.

A: Does that complete your order?

J: No.

A: Okay, your total is $10.95.

J: I wasn’t done. Hello? Anybody there?

J gives up, pulls forward, pays, drives home; discovers it misheard every answer, giving me a medium combo with a regular Coke.

J scans QR code on receipt to give feedback, site never loads after repeated tries. Visits completely different URL on receipt, site never loads. Falls back to the “contact” form on the main web site, which, surprisingly, works.

Public deathmatch

I put the full genai-written project up on Github. Complete with the only Code Of Conduct I find acceptable.

I’ll probably create a grab-bag repo for the other little scripts I’m using for genai image stuff, including the ones I wrote myself, like a caveman.

(it’s been a while since I pushed anything to Github, and somehow my SSH key disappeared on their end, so I had to add it again)

Next genai coding project…

…is gallery-wall, another simple Python/Flask/JS app that lets you freely arrange a bunch of pictures on a virtual wall, using thumbnails embellished with frames and optional mats. It took quite a few passes to get drag-and-drop working correctly, and then I realized Windsurf had switched to a less-capable model than I used for the previous projects. Getting everything working took hours of back-and-forth, with at least one scolding in the middle where it went down a rat-hole insisting that there must be something caching an old version of the Javascript and CSS, when the root cause was incorrect z-ordering. This time even screenshots were only of limited use, and I had to bully it into completely ripping out the two modals and starting over from scratch. Which took several more tries.

Part of this is self-inflicted, since I’m insisting that all Javascript must be self-contained and not pulled in from Teh Interwebs. It’s not a “this wheel is better because I invented it” thing, it’s “I don’t need wheels that can transform into gears and work in combination with transaxles and run-flat tires but sometimes mine crypto on my laptop”. The current Javascript ecosystem is infested with malware and dependency hell, and I want no part of it.

Anyway, I’ll let it bake for a few days before releasing it.

(between Ikea, Michaels, and Amazon, I have lots of simple frames waiting to be filled with the output of my new photo printer; I had to shop around because most common matted frames do not fit the 2:3 aspect ratio used in full-frame sensors, and I don’t want to crop everything; I like the clean look of the Ikea LOMVIKEN frames, but they’re only available in 5x7, 8x8, 8x10, 12x16, and a few larger sizes I can’t print (RÖDALM is too deep, FISKBO is too cheap-looking))

Apparently OpenAI wants subscribers back…

…because they’re promising porn in ChatGPT. For “verified adults”, which probably means something more than “I have a credit card and can pay you”. Also, the “erotica” is still quite likely to be censored, with rules changing constantly as journolistos write “look what I got!” clickbait articles.

They’re also promising to re-enable touchy-feely personalities while pretending that’s not what caused all the “AIddiction” clickbait articles in the first place…

I’m guessing they’ll stick to chat at first, and not loosen the restrictions on image-generation at the same time.

(I’ll likely wait until Spring before giving them another chance; Altman is to Steve Jobs as Bob Guccione was to Hugh Hefner)

“Genai’s strange obsession was…”

“…for certain vegetables and fruits”. The expanded categorized wildcards have produced some violent color and style clashes, which I expected. I can clean up the colors by using variables in the premade costume recipes, but for the style clashes, I may throw the YAML back to Claude and tell it to split each category into “formal”, “casual”, “sporty”, “loungewear”, etc, to reduce the frequency of combat boots with cocktail dresses and fuzzy slippers with jeans.

I’ll need to hand-edit the color list, because while smoke, pearl, porcelain, oatmeal, stone, shadow, snow, rust, clover, terracotta, salmon, mustard, flamingo, bubblegum, brick, jade, olive, avocado, fern, and eggplant are valid color words, they are not safe in the hands of an over-literal diffusion-based image-generator.

Yes, I got literal “avocado shoes”.

For most of them I can probably get away with just appending “-colored”, but I’ll have to test. I’ll need to clean up the materials, too, since “duck cloth” isn’t the only one that produced unexpected results.

With the SF set, you can handwave away many of the fashion disasters by remembering the future fashions in the Seventies Buck Rogers TV series, but there were still some standouts…

I didn’t refine and upscale these; mostly I’m just poking fun at the results, although there are a few that deserve enhancement.

more...

Our DFC Ponytail-Bearing Redheaded Schoolgirl Pal (currently only known by her last name, although now that she’s slipped up and called Our Crystal-Crazy Heroine Ruri-chan, she’s sure to be Shoko-chan soon) stumbles across an unusual orange rock, then stumbles and loses it, leading to a deep-woods adventure that wipes out even the energetic Ruri, terminating in an abandoned factory. Whatever they were producing, the conditions were just right for making big orange crystals, as explained by Our Well-Rounded Mentor.

Nagi’s wisdom is as deep as…

(by the way, this is only the second role for L’il Red’s voice actress)

There And Back Again

My wayward Amazon package finally arrived Friday night, and it was even intact (mildly surprising since it had no packaging whatsoever, just a label slapped on the side). There was no indication of how it went astray, like a second label or a half-dozen scenic postcards, but there is a punchline to the story.

The first entry in Amazon’s tracking has it starting out in San Diego, CA on the 28th. From there it went to: Cerritos, CA on the 29th; Hodgkins, IL on the 2nd; Bell, CA on the 6th; La Mirada, CA on the 7th; Hodgkins, IL and two cities in Ohio on the 9th; then the UPS depot up the street from me early on the 10th, and finally onto my front porch that evening.

The punchline? The shipping label on the package says it really shipped from Hebron, KY. Which is about an hour’s drive from my house.

(I guess it just wanted a little more flight time)

The worst thing about Larry Correia’s Academy Of Outcasts…

…is that it convinced Amazon I’m interested in ‘LitRPG’, a genre I have repeatedly run away screaming from. Not just because the genre is cursed with premature subtitlisis and epicia grandiosa, things that have been turning me away from overambitious new authors for decades.

The book? Fun, although I kept getting distracted by on-call alerts, so it wasn’t an in-one-sitting kind of read. I’ll buy the next one.

(announcing your Grand Epic Plans on the cover of your first novel is a curse that was infesting the SF/fantasy mid-list back when publishers used to sign damn near every first-time novelist to a three-book contract with ambitious delivery dates, only for both sides to discover that it takes more than a year to write a decent sequel to a book that was written part-time over five years)

“You’ve heard of ‘filthy rich’? We’re ‘disgusting’”

In the end, I didn’t have Claude restructure the YAML file from $color/$loc/$time/$type to scene/$type/$color/$log/$time; instead I had the bright idea of molesting it with a one-liner (unpacked for clarity):

grep : scenes.yaml |
    perl -ne '
        next if /^#/;
        ($s,$k) = m/^( *)([^:]+):$/;
        $i = int(length($s)/2);
        $p[$i] = $k;
        print "." . join(".", @p[0..$i])," ",
            join("/", @p[0,4,1,2,3]),"\n" if $i == 4
    ' |
    sort -k2 |
    while read a b; do
        echo "# $b"
        yq $a scenes.yaml
        echo
    done

TL/DR: I used the indentation level to populate an array, printed out the original structure as a yq selector and the new structure as a path, sorted by the new path, then dumped out each section. After that it was a single search-and-replace to indent all the items, and a quick Emacs macro to convert the paths into the new YAML structure. The thing that took the longest was removing the redundant indented keys, which technically wasn’t necessary to create the correct YAML structure.

Probably took less time than writing an explicitly detailed request to Claude.

Waifu Harem Rotation

To overcome the Apple-imposed limitations on wallpaper changes, I instructed Claude to write a little Python script that shuffles separate sets of images for each display at a chosen interval. I called it waifupaper, of course:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""
Waifupaper - Changes MacOS wallpapers at fixed intervals

Bugs:
- doesn't work if wallpaper is currently set to rotate.
- fails to load images if called without full path to directories.
"""

import argparse
import os
import random
import subprocess
import sys
import time
from pathlib import Path
from collections import defaultdict


def get_directory_state(directory):
    """Get the current state of a directory (modification time and file count)."""
    directory = Path(directory)
    try:
        # Get the directory's modification time
        mtime = directory.stat().st_mtime
        # Count image files
        image_extensions = {'.jpg', '.jpeg', '.png', '.bmp', '.gif', '.tiff', '.tif', '.heic'}
        file_count = sum(1 for f in directory.iterdir() 
                        if f.is_file() and f.suffix.lower() in image_extensions)
        return (mtime, file_count)
    except Exception:
        return None


def get_image_files(directory):
    """Get all image files from a directory."""
    image_extensions = {'.jpg', '.jpeg', '.png', '.bmp', '.gif', '.tiff', '.tif', '.heic'}
    directory = Path(directory)
    
    if not directory.exists():
        print(f"Error: Directory '{directory}' does not exist", file=sys.stderr)
        sys.exit(1)
    
    if not directory.is_dir():
        print(f"Error: '{directory}' is not a directory", file=sys.stderr)
        sys.exit(1)
    
    images = [
        str(f.resolve()) for f in directory.iterdir()
        if f.is_file() and f.suffix.lower() in image_extensions
    ]
    
    if not images:
        print(f"Error: No image files found in '{directory}'", file=sys.stderr)
        sys.exit(1)
    
    return images


def get_display_count():
    """Get the number of connected displays."""
    try:
        # Use system_profiler to get display information
        result = subprocess.run(
            ['system_profiler', 'SPDisplaysDataType'],
            capture_output=True,
            text=True,
            check=True
        )
        # Count occurrences of "Display Type" or "Resolution"
        count = result.stdout.count('Resolution:')
        return max(1, count)  # At least 1 display
    except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
        return 1  # Default to 1 display if command fails


def set_wallpaper(image_path, display_index=0):
    """Set wallpaper for a specific display using AppleScript."""
    # AppleScript to set wallpaper for a specific desktop
    script = f'''
    tell application "System Events"
        tell desktop {display_index + 1}
            set picture to "{image_path}"
        end tell
    end tell
    '''
    
    try:
        subprocess.run(
            ['osascript', '-e', script],
            check=True,
            capture_output=True
        )
    except subprocess.CalledProcessError as e:
        print(f"Warning: Failed to set wallpaper for display {display_index + 1}: {e}", file=sys.stderr)


def main():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
        description='Rotate wallpapers on Mac displays at fixed intervals',
        formatter_class=argparse.RawDescriptionHelpFormatter,
        epilog='''
Examples:
  %(prog)s ~/Pictures/Wallpapers
  %(prog)s ~/Pictures/Nature ~/Pictures/Abstract -i 60
  %(prog)s ~/Pictures/Wallpapers -s -i 120
  %(prog)s ~/Pictures/Nature ~/Pictures/Abstract -1 -3
        '''
    )
    
    parser.add_argument(
        'directories',
        nargs='+',
        help='One or more directories containing wallpaper images'
    )
    
    parser.add_argument(
        '-i', '--interval',
        type=int,
        default=30,
        help='Interval in seconds between wallpaper changes (default: 30)'
    )
    
    parser.add_argument(
        '-s', '--sort',
        action='store_true',
        help='Sort images instead of shuffling (default: shuffle)'
    )
    
    parser.add_argument(
        '-1', '--display1',
        action='store_true',
        help='Only affect display 1'
    )
    
    parser.add_argument(
        '-2', '--display2',
        action='store_true',
        help='Only affect display 2'
    )
    
    parser.add_argument(
        '-3', '--display3',
        action='store_true',
        help='Only affect display 3'
    )
    
    parser.add_argument(
        '-4', '--display4',
        action='store_true',
        help='Only affect display 4'
    )

    parser.add_argument(
        '-v', '--verbose',
        action='store_true',
        help='print verbose output'
    )
    
    args = parser.parse_args()
    
    # Determine which displays to affect
    selected_displays = []
    if args.display1:
        selected_displays.append(0)
    if args.display2:
        selected_displays.append(1)
    if args.display3:
        selected_displays.append(2)
    if args.display4:
        selected_displays.append(3)
    
    # If no specific displays selected, affect all displays
    affect_all_displays = len(selected_displays) == 0
    
    # Validate interval
    if args.interval <= 0:
        print("Error: Interval must be a positive number", file=sys.stderr)
        sys.exit(1)
    
    # Get display count
    num_displays = get_display_count()
    if args.verbose:
        print(f"Detected {num_displays} display(s)")
    
    # Validate selected displays
    if not affect_all_displays:
        for display_idx in selected_displays:
            if display_idx >= num_displays:
                print(f"Warning: Display {display_idx + 1} selected but only {num_displays} display(s) detected", 
                      file=sys.stderr)
        # Filter out invalid display indices
        selected_displays = [d for d in selected_displays if d < num_displays]
        
        if not selected_displays:
            print("Error: No valid displays selected", file=sys.stderr)
            sys.exit(1)
    
    # Prepare image lists for each display
    display_images = []
    directory_states = {}  # Track directory modification times
    
    # Determine which displays will be managed
    if affect_all_displays:
        managed_displays = list(range(num_displays))
    else:
        managed_displays = sorted(selected_displays)
    
    if args.verbose:
        print(f"Managing display(s): {', '.join(str(d + 1) for d in managed_displays)}")
    
    for i in managed_displays:
        # Use the corresponding directory, or the last one if we run out
        dir_index = min(managed_displays.index(i), len(args.directories) - 1)
        directory = args.directories[dir_index]
        
        images = get_image_files(directory)
        
        if args.sort:
            images.sort()
        else:
            random.shuffle(images)
        
        display_images.append({
            'images': images,
            'index': 0,
            'directory': directory,
            'display_index': i  # Store the actual display index
        })
        
        # Track initial directory state
        directory_states[directory] = get_directory_state(directory)
        
        if args.verbose:
            print(f"Display {i + 1}: {len(images)} images from '{directory}'")
    
    if args.verbose:
        print(f"\nRotating wallpapers every {args.interval} seconds")
        print("Monitoring directories for changes...")
        print("Press Ctrl+C to stop\n")
    
    try:
        iteration = 0
        while True:
            # Check for directory changes before setting wallpapers
            for display_data in display_images:
                directory = display_data['directory']
                current_state = get_directory_state(directory)
                
                # If directory state changed, reload images
                if current_state != directory_states.get(directory):
                    display_num = display_data['display_index'] + 1
                    if args.verbose:
                        print(f"📁 Directory changed: '{directory}' - reloading images...")
                    
                    new_images = get_image_files(directory)
                    
                    if args.sort:
                        new_images.sort()
                    else:
                        random.shuffle(new_images)
                    
                    display_data['images'] = new_images
                    display_data['index'] = 0
                    directory_states[directory] = current_state
                    
                    if args.verbose:
                        print(f"   Loaded {len(new_images)} images for display {display_num}\n")
            
            # Set wallpaper for each display
            for display_data in display_images:
                images = display_data['images']
                current_index = display_data['index']
                actual_display_idx = display_data['display_index']
                
                image_path = images[current_index]
                image_name = Path(image_path).name
                
                if args.verbose:
                    print(f"Display {actual_display_idx + 1}: {image_name}")
                set_wallpaper(image_path, actual_display_idx)
                
                # Move to next image, wrap around if needed
                display_data['index'] = (current_index + 1) % len(images)
                
                # Reshuffle when we complete a cycle (if not sorting)
                if display_data['index'] == 0 and not args.sort and iteration > 0:
                    random.shuffle(display_data['images'])
                    if args.verbose:
                        print(f"  → Reshuffled images for display {actual_display_idx + 1}")
            
            iteration += 1
            if args.verbose:
                print()
            time.sleep(args.interval)
            
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        if args.verbose:
            print("\n\nWallpaper rotation stopped.")
        sys.exit(0)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Fun fact: Apple’s virtual desktop ‘spaces’ have their own wallpaper settings, which means that each display has different wallpaper settings for each ‘space’. And if you want to keep the menubar on your main display, you have to tick the ‘use same spaces on all displays’ setting.

But ‘spaces’ are not manageable via Applescript, so changing wallpaper affects only the active space. Which means that if this script is running in the background, it will effectively follow you from space to space, updating the wallpaper on the active one. Which is kind of what I wanted anyway, but isn’t what the built-in rotation does. Apple’s standard behavior uses undocumented private APIs, which is a very Apple way to do things these days.

Work-still-in-progress

Revised the lighting & composition wildcards, revised the retro-SF costume wildcards. Next up will be throwing all the retro-SF location prompts into the Claude-blender and having it generate new ones broken down by category; not only are the current ones getting over-familiar, they come from several different models and a variety of prompts, with varying degrees of retro-SF-ness. After that I’ll probably throw the pose file at it; I did some manual categorization, but it’s still a real mish-mash of styles. Either that or the moods and facial expressions, which most models don’t handle well conceptually; I’m going to try asking for the physical effect of words like “happy”, “sexy”, “eager”, “playful”, “satisfied”, etc, and see if it produces something an image-generator can differentiate from “resting bitch face”.

Yet Another Example of words not to use with Qwen Image: the fashion term “cigarette pants” is taken literally, with half-smoked butts randomly placed around the hips. Only once did it put one in the gal’s hand, and I don’t think it ever interpreted it as “skinny pants”.

Also, I’m making a note to go through the costume components and downweight many of them; quilting and padding wear out their welcome quickly, especially when they get applied to gloves and make it look like she’s wearing oven mitts.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
I won’t count fingers and toes,
   as long as you make pretty waifus,
Genai, you fool.

I won’t count fingers and toes,
   but I want limbs on the correct sides,
and each type should have only two.
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

(classical reference)

[wow, I must be tired and distracted by the combination of a houseguest and a busy on-call week; I didn't even notice that I never reviewed the episode...]

This week, The Tale Of The Abandoned Rock-Lover Who Finally Found a Home. With occasional really goofy face distortions that look like CGI rotations without the middle bits. On the plus side, we get one of Our Gals into a bikini. On the minus side, it's Ruri, who's definitely girl-shaped, but no competition even for Gal Gal, much less Our Varsity Over-The-Shoulder-Boulder-Holder Team.

The Tedium Express

That Package(TM) has moved again. Two days after leaving California, it was back to the same depot in Illinois that it visited a full week ago. And then it made it to (the other end of) Ohio Thursday night. Looking this morning, it appears to have reached the depot that’s literally down the street from my house.

So unless it goes back to California again, I should finally have it tonight.

Tell me you know nothing about legibility…

…without telling me you know nothing about legibility:

(also, “tell me you’re desperately hoping people will mistake your derivative crap for Japanese derivative crap…”)

More Claudification

I took a YAML file of lighting/composition/angle prompt components and threw it at Claude, instructing it to break them up into categories like indoor/outdoor, day/night, portrait/natural lighting, color/black-and-white, etc, then flesh out each category in the new YAML file up to 50. It worked quite well, with a few exceptions:

• the output wasn’t valid YAML; I had to correct several indentation errors, and two cases where it started a new category at the end of a line.
• it stopped twice and asked me to press the “Continue” button, because it took too long for a single request.
• the original file had a top-level “scene” key; this was deleted, and the new file’s structure’s structure looks like “color/outdoor/day/portrait”. The dynamicprompts library needs a top-level key for organization, which is trivial to add at the top and re-indent, but more annoying is that the hierarchy would make more sense as “scene/portrait/color/outdoor/day”, which is easier to add globbing to (“scene/portrait/color/*” to get both indoor and outdoor lighting at all times of day). This is a more difficult refactoring, so I’ll throw the corrected file back at Claude and tell it to do the grunt work.

Next up will be applying the same categorization and refresh to the settings, poses, and outfits, but not until I recover from having a houseguest this week…

more...

You’ll never believe this, but…

That Amazon package that went from California to Illinois, had no tracking updates for five days, then appeared back in California? Supposedly left California early Monday morning and hasn’t been spotted since. It’s “still on the way”, allegedly by Friday, but has reached the point where Amazon is now offering me a refund.

Since I don’t actually need it for anything soon, I’m just going to see what happens. Will it suddenly acquire a new tracking number or shipping company, as they’ve done before, or will it just show up a few months from now, as they’ve also done before.

The Flying Sister

Not to be confused with The Flying Nun. I was expecting my sister to fly into town on Wednesday. Monday afternoon she called to say she’d missed a connection on one of her regular business flights, and if she was going to have to Zoom into a meeting, she could do that from my house. So she was going to come to my place early.

Then she (and 20 other planeloads of people) got stuck on the tarmac at O’Hare and missed that connection, with no later flights to Dayton. Fortunately she lives in Chicago, so she wasn’t just stuck in an airport overnight. Although it took them three hours to find her bags…

So close…

They almost did the meme:

Waifu-a-go-go

[trivia: the Hollywood nightclub “Whisky a Go Go” was named after the first French disco club, which was named after the British movie “Whisky Galore!” (a-gogo being Frogspeak for “galore”)]

The dynamic wildcarding is shaping up nicely (although I need to split it up into categorized sets, and generate a wider variety now that I’ve got the prompting down), and I was in the mood to generate a big batch of pinup gals, but it just takes too damn long, and I can’t fire up a game on the big PC while all its VRAM is being consumed fabricating imaginary T&A. Belatedly it occurred to me that if I’m going to do a separate refine/upscale pass on the good ones anyway, why not do the bulk generation at a lower resolution?

Instead of the nearly-16x9 resolution of 1728x960 upscaled 2.25x to 3888x2160, I dropped it to 1024x576, which can be upscaled 3.75x to exactly the monitor’s 3840x2160 resolution. That cuts the basic generation time from 90 seconds to 35, and if I also give up on using Heun++ 2/Beta for the upscaling (honestly, the improvements are small, and it changes significant details often enough to force me to retry at least once), the refine/upscale time drops from 33 minutes to 10. That makes it less annoying to ask for several hundred per batch.

I did get some odd skin texturing on the first upscaled image, so I tried switching to a different upscaler. That changed a bunch of details, so now I’ve downloaded new upscalers to try. TL/DR, the more you upscale, the more of your details are created by the upscaler.

On a related note, file under peculiar that in MacOS 15.x, Apple decided to strictly enforce limits on how often you can rotate wallpaper. It used to be that the GUI gave you a limited selection but you could just overwrite that with an AppleScript one-liner. Nope, all gone; now you’re only permitted to have the image change every 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day. No other intervals are considered reasonable. Apple knows you don’t need this.

No doubt the QA team that used to test this stuff was axed to fund the newly-released Liquid Ass GUI that unifies all Apple platforms in a pit of translucent suck.

(just as I’ve settled on “genai” as shorthand to refer to the output of LLMs and diffusion models, I’ve decided I need a short, punchy term for the process of building prompts, selecting models and LoRA, and iterating on the results; I could, for instance, shorten the phrase “Fabricating Pictures” to, say, “fapping”…)

Just noticed that Crunchyroll has a PG rating for this show, promising nudity and profanity. So not happening.

Anyway, Ruri suffers a brief bout of imposter syndrome, then rereads her notes to discover that she did miss something, and only careful review kept them on the right track. In the end, they not only find the sapphires, but uncover a bit of local lore.

What sort of hills and valleys will they explore next?

…like our primitive ancestors did…

I rearranged things in my office so that the 4K vertical monitor sits between the MacBook Air and the Mini, connected to both. Given that both Macs have widescreen displays, naturally I configured the Dock to appear on the left, as I always do. Except that In Their Infinite Wisdom, Apple has decreed that if the Dock is on the left, it must appear on the left of the leftmost monitor, even if that is not the main monitor. You can force the menu bar to appear on the main monitor regardless of position, but if the Dock is on the side, it must be aaallllllllll the way to that side. Even if that’s literally several feet away from the display that’s right in front of your face.

So I had to move the Dock to the right of my laptop display, like some sort of heathen who eats from a dumpster. It’s quite unnerving. I don’t look there. I never look there. I have over twenty years of practice not looking there.

Someday my prints will come…

Amazon order for $RANDOM_OBJECT placed on September 28. Shipped via UPS on September 29. Until about an hour ago, the last update from UPS had it in Illinois on the 2nd, but now it’s arrived in… California!

I’m old enough to remember when Amazon was good at logistics. Also “packaging items so they don’t get destroyed in transit”.

Bookmarking for later,

OpenAI has discovered that it bought a pig in a poke with Jony Ive’s Mysterious Pocket AI Device. For 6.5 billllllllion dollars. To make it work, whatever “it” is, they not only need more AI server capacity, but also a better-than-their-flagship-chatbot to drive it. And the Ars commentariat will be there to do whatever it is they do.

They really should have asked Grok and Claude if this was a wise investment. Or maybe they did…

Claude dev containers in VS Code

Yeah, there’s a lot of hand-waving involved in how to do this, with no provision for “hey, your official Dockerfile blew chunks”. Meanwhile, I’m not the only person frustrated with Windsurf’s expensive failure policy. It does no good for them to have a polished GUI if it eats up your monthly credit balance in an AI-enhanced “abort, retry, fail” loop.

Not that I actually want to use VS Code with or without a vendor-specific skin on top. The only reason I even tried a pay-to-play “AI” IDE is that it produced a better coding experience for my initial test project (at no cost to me), and all of that goodwill was lost when the second project got bogged down and had to be spoonfed half a dozen screenshots to get it back on track. The vacation scheduler was over 50 passes in when I ran out of trial credits, with some functionality still untested because of blocking bugs, and it might have been able to fix them if it hadn’t eaten a bunch of credits.

Anyway, I bit the bullet and got a paid Claude subscription for a while, and if I can get their Coding UI to work in a secured sandbox, I’ll turn it loose and see what it does to the remaining bugs and feature requests. No chance in hell I’m going to give a Node.js “AI” app direct access to my shell…

(“no, you can’t tempt me; I know there’s node.js under that fur!”)

Wrong model!

I was reviewing image-generation prompts enhanced by an LLM, and ran across something worse than having it randomly switch to Chinese (which it also did):

Note: Please replace “her” with the appropriate pronoun depending on the woman’s gender.

Yeah, that one’s going in the trash heap. The LLM, not just the prompt. (it was a derivative of OpenAI’s free model)

This week, Thicc Girls goes double platinum. Can’t wait for the world tour. Poor Imari really got thrown in the deep end, though; “Oh, we’re not panning in the river today, we’re taking these boulders to the mountains!”

Alya Sometimes Hides The Salami: In Russian

New explicit video from Maplestar. (there are some known errors in this version that will be fixed soon; none of them affect the “thrust” of the story…)

(Patreon link to full video)

(he gets her in the end; also, she gets him in the end)

Windsurf goin’ down

Yesterday’s attempts at app enhancement foundered on the rocks of “Model provider unreachable”. It still charged me “credits” for trying, but didn’t do anything. This would be annoying if these weren’t free trial credits, but it still brings me closer to running out. Pro tip: don’t keep trying when you hit this error…

Dropping from the preview of Sonnet 4.5 to standard Sonnet 4 might have reduced its “intelligence” a bit, but had the advantage of actually running. I hadn’t switched to 4.5 anyway; it did that for me to promote the new one, charging less credits to do… less.

Today’s original-requirement-finally-implemented is all-day events. I think I have just enough credits left in my trial to add a user-prefs page with defaults and password changes (“using best practices for security”), session cookies (“using best practices for security”), and deep-copying an existing project into a new one.

Once I run out of credits, then I decide if it’s worth $15/month to throw more of my dusty old projects at it. Alternatively, since Windsurf is mostly just a custom VS Code skin connecting to third-party models (with some secret sauce in the system prompts and context handling), and it’s been suggesting the Claude Sonnet models, I could download VS Code and the Claude extension and pay them directly, since I’ve gotten good creative results from the free level of Claude.

It also appears that you can run Claude’s coding assistant inside a Docker container and just export your repo directory into it, allowing it to run commands on a completely virtualized environment without network access to anything but their LLM API (once it downloads its CLI tool, which of course is written in node.js, sigh).

(Will I release the final project? Sure, why not; it’s not like I wrote it…)

It’s always surprising when they mention that Ruri’s in high school, since she often behaves like a much-younger girl. This week, they add a reminder in the form of a classmate who can stack up next to Our College Gals. Also a future partner-in-rock-crime who’s slowly being nudged in front of the camera.

The mineral-of-the-week is itty-bitty little grains of sapphire, slowly being traced up-river by tedious visual inspection of individual grains of sand. My back hurts just looking at Ruri leaning over a microscope; there’s a reason professors pawn this sort of work off on grad students, and that Nagi pawns it off on Ruri…

Honestly,

I expected more from Ai Shinozaki’s first tentacle video.

Lost in translation: Isekai Twink In Butchland

Seven Seas has announced new translated manga titles, including Let’s Run an Inn on Dungeon Island! (In a World Ruled by Women). This is softcore porn featuring a runty little guy who gets transported to a world where big buff women dominate, and as they wash up on his deserted island, he alternately bangs them silly and endures cliché role-reversed sexual harassment. Alternate title: Cocksman of Reverse-Gor. Of course he also has OP cheat magic.

New toy: Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-310

I haven’t owned an honest-to-Ansel photo printer in a very long time. I had one of the original 4x6 HP PhotoSmart printers with the lickable ink, and I had a rather finicky dye-sub printer for a while, but both were back when I was shooting on film and scanning slides with a color-unmanaged SCSI Nikon scanner that had an unreliable automatic slide feeder, which would be 20+ years ago.

It’s been on my mind for a while now, and the cleanup of my office made room for one, but I managed to talk myself out of buying a big one, settling for Canon’s A3+ (13” x 19”) model. Mostly because of sticker shock over the cost of ink cartridges for the A2/B3 PRO-1100.

Color management has come a long way over the past 20 years, to the point that every print I’ve tried has come out exactly as expected, including my genai gals and memes. And the ecosystem around fine-art printers is stable, with third-party paper companies publishing ICC color profiles that smoothly integrate into the workflow, so that you can pretty much just click “print”.

The only significant advance in framing technology, on the other hand, is the widespread availability of non-reflective coated glass at framing shops. You’ll still get a lot of glare on premade frames, but if you can afford professional framing, your stuff will be a lot more viewable.

Heartbreakingly expensive, though. Even with the fortunately-timed 70%-off sale at Michaels, my last framing batch was the size of a mortgage payment. Filled up a lot of wall space, but still not something to do lightly.

If I stick to commodity gallery-style frames in standard sizes, the PRO-310 will pay for itself, the ink, and the paper by filling just one wall of my living room with my Japan pics. The only trick is that for many common frame sizes, I need to print multiple images on one sheet of paper and cut them apart with a rotary trimmer, but I have one of those, and Canon’s software allows you to save custom multi-image print layouts and quickly drag images into them.

(and, yes, I printed Red Waifu)

Wallpaper Waifus

Speaking of which, I made a batch of 500 retro-SF dynamically-prompted pin-up gals in 9x16 aspect ratio to serve as rotating wallpaper on the vertical monitor, then deathmatched them down to 18, and while one poor gal spontaneously grew an extra finger during the refine/upscale process, it should be fixable with a bit of variation seeding. Later; at 33 minutes/image to refine and upscale, I’m done for the day.

I usually just post full-sized images and let the browser scale them down, but 18 2160x3888 images is a lot of mumbly-pixels, even lazy-loading them, so click the preview images to see the big ones (no, not Nagi).

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Our second adult fan-service provider has entered the show in the form of a busty underrim-glasses-wearing bookworm, Imari. Could this show get any better? Well, yes, but jello-wrestling probably isn’t on the schedule.

This week, everyone falls in a hole in order to stumble across the Mineral Of The Week. Nagi is not only the voice of reason, but also the voice of A Proper Mentor, getting Imari out of her comfort zone and advancing her career path.

Verdict: thicc is apparently justice.

Windsurf stays on my mind…

My deathmatch project was quite small and self-contained, and even offline LLMs were able to wrap their tiny little “minds” around it, more or less. For my next attempt, I used the free trial of Windsurf to build something more elaborate: a vacation planner that mixes the categorized lists of Trello with the easy drag-and-drop of the Planyway plugin. That is, jettison all the other crap in both apps, and just have a bunch of events that can easily be moved around both between days and within days, so you can lay out an itinerary for the day and quickly update it on the fly. The real bonus is getting timezones right, which Trello still doesn’t do; it always edits and displays events in the web browser’s local time zone.

This time the experience wasn’t so smooth. I’m a dozen passes in, and it’s deferred the implementation of all of the drag-and-drop features because that’s apparently hard. The basic framework is there, but despite being part of the original specs, a fair number of features required multiple attempts to implement at all, much less correctly. Timezone issues required multiple screenshot uploads with detailed explanations. On the bright side, the screenshots and explanations actually worked.

In other words, it required a very detailed set of specifications, didn’t implement all of them, and would never have made any progress at all without extensive human testing and debugging experience. Even though this is still a tiny application (~1,000 lines of Python, ~1,000 lines of Javascript, and ~800 lines of HTML/CSS), it couldn’t be “vibed”.

Interesting note: it never occurred to the LLM that the color used to display text on a colored background mattered. I had to invoke the magic words “best practices for accessibility” to restrict the background color palette, and “strongly contrasting color” to ensure legibility. It then used actual Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I’d required best practices for security and authentication, but did not add the same wording to each other section of the specs…