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).

more...

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…

Thanks for calming down a bit, Ruri. Please don’t feel that you need to make up for it with fan-service; Nagi’s got that covered.

(…and if there was gold in them there hills, we’d all be rich…)

This couldn’t possibly end badly…

ChatGPT can now buy directly from Etsy. I’m sure Sam Altman will guarantee refunds when it accidentally purchases 1000 handmade small-batch organic vegan jam jars (Made In China) instead of 1 blender cozy.

(I recently saw a nice little “handmade-in-California” bamboo desktop drawer set on Etsy, for only six times the price of the exact same Chinese item on Amazon…)

Dear Topaz,

A while back, I purchased a standalone, perpetual license for Photo AI. It said there was an update to download. This turned out to be a new product named Photo. Subscription-only. Yeah, no.

And every time I launch the old app, there’s a prominent “upgrade” button, and a splash screen with the words “your perpetual ownership and active license make you a Topaz Founding Customer, giving you access to the new app at no extra cost.”

… except the $199/year subscription, which currently has a $100 discount for the first year. Clearly they’ve been studying the cable-tv & Internet pricing model.

There’s also a strong push to get a “special” subscription that costs even more, but includes more apps that I have no use for.

Dear Apple,

This morning, I deleted 200 GB of data from my Mac laptop. Hours later, it still hasn’t noticed and insists that the disk’s nearly full. It doesn’t even show up in the “purgeable” field on the Get Info window. There is no way to determine how much space is actually available.

Well, there is, but it’s poorly documented: disable Time Machine backups. This quickly updates the “purgeable” space to the correct value.

It doesn’t do anything with that space. That requires a separate command:

sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data 20214748364800 1

That’s 200GB in bytes, because of course that’s the unit you should use on a device that ships with hundreds of gigabytes of storage.

And don’t forget to turn your backups back on after the cleanup. It will never remind you.

(the data in question was my Lightroom photo archives, which I copied over to the much-faster Mac Mini yesterday; once I had confirmed backups on both ends, I nuked the old copies)

Please tell me that Ruri gets less shouty and annoying, because the lush-bodied rock-jock with a war hammer is aligned with my interests. Also, the music is a touch too dramatic, but the scenery is pleasant (not just Nagi). Her soothing Raphtalia voice is just a bonus.

Perhaps it’s coincidence, but when I stopped by the grocery near my parents’ house, I saw a woman walk by who could have been Nagi’s slightly-older sister. Took me a moment to remember what I went there for, especially with the crossbody purse strap highlighting the resemblance.

Verdict: please grow up fast, Ruri; and I don’t mean in the need-more-fanservice way. That’s more than covered, and I haven’t even seen the busty glasses gal yet.

(fan-art count for the series: 1,500+, and less than 500 are R-18+; not that there aren’t plenty of suggestive pieces outside the filter…)

Seven years later…

…Tim Berners-Lee is still trying to make “Solid” a thing. And after spending half an hour reading the current website (the original Github repo was abandoned without any code ever being checked in), I still don’t know what it’s good for. If he’d taken that long to invent the web, we’d still be living in caves.

[Last show! Until I dip into the reserves from previous seasons!]

Last week, the shit hit the fan, with kaiju springing up all over the place and forcing the good guys to pull out (almost) all the stops to defeat them. This week, it’s more like the shit hit a nuclear bomb, and we see all the major players on Team Good Guy individually targeted by bespoke kaiju while Our Monster Hero obeys orders to keep his head down. Until he doesn’t.

Verdict: cliffhanger! no season 3 announcement yet! Platoon Leader Cutie survived!

(Platoon Leader Cutie got the most screen time she’s ever had, so I’ll celebrate with an Esil)

Dear Interwebs,

Stop trying to make “clankers” a thing. It would be more correct to refer to generative AI as “crankers”, “hallucino-gens”, or “shittoasters”. “Clankers” implies a physical presence that they do not possess, and falsely implies that the “AI” features touted in physical devices are more than marketing buzzwords. I’ve mostly settled on “genai” by analogy to “genie”, although more the Aladdin type than the I Dream Of Genie variety (which I wouldn’t lock up in a server room…).

(I need to make this gal reproducible for future use; right now, she’s just “skinny, nerdy-cute young woman wearing big round glasses with thick lenses”, but that may not produce consistent results in other contexts, even though Qwen has some very strong face preferences)

genai fail

Qwen Image does not know what a “knife switch” is, even if you use the Chinese term that reliably returns images of the right thing (电源闸刀). Also, even in the successful image, I called it a switch, not a Big Red Button. It’s a bit iffy on the concept of “rack of servers”, too, doing better with “server rack”. Also, I asked for a “redneck genie”, and all it got out of that was the color.

“What’s that do?” is of course a Buffy reference.

The robot-adjacent term also suggests a degree of autonomy that does not exist outside of Sam Altman’s febrile imagination. Which is also a steaming pile of marketing buzzwords; look how his fluffers describe the reinvention of cron jobs.

Okay, one more…

Just because she’s actually pushing the button this time.