Last show standing, and since it started late, it’s got two one more episodes to go. [sigh; it's only 11 episodes, so things are going to be rushed next week]

This week, all hell breaks loose, kicking off an episode of Back-Seat Kaiju!, in which our cute glasses-wearing Operations gal’s sanity is tested. Basically, everyone gets to debut their new kaiju skinsuits, with Tsuntail exploding out of the gate in her mom’s hand-me-downs, Vice-Captain playing tsukkomi to #10’s boke, and Super Sidekick… not appearing this week. Good thing we’ve got two captains on deck.

Verdict: two one more episode, and I have no idea what they plan to end it on. I have a hunch Naughty Number Nine has been built up too much as a long-term antagonist, so maybe they’ll just Save The Country For Now and try for a third season? Ratings apparently support the idea.

(time for Tsuntail to go axe-crazy!)

Diffusion Image Evaluation Checklist

1. Count the limbs.
2. Count the fingers.
3. Count the toes.
4. Side-check the thumbs.
5. Side-check the big toes.
6. Count the navels.
7. Check for crazy eyes.
8. Check for consistent skin tones.
9. Check skin texture.
10. Check for texture patterns in background.
11. Watch out for overtrained default clothing.
12. Check all four edges for cut-off objects.
13. Check for giants and tinyfolk.
14. [update!] Check for melting.

Now you can apply standard advice about composition, like rule-of-thirds, division of negative space, not cropping people at joints, etc. If there’s anything even vaguely naughty about the pictures you’re generating, you’ll also want to check the apparent age of all human figures…

GenAI coding: the definition of insanity

devstral-small-2507:

It was quick, and friendly, and the code was half the size of the working one I got from gpt-oss-20b, and it ran the first time. It didn’t do anything, of course, and I spent N passes nit-picking every place where it did something stupid or simply ignored the spec, but as I blew past 24KB of context, my checkin comments started to get snarky. After all, I’d only just got it to finally display the bottom-bar buttons onscreen, without scrolling, and it still refused to actually make them work as buttons, or display the correct contents.

But it was quick, and friendly! Worst thing was that it actually styled the web GUI nicely; it just couldn’t make it meet the spec. I finally had to give up, because it started “fixing” bugs without changing a single line of code.

more...

…and that’s a wrap. Nothing much happens this week, as everyone discusses recent events and finds closure. The closest it gets to action is Our Hungover But Still Hot And Clingy Detective threatening to puke on Our Halfbreed Hero. Nice touch ending with the first-season ED song that inspired the manga.

Verdict: a lot of budget-saving tricks on the animation, but the art and voice acting were good, and the story was interesting despite the cover-our-asses suicide-prevention-hotline PSAs.

(unrelated vampire has ways of making you fall in love with her…)

🎶 Baby, you can vibe my code 🎶

As expected, adding additional features to the small, self-contained Python script took several passes, which took it past 32KB of context, then 48KB, and by the time I had the functionality just the way I wanted it, it was up to 59KB. And it took hours to get to that point, running on a not-exactly-cheap (even refurbished) Mac Mini. As its final task, I ordered it to write a revised design document reflecting the final state, which came in just under the 64KB limit.

For a single file of Python code with just over 500 lines. The maximum context setting for this model is 128KB. This does not scale to real coding projects.

Note that I said the functionality was as I wanted it. The LLM couldn’t fix CSS issues for blood or money, and still took N minutes to try and fail. At the moment, I need to fix all the button sizing and layouts, restyle the text to make it less hideous, and see if I can coax the zoom feature to scroll horizontally as well as vertically. And fix the display of the help pop-up, which got busted in one of the passes (I just need to find it in source control and paste the correct version back into place; which is why I put even the most trivial of projects under source control…).

(AI-upscaled XKCD…)

More LLM Coding Fails

• magistral-small-2509: never got it to display an image, or make any progress figuring out the error messages I fed it.

• qwen3-coder-30b: just could not figure out how to display a new image after navigating, despite the code being more than twice as long.

• qwen3-32b: excellent at parsing error messages to fix syntax errors in Python and Javascript; also excellent at making syntax errors in Python and Javascript. Complete waste of time. The only nice thing I can say about it is that it didn’t make me watch while it retyped the whole program after each change, but even that was undercut by it losing the indentation when telling me to replace a buggy block of Python with a new one.

Haven’t tried it with the licensed cloud-y tool on my work Mac yet…

Fall Season Falling Down

With only a few weeks to go, presumably most of the fall shows have been announced and have their web sites and promotional videos up, right? Meh, kinda.

Setting aside the Nth seasons of shows I didn’t watch N-1 of:

• A Gatherer’s Adventures In Isekai: wow, they managed to make that sound completely generic. NO

• Alma-chan Wants To Be A Family: sort-of Nuku-Nuku as an emotionless loli, with a side order of Sekirei? NO

• A Mangaka’s Weirdly Wonderful Workspace: just NO

• A Star Brighter Than The Sun: tough girl in love with pretty boy. NO

• A Wild Last Boss Appeared: player wakes up in MMO world as her OP character. NOT AGAIN

• Chitose Is In The Ramune Bottle: popular kid tries to coax hikikomori into coming back to school. NO

• Dad Is A Hero, Mom Is A Spirit, I’m a Reincarnator: ohhellNO

• Don’t Touch Kotesashi: generic dorm-harem porn game. NO

• Dusk Beyond The End Of The World: Like World’s End Harem, only more derivative. NO

• Forget That Night, Your Majesty: teaser trailer promises barely-animated shojo-manga romance with chins that could cut glass. NO

• Future Kid Takara: trailer mixes lightly-filtered 3D CGI with real-world footage to mash-up Doraemon with Captain Planet. ohhellNO

• Gachiakuta: future world is divided between floating-city elites and ground-bound garbage-pickers, an idea that’s been done to death. NO

• Ganglion: villain/mook gag show; that’s gag as in “choke”, based on the trailer. NO

• Gintama - Mr. Ginpachi’s Zany Class: ‘wacky’ spinoff of a show I never watched. NO

• Gnosia: serial-numbers-filed-off clone of Among Us, and therefore sus. NO

• Hero Without A Class: Who Even Needs Skills?: pretty sure Starless Tamer did it better. NO

• Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota: high-school romance in which (gasp) opposites attract. NO

• Isekai Quartet 3: this would be a lot more interesting if all the shows were, y’know, current. The first season of Tanya The Evil aired in 2017, and the still-missing second season was announced in 2021, but all we’ve gotten was the (admittedly hilarious) Desert Pasta one-shot, also in 2021. So putting the cast in a new season of this sketch comedy is just rubbing salt in the wound. NO

• Latair The Earth: the promo art is enough for me to say NO

• Let’s Play: official blurb includes the phrase “a comedic, romantic, and all-too-real story about gaming, memes, and social anxiety”, which is a giant ohhellNO

• L’il Miss Vampire Can’t Suck Right: surprisingly, not a porn game adaptation. Unsurprisingly, trailer is full of suck. NO

• May I Ask For One Final Thing?: more ‘villainess’ shit. NO

• Mechanical Marie: robot/maid/assassin/guardian, with the twist being that her master is robosexual but she’s only pretending to be a robot. NO

• Monster Strike: Deadverse Reloaded: game adaptation. NO

• My Awkward Senpai: bitchy sexpot office lady acquires bishie subordinate, and you’ll be stunned to learn she falls for him. NO

• My Friend’s Little Sister Puts It In For Me: oh, wait, that’s “has it in for me”. $10 says it ends up my way, though. NO

• My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha: Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, I’m Out for Revenge!: ohhellNO

• My Status As An Assassin Obviously Exceeds The Hero’s: another whole-class-gets-isekai’d-and-I’m-way-OP show. NO

• Ninja Versus Gokudo: not even going to look at the trailer. NO

• Swallow My Monster Meat, Milady: er, “pass the monster meat”, which sounds like something you’d need laxatives for. NO

• Plus-Sized Misadventures In Love!: NO

• Potion, Wagami wo Tasukeru: love how the “saved by potions” title isn’t even being translated. TL/DR: another “potion loli” show, this one with bonus excitable elf bishie. NO

• Puzzle & Dragon: do not watch the trailer. NO

• Sanda: whoever decided to release an English-language trailer with a flat-affect AI voiceover chose… poorly. NO

• Shabake: Edo period shop owner with weak constitution who’s surrounded by helpful spirits spontaneously goes all Jessica Fletcher as people start being murdered every time he leaves the house. Somebody rolled percentile dice to generate this one. NO

• Si-Vis: The Sound Of Heroes: low-effort ripoff of Kpop Demon Hunters? ohhellNO

• Solo Camping For Two: like “hanging out for hermits”, I guess. NO

• Style of Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH: another AI-generated English voiceover? Kill me now, please. NO

• Sylvanian Families: Freya no Wonder Days: no synopsis or trailer is available, which automatically makes it better than the ones with AI voiceovers. Still NO

• The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest: oh, good, I was hoping there would be a “gonna be the strongest” “kicked out of the hero’s party” show this season, said no one ever. NO

• The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess: NO

• This Monster Wants to Eat Me: not porn, just something-something yuri death-wish romance something. NO

• Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider: NO

• Peach Versus Ogre: (er, “Tougen Anki”) the descendents of the folk-tale hero Momotaro are still fighting oni, which sucks when you find out you’re an oni. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this will suck. NO

• Touring After the Apocalypse: didn’t they just do like five of these shows? NO

• Wandance: dance like no one’s watching, at high school. I also will not be watching. NO

• Watari-kun’s ****** Is About to Collapse: somebody please spoil the ****** for me so that I don’t have to type it again and get the backslashes right so the Markdown processor doesn’t turn it into bold and italic. Or don’t. NO

• With You, Our Love Will Make It Through: chick wants to fuck her furry classmate. NO

• Yano-kun’s Ordinary Days: chick wants to fuck her battered classmate. NO

To sum up, NO. Maybe rock-service and shadow-healer can kill some time while I wait for more Frieren in January.

Wallpaper fail

I added a few hundred non-lingerie clothing sets to my wildcards and made some gals in a 9:16 aspect ratio to potentially share the wallpaper rotation with RedWaifu on my new 27” 4K HDR vertical monitor, and this was one of the first to show up:

“No, no, I didn’t say she can’t dance, I said she’s got two left feet!” 😁

Related, I have to go through the clothing wildcards and remove any reference to “crossbody” purses. They end up with literal crosses attached to them. Sometimes, they have straps.

(classical reference)

Dear Apple,

Please provide fine-grained controls for disabling “data detector” overlays in text and images. It’s really annoying to look at a picture that clearly contains no text at all and have a translucent pulldown menu show up when you mouse over the image that offers to add a random string of digits to your contacts as an international phone number. Note that it doesn’t let you copy the string; it’s so insistent that it’s a phone number that it only offers options to use it as one.

It’s one thing to be able to open an image in Preview.app and deliberately choose the OCR text-selection mode (which is quite good, even at vertical Chinese/Japanese), but having it turned on system-wide for all images is intrusive and dangerous bullshit. I don’t want every image processed by a text-scanning system that has opaque privacy rules and no sense. And of course interpreting random digits in text as phone numbers and converting them to clickable links is also dumb as fuck; remember when a bunch of DNA researchers discovered their data was corrupted by Excel randomly turning genes into dates?

(Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Live Text -> offdammit)

(I didn’t even specify an Apple product, just “silver-colored laptop”; training data, whatcha gonna do? I did have to add a table and ask for a big downward swing of the axe, but the flames were free, thanks to a generous interpretation of the term “fire axe”)

Vibe Me Wild

(classical reference)

There is an executive push for every employee to incorporate generative AI into their daily workflow. I’m sure you can guess how I feel about that, but the problem is that they’re checking.

We have licenses for everyone to use specific approved tools, Which I Will Not Name, and VPs can see how many people have signed into the app with SSO, and at least get a high-level overview of how much they’ve been using it.

So I need to get my Vibe on. The problem is, it’s just not safe to run tool-enabled and agentic genai on my work laptop (especially while connected to the VPN), because I have Production access. The moment I check the boxes that enable running commands and connecting to APIs, I’d be exposing paying customers to unacceptable risks, even though there are passwords and passphrases and Yubikeys to slow things down. All it needs to do is vibe its way into my dotfiles without being noticed. I don’t even want the damn thing to read internal wiki pages, because many of them include runbooks and troubleshooting commands. And of course there’s incidents like this, in which an OpenAI “agent” is subverted to exfiltrate your email.

But I need to show that I’ve used the damn app to produce code.

So I wrote up a detailed design document for a standalone Python script that implements my five-star deathmatch image-ranking system. And before handing it over to the work app, I fed it to offline LLMs.

First up, seed-oss-36b, which has been giving me good creative results and tagging: it ‘thought’ for 20+ minutes, then generated a full project that ignored about half of my requirements, including the one about persisting the state of the rankings to disk. I didn’t even try to run it.

Next, gpt-oss-20b, which ‘thought’ for 30 seconds before spitting out a complete, self-contained Python program that almost worked. When I told it that the /images route and the /api/images route worked, but that the main / route displayed nothing and none of the key bindings worked, it ‘thought’ for 25 seconds, realized that it had written syntactically invalid Javascript for the key bindings (multiple case statements on one line), and corrected the code.

At this point, I had basic functionality, but found three flaws in testing. I listed them out, and after 2 minutes of ‘thought’, it corrected them. Sadly, it also deleted the line import os from the code, breaking it.

I told it to fix that, add a new keybind to reset the display filtering, and fix a newly-discovered bug in the image-zoom code that prevented scrolling. A minute of ‘thought’ and it took care of those issues, but deleted the Flask import lines this time.

A mere 7.5 seconds of ‘thought’ convinced it to add that back, and then I had a fully-functional 413-line self-contained app that could let me quickly rank a directory full of image files and persist the rankings to disk.

All in all, ~20 minutes of me time to write the design doc, 4 minutes of ‘thinking’ time, plus ~4 minutes each pass to generate the script (I’m getting ~5 tokens/sec output, which types out the code at roughly twice human speed), plus ~20 minutes of me time for source control, testing, and debugging. Both models used about 18KB of context to accomplish their task, which means that additional enhancement requests could easily cause it to overflow the context and start losing track of earlier parts of the iterative process, with potential loss of functionality or change of behavior.

With tested results, I’m now willing to present the revised design doc to the licensed tool and let it try to write similar code. While I’m not connected to the VPN…

(I suppose HR would take offense if I pointed out that the Vibe in Vibe Coding should be replaced with a more intrusive sex toy…)

With apologies to The Beatles…

I once had a vibe
    Or should I say
It once vibed me
    It wrote all my code
Then gave away
    API keys

It asked for my keys
    and it said they’d be safe in the vault
Then I looked around
    and I found them shared on ServerFault

I called for support, waited online
    wasting my time
I talked myself blue, tech support said
    “I’m off to bed”

He told me his shift had just ended
    and started to laugh
I emptied my wallet
    and crawled off to sob in the bath

And when I came out, my app was gone
    my credit blown
So I set a fire
    at their HQ
and watched them burn

Boxxo Or Bust 2, last two episodes

I never felt motivated to watch last week’s grimdark horseshit episode, but I might as well embrace the sunk-cost fallacy and get to the end. Here goes…

Shoe Fetishist acquired his peculiar hobby because he was looking for the boots that turned up as the prize in the recent competition. He’d bought them for his childhood friend and adventuring partner, only to wake up after losing a fight to find her mutilated corpse, with legs and boots missing. Yeah, that’s a great story that fits right in with slapstick comedy and lighthearted cheesecake.

Naturally they find the villain responsible without any difficulty, and he and his pals come right out and confess while twirling their metaphorical Snidely Whiplash mustaches. It’s “not well written”.

Basically both episodes are full of near-constant whiplash and expository lumps, right up to the final post-credits scene in which they announce that they’ll continue telling the wrong story in a future season.

Verdict: yeah, no; the people responsible for this mess don’t deserve any eyeballs for another season.

Speaking of ‘bust’,

Miri Hanai in a cowkini:

Tag-a-licious

One thing that’s annoyed me with my blog is that I gave up manually tagging posts with keywords several thousand posts ago, and now I sometimes have trouble finding the quote or reference I’m looking for. So I’m letting an LLM chew on the problem. Specifically, seed-oss-36b, which has been doing a bang-up job inventing color-coordinated cheesecake pin-up costumes and poses, without the annoying wokescold moralization that Google and OpenAI’s offline models ram past your tonsils and gag you with just for using the word “sexy”.

The code is trivial; all the fun is in the system prompt and the user prompt:

Examining the “reasoning”, it clearly separates the TOML metadata header from the body content and parses both as requested, and creates output in the correct format. I don’t necessarily want to use all the tags, but by writing them out to a separate file for each blog post, I can go through with another script and pull out the most common and the most distinctive tags.

When it finishes. Which at ~2 minutes/post on the Mac Mini is going to take about a week. The 4090 would be faster… if the model fit. 20GB on a 24GB card is a bit tight.

Tagged ‘delicious’

Let’s see what sort of poses and costumes seed-oss-36B has been giving me to use in my wildcards. I started out at the usual 1024x1600 resolution, but since I’m making pin-ups, I quickly switched to a Playboy-centerfold aspect ratio at 896x1920.

But not before it fabricated a waifu pic I found so tasty that I not only ran it through the refiner and upscaler, I then ran it through the commercial Topaz Photo AI tool for even more cleanup and a 4x upscale (that did not run me out of memory!), bringing the final result to a silly-resolution 9216x14400.

I might even print her out as a real poster; she could hang on the not-Zoom-visible wall in my office:

(10 megapixels, 132 megapixels)

more...

I’d rather find a second waifu than write about evil right now…

(I found her in a bulk-wildcard-testing run where I set it to use the default sampler/scheduler, CFG=3.5, Steps=37, which took 1.5 minutes/image; cranking the steps up to 60 and using Heun++2/Beta improved quality at the cost of taking 6.75 minutes; refining it at 40% and upscaling it by 2.25x with 4xNomosUniDAT_bokeh_jpg eliminated the artifacts and significantly improved detail, but took 25.75 minutes. Worth it?)

(trying to do a 4x upscale ran out of memory after 45 minutes…)

Fiverr lays off 30% of employees…

…to focus on AI. Meanwhile, Fiverr freelancers are making a bundle cleaning up after AI.

🎶 🎶 It’s the cirrrrrrcle of liiiiiiife 🎶 🎶

Wow, Your Forma was worse than I thought…

Some reviewers made a fuss about the chemistry between the two leads being due to their voice actors being married in real life. Not any more.

Maybe she wasn’t willing to do the Sylphy voice in bed… 😁

(official art from the light novels, where she’s a busty little chibi; I’ve already used up all the fan-art, and I didn’t have any luck with the LoRAs)

Now that’s a knife dock!

OWC is selling a Thunderbolt 5 dock with 3x USB-A 3.2 ports, 1x USB-C 3.2 port, 4x Thunderbolt 5 ports (1 used for upstream), 1x 2.5Gb Ethernet port, and 2x 10Gb Ethernet ports with link aggregation support. For those who need their Mac Mini to have multiple 8K monitors and serious NAS bandwidth.

It’d be kind of wasted on me, so I’m thinking I’ll settle for the CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 dock: 4x Thunderbolt 4 (1 upstream), 4x USB-A 3.2.

Out of context

“Reasoning” models tend to do better at prompts like “give me a list of N unique action poses”, except when they dive up their own assholes and start generating reams of text about the so-called thinking process they’re following faking. I’ve had them spend 10+ minutes filling up all available context with busywork, without ever returning a single result. If they do return something, the list is often non-unique or cut off well before N.

But the context is the real problem, because if you only got N/2 results, you’d like to coax it to finish the job, but there’s a good chance that the “thinking” has consumed most of the context, and most models do not support purging context in the middle of generating a response.

It would also be useful to copy the setup of a known working chat and generate a completely different kind of list. I definitely don’t need the context of a search for poses and lighting setups when I ask for festive holiday lingerie ideas.

You can’t just reload the model with larger context and continue the chat. You can’t fork the chat into a new one; that preserves the context, too. What you want is to wipe all answers and context and preserve the settings and your prompts, so you don’t have to set up the chat again. In LM Studio, this functionality doesn’t seem to exist.

So I wrote a quick Perl script to load the JSON conversation history and remove everything but your prompts.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.020;
use strict;
use warnings;
use JSON;

open(my $In, $ARGV[0]);
my $json = join(' ', <$In>);
close($In);
my $conv = decode_json($json);

# remove token count
$conv->{tokenCount} = 0;
# rename
$conv->{name} = "SCRUBBED " . defined $conv->{name} ? $conv->{name} : "";
# remove all messages not from user.
my $out = [];
foreach my $msg (@{$conv->{messages}}) {
    push(@$out, $msg) if $msg->{versions}->[0]->{role} eq "user";
}
$conv->{messages} = $out;
print encode_json($conv);

This dumps a fresh JSON conversation file to STDOUT, which can be given any filename and dropped into ~/.lmstudio/conversations.

Why Perl? Because I could write it faster than I could explain the specs to a coding LLM, and I didn’t need multiple debugging passes.

(BTW, 32K context seems to be a comfortable margin for a 100-element list; 16K can be a bit tight)

Digits and Shadows

It’s kind of amazing how the “state of the art” keeps advancing in AI without fixing any of the known problems. LLMs hallucinate because they must, and image-diffusion engines can’t count fingers or recognize anatomical impossibilities because they don’t use anatomy. All the alleged coherence you hear about in AI output is either sheer accident or aggressive post-processing.

Let’s examine a few types of Qwen Image failures:

“Thumbs, how do they work?”

Trying to put your own hand into a position seen in a generated image can be awkward, painful, or simply impossible if it’s on the wrong side.

more...

Call Of The Night 2, episode 11

Well, something just happened. With one episode to go, they really can’t deeply explore this new development, but at least everyone will live to see another Night.

Verdict: plot, with occasional animation. You know the conflict is over when they drop last season’s OP song into the mix.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 9

Our Mighty Tsuntail is back! Only in a supportive supporting-character kind of way for now, but this is a combination “must get stronger” and “everything’s better with friends” episode, in which Our Monstering Hero reconnects with his comrades and his childhood crush, while the world goes mad with the results of Naughty Number Nine’s latest efforts.

Dungeon Chibis rewatch

Crush-chan is less annoying the second time through. Naginata Gal is Best Girl by a huge margin. If new seasons keep sucking, I’ll be doing a lot of rewatches like this for a while.

Speaking of which, the three seasons of Dog Days never got a US Bluray release, but subbed Bluray rips are still torrentable. This is another show where everyone involved clearly loved what they were making.

(“pet me, you stupid hero”)

There would need to be explanations…

…if these showed up in the background of a Zoom meeting:

My office just got bigger

The one at home, that is, which was overcrowded with the old Ikea 31-inch-deep tables I brought from my old place and finally replaced. I didn’t use them as desks in my California house, but the desk set I had there went to Goodwill instead of onto the truck, so the tables were pressed into service.

I hate to just hand out a “that’s what she said” opportunity, but it’s amazing the difference seven inches makes. The room just feels so much bigger with 24-inch-deep tables. Also Ikea, but the tops are solid bamboo plywood instead of the old veneer-over-particle-board. They’re also 7 inches longer than the old tables, so there’s more room to fit between the legs. (coughcough)

I also picked up two bamboo side tables (1, 2) for a printer stand and a spare workspace. All of it had typical Ikea assembly hardware, but the bamboo is head-and-shoulders above their usual construction material. Pity they didn’t have the matching bamboo monitor stand in stock, because I’d have bought two of those to free up even more desk space.

Sadly,

My M2 MacBook Air simply does not support 2 external monitors at once. Can’t be done without buying a DisplayLink adapter and installing their software driver (remember DisplayLink? Turns out that’s still a thing). So I can either use the really nice dual HDR portable monitors as one display with a 1-inch gap in the middle, or move them over to the M4 Mini. Since I want the HDR displays for photo editing, that means moving all my photo archives and workflows over sooner rather than later, but not today; between emptying the office, scrubbing it floor to ceiling, hanging pictures, assembling furniture, and moving everything back last night, I’m just a tiny bit tired and sore.

The day Google AI Overview actually worked

I feel it necessary to call this out, because it’s been wrong so many times that I usually automatically scroll past it. I only read it today because it was 6:30 AM and I hadn’t had any caffeine yet.

Anyway, after upgrading to MacOS “Sequoia” recently, I discovered the annoying new system-wide Ctrl-Enter keyboard shortcut. Because my fingers have decades of training in Emacs keybindings in the shell, I often repeat the previous command by hitting “Ctrl-P, Enter”, but my pinky often stays on the Ctrl key. Now Ctrl-Enter pops up a “contextual menu” everywhere, unless you disable it in Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard -> “Show Contextual Menu”.

I was astonished that Google actually gave me a correct answer for once. Shame they didn’t credit the web site they stole it from.

(actually, everything on this particular panel should be disabled, IMHO, and quite a few others as well)

Qwen Image LoRAs not ripe yet

I’ve yet to find one that works as advertised. Either they visibly degrade image quality, or they just do… nothing at all.

My Cyber Princess Waifu continues to amuse, though.

more...

(we now resume our regularly scheduled randomblogging, until the next slaughter of innocents by Left-wing domestic terrorists)

Boxxo Or Bust 2, episode 11

This is really not a good week for the show to go grimdark, revealing Our Shoe Fetishist’s bloody, revenge-fueled path. I’m just not going to watch it right now.

Here’s something wholesome instead:

Warner Bros wants to be the Broadcom of streaming

CEO insists HBO Max should be priced like diamonds. Six customers are so much easier to support than six million.

Not a fan

I bought a new unmanaged 10Gb switch, because my existing one only had 2 10Gb ports with the rest being 2.5Gb. Three years ago, the price of a switch with 8 10Gb RJ45 ports was a bit too spicy, but now it’s just annoying.

What really hurts is when a desktop switch has a fan loud enough to be heard from the next room. And I need it to be in the same room. For comparison, I barely notice the Synology NAS that’s on the same desk, even when it’s doing a RAID scrub. For the sake of my sanity and productivity, I guess I’ll be building the switch a padded crib…

New Monitor(s)

The new monitor is an “ASUS ZenScreen Duo OLED 360° Foldable Portable Monitor (MQ149CD)”, which is quite a mouthful, but the TL/DR is that it’s two 1920x1200 HDR panels that can be used separately or together, portrait or landscape. To use it as two separate monitors, you need to use two cables, but despite the one-inch gap between the panels, you can still get good use out of it as a single 1920x2400 display.

I’m using the 1/4”-by-20 tripod screw to mount it higher than the kickstand, and despite all claims of portability, yeah, you have to plug it in to drive it properly (1 of the 3 USB-C ports is power-only). Right now I’ve just got it hooked up with HDMI, because my current dock was low on free USB-C ports, but once I get things rearranged I’ll separate them, because Lightroom’s window layout is a bit inflexible, and the one-inch gap is bad for photo editing. Better to use the application’s “secondary display” support.

This does make me want a vertical 20+ inch 4K HDR portable monitor, though. I just don’t want it to be from a company I’ve never heard of before, which is what’s all over Amazon.

“Shared memory and fancy NPUs are no match for a good graphics card at your side, kid.”

While I’m discussing new toys, I’ll mention that I also picked up a refurbished M4 Pro Mac Mini, which in theory has much faster “AI” performance than my M2 MacBook Air. With 64 GB of RAM, it can run mid-sized offline LLMs at a decent pace, and even do quick image captioning if I downscale raw images to a sensible resolution.

What it can’t do is more than very basic image generation. It’s not the memory, it’s the cores: not enough of them, and not fast enough. This matches what I’ve heard about the insanely-pricy Mac Studio and the merely-way-overpriced systems built on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395. Their performance comparisons are based entirely on running models that simply don’t fit into a consumer graphics card’s VRAM. “Our toaster is much faster at running this 48 GB model than a 24 GB Nvidia 4090!”

The Mini is a huge speedup for Lightroom and Photoshop, though, which made it worthwhile for me. Any “AI” playability is a bonus.

(I have never seen a human being hold a camera this way)

Related, “Dear Draw Things programmers”

Come back when you discover the concept of legibility. Dipshits.

Accidental Disney Princess

I was testing a few more LLM-enhanced dynamic prompts, and one in particular stood out: a series of very consistent images of a fresh-faced young gal who could make Bambi’s woodland friends sit up and beg.

4K resolution, crisp and highly detailed, create an illustration that exudes a high-budget aesthetic. Depict an average height, lovely ethnic Egyptian woman who is 18 years old with a petite figure. She has deep blue eyes, lobed ears, a straight nose, a wide chin, an U-shaped jaw, dimpled cheeks, and a flat forehead. Her heart-shaped face highlights her gentle features. Her skin is healthy and alabaster white, with festive holiday makeup that complements her almond-shaped eyes and full lips. Her hair is steel gray, styled in a cybernetic pixie cut with metallic edges and glowing circuit-like patterns. The woman has a happy expression as she stands with one arm raised, bathed in luminous waves of light. The background features a lush jungle filled with singing flora, glittering with raindrops under the radiant colors of a rainbow sun. Subtle dawn light filters through, creating an aerial perspective with open framing and pastel tones that evoke a gentle awakening. The composition highlights her graceful form against the vibrant greenery, capturing a dreamlike atmosphere.

Sadly, the prompt that worked so well in Qwen Image was… less successful with other models that don’t have an embedded LLM to parse complete sentences sensibly, and failed completely with a few that couldn’t handle the combination of the Beta scheduler and the Heun++ 2 sampler (I may redo those with their defaults).

It’s not that the others all failed, they just didn’t produce consistent characters who looked like my princess and/or lived in her enchanted forest.

more...

Everyone on the Left, raise your hand if you’re not a murderous savage. Now look around your peer group and count the lack of hands, then come over and rejoin civilization. There might still be time.

Those who didn’t raise your hands? Do not expect civilization to protect you any more.

(no cheeky anime picture, out of respect for the victims)