Turning on region-blocking and automatic translation has had the effect of bringing American xTwitter into direct contact with its Japanese counterpart, and the results have been inspirational and hilarious.

Among the many unanticipated results is the Victorian maid café in Tokyo that has become so popular you can barely visit their web site; it’s suffering a classic slashdotting. Hopefully they’re getting real business out of it as well.

Small steps forward

Version 6 of that NSFW ZIT checkpoint had fewer grotesque anatomy fails and adult-rendered-as-way-underage fails. Still a ways to go, though; I have no idea why its training data included women with bushy black unibrows, for instance.

(some commenters are complaining about poor penis rendering, but since I prefer my nudes with no penis at all, even for recreational uses, I’m okay with that part)

Another step back

I searched my Amazon order history for “kitchenaid”. It returned: a butter slicer, a dusting wand, a dough-rolling bag, an apple peeler/corer, a pineapple peeler/corer, a kitchen-spoon rest, a cord organizer that advertised itself as “for kitchenaid…”, a mixer cozy (ditto), and a KitchenAid spice grinder.

By my count, that’s 70% unrelated cruft. Maybe do a string search before tokenizing it and handing it off to “AI”?

There’s a work-in-progress checkpoint model based on Z-Image Turbo that promises better photographic-quality NSFW results than the existing ones, and at least one of my terminally-online 1girl-maker acquaintances gave it a thumbs-up, so I took it for a spin.

First impression: equal parts Teen Vogue and Barely Legal, with a dash of Girls’ Life to bring the ages down. In some cases way down, leading to quick deletion of images where prompts requesting adult female humans produced lolis. It also often produced elf ears, but that’s not something that would help defend you in court.

I’ve also been running the generated prompts through an LLM ordered to diversify the output by only adding flattering details to descriptions of faces, bodies, hair, clothing, and makeup, but LLMs do whatever is statistically likely, and will randomly remove keywords or change things they’re told not to. Using explicit numbers for ages seems to limit that sort of damage, although there was a surprisingly youthful “127-year-old” in one batch. Must have been some elf blood in there, even though it didn’t give her the ears.

I didn’t require full frontal nudity in every pic, so a few of these are outside the NSFW tag; most, however, are topless, bottomless, or both. The training in v5.0 of the model is unstable, leading to a higher rate of anatomy fails than the base ZIT model, especially for genitals, so I rejected a lot of images. v6.0 will be available in a few hours, so hopefully it’s less disaster-prone.

I threw in a bunch of random art styles, but the strong training bias towards photorealism meant that the subject was often a photo in front of an artsy background, sometimes literally casting a shadow on a painting.

(note: my Mac Mini with an M4 Pro takes about 3x as long to do text-generation as my Windows box with an RTX 4090, using the same model (gemma-3-12b-it-heretic-x-i1) and software (LM Studio); what I’ve seen of early benchmarks on the M5 MacBook Pros suggests that they’re still not great at running text or image models. All they really offer is the ability to slowly run models that don’t fit into consumer-graphics-card VRAM)

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Bit of a fumble there at the end, as if they ran themselves out of material and padded things out to avoid having to start the next story arc, which they’ve spent the past few episodes dropping hints about. Especially since season 3 isn’t coming out until next Fall. A few good character moments, anyway, and a nice self-contained story at the bridge.

This Fall will have Maomao, Fran & Sword-Daddy, and in the hopefully-won’t-suck column, Isekai Space Merc & Harem, Isekai Goblin Mayor, and Isekai Fetish-Porn Gamer (aka “Magical Explorer”), but having to wait a year-and-a-half after such a short season is a bit of a downer.

(season 3 of The Apothecary Diaries will be Fall and Spring, with a movie in between)

PyPI: litellm compromised

Thoroughly hacked. Detected on the same day, fortunately, but if it got pulled in as a dependency for something you run:

Assume any credentials present on the affected machine are compromised: SSH keys, cloud provider credentials (GCP ADC, AWS access keys, Azure tokens), Kubernetes configs, API keys in .env files, and database passwords.

Crunchyroll announces one show I might watch

plus some others.

Fridge waterfail

So, turning the fridge off for 12 hours solved the temperature problem, but it also somehow broke the seal on the water filter for the ice maker and water dispenser, so that when I went to fill the kettle, the filter leaked as much water as it passed, and since it’s located directly above the top shelf, the water went everywhere.

Once I finished cleaning up and reseated the filter, it stopped dispensing water at all, with the status screen (finally) showing LEAK and refusing to dispense water. Replaced the filter, no change; power-cycled the fridge, and the message changed to ERR. No water.

So I guess there’s going to be a service call after all.

Dark patterns

Network Solutions continues to spam me daily after buying my email provider. I click the Unsubscribe link. It takes me to a page with a checkmark for that specific type of spam (only), and a submit button.

The box is pre-checked. Clicking submit keeps me on that mailing list.

Before making the service call for my way-too-cold fridge, I emptied everything into coolers, powered it off, and waited 12 hours for it to come to room temperature.

Seems to have solved the problem, but I’ll definitely spot-check it for a while. It never hurts to have thermometers in both the fridge and freezer compartments, and my old ones didn’t record high/low range, so I threw a new set into my latest Amazon order.

I can’t even muster up a shocked face…

Crunchyroll major security breach:

“Crunchyroll may be facing a security breach through its ticketing system, which is outsourced through Telus in India”

Space Merc & Harem

Coming in the fall, and pretty much every episode unless they tone it down a lot. Our Hero gets isekai’d into his favorite space game with his OP custom ship, and quickly makes a name for himself as a first-rank mercenary and horndog. The teaser trailer gives a decent look at Mimi and Elma, the first two haremettes.

I’ve been enjoying the light novels, so I hope this gets handled competently. Our Hero Hiro’s voice actor is perhaps best known for Benimaru in Slime, first gal was the lead in Emotionless Robo Waifu, second gal has had mostly small roles, and Our Hot Blonde Ally is best known to me as Class Rep in Loner Harem, although some might recognize her as a certain Princess who deals with “torture”. The director has done some porn OAVs as well as a lot of individual episodes of various shows. Animation production by the studio who did Hoe Harem and the awkwardly-named She Professed Herself Pupil Of The Wise Man; they do have a lot of CGI experience, at least, and they’re gonna need it for this one.

(picture is unrelated. pity)

Figure Facts

That Haruhi-bunny pic I posted recently? I’d unpacked it just before taking the picture, and it wasn’t until I went to put it on a shelf that I realized she’s wearing fishnet seamed stockings. Made of fabric. Somewhere out there, a factory worker had to go to the trouble of actually pulling on her stockings before boxing her up.

This week, the mystery of Why Are They Setting Up Beardo’s City Of Gold With Only One Episode Left And They Just Started A Big Fight? I’m not complaining, just wondering how long until the show resumes.

Packagefail & win

Thursday morning, the “delayed” Amazon package still hadn’t gotten a status update, but not only did I have the option to cancel the order, they promised same-day delivery if I reordered the same items. So I did, and they were delivered at 5:30 PM on the same day.

This strongly reinforced my belief that an unqualified driver crashed the original truck.

“We bought your email provider to spam your inbox!”

If you guessed Network Solutions, you win the daily unsolicited shit-tier upsell email spam!

Fridgefail

I pulled a fresh carton of milk out of the fridge, and it was half-frozen. I opened a plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi, and the top half-inch instantly turned to slush. The compartment was set to maintain a temperature of 37°F, but this was clearly not happening, so I put my remote-probe thermometer inside, and saw it gradually drop to 20°F.

Yeah, that’s gonna be a service call. On the bright side, it didn’t fail in the other direction, so my food’s still safe, and setting the thermostat to 44°F got it up to 36°F, so I can make it until they get a tech out with the right part.

(admittedly, for most of my life, having a bottle of soda turn to slush on opening was precisely the temperature I wanted it to be at during the summer)

Ctrl-F “QA”: not found

Microsoft just sent a mass email announcing “Our Commitment to Windows quality”; you may have already seen people react to it, but here’s the exact wording of the bullet points. Based on the past several months of feedback, they plan to improve in the following areas through April:

1. More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions,

2. Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus,

3. Reducing disruption from Windows Updates,

4. Faster and more dependable File Explorer,

5. More control over widgets and feed experiences,

6. A simpler, more transparent Windows Insider Program,

7. Improved Feedback Hub, available starting today.

In order, that’s:

1. restore lost functionality,

2. back off from turning Notepad into a critical remote-code-execution vulnerability,

3. stop forcing you to install broken updates right away,

4. restore lost functionality,

5. cut back on ad-riddled screen-filling bullshit,

6. “higher quality builds” (that’s “insider” preview builds, not public releases…)

7. overhaul broken website.

All of these promises come with an implicit “(for now)” appended.

(some people are paid to put a more positive spin on this email…)

Chuck Norris, R.I.P

While most of his accomplishments have been widely praised, I’d just like to thank him for teaching me the word “gusset”.

Low temperature yesterday: 19°F.

High temperature Sunday: 78°F.

Solo Leveling manga tease

The recent volumes of the SL manga have been labeled “side stories”, and are the bridge between the original series and the sequel, Ragnarok. They include snapshots of Our Hero’s post-victory life, but also a brief glimpse of A Brighter Future.

I’m referring to Best Girl Esil, of course.

Wokalizing Gushing 2?

There are reports that the translation for the upcoming second season of Molesting Magical Girls will be done by one of the opinionated woke localizers who’s been butchering other series. Really hope that doesn’t happen; season 1 exceeded all rational expectations.

Summer: Retired Soldier With Horny Waifu

I read enough of the source material to recognize all the characters in the trailer, and while he definitely acquires a white-haired dark-skinned teenage oni waifu, there’s a touch of bait-and-switch in the setup, as the story gradually adds past events that make him more and more important. I mean, his feats in the present were enough to win the girl, and what more can a man ask for?

(unrelated Best Horny Waifu… and Other Best Horny Waifu)

Workday failed to pass the buck

They argued that the hiring discrimination they got caught doing for their corporate clients was just “the algorithm”. A federal judge just called bullshit and said they’re on the hook for illegal discrimination against protected classes (in this specific case, over-40 applicants).

Given that I’m one of the many applicants who would apply on a Friday evening and be rejected before sunrise on Saturday, I hope this decision holds up and eventually restores some slight sanity to the job market.

Also, cancel all H1B visas and eliminate the program. It’s a clear case of regulatory capture, overwhelmingly benefiting Indian nationals at the expense of American citizens.

(I suspect that eliminating H1B would also end the careers of a lot of Indian execs and senior managers, far too many of whom are reported to be taking kickbacks from their visa-hostage workers)

Learn from my fail!

Something that I hadn’t seen on previous trips to Japan is places advertising curry as カリー (“karii”). The more common romanization カ レー (“karei”) is used for Japanese-style curry, which outside of restaurants is generally made with solid blocks of commercial roux; I can usually find Vermont or S&B blocks at US groceries.

The other is for Indian-style curry, which is not what I want to eat when in Japan. Actually, not a big fan of it anywhere, although I will usually order curry in Thai restaurants.

My plan for this weekend is to make a relatively thick Japanese-style curry with finely-chopped ingredients and bake it into my dinner-roll recipe, using the technique from Alton Brown’s recent sloppy joe bun video. I’m in the habit of buying curry bread at Japanese bakeries, but those are usually deep-fried, and most of the ones I had this trip had too-flaky crusts that made terrible hand-held food.

Illegal Truckers Of The Amazon

While driving to Chicago for the flight to Japan with my sister, I passed a jackknifed semi carrying an Amazon trailer, which had failed to navigate a quite generous highway onramp in broad daylight in good weather. In the distance, I could see the Amazon warehouse it had just left.

Given what we’re (finally) hearing about grossly unqualified illegals getting commercial drivers licenses and “operating” big rigs with no qualifications and no ability to understand English, and Amazon’s notorious cheapness, I strongly suspect that the notable increase in broken delivery promises is directly tied to shipments being scattered across the landscape when their “drivers” crash.

In other news, the item that was promised for same-day delivery on Tuesday by 10 PM was last seen on the other side of the state on Tuesday at 4:15 PM, and no longer has an estimated delivery date.

Interestingly, this is one where I don’t have to wait a week to cancel, and in theory, I could do so and reorder the product with the promise of next-day delivery…

This week, they not only pull out all the stops, but the organs as well. Frieren’s role in the battle was… educational, for all concerned, while Methode was definitely the star.

(Frieren might be popular in Japan…)

A Wild Last Boss Reappeared!

The light novels have returned to Amazon, as completely new listings. Same publisher, same contents, but different ASIN and no series metadata linking them, and backdated as if they’ve been there all along.

Bad tiger!

There are two Tiger Gyoza locations in Kyoto. The one near Karasuma & Shijo is the one we found first several years ago, but on our most recent trip, we were near the other one East of Teramachi when hunger struck, so we went in, only to discover that their menu did not include the pukkuri (plump) variety. The one in Osaka does, so we’d just assumed it was their signature style. Still good food, but we’d never deliberately go there again when the other location isn’t that far away.

Incense countermeasures

After a few whiffs at an incense or diffuser display, it gets really difficult to tell them apart. To me the solution seemed obvious, something I’d first seen in an outlet-mall cologne shop in Gilroy: a dish of coffee beans. The strong odor of the roasted beans is quite effective at resetting your sense of smell.

A grocery store supplied a small bag of dark-roasted espresso beans (which will get cycled through my espresso maker soon), and a dollar store supplied a pair of small screw-top plastic containers. Not only did this make it easier to pick out the fainter incense varieties, it came in very handy when mixing ingredients in our chinese-medicine-style incense-making class.

Today I Learned…

…that I apparently lost power yesterday long enough for the UPS to run dry and shut off my NAS. I didn’t notice due to my body and brain still being spread across three time zones.

Speaking of which,

I made the NAS basically unusable by trying to download the torrent version of Flashpoint Ultimate. Something about how it was trying to preallocate 2.2 TB of space across multiple files before starting the download. Apple’s Samba stack did not approve.

So I copy-pasted the list of URLs and downloaded them directly with wget in a loop.

Unrelated,

Not only does Alton Brown have a new Youtube series (plus a few shorts), he’s following up his final tour with… another tour.