seriously-mike

[seriously-mike]

No kurwa, to jest pet.

pet cigarette

[seriously-mike]

Do fucking tell.

They couldn't find the cable contract I had with them (after they took over UPC) after it expired, their customer database is an absolute clusterfuck, so I did the reasonable thing and just ditched them.

Then, those moronic fucks pulled an entire new contract out of their ass, acting like I already agreed to it, leading me to just snap and say, literally, "I'm sorry, are you FUCKED UP IN THE HEAD?!" to the customer service rep, because I found this kind of behavior criminally insane. Because guess what, I already had a new contract signed, and new cable modem installed three times because the first two were busted one way or another, by another company.

It's like every mobile provider in this country is on some serious bullshit. Not just Play, but Orange as well - I wanted to sign up to their fiber cable service, but for some reason, my building is literally the only one in the neighborhood they don't have the hardware in. Next building up - wired up. Next building down - wired up. The one across the street - wired up. Mine? Fuck off, the best you can get is some ancient, basic-bitch service with a price tag worthy of a 500 Mbit pipe from anyone else.

And don't get me started on T-Mobile, those fuckers are on my shit list since the late 90s, when it turned out that you can have a negative balance on a prepaid card while doing absolutely nothing - no calls, no messages, the phone turned off and dumped in the back of a drawer.

I wake up. I feel hatred for P4 sp. z o. o. I continue hating until i close my eyes at bedtime

[seriously-mike]

imagine a goat with a hat

STOP-

what hat did you give the goat what is the instinctual hat you gave to this goat

[seriously-mike]

This is amazing: the automatic translator sees a word in Polish that starts with "pier" and automatically assumes it's the actual most common word starting with "pier", not the tourist version.

Also, despite absolute lack of knowledge of herbs and spices, it confuses "borowiki" (boletus mushrooms) with "borowina" (a kind of peat mud used in spa treatments). Once again reading the first four letters and skipping the rest. Mistaking lovage for lube? That's reading only three letters and not looking at the overall length of the word.

The weirdest one, however, is making up complete nonsense trying to translate parsnip. A machine is not going to come up with that one in its own, there just had to be some underpaid intern with a budget dictionary desperately trying to build the database five minutes before lunch time doing that.

I sent a friend a recipe in polish and the browser did sooo well. Delishes

[seriously-mike]

I would be the worst spy of all time because on one hand I overshare like hell, but on the other hand I also have THE shittiest memory so it’s really a lose/lose scenario for everyone involved.

[seriously-mike]

Gatekeep the AI!

I had the funniest thing happen to me lately. Actually, a couple of funny things. All involving local, open-source AI image generation algorithms. And pretty much like a lot of open-source software, they do a fine job of keeping the idiots out.

If you want to wring more than the absolutely basic basics out of those algorithms, you need to learn a whole fucking lot. Esoteric programming stuff, shit about Python, gits, pips, modules, dependencies, wheels, error messages that could as well be in Ancient Sumerian, and why that one thing keeps fucking up every time you fire it up and you have to reinstall it and reload the whole pile of mismatched plug-ins built by everyone from basement-dwelling nerds to corporate R&D labs every goddamn time you want to use it.

Not knowing what I'm doing ended up in accidentally updating multiple Python modules way beyond the requirements, which in turn ended in the whole ComfyUI install coming the fuck apart into unrecoverable pile of tiny unidentifiable bits.

So I just downloaded a full fresh and updated install from Github. Which, much to my shock, was an entirely different thing than using the update batch scripts or even manually updating everything piece by piece using pip. Suddenly, the biggest pain in the ass that kept fucking up with uncanny consistency, Flux Dev in the form of separate models (as opposed to all-in-one builds for the other open-source frontend, Forge), started working. Including the lighter GGUF versions, leading me to come up with new and amazing ways of stuffing the entire 16 gigs of VRAM on my 4070 Super Ti full in order to create weird shit.

Halfway through that, I discovered something disturbing: that multiple plug-ins were so forked up it wasn't even funny. And half of them weren't in the catalog available in ComfyUI Manager, meaning that I had to install them manually. For example, there are two different versions of InfiniteYou, a face-swapper for Flux Dev that skips the entire overengineered insanity that is the latest implementation of my #Photobooth from Hell, and both are designed completely differently, with different inputs and controls... and both are named the same. Tencent did their own ComfyUI implementation in-house, and a Vietnamese developer called ZenAI did theirs separately. And both suffer from a couple of the same bugs, so if you're googling for solutions, sure as shit you'll be thrown between the Issues pages for both of them, and if you don't pay attention, you'll wind up completely confused. Like, how in the fuck the nodes in the documentation look completely different than what I have, where's the node that's shown in the documentation but missing from my install, and so on.

Also, InfiniteYou requires a teeny little Python module that hasn't been updated for the last eight years, and for which the pip install fucks up every goddamn time with no other solution than just downloading the whole package off the author's Github and hammering it into your Python install through brute force.

And much to my disappointment, InfiniteYou is not as great at gender-bending as the earlier algorithms, be it ZenID, InstantID or even IP Adapter. It gets the face shape correct, but refuses to add anything to it, which kinda misses the point. Even their own workflow shows that an attempt to add a big-ass wizard beard to a guy's photo works mostly around the edges of his face, and not on his face proper.

Not that the earlier algorithms don't have their own marvelous ways of fucking up, both recoverable through touch-ups in Photoshop, and completely writing off the output. For example, the combination of ADetailer and IP Adapter for SDXL doesn't work with Flux-generated input images. Anything you feed into it gets the brightness cranked up for no reason, so the result is an overly bright face slapped on the original image. Some plugins for automated face masking fuck up, so you're better off generating the components in separate files (Flux base image, the face mask detected in it and SDXL face replacement), then layering them in Photoshop. That way also lets you correct any mismatches in a much easier way than having to painstakingly select every fucked-up part by hand and trying to tweak that. And while IP Adapter Plus for SD1.5 coupled with an ADetailer for masking purposes is idiot-proof enough to provide fairly good results (and stick to the prompt) without the need to whack things with a Photoshop hammer tool most of the time, it's also kinda simplistic and can't achieve as much detail as anything newer.

Now compare that to the idiot-proof corporate product that is OpenAI's new implementation of DALL-E/Sora/ChatGPT, aimed at replicating the facial features of any schmuck that throws his photo at it. If you really want less idiot-prompted garbage online, limit the development of AI to open-source and have people learn something in the process of using it.

[seriously-mike]

“One, he believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it,” Huang said of Amodei at a press briefing at Viva Technology in Paris. “Two, [he believes] that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it … And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it.”

Chief Delusional Officer said the quiet part out loud: he wants a monopoly.

Basically, every fucking time someone's talking horseshit about AI being "dangerous", needing to be "controlled" or "paying creators for their data being used", the endgame is corporate monopoly on that tech. They'll be paying the creators bubkes, much like Spotify does, constantly moving the goalposts to weasel out of paying anything altogether despite being able to afford it, while people who actually push that shit forward will be banned from doing so.

I mean, fuck. Microsoft would have jack smack shit, and not the whole "ghiblification" bullshit in particular, if there was no R&D done by Tencent and Alibaba on replicating human faces on the fly without a pre-baked dataset. I had an AI-generated profile pic as the God Emperor of Mankind a full year before ChatGPT's big image-generating update. Hell, Google's Imagen is still sucking shit as if they haven't gotten the memo.

So next time, rub both of your brain cells together before supporting this kind of nonsense. Because what you're gonna get won't be a total ban or any justice - it'll be dull, technologically backwards corporate monopoly with low-quality AI content being pushed everywhere by the desperate marketing departments trying to sell something that doesn't work.

[seriously-mike]

Well, Scam Altman and Mark Suckerbug proved to be pretty attentive students.

Beware!

[seriously-mike]

Determined butterfly

[seriously-mike]

That was pretty fast. I give you an updated Ostron font.

[seriously-mike]

Is that what they call American Gothic?

Eric Pimpler Photography

[seriously-mike]

Fuck me, and here I thought that "Affordable funerals" and "Autistic poor gardener's son" ads were a bit much, but this shit?

Must have happened when I took a break from posting due to Yahoo!s being too fucking stupid to run this site properly. I still have weird reposts like Kharadrons from Age of Sigmar and Lackadaisy's cosmic horror coffee tagged as "Potential sexual content".

"we took porn off tumblr for more lucrative advertising" like this you mean

"post plus" pay me to have to look at these

[seriously-mike]

So, I just found yesterday that the only existing version of the Ostron language font disappeared along with its creator's all online accounts. DeviantArt? Gone. Reddit? Evaporated. Anywhere else? None to be found.

Luckily, I'm a font hoarder, so imagine my joy when I found a zip file in my downloaded fonts folder. Unluckily - it's kinda half-assed. It misses about four letter symbols (ch, kh, ng and zh) and most numbers, so now I'll have to fire up the ancient and forgotten install of FontForge and fix that - let's say I have a plan how to do it, and it involves moving a couple of characters around for easier use.

I haven't created any fonts before, so wish me luck with this one.

[seriously-mike]

Peter Mather Photography

[seriously-mike]

You're asking me to write something really snarky about spotting clues, putting them together and operating firearms with Hollywood flair and Texas restraint.

This is my usual English accent, and the quote comes from a post about writing RPG character backstories.

[seriously-mike]

Oh HELL to the FUCK no.

I'm kinda surprised that the first page of Google pointed me straight to @gatheringsteveargylesmagic, but since I have this image saved as a desktop wallpaper/lock screen, just adjusted to the new phone's resolution through some eeevul blood sorcery, pay the guy a visit. Maybe give him a follow.

[seriously-mike]

This weird-ass, Warhammer 40K kind of photo depicts Reșița, Romania, its church and steel mill.