GAH!
We’ve let the hedge at the back of the house grow up the whole time we’ve lived here. This is a very dark old house, and that just made it darker. When we noticed brambles were trying to grow up into the fabric of the building we knew we had to cut it back, and OH MY GOD IS IT EVER BRIGHT IN HERE.
Well, I mean, not now. It’s night now. But we wandered around the house all day going LOOK AT THOSE COBWEBS! and LOOK AT THE DUST! It’ll grow up pretty fast, but I feel curiously naked.
The illustration is…meh. When I couldn’t get Grok to give me a picture of a moleman flinching away from a beam of bright light, I decided to ask it for a mole and then ask it for a man on all fours and then cut them together in Photoshop.
I don’t think I’ll try the experiment again. I would have been better off ordering my parts off Google Images.
That first prompt? The complicated one? To my surprise, it gave me that same four racially diverse headshots. I think Grok’s instructions are “when you can’t understand the prompt, give ’em the Burger King Kids’ Club.”
February 12, 2025 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 7
Rats, rats and more rats
Smithfield Market. There’s been a meat market on this spot for over 800 years. The current Smithfield Market – I mean the buildings – are lovely old Victorian spaces. Still selling meat and fish.
We watched a TV program about it once. It’s one of those businesses that work all night to be ready for trade in the morning. It’s a whole overnight ecosystem.
I read somewhere it was closing down after all this time, but there’s no hint of it on the website.
The London Museum has shut for a year in order to move to Smithfield, it looks like in the old poultry building. I couldn’t be bothered to look it up for sure.
In the course of renovating their new (old) building, workmen broke through a wall and discovered an 800-square-yard warren of Victorian tunnels. “The hidden space was rediscovered in 2019 during the early days of the £437m development project, when a building contractor broke through a wall to find a vast, rat-infested network of subterranean vaults.”
They kinda knew there were underground rooms, but they had no idea of the scale. It’s astonishing the things they’ve found walled off in London.
We went to the London Museum once, years ago, in the old building. Outside on a bench, we found a purse and called the police to collect it. The police opened it up and found the woman’s information and a pair of false teeth.
How do you leave your teeth on a park bench?
February 11, 2025 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 5
Didn’t anybody say it out loud first?
I bought a packet of styluses so I can operate my new touch screen computer without getting weasel grease all over the glass. In case you can’t make it out, the brand name is iSOUL.
That’s like, I always refused to join the Graphic Artists’ Guild. If they couldn’t be bothered to visualize the acronym, they couldn’t be very good graphic artists, could they?
February 10, 2025 — 7:29 pm
Comments: 5
Not bad, AI
I asked Grok to “make me an image of elon musk eating a pickle in comic book style” and this is what it gave me. Not bad at all.
Why the phrase “elon musk eating a pickle” popped into my head, I do not know. I’m kind of surprised Grok allowed it, in that it could easily be edited into something ruder.
I do know a whole lot of illustrators will be out of work.
Have a good weekend!
February 7, 2025 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 9
Embarrassing
Bought myself one of these. It’s the small version of the big and unwieldy one I have with my desktop machine. It’s small and unwieldy (Huion tablets use an unfeasible number of ports). I haven’t been able to set it up yet because I’m having a Windows 11 update that’s been downloading for over an hour.
Just had a message saying installing the update could take an unusually long time(!). Yeah, maybe later.
I bought this from the Huion Ebay shop – it’s a refurb. Yes, sorry, I can’t make myself not be a cheapskate. I ordered it yesterday afternoon and it showed up at 1:00 today. Wow.
Took a picture of the box to show you, propped up in a chair. When I saw the image on computer, there was a terrifying amount of cat hair on the chair. Crop! Crop!
February 6, 2025 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 6
Guess who got a new computer?
Me. It was me. It was a trick question.
The laptop that I sit around and shitpost with is over ten years old. It still works fine for my purposes, but the keyboard is going (notably the spacebar, which is hard to work around) and it was starting to lock and complain more and more.
Stupid. I can easily afford a new one. But a certain innate cheapness is hard to overcome. So I bought a nice computer, but bowed to my thrifty instincts and bought an ex-display model. They knocked a few hundred off it.
Nice, bangy screen. Lots of memory. Good sound. Big hard drive. I was loving this thing.
Day two, after assorted updates, the soundcard stopped working. I had sound with Bluetooth speakers but not the native sound. I spent an entire day in Gates hell, fart-assing around with the Device Manager, Control Panel, downloading drivers, rebooting.. I so didn’t want to send this computer back.
In the end, Uncle B found the answer: a Windows update from December broke Realtek and Microsoft hasn’t bothered to fix it. The solution: do a firmware update on the computer. The search idea that called it up for him was the bizarre fact that sound worked with Bluetooth speakers.
I wonder how much of my life I’ve spent chasing Gates bullshit.
Anyway – new computer! w00t!
February 3, 2025 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 19
Like…nothing at all!
I bought some barefoot shoes. No, not as silly as the ones at the link.
Mine are the ones in the pic. I really like them. Uncle B says they’re pink, but the model is called ‘paprika’ so I’m pretty sure it’s red. Pink shoes. As if!
The idea is that they let your feet and toes move around in a normal way, as if you were barefoot. I worried that I’d have problems walking long distances or riding my bike, but no. Although they’re more comfortable without socks than with, but without is philosophically gross.
They’re vegan, so…yay, I guess. But, hey, these same people also sell dog hair socks, so not entirely vegan.
Wait, are naturally shed animal products vegan or not?
They get wider at the tip so your toes can move around, but that does make them look like clown shoes. Also, I keep catching my toe on things.
You’ll have to Google it for yourself, though. There’s no point me trying to sell you shoes from Germany.
Have a good weekend!
January 31, 2025 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 12
Spotted at an open air market
Yes, it’s a genu-wine ermine collar. It was kind of ratty and nasty, but this was a junk stall.
January 30, 2025 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 9
Happy New Year!
Chinese New Year, that is. It is the Year of the Snake:
2025 is the year of the Snake based on Chinese zodiac. This is a year of Wood Snake, starting from Jan. 29, 2025 to Feb. 16, 2026. Snake is the sixth in the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac sign. The years of the Snake include 1917, 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013, 2025, 2037…
Snake carries the meanings of malevolence, cattiness, mystery, as well as acumen and divination. In most cases, this animal is considered evil and the elongated legless body always scares people. However, in ancient Chinese traditions, the snake once presented a venerated image and it is one of the earliest totems of Chinese nations. Chinese mother goddess Nüwa who said to have created humanity has the body of a snake and the head of a human. The Chinese dragon also has a snake body. Today, in some places in China, people still believe that a snake found in their courtyard can bring good luck.
If you don’t know your Zodiac sign, you can calculate it here. From hence, you can read your horoscope. Mine’s okay this year. Uncle B’s, not so good.
The picture comes from the British Museum shop. Their stuff is nice, but very pricey, and it would probably kill you to have anything shipped to the States.
January 29, 2025 — 5:41 pm
Comments: 3
Silly AI, tricks are for kids
This one is going to run long, sorry. This is the text of a Twitter thread on why DeepSeek is scaring the poop out of our domestic AI guys. I found most of it easy to understand. There are a few more tweets in the thread, so if this interests you, check out the original and maybe give the author a follow.
Let me break down why DeepSeek’s AI innovations are blowing people’s minds (and possibly threatening Nvidia’s $2T market cap) in simple terms…
1/ First, some context: Right now, training top AI models is INSANELY expensive. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. spend $100M+ just on compute. They need massive data centers with thousands of $40K GPUs. It’s like needing a whole power plant to run a factory.
2/ DeepSeek just showed up and said “LOL what if we did this for $5M instead?” And they didn’t just talk – they actually DID it. Their models match or beat GPT-4 and Claude on many tasks. The AI world is (as my teenagers say) shook.
3/ How? They rethought everything from the ground up. Traditional AI is like writing every number with 32 decimal places. DeepSeek was like “what if we just used 8? It’s still accurate enough!” Boom – 75% less memory needed.
4/ Then there’s their “multi-token” system. Normal AI reads like a first-grader: “The… cat… sat…” DeepSeek reads in whole phrases at once. 2x faster, 90% as accurate. When you’re processing billions of words, this MATTERS.
5/ But here’s the really clever bit: They built an “expert system.” Instead of one massive AI trying to know everything (like having one person be a doctor, lawyer, AND engineer), they have specialized experts that only wake up when needed.
6/ Traditional models? All 1.8 trillion parameters active ALL THE TIME. DeepSeek? 671B total but only 37B active at once. It’s like having a huge team but only calling in the experts you actually need for each task.
7/ The results are mind-blowing:
– Training cost: $100M → $5M
– GPUs needed: 100,000 → 2,000
– API costs: 95% cheaper
– Can run on gaming GPUs instead of data center hardware
8/ “But wait,” you might say, “there must be a catch!” That’s the wild part – it’s all open source. Anyone can check their work. The code is public. The technical papers explain everything. It’s not magic, just incredibly clever engineering.
9/ Why does this matter? Because it breaks the model of “only huge tech companies can play in AI.” You don’t need a billion-dollar data center anymore. A few good GPUs might do it.
10/ For Nvidia, this is scary. Their entire business model is built on selling super expensive GPUs with 90% margins. If everyone can suddenly do AI with regular gaming GPUs… well, you see the problem.
11/ And here’s the kicker: DeepSeek did this with a team of <200 people. Meanwhile, Meta has teams where the compensation alone exceeds DeepSeek's entire training budget... and their models aren't as good.
January 28, 2025 — 6:41 pm
Comments: 6