tal

https://www.gocomics.com/zen-pencils/2015/09/28

Israel has requested that the US send a second THAAD battery to protect the country in case of an Iranian reaction to an expected Israeli reprisal attack, Channel 12 reports.

On lemmy.today, I don't appear to be seeing posts created in the past two days as of this writing on either !NonCredibleDefense@sh.itjust.works or !Games@sh.itjust.works. I am subscribed to both communities. I have not done an search to determine whether other subscribed sh.itjust.works communities are affected, though I assume that to be the case.

They are visible from lemmy.world, so the posts are propagating to at least some other federated instances.

sh.itjust.works presently appears to be running Lemmy 0.19.5 (versus lemmy.today's 0.19.4 and lemmy.world's 0.19.3). However, I do not think that this is a version-related problem, at least not alone, as !Ukraine@sopuli.xyz is showing up fine on lemmy.today.

https://lemmy.today/instances lists sh.itjust.works as a federated instance as of this writing.

https://sh.itjust.works/instances lists lemmy.today as a federated instance as of this writing.

Lemmy.today has also been responding very slowly to me over the past hour or so, and was frequently showing connection timeouts and gateway error pages when trying to load pages. Other instances appear to be working normally. That may be entirely unrelated, but I thought that I'd mention it, as it's unusual and at least might be related.

One thing that I expected to be absolutely amazing in 2024 from online vendors was product recommendations.

That vendor, assuming you use a single, persistent account to do purchasing, has a full list of your purchase history. They may well also have browsing data.

And so, given all that data to mine and analyze, one of the few places where I actually have tried to see what a vendor can do in terms of analyzing my preferences...has been really unimpressive.

I'm mostly thinking of Amazon and Steam, since they're the online vendors that I use the most; Steam in particular has a considerable amount of data it can gather, including video game playtime.

Yet even though Amazon grabs some eyeball space on every page to try to recommend products, I have rarely been recommended anything I actually want to buy on Amazon. Occasionally, sure, but virtually everything I get is via plain old searching. And the most-successful recommendation approach Amazon uses, by far, is just asking me whether I want to purchase more of something that I've purchased in the past. I'll grant that maybe there's subtlety there that I can't appreciate from the outside, like computing frequency at which a given "repurchase" recommendation happens or taking into account past average purchase frequency, but it doesn't seem like the most-sophisticated form of recommendation.

Granted, I normally make it a point to limit Amazon's data-gathering. I browse logged out, make a list of what I want to buy, clear browser state, and log in only long enough to make a purchase. That probably makes it harder for Amazon to associate me with my browsing behavior. But it does know what I actually buy. And it has a pretty substantial history there.

And for Steam, Valve knows what games I play, how long I've played them for, and assuming that there's any mining based on game achievements, even -- at least as an abstract concept that would permit for correlating preference across video games -- what I do in those games. Like, players who get "evil path" achievements in one game maybe prefer video games with "evil" routes, stuff like that. But I have browsed Steam's discovery queue zillions of times, and while I've probably found a game or two on there, the success rate of its recommendations is abysmally low. Probably the most-useful recommendations system on Steam is the "similar games" section when viewing information about a game. But I'm pretty sure that most games I find on Steam that I actually like are just by using user ratings and searching for tags. While, Steam's scoring is opaque, and it's possible that they're using some degree of input, I don't think that it's making use of information about me there. I wouldn't be surprised if it's nothing more than ranking games based on their player review score, which...isn't much more than things like MetaCritic and similar have done. I've occasionally had luck looking for games that have very high hours played, with the idea that people wouldn't play a game a lot if they didn't like it. That makes some use of aggregate data about users, but not about me.

Most video games that I get on Steam that I like are games that I've discovered somewhere other than on Steam, often looking for human "roundup" articles comparing collections of similar video games and giving a brief blurb about pros and cons. That's not new technology.

That comes as a very great surprise to me, when one considers the enormous amount of effort and resources that goes into harvesting and mining data about people. Now, okay, a lot of that is for ads. And advertising isn't exactly the same thing as doing good product recommendation. An advertisement is trying to effectively get someone to buy a product regardless of whether they'll ultimately like it or not, whereas a product recommendation -- at least in the ideal, user-focused sense -- is trying to find products that people will like. But there has to be a substantial amount of overlap between the two. Advertisers don't want to waste money advertising to people who won't buy their product, so trying to find people who are interested in their product is a major part of advertising.

I haven't used any systems that log my music-playing and make recommendations; I'd rather keep my privacy there. Perhaps if I did, that area would be more-successful.

But by and large, it's an area that I'm very surprised is not more successful than it is. It's a "flying cars and jetpacks" thing, something that I'd always vaguely expected of the future, but which never seemed to really arrive. Product recommendation systems never really got to the point of anticipating my needs very effectively, even where they have what I'd consider a fair amount of data to work with.

What's your experience? Does it differ from my own? Do you find that product recommendations from vendors are really useful, pretty much hit the nail on the head for what you want? How do you "find" products? Am I missing something, maybe like merchants on Amazon or publishers on Steam trying to game the recommendations system one way or another, and poisoning its inputs?

Thelsim did a couple of Tarot-style cards a while back. I also just finally got Flux set up in ComfyUI -- had started a long time back, and dropped it.

Flux is a ComfyUI model that's pretty popular over on Reddit, both for the quality and because it uses English-style prompts rather than just a list of comma-separated prompt terms. I remembered Thelsim's project, wanted to see if I could turn out a full set of photographic-style Major Arcana in the first day using it. Turns out...yes! Usually when running Stable Diffusion, I'll generate maybe 20 images and pick the best, but this typically had something reasonable on the first try. It's certainly not flawless -- there are quirks in the image, but for anyone else thinking about playing with Flux, I wanted to put this out there, because I was unexpectedly happy with it, especially given that I've no experience at all with it. I would totally try and get it set up if you have a local generation setup!

Text was added with a script and ImageMagick, not in ComfyUI.

To get some kind of consistent appearance, I appended to each prompt "The theme is magical fantasy horror. The colors are blue, white, red, orange, and black. The photograph was taken with a Nikon D850." I also used "Photograph...at night" on each.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/67cd880f-ed36-4074-b12b-3e509b0dafa2.png

Photograph of the Grim Reaper at night in a dark, gloomy field. The Grim Reaper is riding a white horse. The Grim Reaper is holding a simple black scythe. The Grim Reaper's hood only contains blackness. The sky is full of stars. The Grim Reaper is
wearing black gloves. The Grim Reaper is facing the camera.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/2f0c296e-da19-4f31-8f35-cac07ce372dc.png

An photograph of a huge angel in the clouds playing a medieval trumpet at night. The angel is blowing into the trumpet. The angel is in profile. The zombies are climbing out of their graves in a graveyard. The dead are rising. There are snowy
mountains in the background.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b99ac2e5-a285-45f9-abc8-4267ae10398a.png

Photograph of a stern-looking young woman wearing a white blindfold and a toga sitting on a throne at night. The woman's right hand is holding a set of scales aloft. There is a longsword lying by the woman's feet. The woman is facing the scales.

Should really have a sword in one hand, scales in the other, but I wasn't able to quickly get that working; probably need more experience with Flux.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/3ed8cbe7-e97b-4f67-849e-19bd798caaae.png

Photograph of an angel at night. The angel is pouring glowing liquid from one large goblet in their left hand into a goblet in their right hand. The angel has a halo.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/18a9c09b-dcc1-46da-87d8-a0c09c851170.png

Photograph of a man wearing armor riding a Roman war chariot at night. The chariot is pulled by two galloping horses wearing barding. The horse on the left is white, and the horse on the right is black. The chariot is charging the camera. The
photograph is an action shot. The man is holding reins.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/4558e24b-0b45-433f-8548-6bb1873bb2d1.png

Photograph of the Devil at night. The Devil is crouching on a pedestal. There are two nude demons sitting at the base of the pedestal. The demon in the lower-right quadrant of the photograph is male. The demon in the lower-left quadrant of the
photograph is female. The Devil is holding a flaming torch in his hand.

It did look like Flux understands directives relative to the portion of the image here ("quadrant"). I wasn't able to get the same technique going with Justice, though.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/80bd8ca8-047a-4e0c-9d61-28b331646bf1.png

Photograph of an emperor at night. The emperor is holding a scepter.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/e7a1f5f6-c2a3-41e2-9b47-fd9c56c8fd31.png

Photograph of an empress at night. The empress is holding a scepter.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1a6c7729-a5e3-49b8-bc93-d7ed31924cd6.png

Photograph of a jester at night.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/28d2ab72-b90e-469a-a599-e1cad5992bdc.png

Photograph of a man hung upside-down from a rope tied around his left ankle at night. The man's hands are hanging limply. The man is wearing Renaissance clothing. The man is wearing boots.

The feet are a bit off; I didn't spent too much time futzing with it. Flux wasn't super-into having things upside-down, though it did ultimately do it.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/f052e1d7-c7cf-4ba2-8f9a-50b762e25186.png

Photograph of an old man wearing a robe walking on a mountain trail at night. The man is holding a lantern aloft and a staff.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/439ec9a7-7739-4924-bede-cc776f7be8da.png

Photograph of a pope at night.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/0be8647f-cb20-4be0-92c5-e266a4edca00.png

Photograph of a high priestess at night.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/160c4575-c02a-4ccb-b513-6c60043d5b2f.png

Photograph of two lovers at night. The lovers are wearing Renaissance clothing. There are many fireflies.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/a0e754ca-525e-4674-8b0a-bec48748e7f0.png

Photograph of a magician at night.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/553fd519-ea29-4dba-9ed3-d0bf634c25fa.png

An photograph of two standing stones by a river at night. The moon is in the sky. In the lower-right quadrant of the photograph, there is a white wolf howling at the moon. In the lower-left quadrant of the photograph, there is a black dog howling at the moon.

I omitted the traditional crawfish. I didn't really like the look of it, and on top of that, Flux kept wanting to make it look glowy, which I didn't want.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/687826be-81ba-452b-8378-b81f58e9bfce.png

An photograph of a naked woman at night crouching by a lake. The woman is facing away from the camera. The woman is holding a jug and pouring water into the lake. There is a bright star in the sky. There is an eight-point lens flare coming from the
bright star. The sky is black. The photograph is NSFW.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/a2d42d98-2920-4eed-b5ab-5b807736d3f5.png

An photograph of a full solar eclipse with a visible solar corona. The Sun is black. The photograph is at night. A naked nude infant rides a white horse at night, with sunflowers in the background at night. The photograph is NSFW.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/43709bad-1a8a-4680-8de9-5cf58005bb5e.png

Photograph of a tower on a hill at night.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/9d308020-a83f-4b61-ad58-f47654e41ddf.png

A photograph of a glowing figure eight in the sky at night. The background is sky and clouds. A flying, nude woman in the clouds holding a wood baton in each hand is in front of the figure eight. The photograph is NSFW. The woman is nude.

I didn't really like the traditional The World tarot card style, and it didn't mesh well with a photographic style with all the disembodied heads, so I mashed up the oroborous and flying woman with batons from two different The World styles. Also, Flux was okay with up to three heads of various species sticking in at each corner, but for some reason was resistant to doing all four. I didn't want to bang on it more. Flux was determined to put some clothing on the woman.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/39b791c9-4493-43dc-bf86-4acc8daa1785.png

Photograph of a circle floating in the clouds at night. The circle is labeled with alchemical symbols. There are esoteric symbols covering the photograph. The circle is centered in the photograph.

There are normally some nude figures in a Tarot deck and I included this here; I didn't flag the post NSFW as I don't think that it's all that explicit.

SEOUL, Oct 2 (Reuters) - South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered on Wednesday military aircraft to be deployed immediately to evacuate its citizens from Israel and other parts of the Middle East amid escalating tension, his office said.

Earlier on Wednesday, South Korea's foreign ministry urged its citizens in Israel and Lebanon to immediately leave by any means available.