Z-Image has its own pixel art LoRAs, but can they actually convert photos to pixel art via i2i? Tested Z-Image Turbo, base model, and compared with Illustrious on M1 Max 64GB.
Testing WAI-Anima v1 on an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU (8GB VRAM). Ran into a tqdm OSError nightmare trying headless execution via ComfyUI API, but once launched normally it generates in 55 seconds.
WAI0731 (creator of WAI-Illustrious) released WAI-Anima v1, a derivative model based on Anima. In the two months since the February Anima article, derivative models have surged along with a LoRA toolkit and text encoder upgrades. Hands-on comparison of preview3-base and WAI-Anima v1.
Tested 5 approaches including Qwen Image Edit, JS color reduction, and Illustrious i2i + LoRA. Illustrious i2i alone turned out to be the fastest and lightest solution for pixel art conversion.
Bryan Cantrill's 'The Peril of Laziness Lost' argues that LLMs have zero cost to write code and no motivation to abstract. Humans must serve as the 'deletion engine' or systems will bloat endlessly.
I tested local Vision LLMs (Gemma 3, Qwen2.5-VL, Llama 3.2 Vision, Gemma 4) to see if they could look at character illustrations and pixel art and generate RPG-style stats in JSON format.
A paper claims that a single binary operator eml(x, y) = exp(x) - ln(y) combined with the constant 1 can express all elementary functions — arithmetic, trig, logarithms, even pi. I read the paper and tested it in 5 languages.
Benchmarking NII's LLM-jp-4-32B-A3B-thinking on EVO-X2 (Ryzen AI Max+ 395) with ROCm. 62.9 t/s vs Qwen3.5-35B-A3B's 44.7 t/s. Covers thinking control issues, KV cache trade-offs, knowledge cutoff, Japanese quality comparisons, code generation tests, and training data composition.
Automatically decomposing a single anime illustration into front hair, back hair, clothes, and other layers with inpaint completion of hidden areas. Testing the LayerDiff + Marigold-based implementation.
After updating to AMD Software 26.3.1 on a GMKtec EVO-X2 (Ryzen AI Max+ 395), Vulkan backend fails to allocate device memory properly and falls back to CPU. Investigation and workaround by changing BIOS VRAM allocation from 48GB/16GB to 32GB/32GB.
