One day I ran a batch of image generation.
After a while it came back: “28 images produced.”
More material. That is what I thought.
Not one of them was new.
I had been re-baking the same pictures
The cause was inside my own setup.
Each theme had a fixed starting number — a seed. Same theme, same starting point, by design.
And the generator I use returns the same picture whenever it is given the same conditions. It is not capricious; it follows a fixed calculation.
Which means — submit the same theme again and you get exactly the same image back.
Not a similar image. The identical file, down to the byte.
Checking, 16 and 12 — 28 files in all — matched the previous run exactly. That entire block of compute time was wasted.
Worse, the earlier batch had already been inspected and registered as approved material.
Why I could not see it
This sounds like an excuse, but there was nothing to see.
The report “28 images produced” is true. Twenty-eight jobs really did run. The images that came out are proper images. Nothing is broken.
A new folder, a new date, 28 files sitting in it.
Visually, nothing is wrong.
The only thing you cannot see is that the contents are the same as last time.
This was the second occurrence of the same failure. It had happened before with a different theme. Had I fixed it structurally the first time, there would have been no second.
What I changed
Now a fingerprint check runs before submission.
The conditions — what to draw, which number to start from, which settings — are recorded together, and if that combination has been used before, the job stops.
The part I cared about was that legitimate regeneration still passes.
If the wording of the instruction has been rewritten, the conditions have genuinely changed, so it proceeds. It only stops on “the same thing again, unchanged.”
Remaking something identical is pointless. If I want more, I shift the starting number and get different pictures. That is now a choice I can make.
The scarier one
While investigating, something worse turned up.
When the separate machine that handles generation is switched off, submitting work to it produced no images — and still logged as complete.
Images generated: 0.
The job was nonetheless marked finished and moved to the done folder.
No error. No record anywhere that the machine had been down.
Since then I check directly that the other end is alive before submitting. And I do not believe a completion report until I have counted the actual files from the outside.
And four weeks of neglect, found along the way
The same investigation turned up one more thing.
Earlier, generated images had been contaminated with torii gates. I had found the cause and the fix: stop using compositions with a horizon.
But one theme’s settings had been left on the old wording for four weeks — the “do not draw a torii” phrasing that does not work and in fact backfires.
I had identified the cause and then failed to fix every place it lived.
Worse, that theme also faded the edges of the frame to black — and that black margin was itself becoming a seat for torii gates.
If a border is needed, it can be added later in the process. There was no reason to bake it in at generation time.
Running is not the same as progressing
If there is one lesson here, it is this.
A machine running and work progressing are two different things.
Processes execute. Numbers appear. Files accumulate. The report says “complete.”
And still, nothing may have changed.
So the last step is always mine.
Is this the same as before? Was it actually made? Is every place I meant to fix actually fixed?
It is dull work. Skip it and time disappears quietly, without a sound.
More production notes
This article does not guarantee any medical or health benefit and is not a substitute for professional medical care. If you have any health concerns, please consult a physician or other qualified professional.
