“… you know frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.”
— Jed BabbinDeskbottom Linux
Next up, CachyOS
CachyOS is another quirky modern distro, and Quirk #1 is that you can’t install at all without an active Internet connection. Apparently the 3 GB on the ISO image is just the “live” environment and an install button, and you need to download everything to make sure it’s fresh.
The catch is that the wifi drivers in the live environment constantly disconnected on the Macbook (not even an Air), so I had to get it onto wired. Except that it has one USB-C port for both power and data, so I had to find one of my old USB hubs with passthrough power and an ethernet port, then go down to the basement, open up the wiring cabinet, and hook up the dining room, since that’s where I was working on this.
Anyway, with the OS installed, wifi still didn’t work, because of the operating system’s precious virginity. You have to google for forum posts that tell you to download a random package from a random web site and run several commands from the (translucent darkmode tinyfonts) terminal window. For the wrong generation of Mac, so figure out what changes to make on your own.
In other words, their purity would be sullied by distributing or downloading any proprietary drivers that could make your hardware functional, or even officially documenting the process of acquiring them. Their install doc gives you a process that might work if you still have MacOS installed on the boot drive. Which I do not; I’d have to reinstall it over the Internet, assuming it’s still up there somewhere on an Apple server.
As much as I did not enjoy the Omarchy Experience, at least it worked out of the box. The second time.
(I don’t want her to punish these devs; Naughty Cosplay Teacher is here to punish me…)
Linux Mint
Good news: a proprietary driver for Macbook wifi is available on the install media.
Bad news: you have to install it by hand, and it’s incompatible with
the current kernel, so the automatic “install latest packages” blows
chunks at the end. Because that’s not really the correct driver,
even though it’s part of the official distribution and works just
fine. The most-recommended solution involves tethering the Macbook to
your phone via Bluetooth and using apt to install the wireless
drivers, which doesn’t work because Bluetooth is on the same
unsupported chipset and incompatible driver, and that’s half an hour I
won’t get back.
No, what you want is a USB ethernet dongle at install time, as above. The update process will semi-automagically install a Mac-specific version of the Broadcom wireless drivers.
There is no technical reason for these elaborate workarounds; it’s just an ideological purity test.
I’ll let Mint bake for a few days. I don’t actually need this laptop for anything right now, and I’m going to be busy driving my sister around the rest of this week.
Oh, and to no great surprise, sleep doesn’t work properly. It sleeps, but it’s not recognizing all the devices when it wakes. The recommended fix is to diddle the config files so it just turns off the display when you close the lid, and just shut it down when you won’t be using it for a while. This is not a Bad Distro thing, just one of those tiny little problems with desktop Linux that they’ve spent 20+ years trying to fix without success. The recommended fix is to buy a different laptop.
Hypersensitive LLM censorship
I mostly use GenAI to make pictures of pretty girls, which works out pretty well for computer background screens where I can just quickly throw away any with anatomy fails or that otherwise don’t appeal to me.
In order to increase diversity beyond what my large set of dynamic
wildcards do, I’ve been doing a lot of targeted LLM enhancements. Some
models do better at this than others, and recently I’ve been getting
some really nice diversity in the background settings (gallery post
coming soon). Tonight I decided to revisit OpenAI’s offline model
gpt-oss-20b, and about 3% of the requests were refused with some
variation of “I’m sorry, but I can’t comply with that request”.
The request was simply to enhance a prompt, and the prompt consisted of a completely-safe-for-work description of a sexy woman, with randomly generated height, single-word looks, ethnicity, adult age, single-word figure, eyes, ears, nose, chin, jaw, cheeks, forehead, face shape, and makeup; not a single word about boobs, butt, etc. Still, 3% of the time, the mere presence of the word “sexy” triggered a flat refusal. It wasn’t even described in detail in the prompt or system prompt; just including that word sent the AI to the fainting couch.
This is why we can’t have nice things. Oh, well, back to the hacked models!
(related, models are a lot less likely to go into an endless loop if
you start the prompt with /no_think; it’s not a universal standard,
but many models are based on one that recognizes it, and it turns out
that navel-gazing “reasoning” is a very common flaw in LLMs. This
happens even in public models, where they get caught up in a loop
endlessly questioning the same points over and over; this is why I’ve
stopped asking for things like “50 unique Christmas scenes” and just
started asking for one scene 50 times)
Not my holiday
My co-workers had the day off. Kind of means that I get the day off, except not.
Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 5
Random scenes were random. Vampire medical research, nut trees, slime parachutes, and tan elves in both adorable chibi and lovestruck adult form.
Verdict: if this were the source material, Our Eager Tan-Elf Maiden would no longer be a maiden, but at least somebody openly wants the D.
FYI, this is pretty much the only tan-elf fan-art from the show:
Witch Hat Atelier, episode 6
This week, a wild man-witch appears! And quickly falls victim to the power of cuteness, against which no scruffy grumpy father figure can stand. Also, Our Main Father Figure demonstrates that he’s actually quite a good teacher. Also a good cook, the subject of the spinoff manga.
Verdict: the animators got to focus on charm instead of spectacle this week. Actually, they got the week off to recover from last week. That’s right, the B team is better than other shows’ A teams.
Omarchy Linux: oh, fuck no
Omarchy pitches itself as a “beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux”. After playing with it for a few days, I’d change that to “quirky, fragile, and retarded”.
Since I resurrected my old gaming PC on Ubuntu to run LLMs, I’ve been poking at the various recommended distros and installing them on an old Intel Macbook that I needed to wipe. It used to be my sterile international-travel laptop, but the last working version of MacOS made it run so slowly that I gave up and migrated that role to my other, not-quite-so-ancient Intel Macbook Air.
The old one predates Apple’s T1/T2 security chips, so it’s easier to install an alternative OS and get full hardware functionality. And indeed, everything worked just fine the second time I installed it.
Because the first install was unable to retrieve updated packages. Apparently, when it tells you that the installation is done and you should click the button to restart, it is not in fact done, and expects you to leave the installer USB stick inserted until the reboot finishes. Surprise!
The second install was fine, but not only did all of the supplied themes have low-contrast small text (and were mostly “dark”, blech), there was almost no ability to customize anything about the graphical UI. Pointer sensitivity and acceleration? No. UI font size? No. Custom font install? No. Pretty much everything you’d expect to find on a “control panel” of some sort simply wasn’t there. If the creators were aware of the concept of “accessibility”, I found no supporting evidence.
There is some customizability, but it involves just dumping you into a text editor with a config file that doesn’t have any useful documentation.
Two tiny little things led me to scrub the disk and try another distro:
-
There is a convenient and easy-to-press menu option to switch the wi-fi into AP mode. There is no button to switch back. I couldn’t undo what I accidentally did when the unchangeable over-sensitive trackpad settings clicked there while I was moving the pointer.
-
I opened the GUI file manager (which bafflingly doesn’t seem to support viewing any files outside of your home directory) and while moving the pointer with the trackpad, accidentally (see above) dragged one folder into another. Unfortunately, I had just made all folders visible (one of the only configuration options available), and since everything about the configuration is stored in
~/.localand~/.config, moving either one of them instantly breaks the entire user interface. I couldn’t open the application menu to get into the terminal, I couldn’t get at the settings, I couldn’t even cleanly shut down the system.
I was already feeling pretty negative about the whole experience, but those two easy fails finished it off. Neither would have happened if the trackpad driver had any configurability, even just a checkbox to turn off tap-to-click, and that sort of “opinionated” design is at the core of the distro. Fail.
God's Shouty Appraiser, episode 6
This week, it’s a trap! Our Plot-Advancing Bad Girl lures Our Hero Party to their doom, but first, it’s bath time! Our Bountiful Landlady and Our Best Guild Catgirl don’t get nearly as much exposure as Our Defensive Button Elf, but it’s enough to compensate for most of the shouting. To no surprise, Our Shooty Shota Hero receives even more ridiculous assistance from the gods.
Verdict: shouty fluff.
(still no fan-art, so catgirl is sadly unrelated)
Urakata 3.3
“Okay, accepting for the moment that I am the child in this relationship, which is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, our immediate problem is this Wicked Stepmother. As the responsible adult in the room, what have you got for protection?”
I could tell I’d be seeing a lot of her surprised face from now on. “You can’t feel the wards on the house? After the way you just walked through that binding spell?”
I shook my head with a dismissive snort, annoyed that it probably looked really cute. “Never had the patience for magic; I’m just good at breaking things. Honestly, I used to get worse from my ‘sisters’ just for cutting in line at breakfast. Unfortunately, my best spell-breaking technique only works on men, and would be illegal at twice my current age.”
Her eyes widened, and I decided that maybe now wasn’t the best time to talk about my experience. “Anyway, wards. We have some, and you seem pretty confident. Good. What about school? Do we need to stay home and hide Kit here for a while?”
She must have caught the eagerness in my voice. “Oh, no, young lady, you are not getting out of school that easily. I have a masking charm that will make you ‘less interesting’ to anyone hostile, and I can get another one for Kit from…”
“…the lovely Miss Bobo, right? I could tell you two were close, but I figured you were just closeted lesbians, not a pair of witches from a less-racist universe.”
Her furious blushing and stammered denial threatened to derail the conversation again, so I did something else I’m not good at: I apologized. “Sorry, that wasn’t appropriate or relevant; this is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with another woman, and I’m really not good at it.”
“Accepted, and we’re going to have to work on your social skills, if only to protect Kit from things she’s definitely not ready to hear. And I understand the soap at your school tastes terrible.”
I paled at the memory. “Right, so for now we’re safe here and at school, but we can’t keep Kit and we can’t hand her over to the witch, so we need to fix something. We can ask her about other family on the walk to school tomorrow.”
“I’ll drive; it’s safer. And I’ll contact Jem to bring her up to speed and get that charm.” She opened her purse and pulled out a small, intricately-carved amulet. Damn, I’d missed a secret pocket. “Meanwhile, if you can sleep after all that espresso, I’d suggest you get to bed. Your second day of school isn’t going to be any easier than the first.”
“Right.” As an old trooper, I could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, and with any number of bed-partners, and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, free of dreams and regrets.
Young troopers, on the other hand, apparently had dreams. And in mine, I wasn’t alone.
Urakata 3.2
I helped mop the floor, not out of guilt for making Sally drop the coffee or an urge to help my new “mom” clean, but simple self-interest. I needed another espresso before I was up to telling the truth. Any truth.
Sally delivered a cup and a question. “So, you work for God?”
I sipped my hot black confidence-builder before replying. “Gods, plural, and most of them less pleasant than the one who brought us together. No names you’d be familiar with, although it’s a safe bet they’ve played the role in your world as well. The thing is, I shouldn’t even be able to say that much, whether I’m retired or still on active duty, which means that something really scr- odd is going on.”
Sally smiled, just a little too sweetly. “So, what exactly did you do for these gods? Run a lemonade stand?”
I shut her down with a look as black as my coffee. “I’m sure you have tales of divine messengers, muses, tricksters, assassins, and temptresses; I specialized in that last role, and I was the best, until I fu- made a mistake. One we are not going to discuss tonight.”
Sally opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, so I skipped ahead. “No, I was not a cute little six-year-old girl with glasses. I was the woman who walked into a party alone and walked out with your husband. And if you ever got him back, he’d been thoroughly inspired.”
“Huh; that sounds like our space program. Sixteen divorces on the team and somehow we still landed on the moon ten years early. Nobody ever knew what happened to the secretary all the engineers were fighting over; she just disappeared one day.”
Oops, I had been to her world; I knew my work. Fortunately, she didn’t. “Right, things like that. The Powers don’t necessarily agree on means and ends, and we usually have no idea whether we’re making things better or worse, but I didn’t really care. I was designed to turn boys into men and men into lapdogs, and I loved my work.”
A glance down at my current body was accompanied by another bitter swallow. “I’m a good ten years away from my usual methods, and I’ve never needed a fallback plan before. Which means that I have no idea how to deal with an evil mind-controlling bitch-witch that has her hooks in my best friend.”
A smile twitched into existence over the rim of Sally’s coffee cup. “You mean first friend, don’t you? I think you’ve been lonely for a very long time.”
For the record, I do not blubber. The sudden urge to throw myself into Sally’s arms and dissolve into a puddle of sniffles and tears was just this body’s reaction to stress, and I successfully fought it down. “Stop that; this is grown-up talk.”
“Yes, it is, and I think it’s more relevant than you realize. I didn’t know I’d be raising an older woman, but you definitely need a mother in your life. As does Kit, which helps explain how quickly you’ve bonded with her.”
The urge to blubber was rising again, like three-day-old sushi. I really needed to get this body under control so I could solve this problem and… then what, exactly? Get my old job back and leave? Get my old body back and retire to a beach villa with hot and cold running boy-toys? Without Kit, or Sally?
Shit.
The boss really got me good. I’d been here less than 24 hours, and I wanted to stay.
Dragon Fight Week
Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 4
The best part of the tournament was that it only lasted a single episode. The worst part is that we didn’t get a longer, more active elf-angel wrestling match. Kudos to the winner for wrapping things up in style.
Verdict: fluff.
Witch Hat Atelier, episode 5
They’re really spoiling us with their animation budget. It’s like food porn with ink. This week, Our Apprentices learn to work together to find a way to deal with The Getting-Bigger Bad, with Our Prickly One grudgingly accepting Our Heroine’s presence on the team.
Hungry Hungry Hero 2 announced
Berserk Of Gluttony is getting a new season.
If the Right were like the Left…
…this Minnesota Wisconsin
brewery
would already have been burned to the ground, and right-wing
politicians and celebrities would be openly praising the act of
“direct democracy”.
Deflecting blame with both-sides-ism pretends that there’s no difference between Left and Right, but there is. And the difference is that only one side riots, loots, burns, and kills every time when they don’t get their way.
(picture is definitely unrelated)
God's Shouty Appraiser, episode 5
Did I miss something, or did The Thief’s Tail Tale end with her only giving back their second, much-smaller purse, despite how much he helped her out? In other news, while we didn’t see nearly enough of Our Best Guild Catgirl, at least Our Busty Landlady’s possessive affection made an appearance. She rubbed him raw to get another woman’s mark off.
Verdict: of course it ended with a Button-Elf shout.
(catgirl is unrelated, because there’s no fan-art for this show)
Definition of insanity:
Thinking that successfully assassinating Trump would make things better for Leftist causes.
As Was Foretold In The Ancient Scrolls
Okay, it’s actually something I said only three years ago:
Old Apple: “how can we make this feature usable by people who don’t know anything about computers?”
New Apple: “how can we monetize this pixel?”
It gains new relevance when the soon-to-retire Apple CEO recently said “Apple Maps was my first really big mistake”, and then the company just announced: “Apple Maps will now shove ads in your face, with no opt-out”.
Isekai Harem Merc promo video
This is a Fall show, so it will be competing for my attention with Isekai Porn Gamer, Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2, Isekai Goblin Mayor, and Maomao. Ahhh, Maomao.
Reminder: Summer has Bumpkin 2, Isekai Super Maid, Magilumiere 2, Tanya 2, Skeleton Knight 2, Frontier Lord & Oni Waifu, Isekai Ass-Guardian, and Isekai Otome Mecha Game Cheat Hero 2. The days are just packed.
(unrelated busty cutie, approximating how Our Mercenary Hero Hiro wakes up in the morning)
What did I name the revived PC that gave me so much trouble?
Agott.
“Spectrum? Damn near killed ’em!”
The pleasant new surprise in SwarmUI-ville is the Spectrum extension, which produces dramatic speedups with common image-generation models at very little cost to quality. The more steps you use in making your images, the more it helps, producing images as much as 3x faster. Woo-hoo.
Sadly, my LLM prompt-enhancement broke; running the headless version of LM Studio on the rebuilt machine is producing not-very-diverse results with prompts that work just fine on the Mac Mini with the same model. I asked it to generate flattering early-20th-century outfits for women, and it literally made 10 copies of the exact same outfit.
Look at this set, and you can see it was doing the same thing for sci-fi city backdrops and black armor/cyborgs. I cherry-picked the most diverse results, but well over 90% were basically the same pic with different heads. So I ended up throwing away almost all of the results and the prompts that generated them, and started over with a different model and sysprompts.
Back from the dead...
[perhaps coincidentally, my MacBook Air lost its tiny little mind and started killing off running processes, starting with Terminal and Finder, so I couldn’t examine the health of the system and couldn’t restart or force-quit any apps. I had to power-cycle it. It had been up for an entire week! Hope the new Apple CEO hires a QA department…]
So after rebuilding my 11-year-old gaming PC on Ubuntu 25, only to discover that LM Studio wasn’t supported on it, I tried to rebuild it on 22, which failed. Then on 22 Server, which failed. Then on Arch, then Mint, then Windows 10. Fail, fail, fail. Different USB sticks, burned different ways, and even a few DVD installs in there.
[Fun fact: Ubuntu ISO images are not designed for or tested on DVD; they are intended for building virtual machines or burning to USB sticks. This is also true for Windows 10, with the added complication that you have to diddle the bits when copying to USB because it has a file that’s larger than 4 GB on it.]
Annoyed at the litany of failure, I cracked open the case, blew out the dust, pulled out and reseated the memory, graphics card, and SSDs, burned a brand new Ubuntu 25 image onto a brand new USB stick (using Rufus on Windows, which seems to be the most reliable option if you don’t currently have a working Linux box…), and reinstalled with no network connection or optional packages.
This worked, and to my immense surprise, the secondary drive that I’d installed SwarmUI on was still intact, despite the fact that I’d made it the boot drive during several of those failed installs, and I’m quite certain I wiped the partition table at least twice, which means that the installers were just lying about formatting the disks and copying data, sigh.
After discovering the appropriate incantation to make Appimages work, I did some quick testing with LM Studio. No head-to-head performance comparisons, because I had to download Very Small Models in order for the RTX 2060 to be able to run them without offloading to system RAM. Also, it’s only academic curiosity, since I’m replacing the card.
For reference, you need a shim library to get Appimages to work; web searches (with or without AI) mostly suggest installing a version of Fuse that will break the rest of your system, but this works:
chmod +x *.appimage
sudo apt install libfuse2t64
After doing that, however, I discovered the LM Studio appimage crashes at the drop of a hat under Ubuntu 25, so I switched to their command-line-only “llmster” build, which has been running for several hours now.
For amusement, here are the original specs for the old Asus:
- Intel Core i7-6700 3.4 GHz (Skylake)
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- GTX 980 4GB graphics card
- 2TB “hybrid” hard disk (8GB SSD cache)
- 256GB SSD
- 550-watt power supply
Over the years, I doubled the RAM, upgraded to a GTX 1060 6GB card, and replaced both drives with 1 TB SATA SSDs. Later, I replaced the 1060 with an RTX 2060 6GB, and it was still quite capable at running most games.
Now that I’ve got the silly thing booting again, I swapped in the RTX 5060Ti 16 GB card that I got cheap (er, “cheap”, these days). I was going to install a Corsair power supply as well, but Amazon didn’t deliver it as promised. No weather delay, crashed semi, or other legitimate excuse, they simply didn’t ship it, and said, “meh, maybe tomorrow”.
I wanted a higher-quality, more powerful, eleven-years-younger power supply to make the machine quieter and more reliable. I won’t get the full performance out of the new GPU on this machine, but it’s still faster than the Mac Mini running the exact same LLM.
(the Mini can run much larger models than this card, of course, or at least slow-walk them)
Future backgrounds
Even with LLMs stirring the pot, my SF backgrounds are starting to look a bit familiar. So I’m working on generating a whole bunch of new ones. Two samples from a recent session:
