Another day, another kernel patch

Linux server up to date after the latest privilege-escalation vulnerability? Nazzo fast, Guido.

“He chose… poorly.”

Farm Harem Never lead actor:

When we were deciding on direction with this series with the director, in the original source material, the harem aspect with the girls was strongly pushed in the manga. In the anime, we decided that we should try to pull back from the harem aspect and focus on the slow life aspect of the series so we can make it a more easy-to-watch experience.

Unrelated, I swear

I sometimes wish Amazon would tell me which of my purchases it thinks a recommendation is related to…

Yet Another Linux Distro: Bazzite

This one is optimized for gaming, which means proprietary driver support. So, while it couldn’t load the Mac-specific wireless driver in the install environment, it worked once it was finished. Oddly, though, the USB ethernet adapter does not work. It’s detected as a network interface, but NetworkManager wants nothing to do with it, and there isn’t a real network control panel in the KDE GUI environment. I can do this shit from the command line (Fedora-based, by the way), but “less-sophisticated users” cannot.

Also, defaults to dark mode, and the terminal had dark tinyfonts on a translucent dark background, and switching to a black-on-white theme did not change the automatic text-color-coding, so much of it was unreadable. This does nothing to dispel the stereotype that Linux developers live in dark caves and feed on the flesh of the Eloi. I do not want Skittle-text in my terminal windows. Ever.

For even more fun, the flatpack app-manager Bazaar that’s installed by default on the toolbar does not work. The icon bounces a few times when you launch it, and then it silently fails. Manually running sudo /usr/sbin/bazaar works fine, and got Brave and 1Password installed.

The most annoying thing, though, was that it was configured to try to sleep after N minutes, even plugged in. Which causes it to lock up when it wakes and can’t read the disk. Sigh. Easy to disable from the control panel, at least.

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 6

At this point, I have to conclude that they’re just taunting the audience. First we have Our Plowing Hero officially winning the right to bang angels, including Second Wife Tia, but not noticing that that’s what just happened. Then he mediates a marriage between Hakuren’s Wimpy Little Brother and His Stalker Fiancée, leading Hakuren’s Other Brother to hint that everyone knows she’s looking to ride the divine tool, and the dragon lady herself to openly state her intentions, both of which fly right over his head.

Verdict: sanitized for your (over-) protection.

(dragon princess is unrelated)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 7

In which many lessons are learned, and the animation budget is once again well-spent.

Verdict: gosh, it’s like someone’s out there pulling the strings!

Mythos Mostly Mastered Marketing

According to the author of curl, the AI model “too dangerous to release” not only ain’t much to write home about, but the people invited to try it were only allowed to watch someone else use it on their behalf.

Last week ended with Our Shouty Hero being given a seriously over-powered bow. This week, he uses it (and the power of Our Shouty Loli Sage) to rush back to the rescue of Our Shouty Furry Knight. With incredibly convenient timing, he temporarily restores Furry’s Full Power, making quick work of the undeafeatable silver wolf that had just defeated them all. Meanwhile, Our Shouty Button Elf is squeezed into a strapless magical dress; it has to be magical, because it held up far better than her usual buttons. Upon discovering that she was called home to become the wife of someone with even less common sense than she has, she promptly fled back to a life of adventure, but not before giving her lesbian maid one last free show.

If this sounds over-packed, it was, to the point that they finished wrapping up the plot threads over the ED music, denying us the wholesome sight of a dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

Verdict: no dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

(silver wolf is unrelated)

Wow, desktop Linux is catching up to Windows!

I ran apt upgrade last night on agott, and came back eight hours later to find it sitting at a screen demanding I set a Secure Boot password. No explanation of why this didn’t come up when I was installing the OS or during the two previous sets of upgrades. No option to not use it. Makes me feel all worn and fiery inside.

Pirate flags at half-mast

The director of Bodacious Space Pirates (and another show some folks might recognize, Martian Successor Nadesico) has died.

Claude Design hallucinated its own functionality

My sister’s in town, and she had a small graphic-design task she needed to do for what I’d describe as “bullshit corporate reasons”. Not really part of her job, just one more damn thing tossed onto her already-full plate. Her pal ChatGPT (which we now pronounce “chat-jippity” after someone said it that way in one of my meetings a while back) failed hard, and I remembered Anthropic’s recent announcement that Claude Design was A New Thing.

She went off and had a happy little session with it, and then asked for the results. It said they’re in /home/claude/projects/..., which of course doesn’t exist. It gave several sets of instructions on how to open and view the slideshow it created, none of which worked. It pretended to run commands with Claude Code to fire up a local web server, which did not happen. It offered to bundle everything up into a single file for her to download and click on, which to no surprise at this point, did not happen.

We went off to dinner, and when we got back, I took over. She had all the image files it had incorporated into the design, so all we really needed was the HTML/JS slideshow. The first time, it gave us just a stub file, but when we pointed that out, it supplied the complete file. With that, I was able to open Terminal, construct the directory tree it expected, and open the file so she could review the animation.

It looked nice. So, apart from the danger of it relying on the dubiously-secured Claude Code, “win”?

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)

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:

NSFW

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:

1. 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.

2. 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 ~/.local and ~/.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.

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)