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)

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