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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • CachyOS!

    • Arch Nvidia drivers are always new, but not too new.

    • Nvidia support is from upstream arch, so no middleman screwing that up. Though it conveniently includes precompiled kernel modules for all the custom kernels so you don’t need to mess with dkms.

    • Easy scheduler switching! I highly recommend scx_cosmos

    • Natively compiled packages for Zen4+, and mostly native AVX for other CPUs.

    • Git proton right in the packages, no need to break shit going out to the AUR or messing with system packages.

    And that’s just what I know. Every time I dig into some preconfigured thing, I’m pleasantly surprised it’s that way and I don’t have to mess with it, while at the same time it doesn’t diverge from Arch for the sake of it and break stuff like Manjaro.

    I switched at least 3 years ago (can’t even remember now), and haven’t switched since. I haven’t even wiped the paritition, it just keeps working with little fuss…




  • I am coming to grips with this myself. Not that I’m exactly in your shoes or anything, but I’ve kind of ignored ADD and realized that I’m probably on the spectrum as well.

    …It’s already wrecked my life. Big time.


    I don’t have great advice. But the two things I might suggest, that I’m trying to work on myself, are:

    • Be mindful. Be conscious of your own limitations and tendencies, and catch/steer yourself before they become a problem. Simply knowing you are on the neurodivergence spectrum is huge, as opposed to falling apart and not understanding why.

    • Be non combative. It’s easy to get frustrated with how shit and incompatible things are, and so on, but I’m finding a more ‘relaxed’ attitude is helping me. Don’t let people get under your skin: who cares what they think, beyond the bare minimum they require from you? Focus precious attention on people (and things) you like, instead.


  • For gaming? You need a distro that does stuff for you!

    To elaborate, if you’re using wine bottles, you’ve gone waaay into the land of manual from-scratch configuration, when you should just use stuff from a community that spends thousands of man hours figuring it out and packaging it.

    Try CachyOS or Bazzite! They have a bunch of packages like advanced versions of preconfigured Proton one install away.


    For docker… yeah, it’s a crazy learning curve if you just want to try one small thing. It’s honestly annoying to go through all the setup and download like 100 gigabytes of files just to run a python script or whatever.

    You can often set up the environment yourself without docker, though.


    And to reiterate, I’m very much against the ethos of “you should learn how to do everything yourself!” I get the sentiment, but honestly, this results in suboptimal configurations for most people vs simply using the packages others have spent thousands of hours refining.





  • I am on mobile and can be more detailed later, if you want but the jist is to sign up (with a payment method) to some API service. There are many. Some neat ones include:

    • Openrouter (a gateway to many, many models from many providers, I’d recommend this first)
    • Cerebras API (which is faster than anything and has a generous free tier)
    • Google Gemini, which is free to just try this out on with no credit card.

    Some great models to look out for, that you may not know of:

    • GLM 4.5 (my all-around favorite)

    • Deepseek (and its uncensored finetunes)

    • Kimi

    • Jamba Large

    • Minimax

    • InternLM for image input

    • Qwen Coder for coding

    • Hermes 405B (which is particularly ‘uncensored’)

    • Gemini Pro/Flash, which is less private but free to try.

    Most (in exchanges for charging pennies for each request) do not log your prompts. If you are really, really concerned, you can even rent your own GPU instance on demand.

    Anyway, they will give you a key, which is basically a password.

    Paste that key into the LLM frontend of your choice, like Open Web UI, LM Studio, or even web apps like:

    Or even the Openrouter web interface.



  • Oh, and one more thing. There’s a sizable linux community specifically built around Asus ROG laptops. Look up ‘linux rog’ and you will find associated gitlabs and a Discord specifically built up around them. It’s still a fantastic resource for my 2020 G14.

    The Z13 is especially good for linux, as it has discrete-gpu-class performance on the IGP, so you don’t have to fuss with a dual GPU setup on linux (which can be a tremendous headache, especially with Nvidia cards).

    As for a distro, I adore CachyOS for ML stuff, and its well suited for gaming. But its really down to your personal experience and taste.





  • I feel like iPhones had a sweet spot between the 4 and the… I dunno. A few generations after that? Where jailbreaking was rampant and incredible, and the phones are basically like the 16 now.

    Then Android had a ‘sweet spot’ after that. Their quality and UI fluidity really caught up, to the point where my old Razer Phone 2 (SD845) still feels faster than an iPhone 16.

    After that… well, I dunno where to go :(. Feels like both platforms are locking down.