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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  5hr ago (text post)   40 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for July 7th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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Bazzite Redux

How it started

How it's going:

The good:

  • BTRFS seems... fine. Only occasionally does it feel slowish and while I'm sure BTRFS itself certainly doesn't help in that department, neither does it help that my NVME drive is generic.
  • HFS is it a relief to have a working goddamn desktop. Get your shit together, System 76! All of your shit! So it's together!
  • Calling all AI boosters, I've had the ChatGPT moment. All of the running down of the local LLMs set some pretty low expectations for me, so I was surprised when I found lots of utility there. Yes, I'm sure it hallucinates way more often than the better online stuff, and buddy, does it like to hallucinate here and there, but it's usually blatantly obvious that it's off the reservation anyway. Yes, mode collapse can be a Thing, especially in certain situations, as can verbose mode, and yes, there are only so many tokens that can be processed locally, and yes, the token limit really sucks, comparatively speaking. But with all that said, this ain't ELIZA with extra steps, and running llms on an RTX 5080 seems to be thoroughly... mid? And I'm still more than a little shocked that I can get half-decent images out of a local instance of Stable-diffusion. I was not expecting that.
  • In fact, once I got back into playing around with AI, which took a back seat both because the wife went in her own direction on her work needs and because Cyberpunk 2077, I had the most fun playing with tech that I've had this decade.
  • I'm so used to Ubuntu that I keep stubbing my toes on Bazzite's immutability. This is a Good Thing because as much of a PITA as it is for me to have to set up containers so that I can run shit that demands older versions of Python (don't get me started on fucking Python) or what have you, the payoff is that I shouldn't ever run into my old normal of pretty much expecting to need a fresh OS install every time the new LTS Ubuntu drops, not to mention smegging up the OS over time with All Of The Things.
  • I can run the GOG version of Cyberpunk 2077 on Bazzite/Lutris and it... just works. Score one for killing Windoze as the dominant gaming platform.
  • AppImages have, thus far, also Just Worked. /me nervously knocks wood.
  • I haven't succumbed to Steam's siren call.
  • The learning curve wasn't anywhere near what I thought it was going to be, container conversation above notwithstanding. Did I mention fuck you, Python? I did, didn't I?
  • I am (theoretically) not training anyone else's models for free.

The Bad:

  • The glazing. The sycophancy. The loops of glazing>sycophancy>glazing>sycophancy ad nauseum. Not the worst thing in the world, but that's like >1 week of my life that I'll never get back at this point, not to say that it isn't occasionally fun and/or hilarious, but still.
  • I should have wasted more money Splurged on the full 5090.

The Ugly:

  • Odin help me, but I'm actually entertaining the idea of saving my shekels for a 5090 and the power supply to run it in tandem with the existing 5080. Not seriously enough to check prices just yet, mind you, but I could see it happening.

So that's my update on my original post. How are you doing, South... wait, no, that's not my line...

Over the past couple months I finished up three new books for my Public Domain Pulp book-to-visual-novel project.

The first was Conan Doyle's A Study In Scarlet, where my main goal was to finally fully address the sprite-gen quality inconsistency issues. This ended up mostly being a success, with the revamped partial-body generation approach producing more cohesive and cleaner character results overall; and, as a bonus, the sprite background removal cleanup was made much much easier by both this and a couple further process improvements around alpha masking and boundaries. (Saving my time and my wrist.)

Second was Chekhov's The Duel, which made some further marginal visual improvements on the new sprite-gen approach, though the bigger goal was finally tackling improving the color normalization process: making the dark areas darker and the light areas lighter and the off-color areas less off-color. The improvements here were again somewhat marginal, but I think still probably worth it for making the images more visually striking and less washed-out.

And then most recent was Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, which ended up mostly being about process-efficiency improvements: automatic regex fixer-upping and parallel image generation/iteration support and easier expression variation batching and what-not. Aesthetically, the images came out strong, though that was less about process quality improvements and more about 1920s detective noir having a good visual vibe.

So on the quality front overall then, things are starting to look adequate now. There are definitely still shortcomings that I’d like to keep improving on, but even if the quality were to end up stalling out at current levels, I think that would be okay. (Something I was not feeling after Pride and Prejudice.)

I think what matters much more at this point is just getting more books out. The conversion process has still been painfully slow, and the rate of starring on Github has also been disappointingly slow; and those two facts seem related, what the project having so few titles to its name (and fewer ones yet of acceptable editing-quality).

But I think I can start picking up the pace from here, putting the process efficiency improvements to better use, getting more books out faster, and especially getting some big titles like Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment out by the end of the year. And with each new book, the chance of virality should increase. Hopefully.

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