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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  20hr ago (text post)   140 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...

I missed it, but what does Bazzite Linux mean to you?

Also

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.

IMO local LLMs are a 100% waste of time compared to Fable, if you have access to Fable. Thing is freakishly smart, and solves problems Opus routinely struggles with. Which is wild because 2 months ago I was impressed with Opus, and now I'm so goddamn bummed if I run out of Fable credits and have to use Opus.

So basically it's mostly a fresh new aesthetic after a decade plus of living in various Ubuntu-based distros, with all of their advantages and annoyances and thus far, I'm finding that I like it much more than I expected I would. As I said in my previous post, just NOT having a half-baked desktop experience is actually a big win after waiting (and waiting) for Cosmic to mature. The juice has been worth the squeeze.

IMO local LLMs are a 100% waste of time compared to Fable, if you have access to Fable. Thing is freakishly smart, and solves problems Opus routinely struggles with. Which is wild because 2 months ago I was impressed with Opus, and now I'm so goddamn bummed if I run out of Fable credits and have to use Opus.

I hear you, I don't doubt you, and while there's a decent chance that I'll end up wanting to play with the big boys, eventually. It's really just that hearing so much of this sort of talk here made it easy for a local LLM to exceed my basement-level expectations of it.

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