ML Exploration

I've been comfortable at prompting for a while. I've been messing with LLMs since GPT 3.5, Pygmalion 6B, and a while when character.ai's blue-hat-dude mascot still existed.
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I've also experimented with Stable Diffusion and [anime|pastel] finetuned models like WaifuDiffusion and AnythingV3 alike, usually within artbot or locally with comfyui
(~10min gens on the puny 2GB VRAM of the GTX 750Ti www)
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TMI: I've leaned off imagegen early 2024 in favor of learning to draw 2D illustrations.

Linux

Migration Journey

Late 2023: My first dual-boot distro was Zorin OS 16 alongside my primary Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 installation.
(I didn't run sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / on that install)
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Late 2023: My full transition distro was Linux Mint due to its intuitive (and homely?) nature.
(don't mind how reinstalling Windows 10 nuked my mounted sdb bootloader with BOOTMGR, giving me all the more incentive to switch www)
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Early 2024: Hopped onto OpenSUSE Tumbleweed since rolling-release and stability seemed interesting.
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Early 2024: Then installed my first Arch Linux with SomeOrdinaryGamers's walkthrough video, with another attempt using the Installation Guide alone.
(Took me about 8 hours of trial to install with the Installation Guide; everytime I mess up I had to reset and redo everything... ;-;)
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Early 2024: I moved to CachyOS and everything felt great with their options and optimizations, especially on my previous PC from the 2014-era.
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Mid 2025: I moved to NixOS with the minimal/manual installation guide due to btrfs root snapshot overflow shinanigans with CachyOS.
I had separate parts for root and /home, root was so small that every update fills up the entire part with snapshots. It's been painful rebooting into TTY just to manually cleanup and rebalance...)
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TMI: My actual linux encounter was much earlier, where I had to use Linux Mint's LiveISO when I was installing BrunchFramework ChromeOS on a poor Intel Celeron N3000 laptop with 512GB 5200rpm HDD that barely runs the YouTube website itself or even stream 480p on Firefox/Chromium running Arch Linux Xfce.
(I hate that 'they' still sell these kind of stuff, just adopt a used T480 with dual battery for <$140 USD on ebay)

Distro rank

1. NixOS
2. CachyOS
3. ArchLinux
4. LinuxMint
5. OpenSUSE-TW
6. ZorinOS

╎ ⚍ᓭᒷ リ╎ ̇/𝙹ᓭ, ʖℸ ̣ ∴

Desk Setup

Desk

I'm using a:
☆☆ Generic Reversible L-Shaped Desk (Option A Edition) ☆☆

Desk Stuff

Generally, my desk as of 2025.12 had:

• Monitors: MSI MAG271VCR, Dell S2415H
• Peripherals: COSTOM WK87 (womier fork), Razer DeathAdder V2, GAOMON S620, 8BitDo Ultimate (w/ dock), AKAI MPK mini play, Beats Studio Pro, and 3x Large Diet Pepsi.
• Thinkpad: T480 (dim FHD IPS, no FP, no BLKB) + chinese 'SANYO' 61++ slice with ~80Wh capacity...
  (idk bro TLP says energy_full has 80060 mWh over its 71280 mWh energy_full_design even after recalibration, heck it even charges and force-discharges ~80Wh too???)

Main Rig (on desk)

I've initially used Lenovo K450e with EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti ACX and Samsung 870 Evo 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive.

Only until 2023.11 had I build my personal, curated main rig by pure research and budget with PCPartPicker:

- AMD Ryzen 5 5500 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition 42 CFM CPU Cooler
- MSI PRO B550M-VC WIFI Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard
- Timetec PINNACLE Konduit 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory
- Samsung 870 Evo 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (reused)
- XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Core Radeon RX 7800 XT 16 GB Video Card (christmas gift)
- Zalman P10 MicroATX Mini Tower Case (discounted to $55.99)
- Corsair RM850e (2025) 850 W Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (christmas gift)
- Thermalright TL-S12-S 47.6 CFM 120 mm Fan (TLS12-S X3)
- Clovertale Braided ATX Sleeved Cable Extension kit for Power Supply Cable Kit 10 Pack (Black)

Subjectively Notable Projects

Project Minimalist

I used to play osu! frequently, so I made a Project-Minimalist skin in Figma. It turned out better than I'd expected, and learned plenty about Figma and even made a custom palette, which a webui of it is hosted in minimalist-palette-web repo.

NixOS Novice

popcat19-nixos includes my very first NixOS configuration prior to Home-Manager Flake transition. It's a thousand line mess built from the original NixOS configuration you'd get from the installer that lived in /etc/nixos/.
(I had to Ctrl+F to configure and add packages... TwT)

WebGL Image Shader

I did vibecode some projects like img-glsl-webui for having something to render screen shaders on an image. Something I wanted where none were present/satiable.
(I should refactor/rewrite it to use WebGL 2.0 sometime)

NixOS Flake Config

popcat19-nixos-hm hosts my current NixOS configurations for multiple hosts to make it simply reproducible, which I also like. Most of it, usually flake and home-manager (module) configuration is vibecoded, except for the minimal installation, since it felt like installing Arch Linux for the first time.
(Theming in HM is such a pain. Why do KDE app themes like Dolphin have to differ from the qt6ct ones?)

NixOS Shimboot

Speaking of NixOS, I'm also trying to get it running on Chromebooks (with LLM contributions) in nixos-shimboot, which is forked from shimboot by ading2210. It's based on an exploit Mercury Workshop team discovered where we can replace RMA shim's rootfs with anything we want, albeit with kernel limitations, of course.
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It's been a challenge due to my inexpertise in Nix and unique quirks from the ChromeOS shim kernel that makes it untrivial to get a non-FHS distro like NixOS running there.

Update 2025.12: I've been using it frequently and it runs somewhat stable (except for rebuilds, it eats time copying caches).
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Just needs some board testing for compatibility (I've only got it running on HP ChromeBook 11 G9 EE Intel Celeron N4500 1.10GHz 4GB RAM 11.6" Chrome OS: dedede), bwrap workarounds, UWSM+SDDM compatibility, busybox generation select script (like systemd-boot), CI workflows, and better project docs. It should be good for a beta release afterwards.