lukasz.aep

Compiled here, all of it WAW

gentoo builds everything from source, so almost nothing on this box showed up as somebody else's binary. 1259 packages, all of them built right here against this exact cpu.

• -march=native -O2 -pipe, so it runs great here and would probably explode anywhere else <3
• desktop/plasma profile, gcc 15.3.0
• openrc, no systemd. i can read the init scripts, that's the whole reason
• USE flags pick what gets compiled in, so stuff i don't use never gets built
• a big update is two hours of fan noise. that's the deal you sign lol

The kernel: distribution, on purpose

i run gentoo-kernel. still compiled here, just configured by people who know more than me. gentoo-sources is installed for poking at but it's not what boots.

hand-rolling a config sounds way cooler until nvidia. that module sits outside the tree and has to be rebuilt every single kernel bump, and a custom config turns each one into a whole evening. i'd rather do literally anything else xD

What it actually taught me

none of the useful stuff came from compiling. it came from breaking it:

• a box with no syslog can't tell you anything about why it froze. i went months like that debugging the same freeze over and over
• vm.swappiness=180 is advice for machines with no ram. i have 30GB. it was just churning zram for fun
• -j16 and --jobs=4 is 64 compilers at the same time, which is a great way to OOM your own desktop mid-update lol
• black screen is almost never the gpu. it's plasmashell dying and nothing bringing it back

The other machines

gentoo is the daily driver but it isn't the only thing running here.

• the thinkpad runs xubuntu. it's old and it has 6GB, so xfce over kde every time — plasma on that thing is just cruel
• the server is plain ubuntu. boring on purpose. it has one job and i don't want it to be interesting
• debian and arch in vms when i'm testing something i don't want near the real install
• the ubuntu box has never once made me open a terminal at 2am. gentoo manages that about monthly lol

one vault, both machines

everything i figure out lives in an obsidian vault that syncthing mirrors between the gentoo box and the server. the notes link to each other, so it's a little graph of how my setup actually fits together — not a folder of dead txt files.

the ai reads it too

same vault doubles as memory for my ai setup — it reads the notes on demand instead of me re-explaining my machines every single time. cheaper on tokens, and it stops forgetting stuff. every message i send gets quietly turned into a proper prompt first, very lazy of me <3

the rules it runs on

the ai side isn't just "chat with it". there's a layer of my own rules underneath that i keep adding to whenever it gets something wrong.

• every message gets rewritten into a proper brief before the model sees it. i type four words, it gets a paragraph
• the memory is files in the vault, synced across all three machines, so it doesn't matter which one i'm sat at
• when it gets something wrong i write the correction down as a rule, so the same mistake doesn't come back next week
• hooks block it from finishing while work's still owed, which is very rude and very effective lol

rules that can fail

the thing i got wrong for ages: a rule written in a doc gets read once and then quietly ignored. the ones that actually stick are little scripts that measure the real thing — the rendered page, the finished file — and refuse to carry on when the number's wrong.

it's just tests, pointed at layouts and renders instead of functions. turns out "this looks off" is usually a number you can go and check.

Sim racing, eventually

a g29 wheel and assetto corsa. both took a fight, and neither failure said anything useful about what was actually wrong xD

• the wheel showed up in lsusb with no input device at all. usbguard was blocking it silently — it enumerates, then dies. check usbguard list-devices --blocked before debugging anything else
• in ps4 mode you get zero force feedback. ps3 mode is the one that actually works
• new-lg4ff over the in-tree driver took it from 3 force effects to 15 <3
• custom shaders patch dies on wine 10+ — W^X means a page can't be writable and executable, and CSP patches the game at runtime. GE-Proton9-20 is the last one that works

VR, the streaming way

quest 3, no cable, running against a native openxr runtime instead of steamvr. minecraft in vr with real render distance is the payoff.

• wivrn — monado underneath, so it's a real openxr runtime and not a translation layer
• alvr + steamvr is a dead end on nvidia: it can't DRM-lease the display, on x11 and wayland both. wivrn dodges it by streaming from a render target instead
• vivecraft for minecraft, with serverside LOD so far terrain streams in instead of the client scanning the world
• the lesson both times: the error message points at the wrong layer, basically always