MountainMan

MountainMan wrote

Reply to comment by asterism in Some final thoughts on Gentoo by asterism

Hey, qutebrowser was what got me into the whole keyboard-centric thing.

I won't claim they're on-par with the mainstream browsers, but Emacs has a few graphical browser modes available for it. The Emacs Application Framework Browser is probably my favorite, but EWW can be nice with a lot of tweaking.

Personally I use EXWM to make Emacs my entire desktop environment. Perfect mishmash of graphical and text for my taste.

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MountainMan wrote

Those compile times do get rough when you're installing the big stuff. It drove me to find other more minimal programs, though I kind of took it to the extreme and now I use Emacs for literally everything.

I was really hoping Gentoo would work out better for you, been on the edge of my seat this whole time.

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MountainMan wrote

It's hard to keep reading consistently, so I almost feel like I'm lying when I say "I'm reading", but I keep bouncing between the following as they strike my interest:

  • The Joy of Revolution by Ken Knabb
  • The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman
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MountainMan wrote (edited )

We're completely fucked.

I hate just believing the hype, so I decided to try this shit out for myself this morning. I found a plugin for VS code (edit: no it wasn't, it was a standalone program called Cursor, my bad) that uses GPT4 to serve as a pair programmer of sorts. It can generate code, or have a conversation with you about the code.

I'm not "a programmer" by any means, more like I've been a script kiddie for over a decade. I wouldn't know how to make anything graphical happen if my life depended on it. String manipulation is about my limit.

Me and GPT4 just whipped up a nice-looking BOIDs flock. It can be run in the terminal and use ncurses as a rendering engine, or it can use OpenGL as a graphical renderer. The BOIDs do all the normal stuff, plus we added K-nearest-neighbors to make their movement a little more natural, and normalized their velocities so they don't whip around like it's a gravity simulation or something. I started to add GUI sliders to adjust BOID behavior at runtime but I got bored and started doing other things.

I never once said anything to GPT4 that related to the code. I said things like "those BOIDs are whipping around like a gravity simulation. Make them move like little fishies" and it knew what the hell I meant.

There were some issues related to the fact that I run a somewhat non-standard Linux system, but GPT4 basically fixed it for me by telling me exactly which commands would fix it. The fixes involved installing a few packages and modifying a config file. It somehow already knew I was using Gentoo just from the errors and log messages.

We did this in about 2 hours.

We're completely fucked.

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MountainMan wrote

Reply to comment by asterism in Asterism probably by monday

I had a problem... UEFI is supposed to use GPT, and BIOS are supposed to use MBR. I somehow ended up with the only computer in existence with a UEFI that uses MBR, and there's no documentation for Gentoo that I could find that covers this.

So now I use a SystemRescue USB to boot it.

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MountainMan wrote

It certainly does take a long time if you're installing a lot of the bigger packages (e.g. LibreOffice, Firefox). This is a good opportunity to re-evaluate all the tools use.

When you're installing these packages (or after, you can always change things and re-emerge) I recommend using the --ask flag and reviewing all the USE flags and dependencies for them for what you're installing. You can really whittle away a lot of crap you never needed.

Some of the USE flags that seemed to do the most for me were:

// etc/portage/make.conf
USE="-bluetooth -bindist -gtk-doc -kde -plasma -systemd -telemetry"

As a side note, I recommend NEVER allowing portage to automatically "fix" your USE flags to just be able to install something. Always manually adjust your USE flags and understand why certain packages failed to install the first time. Saves a lot of headache in the future.

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MountainMan wrote (edited )

For me, Arch is closer to Ubuntu than Gentoo. The amount of control Gentoo provides is just... not even comprable. USE flags are extremely powerful and let you define exactly what's on your system. Arch technically could do the same but you'd have to manually configure every package before compiling.

USE flags allow me to, for instance:

  • remove bluetooth functionality from everything
  • remove telemetry, geoip, geolocation, and gps functionality from everything
  • remove all the extra graphical crap for KDE and Gnome compatibility (massive gains right here)
  • remove pulseaudio functionality because pipewire
  • remove systemd (a.k.a. the devil) completely
  • enable JIT / native-comp and threads for Emacs

There's also the added benefit of being able to globally omit all packages that don't use a free-software license.

Gentoo is getting real close to rolling your own distro. Certainly not as close as LFS or KISS/CARBS or SourceMage, but close enough.

edit: random other thing Gentoo does... When you update your system, any configuration changes have to be approved by you. There's a tool that shows you a diff between the old and new configs so you can decide what to keep and what to omit.

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MountainMan wrote (edited )

Instructions for microwave-oven meals are what gets me. They're never specific enough. "Microwave on high for 2-3 minutes" is not specific enough. It's not any easier when your heads all swirly from forgetting to eat.

Had a Hungry Man meal the other day, and as far as I can tell, the instructions want you to skillfully carve out a section of the plastic covering to uncover the brownie, which a lot of people would get hurt doing. I know damn well they didn't design it that way, I'm just not getting it, but no one is willing to help me with this simple issue. They make fun of how simple it is and how ridiculous it is that I can't get it right. Makes me want to say fuck the brownie.

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MountainMan wrote

I'm also from a small rural conservative town. I think the best approach is to not think of anarchy as a system to be implemented, but as a way to live and interact with people right now. Show people, not tell them, how an anarchist world might work by being an anarchist in everything you do. To me, this boils down to refusing to create or take part in hierarchical structures at any point in time for any reason.

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MountainMan wrote

Howdy! I'm also pretty new here. Yeah it's a smaller community than you might be used to, but these folks are friendly as hell.

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