User:Flexibeast

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Flexibeast
Alexis
Naarm/Melbourne
Australia
Contact info


Gentoo user since 2021 (profile: default/linux/amd64/23.0)
enThis user is a native speaker of English.

About me

My first experiences with computers were in early-to-mid 1980s, involving the (6809-based) TRS-80 Color Computer, the (6502-based) Apple IIe, and my favourite, the (6502-based) BBC Micro B, either via friends or school.

My first computer was a (colour) Amstrad PC1512, which came with 512K of memory, a 5¼" floppy drive, and four disks: one for MS-DOS, two for GEM, and one for CP/M.

i've been using Linux since late 1997, with my first distro being RedHat 5.2 ("Apollo"). i subsequently used Mandriva, Ubuntu, Debian, and Void, before moving to Gentoo in late 2021. i've also been using OpenBSD since 6.2, around late 2017; i maintain a couple of OpenBSD servers.

i run Gentoo on my laptop, my primary machine. It's a Dell Latitude 7490, with a Core i7 (8th gen) CPU, Intel UHD graphics, and 32G of memory. Previously i was running Gentoo on an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U laptop, with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx, and 12G of memory (2G of which was allocated to a Portage TMPDIR).

My system is OpenRC-based, and i currently use Wayfire as my window manager (though in the past i've happily used Sway, i3, Fluxbox, and others). Some of the software i use in my Wayland setup includes:

  • Waybar, a status bar.
  • Mako, a notification daemon.
  • Wofi, a dmenu-style menu provider.
  • imv, an image viewer.

i use Emacs as my primary editor - though i regularly use Vim as well - and as my platform for email (mu4e), IRC (ERC), Web bookmark management (Ebuku), etc.

i have an interest in typography and typesetting, and am comfortable writing both LaTeX and roff(7); i'm also actively following the development of Typst.

Documentation

i place a high value on quality documentation, and in particular, want to demystify the standards / specifications / software related to desktops on *n*x-ish systems, e.g. those of freedesktop.org and POSIX, so that users can make informed decisions about whether they want to use them, and implement their own custom usages should they wish to do so.

While using Void, i made a number of contributions to the Void documentation.

Gentoo wiki

My contributions to the Gentoo wiki can be found here.

Some of the pages i've created from scratch include:

Guides

i maintain some Gentoo-specific guides:

as well as a small collection of ICT guides outside of this wiki, including:

The s6 ecosystem

i'm the porter and maintainer of mdoc(7) man pages for:

Software

i'm the author of several Emacs Lisp packages, including Ebuku, an Emacs UI for the buku bookmark manager, and pulseaudio-control, an Emacs UI for PulseAudio.

i'm also the author of some small POSIX shell scripts which focus on portability, such as qemu-start, for starting QEMU VMs from the command line, and epub-create, for creating minimal EPUBs. Both are available in the 'flexibeast' overlay.

i'm comfortable with Perl, and as part of my work on the Void Linux documentation, contributed some simple Perl scripts: mdbook-latex, to generate a LaTeX (and thus PDF) version of the Void docs, and mdbook-gemini, to generate a gemtext version.

Other programming languages with which i have at least a basic familiarity include C, Common Lisp, SQL, Lua, Haskell, Forth and Ada. i'm something of a programming language geek; some languages i find interesting include Zig, Factor, Coalton, Austral, Pony and Io.

Bug wrangling

My contributions to bugs.gentoo.org.

Resources for using s6/66

On this wiki

External to this wiki

Gentoo-oriented resources

General resources

Some light reading

It would be interesting to study what percentage of security failures can be partly or entirely attributed to compiler "optimizations".

People really like fancy headline-grabbing (but eminently impractical) things ... Only when you’ve fixed the top ten are you allowed to look at the fancy named attacks on crypto, side-channels, etc

Daniel Bernstein's response (2025): "As expensive as a plane flight"

Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything - or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits.

The explanatory shift from non-portable to optimizable also seems revealing. As far as I can tell, C89 did not use performance as a justification for any of its undefined behaviors. They were non-portabilities, like signed overflow and null pointer dereferences, or they were outright bugs, like use-after-free. But now experts like Chris Lattner and Hans Boehm point to optimization potential, not portability, as justification for undefined behaviors.

I've attended my first two large tech conferences. One was hosted by a trendy database vendor, and the other was a general tech conference in a non-hub that no one should know about. Despite some highlights, I would describe both experiences as "grotesque", "troubling", and "oily".

There are more Discords than you realize, and more lore pouring into them than anyone can truly comprehend. They are not the exclusive spigots of lore but they’re a major pipeline, a notable artery on Knowledge’s Heart that we would definitely notice if, for whatever reason, it was clogged with Mission Shift or New Opportunities cutting it off.

If I've made any mistakes in the table, it's not because I secretly hate your package manager and want to make it look bad: I overtly hate your package manager, and it is bad.

It is basically evil to make certain program actions wrong, but to not give developers any way to tell whether or not their code performs these actions and, if so, where.

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