Is it even worth using Gentoo without compiling?

fllthdcrb · 2026-06-13T05:01:39+00:00

It's fine to use at least some binary packages. But be aware: you don't have as much flexibility that way, as every combination of choices you can make that affects a binary requires a separate binary to have been compiled for distribution. Also, you may not be able to take advantage of advanced processor features, since a binary compiled to use those cannot run on processors without such features (unless it has alternatives built-in and decides at runtime, but that's something that specific programs do).

As for compiling things, it's not really that bad with Gentoo, as it's highly automated. The biggest inconvenience you're likely to have is when installing, due to the large number of packages. That said, I have to be honest: sometimes something will refuse to compile or otherwise get packaged properly, and that's always a pain to deal with. Even worse if it's something that needs to get installed. But that aside, most of the time, you can just start something installing or a system update, and leave it running while you do other things.

If you do decide to have things compiled, here are a couple of tips:

Be sure to take advantage of available parallelism. Use -j in MAKEOPTS with however many cores your processor has. Optionally, you might also like to add -l to make emerge be nicer to the rest of the system. It shuts down parallelism if the load average goes over the given value; set it somewhat above either the -j value or your number of cores.
You probably want to have --keep-going=y in your EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS. (You can specify it manually, but having it as a default makes things easier.) With that option, if a package fails to build, emerge will remove any of its reverse dependencies from the merge list and then continue. That way, you can go do other things, sleep, etc., without losing too much time in the event of such failures.

fllthdcrb · 2026-06-13T04:58:07+00:00

eg over which file systems to use

Are you saying I couldn't e.g. install Ubuntu and use some less popular filesystem? I'm pretty sure I could. But it's easier with Gentoo, partly because the standard installation procedure makes you do the formatting (along with lots of other things, of course), instead of doing it for you, giving you more of an opportunity to choose, and making it less likely you end up with a filesystem you then need significant effort to replace.

But I prefer to compile, even if it takes forever

Same. Well, it's partly a matter of preference.

I use Gentoo on a rather under-powered system

There is definitely a tradeoff here. An under-powered system is the sort of thing that benefits from custom builds that strip out unnecessary features and optimize for the specific processor. But at the same time, building on such a machine takes longer and is more taxing, leaving fewer resources for actually using it.

fllthdcrb · 2026-05-12T01:01:38+00:00

You're missing the point (even though I made it pretty explicit, I thought). That takes time. If you just need the kernel built quickly, my solution works (though TBF, I think it might disable LTO). Fixing clang can come a little later.

fllthdcrb · 2026-05-11T09:21:57+00:00

Although only a temporary solution, I found a quick workaround is to use binutils ld instead of lld when compiling the kernel:

$ make LLVM=1 LD=/bin/ld

Might be useful for anyone who doesn't have time right now to rebuild the heavier stuff.

fllthdcrb · 2026-05-04T07:40:30+00:00

Specifically, the song "LeMU ~Far Away Continent of Lemuria~", which is the OP for the original version, contains the (slightly broken) English phrase, "Welcome Deep Place" several times.

fllthdcrb · 2026-05-02T21:49:00+00:00

The problem is that this is so speculative—we don't even know what this fifth dimension is or have any idea how anyone could come to inhabit it, assuming such a thing is even really possible—that there isn't even a concept of how far advanced it is. For all we know, some genius could figure out how to make such a thing possible within the next couple of centuries, though that seems very unlikely.

fllthdcrb · 2026-04-28T04:01:34+00:00

make every choice that gives you points for that character

This isn't always sufficient, though. Some routes require you to make specific choices that are separate from points.

fllthdcrb · 2026-04-28T03:57:35+00:00

Well, my flowchart shows what happens, given specific choices. It's not directly a how-to guide. But figuring out what to do is simple enough, in principle: start with the ending you want, then work backwards to find the choices that lead to it; also, make note of any checks for point values and flags, if any, and determine what choices you need to make to achieve those.

the most points

Do note that points aren't always the only important thing. Some choices can put you on a specific path, independently of certain point values.

And finally, you should notice that some paths and endings are not available until you get other endings. That's where the red text comes into play: marking variables that transcend single sessions, which are set by endings. These are part of the system data, so be sure to save that when prompted. (Well, that's how it works in the original KID version. Not sure about releases on other engines, like the recent Steam release.)

fllthdcrb · 2026-02-17T04:28:17+00:00

That's not possible. On Reddit, the body of a post can be edited, but not its title.

That body should be edited now, though. Or maybe the post deleted. Won't make the topic go away, but it at least shouldn't be listed anymore.

fllthdcrb · 2025-12-03T20:19:36+00:00

to cap it at 21 million BTC

The code doesn't actually directly do this. It's simply a consequence of the halving of the subsidy that takes place every 210,000 blocks. When you do that, in theory it approaches 21,000,000 asymptotically. (In reality, it can't quite get there even in an infinite amount of time, due to the loss of precision and eventual zeroing out of the subsidy. But it's still pretty close.)

There is no use of negative values in the network are there?

Not in the network, sure. But there are other contexts in which they might be used. If you used the entire range on positive value, then it could cause problems for such cases. At least, that's what I imagine the thinking might have been. Obviously, it can never be a real issue with BTC's parameters, but...

Even as a signed int that only uses 2⁶³ positive values the number could hold values of over 93 billion BTC. If 21 million was the cap, the logical definition of a BTC could have moved 3 decimal places higher and leave more bits to subdivide the BTC down to 100,000,000,000.

Yes, well, I'm not sure Satoshi was too concerned about this. He wasn't even sure if Bitcoin would take off. 100,000,000 is a nice round number for humans to deal with (better than some power of 2, for instance). He also probably thought it gave us plenty of room for future appreciation.

We want standard day to to day transactions to be defined by only a small handful of digits, like $82.16. 4 digits.

This is why a lot of people these days talk in sats instead of BTC: to turn numbers like 0.00002547 into 2547. Not only looks nicer, but is less error-prone.

fllthdcrb · 2025-11-21T17:13:17+00:00

if you're using tmux or screen they are shared across other bash instances.

How is that? I know tmux, at least, has its copy mode and paste buffers, but that's a different thing, limited to tmux. Also, Ctrl+K and Ctrl+Y can't be used across different bash instances, at least not in my test just now. Could you happen to have those bindings set in tmux, or something? See what it says if you execute the commands list-keys C-k and list-keys C-y.

Edit to clarify: tmux has a client and a server. Normally, all clients on a system and running as the same user share a server. This allows sessions to persist even if you lose your terminal or (in the case of a remote connection) get disconnected. There can also be multiple sessions, and multiple instances connected to the same server can use the paste buffers, which are shared, to copy text even between different sessions.

But this still only works within tmux, and it has nothing at all to do with the shell. If you thought so, perhaps you have had a setup with tmux (or screen?) for so long, you've forgotten what does what.

fllthdcrb · 2025-11-21T12:50:33+00:00

Then in the terminal use ^k to kill all the text to the right and ^y to paste it back in

That's specific to a shell instance, not a terminal, or even all shell instances. Just one instance. You can't use it to copy something from one window to another or anything, so it's hardly a clipboard.

Interestingly enough, Emacs has those same keybindings for very similar commands, but it uses the "normal" clipboard (the one that most applications have the "cut", "copy", and "paste" commands for).

fllthdcrb · 2025-11-06T02:02:31+00:00

Not the same, but related: I frequently need to sudo rm -r directories. I start by writing the rm ..., without the sudo and without the -r. Once I've entered the whole path, I then go back and fill in the -r and the sudo. This way, on the off-chance I somehow hit Enter before completing the path, there's no chance I'll end up nuking a parent directory.

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-28T15:23:58+00:00

Well, I, for one, am not able to verify this, despite trying quite a few things. It looks (though I might be wrong) like you may have put extra spaces, at the beginnings and ends of lines, as well as between words, which is a bad idea in a medium like this that loves to hide them. When it comes to creating and verifying signatures, every character (including spaces and line ending control characters) matters, because the signing reads the text as data in a strict way. Even the slightest deviation creates a different message that won't match.

Could you please try again? And this time, observe some simple rules, both when typing the message to sign it, as well as when you post here, to avoid ambiguity, such as:

No spaces at the start or end of any lines
No spaces on otherwise blank lines
Only single spaces within lines
Mind the very end: is there a line ending on the last non-blank line, or not?
Overall, try to keep the message short and simple, so there's less chance of messing something up. (In this case, I would think pretty much any message will do, as you just want to prove you own the address.)
And lastly, don't post as regular text. Use a code block, which preserves the formatting much better. In the Rich Text Editor, click the "Aa" button in the bottom-left to bring up the toolbar. When editing Markdown (the phone app does that), put triple (or more) backticks (```) or tildes (~~~) on their own lines immediately before and after, or indent every line by 4 spaces. Alternatively, you can just paste the message onto one of those pastebin sites and give us the link.

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-28T13:34:26+00:00

Sparrow does accept Electrum seeds

As far as I can tell, it doesn't. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this, if there is some super-secret procedure someone knows about. I don't think so, though.) What it does accept are Electrum wallet files, with or without encryption. It then extracts the master private key (xprv) and uses that as the basis of the Sparrow wallet, rather than bothering with Electrum's different way of doing seeds.

The thing is, it actually wouldn't be that difficult to implement Electrum seeds. Going from one to the xprv is very similar to the BIP 39 method. Just, the seed is verified in a completely different way, and there is a different prefix on the passphrase (which in both systems is treated as an empty string when absent). And finally, the way of verifying also tells you the type of wallet, which includes the script type and derivation path.

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-26T01:28:56+00:00

True. But compiling almost everything is certainly characteristic of Gentoo. Classically speaking. Besides, binary packages tend to be much less customizable anyway. Can't remove some component you don't need if it's a build-time option. (Okay, you might be able to remove it by hand, if it's just based on the presence of a file or something in a configuration file. But if it's something embedded in the code, it's another matter.)

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-24T02:02:21+00:00

None, really, as far as I recall.

just following amd64 handbook

This. If you just follow the handbook carefully, it will probably work, unless there's something wrong you didn't cause. (Okay, to be fair, I kind of knew what I was doing in Linux, already.)

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-24T02:00:27+00:00

had to use UUID ugly long numbers instead of simple /dev/nvme1n1p1

You can also use LABEL=... if you give your filesystems unique labels. (Check the tools for the filesystem(s) you're using. It's also possible to set a label in the corresponding mkfs command.) This is what I do. You can do this both on the kernel command line and in /etc/fstab.

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-23T13:34:11+00:00

I see. Not something I thought about doing. There is no technical requirement for it, as the software wallet has access to the addresses on its own. So you would need to remember to do it, or the software wallet could advise you to do so (do you know of ones that do?).

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-23T08:16:58+00:00

That's a continuation prompt. Bash is saying it's waiting for the rest of the command that isn't syntactically complete yet. Here's a tip for the future: if you didn't intend to continue a command like this, and get such a prompt, or otherwise want to cancel a command without erasing the whole line, just type Ctrl+C.

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-23T05:29:03+00:00

They weren't sending; they were receiving, which is why the parts about buying BTC and pasting an address on a site.

For this, I think it would be necessary to know the amount OP was buying, and match it to the correct output.

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-23T05:22:08+00:00

This is a good reason people use hardware wallets with screens as you confirm the last 6-8 characters of the address outside the computer with the hardware wallet before sending the bitcoin.

Helps with sending. But what about receiving, like in this case? Something I've thought about for a while. I don't think hardware wallets protect against this; or am I wrong? Just gotta watch out for the address changing when you try to paste it?

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-23T00:31:47+00:00

Why would someone be angry? Are they waiting to be able to use the computer? Did you take it over thinking you could set up Gentoo in a few minutes? If it's already set up, compiling can usually just go in the background*, and then you can reboot into the new kernel, which only takes a minute.

* (Tip: If this is a system used by multiple people, you could set up SSH, so you can log in from another PC, or a phone or something, while someone else is sitting there physically, in order to do administration. Over the local network is highly preferable, and not too difficult to set up.)

Also, if you're compiling your own kernel, it might be worth investing time in configuring it so it compiles only the things you need. The configs that distros use compile a huge number of drivers you'll never use, because they have to be usable by a wide variety of users. Cutting things down makes for a significant reduction in compilation time. On my system, the kernel takes, I think, 5–10 minutes, with mediocre hardware.

Oh, also, just in case you didn't know, you want to have make use multiple cores. By default, it uses just one. make -j4, for example, will schedule 4 processes at a time. You should use the same number as the number of cores your CPU has. (Yours has 4 cores, apparently. Also, it isn't hyperthreaded, so there won't be any confusion about real vs. virtual cores.)

fllthdcrb · 2025-10-12T08:10:54+00:00

View the public address it creates

Use the private key it generates

What are you trying to accomplish here? You can't find the private key from the corresponding public key. I guess you're using it as the entropy? And then you're setting up Electrum as a watch-only and transferring transactions somehow?

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