Laurel

Grievances with Gentoo

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000Z

We have a "storied" experience with Linux, starting with whatever was box-standard at the start of CURRENT_DECADE, and currently with Fedora. One of those distributions was Gentoo, a (now mostly) source-based distribution initially released in 2002 by known weed-smoker and crashout Daniel Robbins.

The idea was novel, concerning the small breadth of programs available and the relative speed of computers at the time: the prospect that you can compile software with settings meant for your hardware for a speed gain. This inadvertently also includes being able to easily support ISAs other than x86, within the Gentoo project (the "Project")'s available resources.

This advantage, however, has largely disappeared with the sub-recent technological advancements in CPUs and the compilers that build what runs on them, because it isn't <2015 anymore.

Between programmatic inefficiency, compilers, and raw speed, the gap is actively, and rapidly, closing*, because all things are temporary solutions in the moment, regardless of one's faith or active reversal of progress.

* One Line x86 Change To GCC Compiler Nets +12% Benchmark Win For Modern Intel/AMD CPUs (Phoronix)
* Linux 6.19 Kernel Benchmarks With X86_NATIVE_CPU Optimization (Phoronix)
* Benchmarking The Linux 5.19 Kernel Built With "-O3 -march=native" (Phoronix)

Dependency Hell Is Real

It is widely known that installing libraries and developer tools by hand (or more aptly, with your time) is incredibly frustrating. Source-based distributions do not help this in the slightest, though this is inherent. As we've always been the exploratory type, we suffered from this quite hard, much of our time and disk space being spent wrestling with anything that we wanted to install pulling in everything that we never fathomed compiling. Binary packages do little to fix this, since they are spread quite thinly, even after 2023.

Watching those compile lines fly across your screen is mesmerizing, until you snap back to reality and realize how much time you're wasting for such an inconsequential gain.

Attempting to save face, we installed Nix (specifically Lix). While this did rectify the problem to an extent, attempting to use graphical applications on a non-NixOS system without nixGL is a misnomer. Thus, Nix only exaggerated the time we were willing to waste on this. No elaboration will be given, since Nix is a can of worms in progress, as we have more room to finagle with it now.

Unmask Every Package Ever

For every niche thing that we desire to install, there is a large chance that we have to unmask it, considering that most of these packages have their versions in testing, even after a year or so. Due to how Portage works (ebuilds and such), how the Project tests packages is predominantly manual, ergo community effort. This gets hairy fast considering the amount of software available in the distribution, and human hands heal no silicon wounds easily.

If I got told the number of atoms the average Gentoo user has in their package.accept_keywords, I would, likely, not be surprised in the slightest.

Frankensystem

A sysadmin is fundamentally driven by an immeasurable amount of lust to maintain a *nix system, even putting their computer and mental state in harm's way to get what they want. Gentoo caters to this due to the aforementioned, and will happily birth dysfunctional systems that take months to maintain and years to -avuDN @world once the time comes, because this is nerd LEGO.

What I have failed to mention is that Gentoo is fundamentally a meta-distribution, with the fact that both distro and user are what shapes the system they install, stage3 and all. And retroactively, regretfully, because if one thing in their Rube Goldberg castle breaks, everything is soon to follow from the top-down. USE flags make this even more of a problem, as even one small change to a package's set can trip over, or possibly ruin one's delicately crafted setup in one emerge. Any of the means that the user has demanded Portage to build is only instant gratification, and what causes the rest.

Ludditism

This is, unfortunately, the main thesis of this blog post.

The Gentoo Project and their chosen git forge, Codeberg, have an utter hatred and fundamental misunderstanding of how language models work, to the point of banning and incorrectly satirizing them:

[…] However, we have been working on implementing AI [sic] features utilised via the Discourse API, which will scrape the internet for our old forums content (and more!), and post them for us in our new home. Due to this, viewing new posts will include old posts as well for the next few years or so, depending on how much of the old forums are backed up via the Internet Archive and similar archival sites. We have reasonably high hopes that many threads will appear exactly as they used to (after all, AI [iterum sic] can only regurgitate what already existed…) [actual belief].

Two motions regarding "artificial intelligence" and Large Language Models (LLMs) were voted on among Codeberg e.V. members and passed.

We are promising to not use any of your data to train LLM and explain what the planned Terms of Use change mean for 'vibe-coded' projects.

We believe that LLMs endanger the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.

And, then:

It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited [are you sure?], should a case be made for such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical[,] and quality concerns.

Under a petty extension of their poor wording, what falls under an NLP AI under the Project's wording can consist of:

Spell checkers and grammar checkers with neural models (LanguageTool, Grammarly, the average phone keyboard).
Predictive text (the average phone keyboard).
Machine translation (Google Translate, DeepL, Kagi Translate).
Any use of a search engine to help with debugging (Google, DuckDuckGo, Kagi).
Voice dictation (ASR/NLU).

Thus, they have additionally banned an entire category of mathematics and software by way of a copyright policy wearing a technology ban catsuit.

Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless [how so?] content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to review contributions and detect the mistakes resulting from the use of AI.

They are not "stochastic parrots", "content stealers", "regurgitators", and such, and I reject every notion that attempts to prescribe these memes as fact, even when rebutted, concerning modern language models. For how much these people religiously inquire about quality (deadest), "soul" (unkillable), and the lack of an "actual reasoning process" (what's your thought process like?), I am surprised these human feather-brains haven't stochastically burnt their ethos to a crisp yet, considering the rapid progress concerning them.

It is a valid conversation to not allow them due to member burden or potential code quality, but it falls apart when there is a limited number of people that can contribute code to the core Project in the first place. Even more so, LLM-assisted tooling would serve to empower the project if used by that small pool wisely, but they wouldn't be able to regardless, because of the Project members and community they've cultivated.

But such is the nature of proselytization:

Ethical concerns. The business side of AI boom [sic] is creating serious ethical concerns. Among them:

Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. [the only actual argument here, if by little]

Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. [you need citations that are based on actual numbers (see last paragraph)]

The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. [how does this pertain to the Project meaningfully?]

LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts. [ditto]

We begin to grow ever-distant from "FLOSS" as a whole, because how do you proceed to promote "free knowledge" while simultaneously preaching copyright law and the abhorrent act of "stealing work", because you've decided to make AI your political polarizer? I do not have the want of abolishing copyright law, nor the erasure of human labour, but how many times will you repeat this rhetoric until you start alienating the people you wish to "empower"?

Language models are, fundamentally, given a large enough set, melting pots of their training data, and will never output or "regurgitate" a full body of work in daily use near-verbatim if it isn't already a substantially popular work. Source code isn't substantially popular, and does not stay static.

As well, they and Codeberg have provided little evidence for their statement of energy and water use that compare against other sectors. If they eventually do, I suspect it will have been chosen to validate their opinion, with little mention of others that contradict it. Any other ethical claims they and Codeberg have made do not pertain to their projects, and not accepting contributions from language models on the basis of them will not slow or stop them, because those are jobs for regulation.

Yet, they argue all of this when their main course is a distribution of a kernel that already uses language models to assist with development. Under their stated stance, this; their beloved kernel supposedly committing copyright infringement; affects their bottom line.

People in this space frequently manage to confound the use and development of anything AI-related with ideological impurity, "class traitor"-ism, and such, to the argument and "benefit" to whom/why/what. For all the militarism they have expressed toward unfree software, they now believe it is rational to huff-and-puff about AI and harass users of it under the guise of "direct action" instead of actually helping or tackling the core problem: the lack of openness from model vendors and the technology surrounding them.

I don't think this can be answered or solved with a remotely straight face, because it'll end up as a tortured projection of any grievances they have with late-stage capitalism. This would likely have better chances as a political lobbying campaign rather than ideological soft-balling.

Security

Vulnerabilities are being found at an unprecedented rate and quality due to the advent of agentic tools such as AISLE, Codex, and frontier models such as GLM-5.3, Kimi K3, and, more recently, GPT-6 Astra. Used by a human operator, if one of these finds an exploitable vulnerability in something like Portage, which is then responsibly disclosed to the Project with a LLM-generated fix included, they wouldn't be able to include it verbatim* because of their own policy, possibly opening up an infinite can of worms for the distribution's users.

For this reason, we outright refuse to use any Linux distribution that prohibits the use of language models in development, for bad omens would certainly be running amok in the current day.

* This must be tested in practice before I can consider my own words as dogma, like how copyright licences are conjecture until proven in court. Yet, how one ensnares themselves so badly that it gets me to write -that- is confuzzling enough.

To Distrohop

Right, with that vent out of the way…

We started using Gentoo Linux as a means to end our distrohopping. Before this, we were novices using EndeavourOS, which, as with any other Arch derivative, turned out to be complete scouse, and whatever we used before that has been, thankfully, lost to time. At that point, we were quite offish about binary-based distributions, seeing the constant breakage that occurred with them; only partially corroborated by pacman being sloppy with its operations, because the actual problem is that distro being hemorrhage-edge.

With that twisted worldview, we thought it'd quell all of our problems; to which it evidently didn't; so we took a 180° turn and started using Debian instead in early-CURRENT_YEAR. And then, being scared that language models would once again be banned in 2026's vote 002 (they were not), and because we didn't want outdated libraries for our development anymore, we are now currently using Fedora.

Nothing is learned, gained, or lost, for every canary used to divine this coal mine, because we'll be sick if we have to breathe its air again. I am not grateful, nor do I beg for the manual labour of these bastard computer-touchers, for it would be just as saccharine if we stopped using Linux, started living in the woods, and blamed all of our problems on some random big-name like rms.

I'm too sure of myself, aren't I.

2 Years of Spaghetti Code

2026-05-15T00:00:00.000Z

There has never been a time where we've wanted to rewrite something so badly. Unfortunately, that was the case with llia's site.

We used to have our main pseudonym be under llia, a shallow keysmash that started on a now-dead fediverse instance, and what we still publish our music under (technically under the jurisdiction of the Sylvester Sound Group of Laurel). There isn't any good history with it that I'm comfortable with mentioning, but I'm talking about its site, that damn thing.

Made in 2024, it was originally made in bare CSS and HTML—poorly made and all—and then sloppily ported to Eleventy by a then-SOTA GPT-5 because we didn't have any prior experience with SSGs (see here), and all of its shortcomings stayed with our mostly-manual porting to Astro. Completely horrible no-good bad, and every other site of ours that wasn't it was infinitely superior.

It had an absolutely atrocious aesthetic with bad contrast, as the colour scheme was yanked from a Mastodon bot that we can't find anymore; the sidebar image exists; everything that weren't the notices were hardcoded; and almost everything in the stylesheet was defined with pixel values, so it was completely unworkable. Plus the content contained within (particularly the about page). That's enough complaining for now, though...

the new layout 'n schtuff

Thanks to the efforts of Aspen, Flora, and yours truly, you and us mustn't worry anymore, as the only efficient solution to that horseshit was to just trash it completely and make a new layout entirely. While it is marginally more subdued, and we did have to revamp the previous cover images to fit in, it's more manageable and reflects our current selves better. AND we don't need our blog on Aspen's site anymore!

For one, we were less liberal with how we did things; while it was internally formulated before we did anything, we did an iterative approach so that it could actually be to standard (one person just did it in one shot for llia's site, whom we won't name). Secondly, the aforementioned blog is now directly integrated instead of being on a separate site; it was that way considering that it originally was hosted on Nekoweb, thus not easily updateable. And finally, its existence is no longer completely and utterly pointless.

If this feels more corporate or "professional": you aren't us and don't like what we like, so keep it. kthxbai

– DJ Big Schnasty

Llia In Review 2026

2026-01-27T00:00:00.000Z

It's our birthday today, so now we're officially 22 (ignoring time drift). That's nice, but I'm less happy about the day itself and am more grateful to be alive atp.

Of course, that does in fact mean we waited over 365 days for this specific recurring date because some jackass invented chronology, and another invented birthdays for the fuck of it because Why Not, so I'm well within my right to make this post.

We've made a lot of music over the course of 2025 and have changed styles frequently as well, individually and wholly, so there's a lot I'm going to be glossing over for the sake of brevity (and because I'm writing this at 1:00 PM). Regardless, here are the stats:

The Main Account

7 jersey club tracks
7 experimental tracks
3 vocal tracks
1 footwork track
1 dereleased track

There's that many jersey club tracks because of DJ ROVER's rather short but productive lifespan, and because it is an easy genre to make. The former's latter is true for experimental music as well, but it is a very broad umbrella term that doesn't hold much merit in terms of classification.

Through the Archives (you'll never get, or otherwise)

40 one-offs
9 still-in-progress/unfinished tracks
9 melody sketches
3 dead-in-the-water tracks
1 mashup

NOTE: This may be inaccurate, have missing entries, or have duplicate entries since we're doing manual bookkeeping.

What Now For 2026?

We aim to release an album in the near future, purposefully made or a mixtape, or die trying. It will be an amalgamation of our one-offs and unfinished tracks' styles, and'll most certainly have a rating of less than 3 stars on RYM. ~~We will commit suicide if we miss that goal, and that is not hyperbole or self-deprecation.~~ Suicide postponed indefinitely.

Kind Regards, [BITES YOUR ARM].

- dj fagleg

persimmon goes rotten

2025-11-14T00:00:00.000Z

when this new version released, we were excited. we reinstalled windows, grabbed the finest torrent we could find, then started blasting.

i only have one question after this: Image-Line, who are you trying to appeal to?

you don't need an AI assistant (Gopher) and i'm making it into a sacre. there's a reason why manuals exist, and this only makes me unlearn behaviours.
stop shoving FL Cloud in my face.
everything is more slower and unstable compared to 2024.
stop changing behaviours that don't need to be changed if it isn't absolutely broken or a complete pithea to use.
per-clip audio editing is cool, but declicking doesn't work.
and everything takes more effort now because my computer's getting killed.

this program is actively fighting us with every action we do, and i don't know if i'm just going insane or if its actually trying to kill us. either way we're downgrading.

speakers never learn

zawinski's law states that "every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can". the replacement part is not really relevant here, as FL Studio is the only DAW that i can actually use without pulling my hair out or relearning how to walk currently, but it is relevant.

it has a full video player, it can view HTML documents via Edge WebView2 and whatever equivalent is on MacOS—some UI elements are just that, it has 3 versions of a notebook plugin with one being a web browser (just go use a text editor), and also they're attempting to do Splice but worse. plus there's automatic mastering—which most-of-not-all-the-time makes your music sound bad if you don't want it to fit into a specific genre/sound (reminds me of Dolby and SoundCloud). you should go learn how to mix and master instead of wasting your time.

small fries: i swear on lucifer that these developers, lest even the executives running the show, just sort-of think about the people who actually regularly use these programs—the power users—and mostly let their mind and focus dwell on the new license-holders who are just getting into this program. presets, (sample) loops, a prompted LLM, "project jumpstarters"... which most people won't care about because they already decided to pay for fucking Omnisphere and Splice, and are avid OTT abusers.

my enemy is also my friend

i prefer how Ableton Live does most of these and how it props them up to be—just supplements, not be-all-end-all necessities that you should kill for to use. not presented en masse, just There.

Image-Line immediately tells you their sale price on their index.html, tiktoks related to their benevolently divine program are prominently displayed, and https://www.image-line.com/reportpiracy/ exists (which i haven't seen from any other company who offers a paid DAW thus far). do you think i respect you?

if i had a binary choice between FL Studio 2025 and Ableton Live, i would chose the latter, because using the former is genuine suicide for me due to SEE PREVIOUS and because we don't own a high-end computer (i3 CPUs are bitches). i'm not trying to hide my disdain for this, we're done here. all roads lead back to monolake.

- epsilon a.k.a. big avali

the new order and hell's plight

2025-11-09T00:00:00.000Z

(disclaimer: most things in this post are exaggerated. please don't take things on the internet seriously.)

we've been getting bored.

we've been getting bored of them fl studios and renoises. we barely use the last anyways, too cumbersome (there's a reason why they were quickly replaced). and besides, we wiped our computer clean with a shiny new coat of shit—windows 11. what fun'll await us now...

PART -1. FL STUDIO

we have a storied history with FL. coming from LMMS around ~2021, it was a breath of fresh air to have an actually working DAW that wasn't designed to kill you. a working soundfont player, proper automation clips and samples, it was all we could ask for.

and then, a couple years down the line, fl studio 2024 hit.

it brought many wonderful features which i won't go into here because i'm not editorialising. but you know what it introduced? aggressive DRM. and now, whenever i put even ONE Saturn 2 with linear phase on my master, it immediately jumps to ~15% CPU usage instead of the usual 2% i'd get in REAPER despite being on the same ASIO driver, as it's probably-maybe-speculatively decrypting resources live all the while (along with the useless features and then some). also it likes to crash a lot now for some reason. stop cosplaying as Pro Tools.

it's our daily driver DAW, for god's sake. we have a competent CPU. why does it do this? why has our baby boy forsaken us?

so, i began to get sick of it. i'm a maximalist, and now i can't do what i could do before easily without breaking 20 million legs and shooting a dog. and that brings us here, now...

PART 0. BITWIG

i haven't been allowed to comment by my benefactors. not good, next.

PART 1. REAPER

REAPER is a rather divisive DAW for us. it's cheap, sure, but the thing that ticks us off the most is its verboseness. context menus upon context menus, knobs upon sliders, tables upon weird UI choices. and it's perfectly valid; you can't fit all of the features it has well in a DAW without burying it under weird abstractions. except that you can- but that's the beauty about it (d'aww).

we use it mainly as a post-production environment for mastering and mixing, and also some sound effects due to it not being bound to the hardware's audio channel count, and having r8brain with a featureful renderer and batch converter. but the problem is we only use it for that purpose. otherwise, it takes us 10x the amount of effort it'd take in FL or live to make a basic llia track. and that damn sample browser, [shudders]...

whatever. 5/10.

PART 2. ABLETON LIVE

ableton live, the platform for artists like autechre and the child of monolake. you can do anything you want in it! as long as you don't value your time.

it buries some features under its infamous options.txt, its macro implementation is horrible, and it has those cumbersome instrument and effects racks. it keeps scanning for... whatever, constantly, for some reason, AND THEY DON'T WANT TO FUCKING SUPPORT CLAP. the exporting is pretty lacklustre, too.

small fries: the people who use this DAW keep consistently pointing out FL's 10-effect limit, the (actually tame) track routing, yadayadayada, whatever. ableton is worse in this department, UI and UX wise. you can't bypass every effect at once, session view is basically useless if you ain't doing live shit (90% of people) or minor things, changing track gain is rather opaque, MACROS, the symbolism used is a joke, and sends suck to work with. i don't care if i have a 10-effect limit, because you have effect racks, and we have patcher. and patcher is honestly more usable...

the only reason i was drawn into it was M4L and corpus. the former because I Need More Tools, and the latter because we really like resonators. this has gone horribly, because as just like the DAW itself, they are both horribly obtuse (only understandable for M4L). but there's only one shining beacon i can see, even if it is a bit of a wank as well: the sample browser... and that's all i can say, because once you add a folder to Places, you have to wait around 2 hours for it to (incorrectly) tag your files based on sound-type.

maybe the developers are sleazing around and are only employed for a paycheck, maybe the codebase is a shitshow, i don't know, but development has been very stagnant. but trust me, it is WAY more usable than REAPER. so much so that it takes only 2.5x the effort now.

still, i'm trying to love this—no two users use it the same way. but i can't.

4/10. side-hoe.

PART 3. RENOISE

hard to use for us because we don't have a MIDI keyboard, and also because It Is A Fucking Tracker.

X/10. not for us despite having this one purchased legally.