1,340 karma · joined August 26, 2017
It's not an either-or though, LLM generated text already provides lots of value in many situations right now. It's also used for fluff, yes, but much of what humans write is fluff too, reporters often get paid by the word.
The point is that the value in a text has nothing to do with whether it was generated by an LLM or not. What matters is if it's useful or not.
A math teacher only has "this class is about math" to transfer, the rest is known. ;-)
Jokes aside, I think we're in a weird transition now where AI is used to generate text that looks good but is bad. In a few years people will know that and be more critical.
I think we went through a similar phase when DTP had it's breakthrough. Suddenly school papers were laser printed 300ppi times new roman and got more attention than better papers written by hand. But eventually that became the baseline.
I think Ai will make it so that well-written texts with clarity, good layout, correct illustrations, callouts etc become the norm, and will no longer impress anyone unless the information itself is actually good.
And if the information is good, it won't matter if it's AI generated or not.
"This" includes installing in a literal minute, having codex, claude code, vs code etc installed as easily as emacs with 0 extra config. Also things like localsend, tailscale, bitwarden etc. Very useful stuff and it all "just works".
Do your nameless distros do that too?
>Omarchy has nothing special behind it except the dude who made it.
I don't care who made it, just how good it is. You seem to care too much about who made it to ever discover how good it is. ;-)
No they don't, they don't even consider it their job to do it. It's the job of the distro's package manager, or a 3rd party app wrapper like Snap or Flatpak.
You can of course configure a distro using KDE and Gnome so that the experience becomes as good, if you want. Which is how things have been in Linux for decades. "Walk the last mile yourself".
My point here is that Omarchy shows that there is a last mile to be walked. By having commercial apps included it becomes interesting for commercial vendors to invest in.
I think that (and the overall buzz) is the main reason why it's getting funding. A hundred thousand wealthy geeks installing a platform where our apps are trivial to install and we won't have to deal with MS or Apple if it takes off? Ok, have a bag of cash why not.
Distros where it takes a nerd to even figure out how to install the official nvidia drivers? Nah.
>Literally their own documentation says it only themes Chromium
Ok so you haven't tried it. Then I understand. It's not just skin deep, but you won't know that from just looking.
I'm not saying it's a "new era" of anything btw. I'm just saying there are good ideas there that could benefit any DE or distro.
It was a separate point - Omarchy lets you install commercial apps as easily as any other app. Including things like Spotify, Claude Code, Codex, steam and even Windows itself (as a VM). All from the same menu and mechanisms. That's just undeniably useful.
Also, Omarchy does theme not only Chromium, but VS Code for example, and several other "blessed" apps. I get the impression that you haven't actually tried it?
Regolith is similar to Omarchy in many ways but is an older initiative that hasn't gotten as far despite having had more time.
When I look up how to install apps in Regolith it says "use debian package tools" (sad trombone). That's clearly worse than Omarchy.
You can decide that Regolith isn't gaining traction because it's not made by a techbro mascot if you wish but I think the explanation is easy - Omarchy is clearly better.
I'm not saying it being by DHH hurts of course, but IMO it's less about him being connected than it is about his enthusiasm and energy. If being well connected was all it takes we'd all be living in the metaverse now. :) There has to be substance.
It'd be fun to see if there are other initiatives that are as polished as Omarchy - the latest Omarchy demo is here[1], if anyone has links to similar demos of other setups it'd be fun to compare.
AFAIK Omarchy is the slickest one around so far but I hope open-minded devs will take inspiration and start competing instead of just dismissing.
Things like:
- Sweating that the install should take a minute. - Ensuring that when you change themes, most relevant apps also change themes. - Including popular commercial apps with 0 friction. - Consistent design in menus, features and default apps. - Clear explanations of how everything works, including video demos.
All of that is good taste, and would be good taste even if the visuals were "My little pony" or "Lovecraftian horror" instead of 80s retro. ;-)
How can we have progress if every shoulder to stand on will cost money? Should we pay every time we walk on the pavement or drive on the road?
Sometimes work is just "for the common good", and sometimes that work is harder than the latter part that actually makes money. It's peculiar, but I don't think it's unfair.
Linus Torvalds will never in his life make a fraction of what Github has made, let alone what RedHat, Ubuntu, Suse etc have made.
But he also doesn't have to pay the GNU project for the use of their compiler. And the GNU project doesn't have to pay him for using his kernel. And RedHat doesn't have to pay either one of them (although they do, voluntarily).
DHH has also made Rails, which is the foundation of several billion dollar enterprises. So he's at least on both ends of the argument.
Can't agree with this, there's clearly room for improvement
>Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI.
Do agree with this though. Fragmentation is not ideal for having a consistent UI and a consistent UI is needed to develop muscle memories so it can be used effectively.
>We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai.
I don't think that will happen while AI costs dollars per minute of actual use. Being able to use a computer for free will be valuable for a long time still I think.
Don't let politics cloud your thinking. There are a lot of good reasons to like Omarchy, and other distros should pay attention to the substance.
Omarchy shows how it's possible to realize a very clear, distinct vision of how desktop computing should be. I'd like to see the same amount of effort put into realizing several other visions!
An LLM will happily take an instruction like "my currently super-tweaked Debian install is awesome, create a set of scripts that recreates the exact setup starting from a minimal netinstall". It will create a VM, install the base debian, iterate until it's right. You can have it make a user-friendly UI on top of the scripts, have it install drivers, commercial software that Debian shuns from their distro, and so on.
If you have good taste and attention to detail, your setup might have universal appeal. You will have created a Debian flavour that might be better than anything anyone gets when installing official Debian.
If you have poor taste and attention to detail, at least you have a one-command way to get your familiar janky setup installed from scratch. :)
Worth noting there is that Google (alone, and they are one of several) are spending around 200 billion on datacenters this year, and that the 125/kWh figure is a year old and calculated from BESS-projects that need to pay for a lot of things the datacenter already pays for.
A datacenter already needs infrastructure to handle a 1GW load, which means it can also deliver 1GW back to the grid. Trucks, cranes, housing, roads and everything else that a BESS-project has to finance separately are already paid for by the datacenter itself. So the "extra cost" would likely be close to the raw cost of the actual battery capacity.
It's therefore reasonable to assume that Google & co would pay a lot less than a billion for 8 hours of runtime on batteries. And they are already spending so much that even the billion is no problem.
For the communities who will give up 10-15% of the nations electricity production per center, it seems like a sensible demand. Google will still grab their cheap electricity but a 8GWh battery would go a very long way to remove the biggest problems with solar and wind, which can then be built out much more aggressively.
They are at about 100 euros per KWh now, which is small potatoes for the hyperscalers building AI-centers for 10s of billions of euros. How about we demand that any data center being built in Europe needs to provide at least 8 hours of battery backup for max power draw? Most of the time that battery backup will not be needed, and can then benefit the grid.
Google is building multiple 1GW data centers in europe, 8 GWh of battery backup at each of those would stabilize the grid nicely!
>The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
Here I agree 100%. We are fortunate that Xi seems relatively benign for a despot but we should not count on that fortune lasting indefinitely. It's imperative that we in the west start making our own solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible.
I think it's more interesting to compare actual production in this case. Here is a truly mindblowing statistic:
China's solar panels already produce more than twice the total amount of electricity consumed by Germany per year.
China's solar growth is equivalent to "one Germany" every 2 years.
Batteries follow a similar curve to solar panels, and I disagree strongly that they should not be used for grid stabilization. In fact, nothing stabilizes the grid better than batteries. They should of course also replace fossil fuels in transportation as well, and that's been happening for years now.
I recall many similar arguments for EV's as we now see for grid storage. "It's too expensive", "We can't make enough batteries". Turns out it wasn't, and we could.
I'm sure we can again, and China is basically proving it repeatedly. All that our politicians in the west need to do is get out of the way, and I'm sure it will solve itself without any further involvement from them.
This is what matters.
>How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies?
This doesn't matter whatever the answer is. Cheap solar is what matters, not how humanity made the breakthrough or who paid for the research or build-out.
Personally, I think China deserves credit here. They made a political decision to develop batteries, solar and EV's as part of their long-term planning several years ago and have been wildly successful with all 3.
That Germany (and most other western nations) failed to do this themselves is unfortunate, but having a sour grapes attitude about it is not constructive. Cheap solar and cheap batteries are here now. All countries should make the most of it as quickly as possible. Particularly Germany, and I'm happy to see Munich getting one of the first Sodium BESS storage facilities from CATL.
But that's a separate activity from shutting down electric power plants. Oil rigs will continue to operate even if all gas and oil power plants were shut down tomorrow, since only about 25% of all oil and gas is used for electricity generation.
We have also discovered cheap containers that can be built using the fourth most common element in the earths crust to store that electricity for when it's needed.
All of this can be built cheaply, massively, quickly, and be deployed anywhere with no conceivable risks of either massive disasters or proliferation of destructive weapons.
The end result is electricity creation distributed everywhere, so cheap that it's realistic to have small communities provide all the electricity they need. Resilient to failure, sabotage or natural disasters.
Why argue for massive amounts of money, manpower and time being spent to create central power plants that take a decade to build, end up controlled by a few masters who can milk the customers at will forever, when we can have so much better?
The site itself sure, but the "removal" just moves the remaining cost somewhere else, it doesn't /re/move it.
The remaining costs for "decommissioned" power plants usually end up with the military. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US for example.
The problem with the idea of a multi-century stable solution is that we make mistakes. The WIPP facility in the US had a similar cousin in Germany, the Asse II mine. Also planned to be permanent storage until they had to empty it because water found a way in. Several new billions of euros will now be drawn from taxpayers to pay for "decommissioned" plants.
It can be argued that so far, there has been no fully decommissioned, as in "stopped costing any money" nuclear plants, anywhere.
Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs. Thank god, because that's what we should do of course!
A fossil plant can simply be abandoned, and the damage will be minimal compared to abandoning a nuclear plant.
Without this information the chart is repeatedly used as an argument that nuclear power is safe, which is of course the direct opposite of the truth. It is the option that requires the most money and effort to keep safe and nothing is even a close second.
I don’t think that’s been true for some time now, batteries have fallen in price very quickly. LCOE for solar+storage was below nuclear a few years ago and batteries are cheaper still now. An estimate from 2025 put storage cost at $125 per kWh.
CATL estimates 10 usd per kWh from their sodium batteries, and just installed one in Germany.
At 10/kWh, batteries will make any other option seem fiscally senseless by comparison.
This has to be off by at least two orders of magnitude.
The Reykjavik symphonic orchestra in Iceland alone employs some 30 full time violinists. The nation's population is less than El Paso, tx - which also employs some 80 musicians in their symphonic orchestra.
Your main point might still have merit, but this forum is one where missing the numbers by so much will distract many readers. It distracted me, at least. :)
Pop musicians have fewer options and need to chase gigs, but the payoffs are also larger if they make it. One-hit wonders drive Ferraris.
I just wanted to highlight a common bubble-truth that turned out to not be as true as many think. You may be convinced he tried a coup, but does the BBC story perhaps move the needle a little bit towards understanding how someone else might feel that maybe he didn't?
Accusations of trolling is depressing, but I appreciate you actually writing a comment instead of just smashing the downvote.
That's not helpful though, as she also made multiple public expressions of support for the defund movement, the protests-turned-riots after the Floyd murder, and the BLM movement.
I can't help thinking that made her a weak choice for both sides of that divide. Is she the tough on crime option or the anti-police one? Where does she actually stand?
I think if she had gone all-in on the tough-on-crime track she'd still have gotten all the protestor votes, and perhaps also the "can we stop police brutality without burning cars" votes. Which I think is a sizable chunk, perhaps even the most common opinion on the matter.
Anyway, all this to say that the explanation for the current situation is not as simple as "half of all Americans are crazy and evil". Current approval ratings clearly say most Americans know they effed up.
My first response was to a German who clearly felt the US as a whole is a lost cause, without acknowledging that Germany is in the process of making the same mistake. I wonder if the Germans will realize they effed up as quickly as the Americans have?
Both sides of the atlantic are throwing stones from glass houses, when we should be cooperating. The dictators are rejoicing...
Of course he said the words, but not together as the sentence the BBC reported. The meaning was faked.
What the BBC did here was literally equivalent to filming someone saying "We should support Kamala and fight Trump at every opportunity" and cutting it to say "We should support Trump at every opportunity".
No honest person can accept that. No honest person can accept Trump either, for many reasons, but perhaps an actual coup-attempt is not one of those reasons.
We all live in bubbles these days, it's not easy. :-/
To me it never made any sense. The buffalo hat guys clearly had no greater plan, and the BBC actually had to apologize for faking a clip to make it seem Trump ordered it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/13/bbc-doctored-tru...
The BBC spreads to all of the EU's other news outlets, so Europeans "know" there was a putsch attempt based on a fake clip. Literally fake news, which plays directly into Trumps narrative and adding to the teflon layer he seems covered in.
Exaggerations, bad faith reporting, assumptions of guilt based on hunches - that's counterproductive if you really want to hold power accountable.
It's very important that the accuser of a crook is not a known liar. Because then even the true accusations won't stick and the crook gets away.
That's a simplistic take.
Trump had less than 50% of the popular vote even though his opponent was clearly showing signs of dementia. The last-minute replacement had spent too much time being the "defund the police/eat the rich" sidekick to Biden and was clearly not representative of the views of the average American. She still got almost as many votes as Trump, from Americans who wanted to vote "Not Trump".
Seems to me the average American had little choice. All the Democrats had to do was field a candidate that could finish a coherent sentence mirroring the average American sentiment and they'd have landslide victory. But they didn't.