Ostfriesentee

Why not? Public transit often reaches villages of a few hundred people in Germany despite being pretty patchy compared to the past. I live in a rural part of Germany and I don’t need a car at all. I have to acknowledge that having one does give you an edge in many cases, but it’s not a necessity. I’ve never had a car.

The US are a lot more spacious, yes, so the infrastructure would cost more to build and maintain, but that’s more of a “Do we want to spend money on that?” problem, rather than a “Would it work?” problem. Get some autonomous busses maybe and you don’t even need drivers.

What am I missing?

I’ve become a heavy user of Noctalia and figured these issues out.

I’ve been through these: CachyOS+Hyprland+Noctalia ↓ CachyOS+MangoWM+Noctalia ↓ CachyOS+Umbriel+Noctalia

I honestly recommend Umbriel. It’s a nice mix of Niri and Hyprland and is very customizable. Also better integration with Noctalia.

Anyway: The fixes are the same.

sudo noctalia-greeter passwordless-sync enable “$USER”

For passwordless theme syncing between shell and greeter. My setup also syncs the wallpaper to hyprlock via a Noctalia hook.

If the keyring authorization thing shows up after login with Noctalia greeter, edit /etc/pam.d/greetd to include:

auth optional pam_gnome_keyring.so

in the auth section and

session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start

in the session section (obviously this requires gnome-keyring).

That should fix all weird pop-ups. Been very happy.

COSMIC I’ll have to check out. But I’ve been so invested in customizing my Noctalia/Umbriel setup it’s going to be hard to switch. I really like my look and feel right now.

So what are the consequences? No internet for my machine today, I guess?

That’s very interesting. Might try it out.

How about going SETI@home with LLM training? Everyone contributing their own computing power to train better, more transparent local models. Using properly licensed, publically available datasets. Not sure how viable this approach would be, but that would make forking of open-source models possible, maybe?

Olmo exposes all of its training code and training data, including post-training etc.

Olmo: https://huggingface.co/allenai/Olmo-3-1125-32B

Also Apertus: https://www.apertus-ai.org/

I’ve trained a tiny GPT model on my computer before. It’s shitty, certainly, very shitty actually, but essentially anyone can train an LLM, if you got either enough time or calculation power.

Spring this year is like ages ago in terms of LLM development. I suspect that you would need to do considerably less checking now or none (it checks itself) with an up-to-date agent, if you use your harness correctly.

Let me put your point into perspective:

“Try calculating without a calculator and you’ll quickly realize how dependent on it you’ve really become. I haven’t used it at all since spring this year and it’s been great. I actually get more work done without it since I don’t have to double check the calculations anymore.”

I think overdependence on LLMs is a valid concern, not restricted to coding. Studies would indicate as much. It’s good to be able to write code yourself. But I wonder if that is really a skill that is going to continue to be necessary in the future. Being able to do big calculations in your head or on paper is a nice skill to have, even now, but it’s honestly not absolutely necessary in today’s world. It’s good cognitive training, so I would still recommend it and basic arithmetic skills are necessary to understand higher maths and be able to use a calculator.

As I’ve pointed out in another comment, LLM companies are terrible for a variety of reasons and I despise their business models, but saying that the models are not useful is a notion not rooted in reality, imho.

That’s a valid point. I was just getting at OP’s point that “AI code is terrible”, which it can be, but doesn’t have to be.

Something has to be done about data centers, especially in the US. But that’s also why I believe promoting local inference is important. My local model runs on the sun on my roof, for the most part. It’s not causing environmental havoc. The training of new frontier models is. The training of new proprietary frontier models is disincentivized if you can’t make money with them anymore. Open-weight models are free and hurt Anthropic and the likes. But it’s also a matter of energy infrastructure and how the centers are built. That needs more regulation. It’s good that local backlash seems to have an effect.

LLM agent code is good if you don’t try to one-shot things. Have it devise deterministic tests to test the code and give it the ability to check its own results via screenshots. Have it plan ahead, ask questions, work step by step in separate sessions. Give it enough context, always have it create a README.md explaining the structure and purpose of the project for other sessions. Fix some stuff yourself. It’s not either or, it can be both.

American LLM companies are terrible for their copyright infringement, the environmental effects of their data centers and for several other valid reasons. I hated that Microsoft tried to push Copilot on every system because it sucked (mandatory “I use Arch, btw.”).

So yes, LLM companies are terrible, people losing their jobs because of questionable business decisions is terrible. But LLMs are good tools. Like any tool, you can produce utter shit with it. You can use a screw driver to destroy the drive of an old screw and make it unusable. You can stick it in a wall and have a gaping hole. But you can also use it to remove and fasten screws regularly. The same applies to LLM agents. If you have got no idea what you’re doing, you may produce shit. The thing with shitty AI code is, you only notice it when it is shitty. Because the output that’s good is essentially invisible. The problem is not the tool, it’s who’s using it.

Use open-weight models locally and use a harness like Pi and expand it or modify it as you wish. Don’t support the per token pricing/subscription companies.

I think the US banning open-weight/open-source models could be a real concern. Anthropic is certainly pushing for it with their weird self-propagating local open-weight worm in smart TVs narrative that makes little sense. But I don’t think other countries would follow suit, because it wouldn’t be in their interest, given that they are not currently in control of the frontier models and open models giving them an edge.

Remember SETI@home? If compute is the bottleneck, why shouldn’t people all over the world get together to train their own models? Cyber security would be a concern, of course. Such a cluster could be misused. And the underlying question of copyright remains. But if lots of people were able to get together to create open-source software, lots of people can get together to train better, transparent models. The EU also offers free training clusters if you apply, if I’m not mistaken. I also read about an open-source LLM somewhere. Not only open-weight, open-source. Can’t recall right now. Mistral 4 Large and Kolibri 1 are interesting open-weight models. Lots to come.

I also think that making the technology your own is the best way to tackle the big American corps and their proprietary models.

Sounds good

They want to get local open-weight models banned so people continue buying their subscriptions.

New narrative just dropped. Now the oil prices are Zelenskyy’s fault instead of Trump’s with his Iran war. Just right in time for the midterm elections. Hopefully not too many are gonna buy this.

In exchange for French support on cars, Germany will back France’s demands for strict “Buy European” rules favouring EU-made products in public subsidies and tenders, Handelsblatt wrote, citing three unnamed sources.

Delaying the phase out is probably not good. But realistically, it’s already happening even without a legal framework simply due to cost considerations. I reckon the trend will continue. “Buy European” rules that favor EU-made products in public subsidies and tenders on the other hand are probably good. Ideally, you wouldn’t need to trade in a phase out for “Buy European” rules, but I guess this is one way to gain support for it?

If I were tasked with a covert DuckDuckGo Claude ad on Lemmy, that’s how I’d do it.

Interesting. What were Canada and the EU pressured with?

Edit: It’s still being funded, apparently. Just the branding is gone.

EU officials, the Guardian understands, did not agree with the characterisation of the US as a disinformation actor.

Despite withdrawing its branding as an official supporter, the EU continues to fund the conference.

If the officials do not see the added value in having sovereign software and infrastructure, I have to seriously doubt their qualification. Sure, Element isn’t perfect but no concrete mention of what isn’t working is made. That’s not very constructive. Software isn’t static. You can change it.

It doesn’t do that. My color theme changes dynamically with my background. But even manual changes don’t require that. Did you enable polkit in the control center? Are you running Noctalia 5 or newer?

Only when I want to update my greeter theme alongside everything else, I get polkit requests asking for my password. But I also got noctalia-greeter after having had installed another greeter. So maybe that messed it up. Anyway, you can disable auto theme update for the greeter. Or use a different greeter.

I’m sure there are problems still, but it only just got implemented last month (Noctalia greeter is also super new). I think we can expect fixes. Maybe your particular issue has already been fixed. For some tools I’m using I’m getting daily updates by now, so last month is like ages ago in terms of updates. Not necessarily true for Noctalia, though.

I did like Mint Cinnamon, as well. Pop!_OS I haven’t tried yet. I might hop a little on my second machine. But for now I’m happy with my heavily customized Noctalia setup on my main machine. What else did you find to be messed up?

I can only tell you that I’m using CachyOS (Arch) with Wayland and the latest Noctalia, which is extremely customizable. I’m very content. My compositor is Hyprland, but Niri or Mango work, too. Noctalia even technically works with KDE, which I also used for quite some time, but I wouldn’t recommend using it on top of it. Noctalia (Hyprland) has been a standard installation option in the CachyOS .iso ever since August 2026.

Time to switch to Noctalia I guess.

I haven’t logged in or watched any recommendations for almost two years now. The only time I see a video is when I actively search for it. Man, have I been out of the loop.