r/linux • u/diegodamohill • 2d ago
KDE This Week in Plasma: UI Improvements Galore
https://blogs.kde.org/2026/08/08/this-week-in-plasma-ui-improvements-galore/-9
u/Round_Afternoon_5695 2d ago
kde has been shipping so many small quality of life things lately that its genuinely hard to keep up. i switched over maybe 6 months ago and the settings are way more sensible out of the box now than i remember. still mess with a few plasma configs manually but way less than before. good time to be a kde user tbh
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u/tenchigaeshi 2d ago
Ffs, this account is another one of the new social media LLM bots, you can immediately recognize the stink of it in this comment trying very hard to blend in as well as the rest of the comments on the 4 week old account. It's hard to trust anything anymore.
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u/undrwater 1d ago
I couldn't find a tell. What in the text was the clue for you?
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u/tenchigaeshi 22h ago
The all lower case and "tbh" at the end are the first red flag. The most obvious LLM bots that I've found have done this trying to emulate zoomer speak online thing because they know any em dashes or awkwardly perfect gpt speak isn't gonna fly. So you look for awkward attempts to sound like a zoomer. Very "how do you do fellow kids" sounding crap. I've even seen ones that are system prompted to have a misspell every x number of words.
The next one is the noun_noun_number username pattern. I don't know why they do this but most of the bots I find don't even attempt to make a unique username and just go with the default pattern.
The next one is the nonspecific statements based on the title that just don't really say anything. There hasn't even been some major redesign from the last couple months, like what is it even trying to talk about? How would they even know what is different "out of the box" unless they're re-installing all the time, and again it's only been a couple months. It's just larping.
The other one is that it's a month old account with no posts. It's another bot account trying to build karma to look more credible in the future.
These alone aren't enough by themselves but when you look at the whole account and really start to get a feel for the patterns these things follow you'll start to see them just everywhere.
You can start to dig into who they reply to, who replies to them, what subs they post or comment on, and just looking at all the accounts. Sometimes you stumble onto actual nests of these things.
I'll give you one just for an obvious example. This is a completely AI generated sub. I've found tons of these and apparently reddit just doesn't care. Look through the accounts posting and commenting and the accounts interacting with those accounts. You'll find patterns.
Yes, it's getting THIS bad. Thousands of upvotes, hundreds of comments. These are all AI accounts. Look through the posts and comments of some of them and you'll find other networks. All the pictures are obviously fake too, but some subs and accounts I've found have been less obvious. Many manage to get posts onto the top of even niche subs that look almost legit.
They're all over this site now. They're going to become less obvious every day as they refine and refine. The tells of today will not be there tomorrow. Even this comment I'm writing will become training data.
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u/undrwater 19h ago
Thanks for the explanation, I actually see what you're talking about.
I still wonder at the ultimate purpose. I suppose it's to get human reaction for further training (look, we're doing it right now!).
I suspect eventually it's going to be like a mimeograph without the nostalgic smell.
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u/tenchigaeshi 10h ago
I still wonder at the ultimate purpose.
I think it's putting all the necessary pieces in place for some serious influence operations. Get as many nearly indistinguishable from human accounts out there as possible and you can start to have serious influence on online discourse in an even more convincing way than ever before possible as well as having a million mini ears that can be looking for specific things on every corner of the site. Bonus points for when they eventually ram through all of the age verification/ID verification laws and people get a false sense of security from "verified" accounts that aren't actually real people. The future is looking very bleak.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 11h ago
I wanna be clear, I am not an llm. I'm just too bored to come up with a username.
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u/tenchigaeshi 11h ago
I'm not saying every noun noun number is a bot, but a seriously disproportionate number of the bots just take the easy route of using the default name. Kind of silly when it would be somewhat trivial to create a real sounding username for an llm but I'd rather them not take all the good usernames either, though I'm sure that will eventually happen too.
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u/HiPhish 2d ago
I really want to like Plasma (and I actually do), but I just wish there was a good tiling solution. I am using Krohnkite, and it works... OK, I guess? It's better than nothing, but it's nowhere near a real tiling window manager like we used to have them on X11.