That’s not learning, that’s just reading LLM generated prose. Not entirely pointless depending on the circumstance, but not what I’m talking about.

Noooo not like that lol +1

That’s just investorbait grift. I’m a self-taught programmer (~15yrs), and I both teach and learn using LLMs frequently now.

Let me say it another way: LLMs are a useful tool for self-taught learning. They are NOT a replacement for a teacher or tutor.

I think learning is actually a very underrated application for LLMs; they can be extremely useful for that. However, it’s difficult to get right and requires an active effort and discipline from the learner, even in purpose-built harnesses. I don’t know if you can use LLMs to learn if you don’t already have the skills to self-teach effectively.

Additionally, I’d hesitate to let corporations shape developing minds more than they already do… Ideally, we should be reducing corporate influences on education, not integrating them deeper with direct 1:1 contact with students.

Maybe in some sense like how maybe a zip file with all published peer-reviewed papers over the last couple years technically contains more knowledge than a random scientist…

But smarter? Frontier models aren’t even smarter than me, and I’m an idiot

Oh, I’ve done it… Won’t do it again, but I have done it.

I think you’ve vastly underestimated how much digital media people consume…

But setting that aside, there are real efficiency wins from scale. I am a self-hoster, I have a fleet of machines I manage with Nix, I run local LLMs and do real work on consumer gaming hardware, i’m a huge fan of federated and distributed peer systems. I am 100% for that. The cloud is just somebody else’s computer. And I’m saying we also need the gigantic warehouses. Absolutely.

The issue is zoning and environmental concerns and the effect on communities and strain on public infrastructure. All issues worsened by the AI boom and incentivized by capitalism.

There’s a way to do datacenters right and its been done before. You just need legislation and enforcement. The problem isn’t datacenters: the problem is that the same people putting up datacenters are the same people who own your politicians

I don’t know… Have you provisioned Cisco equipment before? It feels like the quality can only go up.

(But no, obviously this will end terribly unless they’re incredibly careful. It’s possible, but unlikely.)

I’m all over this multi-dimensional spectrum…

I think AI is terrible for society; at least how society is currently structured. I also think society is terrible for AI.

The reason AI sucks, and the reason we’re even calling this tier of ML “AI” to begin with, is because of global capitalism’s incentives. And the reasons “AI” is bad for society is because our society is globally capitalist. From jobs, to loneliness, to disinformation, to the environment, to education, to the lack of critical thinking,… Everything AI makes worse is already weakened by our societal systems, and they incentivize using AI to further degrade them in order to expand, control, and extract.

I love AI and the world, in theory. I hate AI and the world for how they exist right now.

not in spite of it

I agree.

Everyone can write in Markdown already, I’ve seen people physically write asterisks for emphasis on paper (edit: I’m not saying markdown came first…). But not everyone can see it rendered.

This is mostly addressing the latter, so that we don’t all have to just imagine what the formatting looks like, and so that it can be used in settings where currently it would fit perfectly well, but it isn’t acceptable because it isn’t rendered.

I’m perfectly comfortable reading a raw Markdown file. That doesn’t really fly in a business setting. or in most places where people want formatting. There’s a reason people don’t just write [bold] in the middle of their resume/report/paper and expect the reader to visualize it with their mind’s eye.

The problem is that everybody knows Markdown, not everyone knows that it is Markdown or that Markdown files exist. And even if they do, they still can’t use it because support isn’t as ubiquitous as the formatting syntax. Making MD files more accessible would mean that people can use the knowledge they already have and learn more and be able to use it places where they want to.

Currently, people who could otherwise just use markdown are forced to use proprietary formats that are supported by their organizations or that they can expect the recipient open, like a a docx or PDF

Your first paragraph makes a very good point. I could understand that as an impulsive motivation. Thanks.

Yes, I also don’t want Markdown turning into a binary format. Absolutely. In fairness, I can see the risk of that in some situations. e.g. my professional obsidian vaults are so heavy on JS and custom plugins that the render is significantly detached from the source text, using dynamic elements. I guess I could see an unfortunate world where people push into that. But I only really see that as if it is a complete replacement for other document formats, which I don’t think it is. It’s sort of like text++ rather than odt–

I don’t see markdown replacing advanced formats in all cases like that, but I think it’s sufficient, even in its most basic forms, for the vast majority of people.

Oh yeah, I’m not gonna lie, I’m totally crashing out in the comments.

To be clear, my point isn’t so much that people are aggressive, but rather that they’re hostile to the message of the article, which is as far as I can tell objectively a good thing that everyone should desire: more success for markdown, easier to use for more people.

How this is drawing such near-universal criticism (at the time of writing) is utterly dumbfounding to me.

Yeah, it just confuses me why people here are arguing against the idea that markdown should be more accessible to the normal user. I read this the moment I woke up and it’s been driving me a little mad. The formatting is literally one of the most ubiquitous things you can come across on the internet.

I understand that maybe this is something Microsoft et al would not rather pursue because they have their own proprietary formats they want to push instead… But why was every Lemmy comment here attacking the article? Do we not like free and open source standards any more? Do we not want these things to succeed?

Like, if you just want to say the author is a dumbass, then sure, but I don’t understand why people are so aggressive against the idea of making Markdown easier to use…

They’re not solving anything, though. They’re pointing at a problem and saying it should be solved. That’s pretty different. Why the hell am I defending this so hard? Why the hell is everyone here attacking it so hard? I am so confused. It is not a bad thing to mark down to succeed or have more support. You all confuse me very much. Is this a tankie community? It’s really hard to follow the complete lack of logic.

Not to mention that you are doing all that for a document format that the non-tech/average user has never even heard of probably.

Just wanted to point out that literally everyone already uses it, in these very comments no less. On discord, in game chats that don’t support it, in regular text files. Literally, everywhere on the web, grandmas are using Markdown.

I know this is hard to hear, but…

Making Markdown files easier to use for the normal person is not a bad thing.

Holy fuck you guys are stupid…

“Full hardware support” for a text format? The standards he likes? They said they wanted cross-platform support and named the biggest and most ubiquitous standards there are. You know, the ones you used to type your comment.

What the fuck are you on about? Where’s this agro coming from?

“I think people should be able to use markdown easier” >screaming nerd rage ensues

I’m not sure why you’re criticizing the article by mentioning nuances as if they didn’t also mention them in the article…

The point is that when they average person double clicks an MD file, it should probably open and display.

They’re also like a bazillion different PDF and TXT formats, but viewers for them are rather ubiquitous.

You might say that nobody uses PDF viewers because they just opened them in a browser. Well, that’s also a suitable approach for MD.

The support doesn’t have to be comprehensive. I don’t think they’re asking for the God of all viewers and editors that supports every different styling and switches between them automatically.

The idea is that if you send someone a markdown file, they should be able to read it without having to go into a menu and opening with a text editor. You know, like Normies do with a bunch of far more complex standards already…

My guess is that this is because Markdown is mainly used by technical folk, and they’re fucking stupid when it comes to end-user experience and just haven’t considered it much. And the other reason is that the big players would rather push their proprietary formats so they don’t want to see adoption of Markdown.

The author is right. Widespread, ubiquitous support is far overdue for such a simple format. Your remarks about cellphones not opening text files isn’t a great argument against not opening markdown files; frankly, I think it’s absurd that they don’t, and that should be pointed out rather than used as an example of why we shouldn’t bother for MD. If an OS shipped on a floppy drive could have a text editor out of the box, I’m pretty sure your fancy multi-gigabyte smartphone in $current_year could do it too.

I swear, these comments are depressingly stupid. Imagine arguing about this for any other format…

Yes, markdown should be more accessible and its files should be easier to use. Why? Because everybody uses it already, even if they don’t know what it is. That’s how ubiquitous it is, and supporting it out of the box is what you’re arguing against. It’s hard to comprehend. Are you employed by Microsoft?

I’m not too sure it’ll make much of a difference, to be honest. I mean, looking around…

Baduntss

The people who want to use a roleplay chatbot, and the people who are comfortable with their chat being in the cloud, probably makes a very poor venn diagram. Things like Sillytavern ate their lunch before it even got off the ground. No idea what (non-hype) investors excepted

I can only talk from personal experience, but it absolutely does speed up things. I know because I went from working away at one project to progressing many projects at the same time. Starting up new projects I never would have bothered to do in the first place just because the work would have been so tedious and I wouldn’t have enough time in the day. Mind you, I don’t vibe code things for public consumption. These are all for my personal use, but the fact that they exist at all is evidence contrary to your points.

(Important note: how I use AI in important software is very different from how I use AI for slop projects; the speedups are not as dramatic when you aren’t vibrcoding and you actually need good quality; I suspect most AI usage would actually be a slight downgrade for speed unless I delegated them strictly to review and menial implementation; but that actually assumes that I know the language I’m working in very well, which isn’t always the case for vibecoded projects: In those cases, the AI slop is probably equal to or better than what I would write by hand because I’m not as competent in elixir or javascript as I am in C or C++)

I feel like this is dishwasher discourse… Washing by hand is faster than the dishwasher by the wallclock; but you don’t actually need to rinse as much as you probably do, and you can walk away and do other stuff while the dishwasher is working. If you just sit there and stare at the dishwasher, yes, it’s slower, but that’s not how people should use it, and that’s what most of those studies are showing. Again, that level of sloppiness isn’t applicable for all use cases, but for where it is useful, it is very useful.