It’s not even particularly accurate or nuanced in its history of Microsoft’s actions and the doc formats, it doesn’t mention any competitors, it doesn’t mention anything about the history of type setting generally or more advanced projects like LaTex, and at a fundamental level, it’s edited worse than my first year essays.

It spends like 2000 words just to say markdown good because it focuses on intent rather than a particular style.

Yes, I would describe it as bad.

Honestly, this is a pretty badly written and researched article for someone that likes writing so much.

Like, just the opening two paragraphs about Microsoft controlling document formats … They repeat the same information in both paragraphs and give a rather incomplete history of document formatting.

It’s also wild to write that many words about Markdown and never discuss its connection to HTML and its foundation in formatting via declarative intent rather than imperative formatting instructions (i.e. in markdown you dont style your title by saying bold / underling / font-size:20, you declare your true intent which is this is the top level title / heading, but that all comes from the underlying structure of HTML which markdown is basically just a simplification of.

Also, come on, how are you not going to mention Latex in your history of document formatting.

Lmao, the fuckepic and ‘Tim Sweeney is a bastard man’ sentiments were always wildly overblown.

The fact that anyone took Apple’s side in this case (because the Epic game store paid for a couple exclusive games to try and break into the market) is laughably childish.

Apple literally rips off the entire world to the tune of billions of dollars a year through app store mafia extortion fees alone, let alone the rest of their anti-competitive bullshit.

Epic was just trying to break into the Apple / Google / Steam monopolies and made a couple unpopular / anti-consumer business moves on a couple games (all the while taking afar smaller cut of profits than any other store), meanwhile Apple has based their literal entire multi-decade business model on anti-consumer choices and done that for every single hardware and software device they sell you.

They are not remotely comparable. Epic was always fully in the right in their anti-monopoly legal battles.

This one.

I mean, in an overall sense yes, but that’s like saying climbing Everest is easy because on average the world has very little elevation change.

This is literally lemmy, a (relatively) niche platform where somebody is asking about a (relatively) niche subject. I dont think anything about this is a average person.

‘Average person’ was in quotes because it’s the language you used to describe someone not comfortable with the command line.

I mean what’s the point of “self” hosting then?

If you have to be a professional server administrator to host one of these services, then why even have a self hosting community as opposed to just a hosting community for server admins to discuss how to set and configure various services? Is this community dedicated to just discussing the uniqueness of managing a home server without a static IP?

Self hosting is just an extension of open source software. It’s only goal is being able to run your own backends of apps to not be exploited by major companies. It’s goal is not to be a niche technical hobby, if that’s your goal in its own right, then get a model train or a Warhammer set.

Mainstream consumers don’t know words “Plex” and “Home Assistant” either.

Yes, they do lol. It’s flat out weird to think that the only people who have ever heard of pirating are software developers and server admins who use the command line.

You’re viewing this through an incredibly skewed lense. The average person will never even consider self hosting nor will care, if anything the average person prefers cloud services.

The only lens I’m viewing this through is one that dares to imagine that the Venn diagram of “computer users savvy enough to care about privacy” isn’t 100% contained within the circle of “computer users savvy with the terminal”.

Quite frankly your stance that the ‘average person’ doesn’t care, when this post is LITERALLY from an ‘average person’ who does, is the one that seems off base on its face.

Notice that it hasn’t amongst mainstream consumers.

You know what self hosted projects have been successes? Plex and Home Assistant. You know what projects don’t require the terminal? Plex and Home Assistant.

Self hosting is doomed until this isn’t the answer.

If you can’t imagine why this is bad, maybe read some Kafka or watch some Black Mirror.

Lmfao. Yeah, ok, let’s get my predictions from the depressing show dedicated to being relentlessly pessimistic at every single decision point.

And yeah, like I said, you sound like my hysterical middle school teacher claiming that Wikipedia will be society’s downfall.

Guess what? It wasn’t. People learn that tools are error prone and came up with strategies to use them while correcting for potential errors.

Like at a fundamental, technical level, components of a system can be error prone, but still be useful overall. Quantum calculations have inherent probabilities and errors in them, but they can still solve some types of calculations so much faster than normal computers that you can run the same calculation 100x on a Quantum Computer, average out the results to remove the outlying errors, and get to the right answer far faster than a classical computer.

Computer chips in satellites and the space station are constantly having random bits of memory flipped by cosmic rays, but they still work fine because their RAM is error-correcting ram, that can use similar methods to verify and check for errors.

And at a super high level, some of my friends and coworkers are more reliable than others, that doesn’t mean the ones that are less reliable aren’t helpful, it just means I have to take what they say with a grain of salt.

Designing for error correction is a thing, and people are perfectly capable of doing so in their personal lives.

Yes, they literally are. Or maybe you haven’t heard of human caused climate change?

But a) they don’t refuse, most will tell you if you prompt them well them and b) you cannot rely on them as the sole source of truth but an information machine can still be useful if it’s right most of the time.

My friends would probably say something like “I’ve never heard that one, but I guess it means something like …”

Ok, but the point is that lots of people would just say something and then figure out if it’s right later.

The problem is, these LLMs don’t give any indication when they’re making stuff up versus when repeating an incontrovertible truth. Lots of people don’t understand the limitations of things like Google’s AI summary* so they will trust these false answers. Harmless here, but often not.

Quite frankly, you sound like middle school teachers being hysterical about Wikipedia being wrong sometimes.

Lol

• God 31:5

“Regurgitation without critical thought is fundamentally counter to the principles of science and engineering”

• Jesus 4:12

Their office is downtown, go down and ask to talk to someone. Don’t leave until they ask you to.

You have no obligation not to inconvenience them.

Search for the company on LinkedIn, click through its employees. Have them get a bunch of ‘Appeared in Searches’ notifications from LinkedIn. Make sure they feel seen by a bunch of their fellow citizens.

Try this on your friends, make up an idiom, then walk up to them, say it without context, and then say “meaning?” and see how they respond.

Pretty sure most of mine will just make up a bullshit response nd go along with what I’m saying unless I give them more context.

There are genuinely interesting limitations to LLMs and the newer reasoning models, and I find it interesting to see what we can learn from them, this is just ham fisted robo gotcha journalism.

PC Gamer regurgitating the abstract of a random research paper makes baby jesus cry.