Ideally, the same text should appear consistent across any UI. Obviously, some apps will use different fonts and colors and may interpret the style of an element differently.

Oh yea styling isn't the issue here ... it's whether the markdown is correctly interpreted and rendered. AFAIU, lemmy doesn't have any instructions about how to interpret the text, just some standard that they've chosen to use, along with their open source software for doing so (as they've built too clients, the default web UI and Jerboa).

Didn't know it worked on reddit. Generally it seems necessary to require the space as it disambiguates headings from hashtags, and also makes the raw text more readable.

We wouldn’t need AI in the first place if we could just find the information we need.

I've commented on this before ... but it almost seems like that is the point, or an opportunistic moment for Google ... turn the internet to shit so that we "need" the AI and that Google have a new business to grow into. Capitalism at its finest.

Also there’s a fair bit of effort going in to making local LLMs.

Yea it's definitely interesting but my gut feeling is that open source or local LLMs (like llama) are false hope against the broader dynamics. Surely with greater Google-level resources comes 'better' and more convenient AI. I'd bet that open/local LLMs will end up like Linux Desktop: meaninglessly small technical user base with no anti-monopoly effects at all. Which, to open the issue up to "capitalism!!", raises the general issue of how individualistic rather than organisational actions can be ineffectual.

So what's the technological story here? I'm guessing lemmy itself uses a particular markdown parser that could probably be extracted and used in other contexts as it's likely written in rust and should therefore be pretty portable without too much effort.

Are other apps just using whatever markdown parser is convenient to them? Is this something that the lemmy and threadiverse community could converge on? Even the fediverse as a whole where just about every platform other than mastodon supports writing in some for of markdown ... feels like a pandoc like utility could go far.

Dunno ... I went to the linked page in the top post and everything seemed fine to me (using Lemmy-UI)

I'm not sure #heading is valid markdown (see, eg, Daring Fireball's "original" syntax page) ... and I've never seen it. I've always understood that the space was necessary, which I think makes sense for a number of reasons TBH

So ...

#This does not work

This does work

The insidious part missing here is that AI search destroys the internet. You no longer search for other people's pages or content ... you simply search for "the answer".

Sure there might be links and footnotes, but the whole product is to reconstitute the internet into something Google (or whoever) own and control from top to bottom. That is the death of the internet and some of the values which built it in the first place.

Ideally for Google, we all become "information or content" serfs to their AI "freehold". Every "conversation" we have with the AI or otherwise is more training data. Every post or article or report or paper is just data for the AI which we provide as service to suckle at the great "AI search".

And lets not fool ourselves into thinking that there isn't real and convincing convenience in something like this. It makes sense, so long as AI can be useful enough to justify the easiness of it.

Which is why the real issue isn't whether AI is "good enough" or "not actually intelligent" ... that's a distraction. The issue is what are the economic implications.

AI is hard to train and to keep up to date and it's hard to improve on ... these are resource intensive tasks. Which means there's centralisation built right in.

AI consumes and stores data in a destructive way. It destroys or undermines the utility of that data ... as you can just use the AI instead ... and it is also likely lossy (thus hallucinations etc).

So ... centralised data eating technology. If we were talking about liberties or property rights or IP or creativity or the economy ... an all eating centralising pattern would be thunderously fearsome. Monarchism, Imperialism or colonialism ... monopolisation ... complete serfdom. It's the same type of thing ... but "just" for information technology ... which is maybe not that significant ... except how much are we all using the internet for anything and how much are our livelihoods linked to it in someway?

While there's a bit of a focus here on what it'd "mean" for Apple to do this ... more broadly, which streaming services don't have ads by now? Prime and Netflix do, I know that much.

Basically it seems the industry has done exactly what cable did IIRC ... once they've got you by the balls they'll squeeze you as dry as they can.

Apart from finding a local hardcopy rental shop (I have and am trying to use it as much as possible), or you know, just not watching, "reverting" back to piracy is likely the only way to react here.

Very happy to see it come to wikipedia!!

But I think it also needs some polish. The contrast is too high and the blue on black of the hyperlinks is too garish for sure.

Always happy to chat about the fediverse ... even when I'm critical it's out of optimism for its future and promise.

On the point of competition ... what's kinda interesting is that for some people "fediverse" is now a broad term that encompasses BlueSky with their ATP protocol and Nostr and farcaster with their more crypto based protocols. So there's certainly some strange mix of things at the moment.