6 ms·

ChatGPT is my static site generator

17 points by npilk 1y ago

nullwarp 1y ago
Seems extremely.... wasteful? Why use something that can take next to no CPU and instead use massive energy sucking LLM?
- stego-tech 1y ago
  Because in the current tech cycle, everything must be a subscription forever, controlled within the walled garden of a service provider or building upon some other complex infrastructure or framework to let someone justify their expertise in said technology to themselves. Static site generation really should be as simple as “Export to HTML”, and upload to your web server. The fact it’s not anymore shows that none of these are about “democratizing” anything, but just locking people into prisons of their own making with highly specific tools.
stego-tech 1y ago
So…ChatGPT can recreate ye olde Dreamweaver templates but with exponentially more resources consumed, and this is a good thing? I don’t think we need to foist such basic tasks into a prediction machine, so much as we just need to go back to making competent software for end users again. Like sure, it’s a neat concept, but man I just do not see the value of this as opposed to prior, lighter, and easier methods of static site generation. If anything, I see an author lamenting the lack of consumer options for site building that don’t involve extortionate subscriptions to overly powerful tools, and trying to reframe ChatGPT as some form of godsend of simplicity when it…kinda isn’t.
- bko 1y ago
  > So…ChatGPT can recreate ye olde Dreamweaver templates but with exponentially more resources consumed, and this is a good thing? The ultimate resource is human time and effort. Why should I care about efficiency of the underlying process. That's captured by the price. So considering an LLM call to this likely a few pennies if that much, and it's saving me even a few seconds, then I would say it's worth it. There's costs to optimizations. We don't need to optimize everything. This is a nice general solution
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    > Why should I care about efficiency of the underlying process. Because, as you just said yourself… > The ultimate resource is human time and effort. This is a disconnect I don’t think most people appreciate. Developers seem to operate as if Moore’s law will continue forever, that components are infinite, that cloud resources appear and disappear at the snap of their fingers, and that optimization is pointless in an era of excess. Meanwhile, the actual engineers are building out new data centers to support these fancy prediction machines, supply chains are exploiting labor abroad for the raw materials necessary to power these guessing boxes, and we’re tearing our hair out at developers casually demanding dozens of CPU cores or terabytes of memory for their newest product specifically because they did no optimizations. Actual humans - millions of them, in and outside of technology fields - are working in concert to support the least optimized software product in human history, just so you can squander water, energy, and land to run inference on a farm of GPUs to output a static website that Microsoft Word could generate in 2003 on a Pentium 4. Jesus christ I am sick of this nonsensical argument that because something is cheap, it is somehow optimized and/or superior.
  - nullwarp 1y ago
    I don't really see where it saves any time. You still have to build the initial template. Then every time you post you go copy and paste that template into ChatGPT? I guess you could write a script that reads your template and body and submits the whole thing to chatgpt API then dumps out the file. But you also have to double check the whole thing again to make sure it didn't mess anything up or change any text? But then all you do is invent a shittier SSG that costs more money and more resources for literally no benefit. Seems dumb
  - profsummergig 1y ago
    I agree. A goal of humanity should be to make energy too cheap to meter. Using AI will help us get there. Every minute OP saves using ChatGPT instead of a text editor, OP can devote to other things that could incrementally get us there.
    - chneu 1y ago
- xnorswap 1y ago
  I'm in two minds whether the OP is satire. This quote in particular sells me on the idea of satire: > Almost anything that relies on structured input would be more convenient with an AI solution You could take what you know about that structure and deterministically transform it, or you could just vibe it over to chatGPT! That doesn't seem like a serious statement at all. But this feels real: > I looked into some other generators: Jekyll, Pelican, and so on. But everything seemed to have two problems. First, most of these seemed overkill for what I wanted to do. And second, despite the overhead, many didn’t seem to provide the kind of flexibility I wanted — they relied on writing strict Markdown or fitting within a predefined way of structuring the site. That's an understandable problem. The purists will suggest, "Just write HTML", but markdown is convenient. For anyone facing this issue, I'd suggest pandoc does a great job at transforming markdown to html. One of the benefits of HTML was that it would work around what it considered "bad" input. You didn't even need to close tags properly a lot of the time. If you made an error, you'd still get mostly correct output. Pandoc markdown isn't too fussy either. They have a markdown_strict variant if you want strict spec adherence. They also have a gfm (github flavoured markdown) option for those of us used to the github extensions. Pandoc parses a small markdown page into html in, well: Milliseconds : 71 So, certainly faster than any LLM response time.
  - npilk 1y ago
    Perhaps my statement in the first quote is a bit unclear... Markdown is easier to write than raw HTML, and deterministically transforms. But writing strict Markdown (or using any specific syntax) creates an efficiency penalty - e.g., how do I format a URL again? How do I insert an image? Guess I'll have to look that up. What if I want to use more advanced CSS formatting? I'll have to update the HTML afterwards by hand. In contrast, using an LLM to format means I can put any kind of text in and the machine will just figure it out for me. That's what I mean by "more convenient".
    - xnorswap 1y ago
      The cost of this "convenience" is orders of magnitude more processing time, and with it the energy costs and ecological destruction that comes with that.
tantalor 1y ago
Missing "[joke]" tag.
profsummergig 1y ago
In the late 90's there were free WYSIWYG apps that generated reliable HTML/CSS. I did a deep search recently into finding the Microsoft FrontPage equivalent of today, and the only one I could find that worked reliably was Adobe Dreamweaver, and it's not free. (Kompozer, Brackets, SeaMonkey, BlueGriffon, etc. did not work reliably for me. I found that TinyMCE etc. are WYSIWYG for text, but not for positioning [i.e. they are "rich text editors"]) Why did such free WYSIWYG apps to generate HTML/CSS die out? Anyone have theories?
- stego-tech 1y ago
  Because they enabled too many people to have a web presence independent of social media, and therefore outside of the technosurveillance apparatus of Google/Meta/Amazon/Microsoft. There’s a healthy appetite for WYSIWYG editors still, but nobody wants to make anything that simple anymore. It’s all about building moats, using the latest frameworks, and ultra-slick designs with spy pixels and a deluge of cookies. Everything must be in a CMS, on a hosting provider, with load balancers and CDNs, and saddled with pop-ups, pop-ins, chat boxes, e-mail signups, metric collection, data hoarding, and third-party tie-ins.
- Toritori12 1y ago
  iirc they generated really bad and unmaintainable code (no css classes, absolute position, etc...), unlike (imo) modern LLMs.
  - nullwarp 1y ago
    In my experience, LLMs happily generate just as much unmaintainable code as Dreamweaver ever did.
- Dachande663 1y ago
  I remember a lot of them initially struggled with the switch to CSS (but then got much better) and then eventually responsive design just hit them hard. Normal users just didn't know how to handle making things flow and the tools struggled to explain the necessary primitives to them. IMO.
- 1y ago
blendergeek 1y ago
I've been doing this for a few years now. It usually works but occasionally rewrite the posts or forgets what it is doing. Really frustrating in my opinion
deadbabe 1y ago
Why stop at static sites? ChatGPT could develop your dynamic website too, per request.
- msgodel 1y ago
  LLM in a CGI script sounds like a chaos monkey by another name.
Deukhoofd 1y ago
Yeah, looking at that blog source, I can definitely tell it's been generated by an LLM. ```  <footer class="py-3" style="margin-top:5rem;"> ```
- npilk 1y ago
  What makes you say this? Using inline CSS styling alongside Bootstrap classes? Applying both vertical padding and margin? (For what it's worth, that was part of the handwritten template already, not something the LLM generated on its own.)
  - Deukhoofd 1y ago
    Adding absolutely useless comments everywhere. In this case, adding a footer comment above a footer element.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
b0a04gl 1y ago
[dead]
hackerbeat 1y ago
Just use Bear Blog https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/
- npilk 1y ago
  Nice - I didn't realize Bear had such extensive customization options. Would definitely be worth looking into next time.

17 points by npilk 1y ago

Seems extremely.... wasteful? Why use something that can take next to no CPU and instead use massive energy sucking LLM?

stego-tech 1y ago
Because in the current tech cycle, everything must be a subscription forever, controlled within the walled garden of a service provider or building upon some other complex infrastructure or framework to let someone justify their expertise in said technology to themselves. Static site generation really should be as simple as “Export to HTML”, and upload to your web server. The fact it’s not anymore shows that none of these are about “democratizing” anything, but just locking people into prisons of their own making with highly specific tools.

stego-tech 1y ago

So…ChatGPT can recreate ye olde Dreamweaver templates but with exponentially more resources consumed, and this is a good thing? I don’t think we need to foist such basic tasks into a prediction machine, so much as we just need to go back to making competent software for end users again. Like sure, it’s a neat concept, but man I just do not see the value of this as opposed to prior, lighter, and easier methods of static site generation. If anything, I see an author lamenting the lack of consumer options for site building that don’t involve extortionate subscriptions to overly powerful tools, and trying to reframe ChatGPT as some form of godsend of simplicity when it…kinda isn’t.

bko 1y ago
> So…ChatGPT can recreate ye olde Dreamweaver templates but with exponentially more resources consumed, and this is a good thing? The ultimate resource is human time and effort. Why should I care about efficiency of the underlying process. That's captured by the price. So considering an LLM call to this likely a few pennies if that much, and it's saving me even a few seconds, then I would say it's worth it. There's costs to optimizations. We don't need to optimize everything. This is a nice general solution
- stego-tech 1y ago
  > Why should I care about efficiency of the underlying process. Because, as you just said yourself… > The ultimate resource is human time and effort. This is a disconnect I don’t think most people appreciate. Developers seem to operate as if Moore’s law will continue forever, that components are infinite, that cloud resources appear and disappear at the snap of their fingers, and that optimization is pointless in an era of excess. Meanwhile, the actual engineers are building out new data centers to support these fancy prediction machines, supply chains are exploiting labor abroad for the raw materials necessary to power these guessing boxes, and we’re tearing our hair out at developers casually demanding dozens of CPU cores or terabytes of memory for their newest product specifically because they did no optimizations. Actual humans - millions of them, in and outside of technology fields - are working in concert to support the least optimized software product in human history, just so you can squander water, energy, and land to run inference on a farm of GPUs to output a static website that Microsoft Word could generate in 2003 on a Pentium 4. Jesus christ I am sick of this nonsensical argument that because something is cheap, it is somehow optimized and/or superior.
- nullwarp 1y ago
  I don't really see where it saves any time. You still have to build the initial template. Then every time you post you go copy and paste that template into ChatGPT? I guess you could write a script that reads your template and body and submits the whole thing to chatgpt API then dumps out the file. But you also have to double check the whole thing again to make sure it didn't mess anything up or change any text? But then all you do is invent a shittier SSG that costs more money and more resources for literally no benefit. Seems dumb
- profsummergig 1y ago
  I agree. A goal of humanity should be to make energy too cheap to meter. Using AI will help us get there. Every minute OP saves using ChatGPT instead of a text editor, OP can devote to other things that could incrementally get us there.
  - chneu 1y ago
xnorswap 1y ago
I'm in two minds whether the OP is satire. This quote in particular sells me on the idea of satire: > Almost anything that relies on structured input would be more convenient with an AI solution You could take what you know about that structure and deterministically transform it, or you could just vibe it over to chatGPT! That doesn't seem like a serious statement at all. But this feels real: > I looked into some other generators: Jekyll, Pelican, and so on. But everything seemed to have two problems. First, most of these seemed overkill for what I wanted to do. And second, despite the overhead, many didn’t seem to provide the kind of flexibility I wanted — they relied on writing strict Markdown or fitting within a predefined way of structuring the site. That's an understandable problem. The purists will suggest, "Just write HTML", but markdown is convenient. For anyone facing this issue, I'd suggest pandoc does a great job at transforming markdown to html. One of the benefits of HTML was that it would work around what it considered "bad" input. You didn't even need to close tags properly a lot of the time. If you made an error, you'd still get mostly correct output. Pandoc markdown isn't too fussy either. They have a markdown_strict variant if you want strict spec adherence. They also have a gfm (github flavoured markdown) option for those of us used to the github extensions. Pandoc parses a small markdown page into html in, well: Milliseconds : 71 So, certainly faster than any LLM response time.
- npilk 1y ago
  Perhaps my statement in the first quote is a bit unclear... Markdown is easier to write than raw HTML, and deterministically transforms. But writing strict Markdown (or using any specific syntax) creates an efficiency penalty - e.g., how do I format a URL again? How do I insert an image? Guess I'll have to look that up. What if I want to use more advanced CSS formatting? I'll have to update the HTML afterwards by hand. In contrast, using an LLM to format means I can put any kind of text in and the machine will just figure it out for me. That's what I mean by "more convenient".
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    The cost of this "convenience" is orders of magnitude more processing time, and with it the energy costs and ecological destruction that comes with that.

tantalor 1y ago

Missing "[joke]" tag.

profsummergig 1y ago

In the late 90's there were free WYSIWYG apps that generated reliable HTML/CSS. I did a deep search recently into finding the Microsoft FrontPage equivalent of today, and the only one I could find that worked reliably was Adobe Dreamweaver, and it's not free. (Kompozer, Brackets, SeaMonkey, BlueGriffon, etc. did not work reliably for me. I found that TinyMCE etc. are WYSIWYG for text, but not for positioning [i.e. they are "rich text editors"]) Why did such free WYSIWYG apps to generate HTML/CSS die out? Anyone have theories?

stego-tech 1y ago
Because they enabled too many people to have a web presence independent of social media, and therefore outside of the technosurveillance apparatus of Google/Meta/Amazon/Microsoft. There’s a healthy appetite for WYSIWYG editors still, but nobody wants to make anything that simple anymore. It’s all about building moats, using the latest frameworks, and ultra-slick designs with spy pixels and a deluge of cookies. Everything must be in a CMS, on a hosting provider, with load balancers and CDNs, and saddled with pop-ups, pop-ins, chat boxes, e-mail signups, metric collection, data hoarding, and third-party tie-ins.
Toritori12 1y ago
iirc they generated really bad and unmaintainable code (no css classes, absolute position, etc...), unlike (imo) modern LLMs.
- nullwarp 1y ago
  In my experience, LLMs happily generate just as much unmaintainable code as Dreamweaver ever did.
Dachande663 1y ago
I remember a lot of them initially struggled with the switch to CSS (but then got much better) and then eventually responsive design just hit them hard. Normal users just didn't know how to handle making things flow and the tools struggled to explain the necessary primitives to them. IMO.
1y ago

blendergeek 1y ago

I've been doing this for a few years now. It usually works but occasionally rewrite the posts or forgets what it is doing. Really frustrating in my opinion

deadbabe 1y ago

Why stop at static sites? ChatGPT could develop your dynamic website too, per request.

msgodel 1y ago
LLM in a CGI script sounds like a chaos monkey by another name.

Deukhoofd 1y ago

Yeah, looking at that blog source, I can definitely tell it's been generated by an LLM. ```  <footer class="py-3" style="margin-top:5rem;"> ```

npilk 1y ago
What makes you say this? Using inline CSS styling alongside Bootstrap classes? Applying both vertical padding and margin? (For what it's worth, that was part of the handwritten template already, not something the LLM generated on its own.)
- Deukhoofd 1y ago
  Adding absolutely useless comments everywhere. In this case, adding a footer comment above a footer element.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

b0a04gl 1y ago

[dead]

hackerbeat 1y ago

Just use Bear Blog https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/

npilk 1y ago
Nice - I didn't realize Bear had such extensive customization options. Would definitely be worth looking into next time.