3 ms·
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
by 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 agoPerhaps 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 agoThe cost of this "convenience" is orders of magnitude more processing time, and with it the energy costs and ecological destruction that comes with that.
- npilk 1y agoSure, there are higher energy costs and it's probably worse for the environment. I just wanted to clarify what I meant by convenience - less effort and "processing time" for me, personally, not overall. I guess I'd compare it to ordering DoorDash every night instead of buying groceries and cooking at home. The first one is much more convenient, but comes with much higher total energy costs.