Two Minutes Hate against Jeffrey Epstein is the new heterosexual Rainbow Flagism?

by philg

From 2019… Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?:

I’m wondering if LGBTQIA is the most popular social justice cause because there is no obvious connection between saying one is passionate about supporting LGBTQIA and having to donate money. If someone says “I care about the poor” and then buys a Tesla instead of a Honda Accord, a friend might ask “Why didn’t you give $70,000 to the poor and drive a Honda rather than your fancy Tesla?”

In the intervening seven years, Teslas have gotten cheaper so perhaps a better analogy is to the $10,000 European vacation. Certainly over those seven years, though, heterosexual Rainbow Flagism, i.e., the public celebration of homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. by white cisgender heterosexuals, has become even more common. Nominally Christian churches in majority-Democrat parts of the U.S. will usually have a rainbow flag even when their entire congregation is hetero. None of these churches have flags or signs out front saying “help the poor by giving them half of your income since you already live at least 2X as well as Americans in the 1950s”.

I wonder if we’re seeing the same phenomenon right now with respect to people indignantly condemning Jeffrey Epstein. Hardly any of these folks were important enough to be included in the Epstein Files and, therefore, they can’t have been personally offended by Epstein’s conduct. If we assume that Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea for “soliciting prostitution” wasn’t coerced by the threat of decades in prison, what has been established is that he had sex with a paid 16-year-old female roughly 20 years ago. (He is often referred to by the Two Minutes Haters as a “rapist” or “pedophile”, but he was never charged with rape, much less convicted of rape, and having sex with a 16-year-old is not an example of pedophilia as the term was previously used in English.)

The Two Minutes Haters often live within a short drive of places where teenage prostitution is going on right now. I’m in a politically diverse Facebook group with a Big Law partner (average partner at his firm earns about $1.5 million/year in post-Biden dollars) who posts daily about his sympathy for the Epstein victims. He lives in an elite neighborhood of Greater Los Angeles that is within a one-hour drive of the street that the New York Times recently identified as having a high-density of juvenile prostitutes:

Ana paced on the sidewalk at 68th and Figueroa, her front teeth missing and an ostomy bag taped down under her hot pink lingerie. … Ana was 19, but the girls on the street reminded her of herself and her sister when they were first put out on Figueroa for sex. She had been 13. Her sister, 11. … Ana had grown accustomed to the protocols of the Blade, a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street that had become one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States. … The Blade was an eight-minute drive from the University of Southern California … The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota.

My response to one of his recent demands for more action regarding the Epstein Files. I’ll call him “Hassan” since that’s the first name of one of the Somalis charged in the Minnesota welfare state frauds and we are informed that Somalis built the United States:

There are teenage prostitutes whom you can rescue tonight, Hassan. The New York Times tells you exactly where in Los Angeles to find them. I will send you $1,000, Hassan, if you will go to Figueroa St. tonight and take home one of the under-18 prostitutes and keep her safe in your guest rooms for at least one month. This is to offset the cost of her food (I know that it should be a lot less than $1,000 to feed a skinny kid, but I see you more as an Uber Eats kind of person than a competent chef).

His only response to this offer was to take issue with my criticism, admittedly unsupported, of his cooking abilities. A few hours later he was posting the assertion “Donald Trump was actively recruiting girls for Epstein”, apparently made by someone the FBI interviewed in 2021.

The easiest way for authorities to bring the criminal justice system down on men who have sex with “underage” women is to prosecute them for statutory. Then a jury doesn’t need to sort out whether providing a female with housing, private jet rides, clothing, jewelry, spending money, etc. is prostitution or just legal “dating” in our debauched country. The people who engage in the Two Minutes Hate regarding Epstein often live in states where sex with a 16-year-old might be perfectly legal because that’s the age of consent. Here’s my offer to one of the haters who sent me a stream of enraged X messages regarding my failure to unequivocally condemn Jeffrey Epstein:

If you want to work together to lobby the Massachusetts legislature to raise the age of consent in MA to 18, I will be happy to help with that.

He did not respond to this offer.

What we’re seeing is a huge group of Americans who don the mantle of righteous protectors of teenage females because they posted on social media about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, all of whom are now adults and nearly all of whom have been or are being paid $millions, i.e., more than the typical American female will earn in a lifetime of W-2 slavery. See “Jeffrey Epstein victims program shutting down with $121 million paid to abuse survivors” (ABC, 2021):

The Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, since launching last year, received approximately 225 applications from alleged victims from the United States and abroad. That astounding number was more than double the initial expectations of the fund’s administrator and advocates for the victims. … Of the 150 applicants deemed eligible for compensation, more than 92% accepted the offers. The awards were paid by the executors of Epstein’s estate, but the claims were evaluated independently “free from any interference or control” by the estate, said Jordana Feldman, the program’s designer and administrator.

(75 out of 225 applicants were considered to be obvious liars by the administrators and, therefore, not eligible?)

“Epstein survivors secure a $290 million settlement with JPMorgan Chase” (NPR, 2023):

The lawsuit is one of several targeting banks who serviced Epstein’s financial dealings for years, even after it emerged in 2006 that Epstein was using his wealth to exploit minors and young women. Last month, Deutsche Bank agreed to a $75 million settlement in a similar case.

News of the JPMorgan settlement emerged on Monday, the same day a federal judge granted class-action status to the lawsuit, saying the number of plaintiffs involved could be “well over 100 people.”

Let’s assume it is the same 150 people who will also share the JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank cash. That’s $486 million divided by 150 = $3.24 million on top of whatever Jeffrey Epstein paid them while they were spending time with him. A reasonable person could certainly argue that $3.24 million tax-free isn’t sufficient compensation but it is unarguably far more than the typical teen prostitute receives. Thus my confusion regarding why it’s considered righteous to dwell on Jeffrey Epstein’s victims of 20 years ago rather than try to rescue today’s teen prostitutes.

Maybe the best response is to offer anyone piling on condemnation of Epstein three options: (a) spend time and money rescuing today’s young female prostitutes, (b) spend time and money lobbying to raise the age of consent in every U.S. state and every country where it isn’t at least 18 (you could also argue for 27, at least for women, given recent outraged stories about Epstein and 26-year-old females (e.g., NYT)), (c) spend time and money on imposing alcohol prohibition within the U.S. (my standard proposal for improving a lot of stuff, including sexual behavior), or (d) spend money on a new fund that will give people who say that they were Epstein victims additional money. Perhaps the new fund could find the 75 women who were denied any compensation by the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program and give each of them $1 million?

Related:

  • Fox story about Wendy Stephens, just 14 years old when she was murdered by the Green River Killer; Wendy Stephens ran away from home in Colorado and found her way to Seattle somehow. Not only did Wendy Stephens not get paid $millions, but she didn’t get to enjoy her remaining 60+ years of life expectancy. Had the citizens of Seattle shut down their teen prostitution corridor, which is where Gary Ridgway picked up nearly all of his victims, Wendy Stephens would likely be with us today. (The arch-criminal, according to Wokipedia: “Ridgway, who is dyslexic, was held back a year in high school and exhibited an IQ recorded as being in the ‘low eighties.'”)
  • Are women the new children? (support for raising the age of consent to 27)

AI vs. Groupthink

Would it be possible to use AI to determine whether, as is commonly asserted these days, that Jeffrey Epstein was a rapist of 14-year-old girls?

Screenshot

ChatGPT says that it is fair to characterized Jeffrey Epstein as a “pedophile” because at least some women were under age 18. When asked about Mohammed and his marriage to Aisha, on the other hand, it turns out that the Prophet was not a “pedophile”:

Traditional Islamic hadith literature — especially reports in collections such as Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — state that:

  • Muhammad married Aisha when she was six.
  • The marriage was consummated when she was nine.

These reports have been accepted as authentic by the majority of classical Sunni scholars for over a millennium.

…

4) Comparison with Jeffrey Epstein

The comparison is difficult because the contexts differ on multiple axes:

DimensionMuhammadEpstein
Time period7th century20th–21st century
Cultural normsEarly marriage commonSex with minors illegal & stigmatized
Evidence typeReligious texts & historical reportsCourt records, testimony, indictments
Pattern allegedSpecific marriagesLarge network of abuse
Legal frameworkPre-modern tribal lawModern criminal law

Because of this:

  • Epstein’s conduct was criminal under the laws and norms of his own society.
  • Muhammad’s marriage practices reflected norms widely accepted in his historical setting.

This doesn’t make moral evaluation impossible — but it makes clinical labeling across contexts methodologically unsound.

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Get together in Austin Feb 20? Or Vegas on February 24?

by philg

Dear Readers: I’m headed to Austin and should be free on February 20. Would anyone like to meet up? Terry Black’s, perhaps? (see Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours) Email philg@mit.edu if interested.

Does anyone have a good idea for activities? I went to the city’s official events page and just one event is listed for February 20:

OUTsider is an Austin-based transmedia nonprofit that celebrates the bold originality and creative nonconformity of the LGBTQ+ communities through the presentation of provocative, overlooked and out-of-the-box film, dance, theater, performance art, music, writing and visual art. Through its annual festival and conference, OUTsider unites queer artists, audiences and scholars from around the globe to exchange ideas, ignite conversations, transcend boundaries and experience new pleasures through artistic discovery.

If Feb 20 doesn’t work, how about Feb 24 in Vegas? Please email philg@mit.edu!

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Antigravity as web developer (AI in an IDE)

by John Morgan

As noted in previous posts, the web chat interface can be a cumbersome method of interacting with an LLM for the purpose of web development tasks such as adding a CSS file to an HTML page to make it render nicely on smartphones.

What if we try artificial intelligence as a companion to a programmer’s integrated development environment (IDE)? Google’s $2.4 billion baby, Antigravity, is the contender for this post, a collaboration between John Morgan and Philip Greenspun.

Installing Antigravity immediately presents the new user with a challenging question: Review-driven development vs. Agent-driven development. There is no explanation on the setup screen as to what the difference between these two might be:

Antigravity’s default user interface presents the developer with three panes: a file explorer on the left, a code editor in the middle, and an LLM chat interface on the right. We start this experiment by opening a folder we’ve created named bh-antigravity-gemini that contains the HTML for the decidedly archaic Berkshire Hathaway homepage and proceeding to write a prompt asking to generate CSS and edit the page’s HTML to make it responsive:

Antigravity offers a variety of models to choose from but for the purposes of this experiment we’ll use the default which is Gemini 3 Pro (High) in Planning mode. Planning mode causes Gemini to come up with plans before implementing them. After submitting the prompt Gemini begins to think through a plan:

As Gemini works to develop a plan Antigravity presents a Task document showing the steps to be taken:

Once Gemini has come up with its plan Antigravity presents us with an Implementation Plan document outlining the proposed changes as well as a verification plan:

Since the plan sounds sensible we instruct Gemini to implement it:

Once Gemini completes the task Antigravity presents us with a Walkthrough document with an overview of the results of completing the task:

Below the message announcing the completion of the task Antigravity presents us with a list of files that have been changed including counts for lines added and removed. Just below the list is a button to “Accept all” changes. We want to inspect the changes for ourselves first so we select the berkshire-hathaway.htm file to see what was added. Sure enough, Gemini has kept the changes to a minimum as requested and simply inserted a viewport <meta> tag and a <link> to incorporate the newly created stylesheet:

We accept the changes in the HTML and move on to examine the newly created style.css file. The CSS includes comments indicating that Gemini has tailored it to match the styling present in the original HTML while implementing the proposed changes to make the page responsive:

Satisfied with its suggestions we accept the changes and proceed to view the results. The images below are the original page as viewed on desktop followed by the new page as viewed on desktop. As promised Gemini has kept the desktop styling largely the same with the primary difference being greater spacing between links:

The images below are the original page as viewed on mobile followed by the new page as viewed on mobile. The new CSS has transformed the page such that it is no longer rendered as it would be on desktop but instead presents the links as a single column with text that is readable and easy to select without needing to zoom.

The quality of Gemini’s code generation in this experiment appears comparable to what we saw from it in our previous comparison of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. This is not surprising as Antigravity is merely another interface for a developer to interact with an LLM such as Gemini.

Our conclusion is that having AI integrated tightly into the IDE where the chat log is presented and persisted alongside the code and the model can be quickly directed to analyze files within the codebase without the need to paste them into a chat window or manually upload them via a web interface saves time and leads to a more organized and less fragmented experience. We also find that the IDE’s ability to highlight proposed changes and allow us to accept or reject them and edit our files in place achieves a level of integration into the development workflow that a web chat interface cannot match.

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Climate change alarmist pays $200 million for a sea level house; time for new envy level?

by philg

May 2017, Harvard Crimson:

Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement address at Harvard

How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? … We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics.

(The last part is my favorite. In 2017 he predicted that the lavishly funded UN and WHO would, three years later, be able to prevent a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic via muscular action, Scientific interventions such as saliva-soaked face rags, etc.)

February 2026, WSJ:

Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are the latest California billionaires to buy a home in South Florida. … THE PRICE: While it isn’t clear exactly what Zuckerberg and Chan are paying for the nearly 2-acre property, local real-estate agents said it would likely trade for $150 million to $200 million. Last year, an undeveloped Indian Creek lot of roughly the same size sold for about $105 million.

A peasant to whom $200 million is real money might look at the contrast between the 2017 statement about climate panic (“destroy the planet”) and the 2026 sea level waterfront house purchase and shout out “Hypocrisy!”. But maybe instead it is time for a new level of envy. What if Mark Zuckerberg believes what he’s been saying about climate change and bought the house anyway? That’s the real estate equivalent of driving a $600,000 Ferrari Purosangue to an elementary school with two kids and a bag of drive-thru breakfasts in the back. The owner knows that the kids are doing $200,000 of damage to the interior and simply doesn’t care. Zuck expects the above house to be washed away in 5-10 years, in other words, and is indifferent to the consequent loss of $200 million.

Envy 101: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and pass them down to their kids and grandkids

Envy 303: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and treat them as disposable

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The Army helicopter crash in DC revisited

by philg

As noted in Reagan National Airport Black Hawk-CRJ crash, the easiest way to have prevented the January 2025 crash would have been to implemented congestion pricing on the highways around DC so that officials didn’t need helicopter taxi service to avoid the traffic jams that have been caused by dramatic population growth induced by spectacular growth in government spending (plus open borders?).

“The Last Flight of PAT 25 Two Army helicopter pilots went on an ill-conceived training mission. Within two hours, 67 people were dead.” (New York Magazine):

Black Hawks are typically flown by two pilots. The pilot in command, or PIC, sits in the right-hand seat. Tonight, that role was filled by 39-year-old chief warrant officer Andrew Eaves. Warrant officers rank between enlisted personnel and commissioned officers; it’s the warrant officers who carry out the lion’s share of a unit’s operational flying. When not flying VIPs, Eaves served as a flight instructor and a check pilot, providing periodic evaluation of the skills of other pilots. A native of Mississippi, he had 968 hours of flight experience and was considered a solid pilot by others in the unit.

In terms of flying hours, Mr. Eaves was at the same stage as a civilian helicopter pilot beginning a second year working as an instruction in little Robinsons, mostly going in circles around a training airport.

His mission was to give a check ride to Captain Rebecca Lobach, the pilot sitting in the left-hand seat. Lobach was a staff officer, meaning that her main role in the battalion was managerial. Nevertheless, she was expected to maintain her pilot qualifications and, to do so, had to undergo a number of annual proficiency checks. Tonight’s three-hour flight was intended to get Lobach her annual sign-off for basic flying skills and for the use of night-vision goggles, or NVGs. To accommodate that, the flight was taking off an hour and 20 minutes after sunset. …

Night-vision goggles have a narrow field of view, just 40 degrees compared to the 200-degree range of normal vision, which makes it harder for pilots to maintain full situational awareness. They have to pay attention to obstacles and other aircraft outside the window, and they also have to keep track of what the gauges on the panel in front them are saying: how fast they’re going, for instance, and how high. There’s a lot to process, and time is of the essence when you’re zooming along at 120 mph while lower than the tops of nearby buildings. To help with situational awareness, Eaves and Lobach were accompanied by a crew chief, Staff Sergeant Ryan O’Hara, sitting in a seat just behind the cockpit, where he would be able to help keep an eye out for trouble.

Lobach, 28, had been a pilot for four years. She’d been an ROTC cadet at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which she graduated from in 2019. Both her parents were doctors; she’d dreamed of a medical career but eventually realized that she couldn’t pursue one in the Army. According to her roommate, “She did not have a huge, massive passion” for aviation but chose it because it was the closest she could get to practicing medicine, under the circumstances. “She badly wanted to be a Black Hawk pilot because she wanted to be a medevac unit,” he told NTSB investigators. After she completed flight training at Fort Rucker, she was stationed at Fort Belvoir, where she joined the 12th Aviation Battalion and was put in charge of the oil-and-lubricants unit.

In addition to her official duties, Lobach served as a volunteer social liaison at the White House, where she regularly represented the Army at Medal of Honor ceremonies and state dinners. … She was planning to leave the service in 2027 and had already applied for medical school at Mount Sinai. Helicopter flying was not something she intended to pursue.

Though talented as a manager, she wasn’t much of a pilot. … One instructor described her skills as “well below average,” noting that she had “lots of difficulties in the aircraft.” Three years before, she’d failed the night-vision evaluation she was taking tonight. … It’s not uncommon for pilots to struggle during the early phase of their career. But Lobach’s development had been particularly slow. In her five years in the service, she had accumulated just 454 hours of flight time, and she wasn’t clocking more very quickly.

Captain Lobach had the same number of hours as a Big Tech engineer who flies recreationally for about three years and, based on the above, far less interest in becoming proficient. The small number of hours seems to be common within the Army:

Similar problems exist throughout Army aviation; the service has been having a hard time retaining its most experienced pilots and providing adequate flight time for those currently coming up through the ranks. Since 2011, the average number of hours flown per year by crewed Army aircraft has fallen from 302 to 198.

Here’s a confusing part. Maybe the issue was with the tail rotor rather than “a tail fin”?

As they passed over the Civil War battlefield of Thoroughfare Gap, an alarm called a master caution went off, indicating that a control system for a tail fin was malfunctioning. If the situation worsened and the surface became stuck, the helicopter could crash.

(This was unrelated to the crash as it happened an hour earlier and the system was “reset”.)

The conclusion of the article is bizarre. After writing about a person who wasn’t interested in aviation, the author concludes with a quote from the pilot-brother of one of the regional airline pilots who was killed by the Army crew’s incompetence:

He thinks that Lobach could have become a good pilot if they gave her another thousand hours of flying time. Instead, the Army withheld from her the training and flight time that she needed to fly safely and then required her to go fly anyway on a mission that was as ill-conceived as it was poorly executed.

The article is heartbreaking because there are thousands of superb civilian helicopter pilots who would have sacrificed almost anything to take Captain Lobach’s place behind the controls of a Blackhawk even without receiving her Army pay and benefits ($150,000/year if we include housing allowance and the actuarial value of the pension?). It’s understandable that the military is a bureaucracy, but after all of the selection hurdles how does it end up with pilots who don’t love to fly and live to fly?

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Bad Bunny’s nuanced views on immigration

by philg

“Bad Bunny uses Grammy Award win to protest ICE” (CNN, February 2026):

Accepting the award for best música urbana album, Bad Bunny began his speech saying, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out!”

“How Bad Bunny Did It” (The Atlantic, February 2026):

Bad Bunny is articulating the surreal and sad feeling of seeing his homeland transformed by internet-supercharged globalization. The U.S. territory’s economy has long relied on tourism, but in recent years, a wave of laptop-toting mainlanders lured by the balmy climate and notoriously loose tax laws has driven rent increases and threatened to wash out the local identity. Bad Bunny’s new album, Bonilla wrote, is a “lament for a Puerto Rico slipping through our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxury developments; its land sold to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.”

(The gringos at The Atlantic characterize Puerto Rico as having “notoriously loose tax laws”, but “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich” (GQ 2018) and other sources make it clear that Act 20 and Act 22 are, in fact, tightly specified.)

Separately, if you want to enjoy Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, but don’t understand el idioma de los conquistadores (or the way that Bad Bunny pronounces this language), here’s a recital in the English language:

The “We Accept EBT” sign on the set was a nice touch. It wasn’t inclusive, however, for viewers in Minnesota. Why not an additional “Waxaan aqbalnaa EBT” or “Halkan EBT waa laga aqbalaa” sign? (the majority of Somali-headed households are on SNAP)

In other NFL news, our home town of Jupiter, Florida was indirectly featured recently by Bill Belichick’s young associate:

Related:

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Why won’t San Francisco Democrats provide their teachers with fair compensation?

by philg

Californians love to brag about how productive and rich they are. San Francisco should be the richest city in the world right now given that most of the AI companies have set up shop within the city limits and the founders/executives of these companies also live within city limits, e.g., Sam Altman (worth nearly $2 billion) That’s a tax base that municipal governments all around the world can only envy. We are informed that Democrats protect American workers’ interests and there are no Republicans who could potentially prevent San Francisco from taxing and spending.

Separately, we are informed that public employee unions would never use their power to exploit taxpayers by demanding above-market compensation. Our newspapers report as an established fact that unionized schoolteachers are “underpaid”.

This week, however, we learn that the elite Democrats who run San Francisco refuse to provide their public schoolteachers with the fair compensation that the union has requested, thus necessitating a strike. NYT:

On Monday morning, Cassondra Curiel, the president of the union, the United Educators of San Francisco, led a rally on the steps of Mission High School, where dozens of teachers, dressed in red, rattled tambourines and hoisted signs calling for higher wages. Some brought their children, who were out of school for the day.

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If AI is useful why is gold gaining in value compared to the S&P 500?

by philg

One of my faith-based beliefs is that productive assets, such as a company that makes widgets, are more valuable than rocks or metal bars. This, of course, hasn’t been true lately. Here’s the price of gold over the period of Bidenflation (we’re still in the “Bidenflation” period even without Biden, since inflation is tough to tame once it gets going, e.g., because government is nearly half the economy and many government payments are automatically indexed to inflation):

On the other hand, the S&P 500 is also way up, especially the Big Tech/AI companies.

What does ChatGPT have to say? The S&P is worth 1.7X all of the above-ground gold:

How about 10 years ago when AI wasn’t functional and productivity gains from AI weren’t baked into investor expectations? The ratio was higher: 2.35X.

So the value of productive assets, which should be enhanced by AI, have actually fallen relative to an unproductive asset, whose value shouldn’t be directly affected by AI.

Does this mean that markets don’t think that AI is useful? Or perhaps they think that AI will make some companies more productive, but it will render so many humans useless that taxes on the productive to fund idle lifestyles for the useless will wipe out any economic gains? Or maybe there is a simpler explanation, e.g., people love gold.

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In Mr. Biden’s Neighborhood only one of your next-door neighbors is a violent criminal

by philg

Mostly Peaceful Immigrants, Installment #6734… “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows” (CBS):

Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. … Nearly 60% of ICE arrestees over the past year had criminal charges or convictions, the document indicates. But among that population, the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.

In other words, at least 1 out of 7 of the arrested migrants was a violent criminal (plus some additional migrants who are violent criminals, but had (1) never been arrested by the police, (2) never been charged with a violent crime by local prosecutors, and/or (3) been convicted of a violent crime only in their home country).

CBS spins this as evidence for the irrationality of Donald Trump’s deportation policies. But who would be enthusiastic living among the 400,000 noble enrichers who’ve been arrested? Imagine a realtor telling a potential house buyer, “only 1 out of 7 of your new neighbors will be violent criminals. So if there are two households of 4 people on either side of you, most likely you’ll have a next-door neighbor who is a violent criminal and 4 or 5 next-door neighbors who are non-violent criminals.”

A hater’s response to CBS on X:

Also in Journalism, the New York Times told us that we’re in a “climate emergency” and that Donald Trump was ending democracy. How do the journalists there prepare for these catastrophes? Are they digging tunnels in Nova Scotia and planning their escape before the Trump Dictatorship v2.0 closes the border? No. They spent at least an entire day digging up and watching 25 years worth of old halftime shows:

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AI competition for the redesign of a site that already has CSS

by John Morgan

In our last post, John Morgan and Philip Greenspun compared four LLMs to see how they would do on redesigning the Berkshire Hathaway home page, an HTML relic of the 1990s untainted by CSS. Today we’ll give AI a tougher challenge: redesign the philip.greenspun.com site from four sample HTML files and the CSS that is referenced by them. The contenders are ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Claude.

The Prompt

I want to update the CSS on a web site so that it renders nicely on mobile and, ideally, has an improved look on desktop as well. I’d like to not make too many changes to the HTML, though I could add a viewport meta tag in the head of every HTML file, for example. I’m going to upload four sample HTML files from this site and two CSS files that are referenced (margins-and-ads.css is the one that nearly all pages on the site reference). Please send me back new CSS and any changes that you think would be worth doing on all of the HTML pages on the site.

Sample Pages on Desktop Before (Chrome)

Sample Pages on Mobile Before (iPhone 17 Pro Max, Chrome)

Comment from Philip: I’m grateful to John for not looking at these and asking, “Did you think that mobile web browsing was a fad and would go away?” (on the actual device they all are absurdly small and hard to read)

from ChatGPT 5.2

Below is a “drop-in” modernization that keeps your existing HTML working, but makes it responsive on phones and nicer on desktop—without needing structural HTML changes.

It’s designed around what I see in your samples:

  • Most pages pull in margins-and-ads.css and currently just set big left/right margins plus floats for images/ads/notes. margins-and-ads
  • Some pages also include philg.css for paragraph spacing/indents and note backgrounds. philg
  • Layout is often “classic HTML”: <body bgcolor=...> , <center> , <table> for header layout, images with align/hspace/vspace , etc. Philip Greenspun on Photography Travels with Samantha Home
  • Photo pages use <div class="minigallery">…</div> with <br><br> breaks. How to Photograph Architecture …
  • Some pages include custom elements like <photonetpage> / <photonetpagenav> and <product…> tags. How to Photograph Architecture … How to Photograph Architecture …
  • p.marginnote exists and is sometimes floated right at 25% width (bad on mobile). margins-and-ads

One small HTML change I recommend on every page

Add this inside <head> :

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

That alone fixes a lot of “tiny text / zoomed-out” mobile behavior.

(Your pages currently don’t have this viewport meta in the sample heads. Philip Greenspun on Photography Travels with Samantha Home)

Optional but nice (safe even with older markup):

<meta name=”color-scheme” content=”light”>

Why these changes help (mapped to your existing markup)

  • Big fixed margins become mobile-friendly padding: your current body {margin-left/right: 3em} can still be too wide or awkward on phones. margins-and-ads
  • Floats collapse on mobile: images with align="right" and your .illustration floats (plus margin notes/ads) are the #1 cause of “narrow column” mobile misery. Philip Greenspun on Photography margins-and-ads
  • minigallery becomes usable: instead of relying on <br><br> breaks, it wraps naturally and centers on small screens. How to Photograph Architecture …
  • Layout tables stack: your header table (image + title) won’t force sideways scrolling. Philip Greenspun on Photography
  • Custom tags display correctly: <photonetpage> / <photonetpagenav> should behave like block containers. How to Photograph Architecture …

If you’re willing to do one more (still small) HTML improvement later

Not required, but high value over time:

  1. Remove bgcolor / text attributes from <body> and let CSS control it. (Right now you set it in HTML on many pages. Philip Greenspun on Photography)
  2. Replace <center> blocks with CSS classes (centering via CSS is more controllable). Travels with Samantha Home

But again: the CSS above works even if you do none of that.

If you want, I can also generate a tiny “smoke test” checklist (pages to open + what to verify) based on these exact sample files (header table, minigallery , marginnote , and a long chapter page).

[after asking for the checklist]

After ChatGPT

A huge amount of screen space is wasted when the browser is opened at my usual width:

Maybe ChatGPT is right that this is about as wide as a column of text should be, but on a site without ads it doesn’t look right and denies the user the choice to get more content on his or her screen. My previous style sheets didn’t set a font, which enabled the browser to default to whatever the browser authors thought was best or whatever the user had chosen via customization (of course, it would be a rare user who’d take the trouble). ChatGPT has hard-coded in a sans-serif font. Asked why, ChatGPT explains:

But then it backpedals and says that maybe serif could play a role:

Why serif may actually be the right choice for your site

Now the counter-argument—and this matters for your content.

Your site is:

  • long-form
  • essay-like
  • book-structured
  • historically text-forward
  • intentionally “print-ish” (paragraph indents, chapter structure)

That is exactly where serif shines, especially on desktop and tablets.

You’re not running a SaaS dashboard or news feed—you’re publishing durable prose.

My recommended compromise (best of both worlds)

Use serif for body text, sans-serif for UI and headings, with mobile-aware tuning.

Option A: Classic, conservative (very “Philip Greenspun-appropriate”)

body{
font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

Then add (already supported by the rest of the CSS):

h1, h2, h3, h4,
photonetpagenav{
font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Arial, sans-serif;
}

This:

  • preserves the essay/book feel
  • keeps navigation and headings crisp
  • avoids over-modernizing the site

Option B: Modern serif optimized for screens (my favorite)

body{
font-family: Georgia, "New York", "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-size: 17px;
line-height: 1.6;
}

Plus mobile tweak:

@media (max-width: 720px){
body{
font-size: 16px;
}
}

This gives you:

  • excellent long-form readability
  • no “tiny Times on iPhone” problem
  • minimal aesthetic change from the original site

Option C: Keep sans-serif everywhere (only if you want a stylistic reset)

This is what I initially gave you, but I would not recommend it unless you’re intentionally rebranding the site visually.

Why I didn’t ask first (and what I’d do now)

I defaulted to sans-serif because:

  • the stated priority was mobile correctness
  • you wanted minimal HTML changes
  • CSS-only fixes favor safe defaults

But given:

  • your paragraph indents
  • chapter structures
  • archival nature of the content

I would switch the body back to serif and tune size/line-height instead.

TL;DR

  • I chose sans-serif for mobile safety and cross-platform predictability.
  • For your site, serif is not only appropriate—it’s arguably better.
  • Best solution: serif body, sans-serif headings, with slightly larger text and generous line-height.

If you want, I can:

  • give you a one-line diff to revert the font choice cleanly, or
  • mock up before/after screenshots (conceptually) for desktop vs mobile so you can decide instantly.

That last offer is interesting. Maybe ChatGPT actually does have a browser in its back pocket, contrary to what we’ve seen in earlier interactions. Asked for the screenshots, it responds that the first rule of Screenshot Club is that there are no screenshots.

Great—since I can’t literally render screenshots of your pages here, the most useful thing I can do is give you faithful visual mock-ups of what you’d see, tied directly to your actual content and layout patterns. Think of this as a guided “mental screenshot” you can compare against your browser in 30 seconds. Another page:

Things actually look pretty good on mobile. These are iPhone 14 Pro Max mockups from Desktop Chrome’s developer tools:

From Grok Expert

Analysis and Key Changes

  • Mobile Responsiveness:
    • Added media queries for screens under 768px (common breakpoint for tablets/mobile). On small screens, I remove floats (e.g., stack margin notes and ads vertically), ensure images scale down, reduce body margins for more content space, and increase relative font sizes where needed (e.g., small notes).
    • Images now have max-width: 100% and height: auto to prevent overflow and maintain aspect ratios.
    • Flexible layouts: Used relative units (em, %) more consistently. No fixed pixel widths were added; existing ones (like 25% for margin notes) are adjusted or overridden on mobile.
  • Desktop Improvements:
    • Modernized typography slightly: Set a base font size (16px for readability), used a sans-serif font stack (system fonts for performance), and added subtle line-height and padding for better readability.
    • Improved spacing: Increased paragraph margins slightly for breathing room, without altering the vintage feel.
    • Kept the look simple and consistent with the original— no major redesigns like grids or flexbox (to minimize potential breakage on old HTML).
  • Minimal HTML Impact:
    • No structural changes needed (e.g., no new wrappers or classes). The existing classes (e.g., .illustration, .marginnote) are leveraged.
    • The only global HTML change I recommend is adding a viewport meta tag to every <head> (this enables proper scaling on mobile).
    • Tested mentally against the provided HTML samples: They should render well without edits beyond the meta tag. For example:
      • “Travels with Samantha Home.htm”: Centered content and image galleries stack nicely on mobile.
      • “Chapter X_ Overcharged in Katmai.htm”: Narrative text with inline images flows better; philg.css styles (e.g., indented paragraphs) are preserved but made responsive.
      • “How to Photograph Architecture (Interior).htm”: Minigalleries (floated images) stack vertically on mobile.
      • “Philip Greenspun on Photography.htm”: Lists and blockquotes remain readable.
  • Other Notes:
    • Combined some redundant styles from philg.css into margins-and-ads.css (e.g., body margins, paragraph indents). If philg.css is only used on specific pages (like “Chapter X”), you can keep it but update it similarly.
    • Assumed no JavaScript or modern frameworks—just plain CSS.
    • Performance: Kept CSS lightweight; no bloat.
    • Browser Compatibility: Should work on modern browsers (IE11+ might need tweaks, but the site is old anyway).
    • Testing: I recommend testing on real devices (e.g., via BrowserStack or your phone). If you provide a live URL, I could refine further.

Recommended HTML Changes

Add this to the <head> of every HTML file (right after the <title> or existing meta tags):

HTML

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

This is the only change needed site-wide. It tells mobile browsers to use the device’s width for layout and start at 1:1 scale (no forced zooming out).

If you want to automate this (e.g., via a script or find/replace), search for </head> and insert it just before.

No other HTML changes are required—the CSS updates handle everything via existing selectors.

Updated CSS Files

Updated margins-and-ads.css

This is the primary CSS file (referenced by nearly all pages). I’ve incorporated relevant styles from philg.css (e.g., paragraph margins and indents) to make it self-contained. If a page references both, this won’t conflict, but you could remove redundant philg.css includes if desired.

after Grok

Not nearly the epic waste of horizontal screen space:

Based on the desktop samples: Advantage, Grok. How about mobile?

These seem fairly similar to what ChatGPT’s CSS produced.

from Gemini Pro

Here is a modern, mobile-responsive solution for your website.

1. The HTML Change (Crucial)

You must add the “viewport” meta tag to the <head> of every HTML file. Without this, mobile phones will zoom out to show the desktop view, making the text tiny and unreadable regardless of what CSS we write.

Insert this line inside the <head> section of all HTML files:

HTML

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

2. The CSS Updates

Since margins-and-ads.css is your primary stylesheet, we will transform it into a “Master” stylesheet that modernizes the look and handles mobile layouts.

Replace the entire content of margins-and-ads.css with this:

…

For philg.css : The old text-indent (indenting the first line of every paragraph) makes mobile text look messy and is generally outdated for web design. I recommend replacing the content of philg.css with the following, which aligns with the new modern style:

…

3. Summary of Changes

  1. Fixed Widths Removed: The old CSS set specific margins (3em) that squeezed phone screens. The new CSS uses max-width: 900px for desktop (comfortable reading width) and small padding for mobile.
  2. Images Tamed: Old HTML uses width="230" attributes and align="right" . The new CSS overrides this on mobile, forcing images to scale
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