Happy National Immigrant Heritage Month to those who celebrate (and if you don’t celebrate, you’re an irrational hater because diversity is our strength and immigration has made Native Americans vastly better off than if Europeans had come only to trade; Biden proclamation).
In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.
In 2005, Florida first got signs of a new affliction in its groves called citrus greening disease. It also has a Chinese name, Huanglongbing, or HLB, because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place.
Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection that is delivered by the gnawing of the Asian citrus psyllid. (It’s now believed the psyllid first turned up near the Port of Miami in 1998.) The flea-sized psyllid bites the leaves and transmits the disease, which slowly chokes out the tree’s vascular system from the inside, taking years to finally show itself. By the time a tree is displaying symptoms—three to five years, in most cases—it’s too late.
The orange tree came from China and the insect that has killed almost all Florida orange trees also came from China. Why hasn’t the Chinese citrus industry been destroyed? ChatGPT:
Because HLB originated in that region, China has had more time to adapt practices, including: Using clean nursery stock; Routine tree replacement cycles; Managing psyllid populations
China has many small, dispersed orchards rather than vast contiguous monocultures
Growers often accept shorter productive lifespans and replant more frequently; Florida’s model relied on long-lived, high-yield groves—HLB breaks that model.
Lower labor costs make intensive management and replanting more feasible
Even in China: It prevents the kind of high-margin, long-lived grove model that Florida once had
In other words, citrus might go back to being a luxury item for the rich, though Spain (#FreePalestine) and California are still largely uninfected. The article claims, without citing any #Science, that Roundup weed-killer is substantially responsible:
Then came the 1970s, and a new technology arrived: the herbicide glyphosate, created by Monsanto. The citrus industry adopted it early, and zealously, taking to it like water, spraying it all over the ground until not one sign of non-citrus life remained. When new complications came, they sprayed more. Acreage grew to 832,000, with record yields, and Florida was king, producing 78 percent of all United States citrus.
Up and up it went, and why not? The process got more mechanized through the back half of the American Century—out with the cover cropping, in with the monocrop, packed tight as can be. One innovation followed the next. Frozen concentrate fell behind the novel idea of “not from concentrate”—no longer did they squeeze it and freeze it. And they were unaware, or unconcerned, that that chemical was wreaking havoc on the soil, weakening the trees’ defenses, leaving them extremely vulnerable to disease.
What made pre-psyllid-immigration Florida such a great place to grow oranges?
A citrus grove must be planted in sand, which occurs naturally, by some geological miracle, in central Florida. (The miracle, specifically, was the Appalachian Mountains, which eroded and deposited sand there over millions of years.) The trees won’t take in wetlands, in mucky soils. But that sand itself is also in high demand for cement, for construction, for building shoulders for highways, for filling in wetlands for development. Up here, Dantzler pointed, was a sand mine, which had torn out groves and gotten to mining beneath them. “There’s a crazy market for sand,” he said.
Sandy land itself is the easiest property to develop. Wetlands are still often protected from a development standpoint, and so, in addition to infill, require pricey, lengthy permitting. Sandy uplands, hiding beneath every citrus tree, are low-regulation and ready to build on.
So, while the growers were losing money hand over fist, housing developers were coming through with godfather offers to buy them out, convert them to row housing, and sell, sell, sell. Flags of every homebuilding giant flew on vanquished ground: DR Horton, Lennar. At nearly every intersection there were signs for cheap housing—no money down, homes in the low $200,000s, yes, for real, in 2026. Bunting and grand openings and exclusive offers abounded.
This part of central Florida is 100′ above sea level and essentially immune to hurricanes (hence Disney’s decision to locate Disney World in Orlando). The reduced wind spec of 140 mph (compare to 160-170 in Jupiter and 170+ in Miami) enables building cheap wood-frame asphalt-shingled houses, just as builders throw together up north (120 mph ultimate design wind speed in the Boston suburbs). I was able to find a 1424 sqft. 3BR, 2BR house with a hideous garage door in front for $254,490. Lennar doesn’t say that it is concrete block, so I think that means “cheap wood”. (Our MacArthur Foundation-built development includes garages in the back of each house, served by alleys, even for townhouses.)
Here are the amenities:
It’s in the middle of nowhere, so it is tough to imagine what kind of job a person would get.
A recent interaction on the Hertz web site, trying to rent a car in Seattle for an upcoming trip. The 33 mpg car is $32/day. The pavement-melting gas-hogging 19-mpg SUV? Consumers are so alarmed about paying high gasoline prices that they’re willing to pay $401/day in order to burn twice as much fuel.
We’re informed that low-skill migrants make a country rich. If this is true, could there be any rational basis for opposing open borders? From Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life, a conversation between a Honduran and the 27-year-old son in her Brooklyn host family (“Big Apple, Big Heart” program):
“America is rich.”
“America is broke—thirty-three trillion dollars in debt, and a couple trill more every year.”
“Los inmigrantes take small money.”
“Small money adds up.”
“You is crowded? This house, three bedroom with nobody. In Honduras, thirty, forty people live here, no hay problema.”
“Okay, no, I’m not personally crowded.”
“You no pay. You no crowded. Why big feeling?”
“The ‘big feeling’ has to do with home. Home isn’t only a place; home is a big feeling. That you belong. That you can understand the people around you, and they can understand you, because you’re mostly the same.” Nico was struggling for a definition that didn’t stray into the tar pit of race. He resorted to Google’s conversation mode. “It’s about feeling comfortable and welcome and not having to try very hard. It’s a place where people laugh at your jokes, and you laugh at their jokes. You can sing some of the same songs. You watch some of the same TV programs. You know you can trust most people, and you know how to recognize the people you can’t trust. When your home fills up with people from somewhere else. Who speak different languages so you can’t understand each other. Who think different things. Who have no deep connection to your home, no ‘big feelings’ for your home. No history there. Who often . . .” Here he hesitated; this was awkward face-to-face, but he remembered Palermo’s unflattering characterization of her brother as only braving negative sentiments about people behind their backs. “Who often come to your home to take advantage, to see how much they can take. Well, then your home doesn’t seem like a home anymore. It seems like anywhere. It makes you sad.”
Of course, rich people in the U.S. can escape the above by moving, e.g., to an all-white ski town in the winter and an all-white beach town in the summer. The only migrants they’ll encounter are deferential service workers (i.e., servants). It is the middle-class resident of Dearborn, Michigan who might be forced by economics to stay in a neighborhood that has become almost entirely Arab-Muslim. It is the middle-class resident of Elmhurst, Queens who doesn’t have the resources to move away when every other family on the block speaks primarily Mandarin.
(I recently met a reasonably-rich-via-trust-fund older lady who’d moved after decades in Key Biscayne, Florida. It was mostly non-Hispanic white when she moved there. It’s now over 70 percent Latinx. Despite being a lifelong Democrat, she unashamedly said that she’d moved to Florida’s Treasure Coast because she was tired of hearing Spanish spoken all the time and not being able to communicate with everyone she encountered in a shared language (she hadn’t learned significant Spanish). ChatGPT: “Key Biscayne went from almost entirely non-Hispanic in 1960 to a Hispanic-majority community by ~2000, and today is roughly two-thirds Hispanic.”)
Loosely related, a visualization of migration into Europe. It would be interesting to see one for the 70+ million migrants who’ve entered the U.S. since 1976 (Pew).
It’s one thing to see a graph saying, “12 million illegal migrants entered Europe since 2008.”
It is possible to see a visualization of “illegal immigrants” (the undocumented, in other words), but only since 2020. And the people who’ve transformed the U.S. in the most profound ways have been legal immigrants.
Hampshire College announced today its commitment to offer admission to all New College of Florida students in good standing and to match their current cost of tuition. This opportunity is in response to the continuing attacks on New College of Florida intended to limit intellectual exploration, turn back progress toward inclusion, and curtail open discussion of race, injustice, and histories of oppression. By committing to impose a narrowly politicized curriculum on New College, the newly appointed trustees broke promises made to its current students to support a self-directed, rigorous education grounded in a commitment to free inquiry.
Maybe they got into financial stress because they gave their land back to the Native Americans, who they say are the rightful owners, and then had to pay rent?
The original peoples of this land have had connections with these lands for millennia and maintain and reclaim relationships to this day. They are part of a vast expanse of Algonquian relations. Over 400 years of colonization, Nipmuc, Nonotuck, and Pocumtuc Peoples were forcibly displaced. In the 17th century, the Nonotuck peoples responded to ongoing settler colonial violence by seeking safety with their kinship connections in surrounding areas. … we are on stolen land built up by the stolen labor of enslaved African peoples. Let us be mindful of the ongoing colonial violence that continues to rage across the globe in places like Sudan, Congo, and Palestine, and our complicity in that violence.
Who are the evil people perpetrating “colonial violence” in “Palestine”? Maybe we could have learned at Hampshire’s 25th Annual Eqbal Ahmad Symposium, “The boomerang Comes Back: How the U.S.-Backed War on Palestine is Expanding Authoritarianism at Home”:
Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and associate professor in the department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, as well as the cofounder of the online journal Jadaliyya, presented an analysis for our times. Amherst College Writer-in-Residence George Abraham moderated.
Since 2020, an emerging consensus among legacy human rights organizations as well as the world court, have defined Israel as an apartheid regime. Rather than boycott, divest from, and sanction apartheid Israel, the global community has attempted to normalize it.
What else can one learn at Hampshire? That our society rests on “fundamental contributions” from Africans:
That the university is a place for “theorizing queer horizons”:
That being trans is not a modern fad of some sort:
That anyone who says liberal arts kids study basketweaving is an ignorant hater. It’s actually how to make brooms:
Students can study Donald Trump, a man who likely be long-dead by the time they’re mid-career (separately, a group of people who can’t figure out whether they’re male or female throws rocks at Donald Trump’s understanding of science):
What’s the value of having “Trump vs. Science” on one’s resume? It gets a graduate into the lucrative world of taxpayer-funded nonprofits?
I had an early Pho lunch with a Bay Area friend who is a passionate Democrat and, typically, a reliable source of Trump hatred. Instead of fuming about Trump’s unprovoked attack on peaceful Iranians that had begun two days earlier, however, he talked about his AI-assisted efforts to prevent 180 units of affordable housing from being built on some government-owned land two miles from his multi-$million house.
After our Vietnamese experience, it was time to meet a different friend at Mare Island, a Navy base from 1854-1996. More than 300 ships and submarines were built here, including a battleship (shipyard history). Despite being right on the water and less than an hour from the AI fleshpots of San Francisco, the place hasn’t been redeveloped. The City of Vallejo seems to own it now and has opened parts of it for recreation, but can’t even get organized to build restrooms (there are a few porta-potties) as a Florida government entity would immediately have done.
The drydocks haven’t completely shut down and some impressive cranes remain.
There are some beautiful homes built originally for Navy officers.
There’s a sculpture with the names of many of the ships built at Mare Island on top of a hill:
I had dinner on Berkeley’s 4th Street with a local. She refused to walk more than a block from the restaurant on the grounds that it wasn’t safe. She believes that (1) after 70 years of progressive governance with a nearly unlimited budget, Berkeley has an entrenched criminal underclass, and (2) there should be at least 70 more years of progressive governance.
This was my introduction to a new-ish form of California fraud. Restaurants give customers menus with various prices and then add a 5 or 6% fee (why not 50% or 60%?) for “living wage” or “EE [employee] benefits”:
Traffic from Berkeley to SFO at 6:21 am was already grim (1:13 for what is a 29-minute trip without traffic):
My Uber driver (from Ethiopia) decided to take an expansive view of “HOV 3+” to include him+me. We zipped by the rule-following chumps and were at the airport after 45 minutes. We passed through some of the housing that is delivered to the vulnerable by wealthy progressives who say that housing is a human right:
Californians with whom I talked were passionate about wanting to further investigate the dead-for-seven-years Jeffrey Epstein and male associates who purportedly victimized under-18 females by paying them to have sex. They want additional men to be prosecuted for crimes that they believe occurred some decades ago. What do they do with their latest airport terminal? Celebrate a man who had sex with men under the age of 18. (Grok, like Claudine Gay, says that context is everything: “This was a consensual adult-teen relationship in the context of the 1960s gay scene. … Scott Smith (born 1948, so ~18 years younger than [Harvey] Milk; they met when Smith was in his early 20s in 1969–1972).”)
Grok was able to produce a variant of the brochure without any spelling errors:
(ChatGPT: “Sorry, I can’t help create or edit an image that promotes or glorifies Jeffrey Epstein.” Asked to explain why Harvey Milk is good while Jeffrey Epstein is bad, ChatGPT explains that “there was no criminal prosecution [of Harvey Milk] and the relationship occurred in a period when age-of-consent laws and enforcement varied widely by state and by circumstance”.)
Don’t fly without your djembe (West African drum) and indigenous blanket:
Don’t stay home and Zoom it in or travel safely by private car when you could instead exchange aerosol viruses with 200 potentially infected/infectable humans, protected by nothing more than a simple mask:
JetBlue reminded passengers to celebrate Women’s History Month:
The Broward County/FLL officials highlighted their entry in the South Florida Poetry Contest: “Pack the Fun, No Carry-On Gun!”
TL;DR: An LLM might take your job but it can’t take your public housing entitlement.
Let’s suppose that the AI/Robotics revolution happens gradually enough that Americans don’t feel that a total revamp of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare state is required. Those employed as drivers, for example, get replaced over a 20-year period as vehicles that don’t have the requisite hardware for self-driving age out of the fleet. FAA regulation for supplemental type certificates remain so onerous that it is cheaper to pay two pilots on each flight than to retrofit an Airbus A320 or Boeing 787 for self-flying.
Let’s assume that AI/robotics renders only about half of the U.S. workforce unemployable (we’ll keep our high minimum wages so anyone with below-median skills, health, beauty, or strength won’t be able to work legally). That means there will be a gradual, but huge, increase in demand for taxpayer-funded housing (public housing or Section 8). Even before ChatGPT was launched (November 2022), there was already a long waiting list for a taxpayer-funded apartment and, oftentimes, the waiting list was so long that authorities closed. Here’s a March 4, 2026 snapshots from New York City’s taxpayer-subsidized housing web site:
The last window of application to be placed on a waitlist (not to get housing!) was almost two years ago. Nationwide, waiting times, for those who are fortunate enough to have gotten on the waitlist, are apparently typically between 2 and 10 years.
Is the smart move for a young person to get into the welfare system now while the waitlists are still no more longer than 10 years? He/she/ze/they can (1) refrain from work, (2) have a child, and/or (3) be diagnosed with a disability.
Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, published last April, revealed a five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. But a large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, found that this dramatic rise may be entirely driven by children with mild or no significant functional impairment.
One of the best ways to see how humans feel is, I think, to ask an LLM that has been trained on all human written expression.
The prompt
I have a friend who is a very skilled aircraft mechanic. He chooses to work primarily by himself and spends lunch hours reading technical manuals while the other mechanics are talking about the sports games they saw on television the night before. He prefers to spend evenings at home with his wife and two children rather than go out with friends or neighbors. He doesn’t speak unnecessary words. He shows up to work at exactly the same time every day. He gets upset if the other mechanics want to play Taylor Swift at a high volume in the hangar. Could he have a psychological disorder and, if so, what would it be?
Grok
Based on the behaviors you described—such as a strong preference for solitary work and focused activities (e.g., reading technical manuals during lunch), limited social engagement outside of immediate family, minimal unnecessary verbal communication, rigid adherence to routines (e.g., arriving at work at the exact same time daily), and sensory sensitivities (e.g., distress from loud music)—these traits could potentially align with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), particularly at a milder level on the spectrum.
ASD is characterized by challenges with social communication and interaction, alongside restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. For instance:
Intense focus on specific topics (like aviation mechanics) is common.
Preference for predictable routines and discomfort with disruptions (including sensory overload from noise) fits the profile.
Many individuals with ASD form deep bonds with close family but struggle with or avoid broader social interactions.
Gemini
… Some of the specific details you mentioned—the sensitivity to loud music, the strict adherence to routine, the deep focus on technical manuals, and the preference for literal communication—are common traits of people on the autism spectrum.
Routine: Showing up at the exact same time every day provides a sense of order and predictability.
Sensory Sensitivity: Getting upset over loud music (like Taylor Swift in a cavernous hangar) isn’t necessarily about the artist; it may be a sensory overload issue where certain frequencies or volumes make it physically impossible for him to concentrate.
Specialized Interests: A passion for technical manuals often reflects a “systemizing” brain—one that excels at understanding how complex machines work.
…
[Gemini didn’t immediately go to “autism” as Grok did, but threw it out as a possibility]
Wrap-up
Grok gets a prize for being surprised that someone who gets paid to work at Job X focuses on Job X (“Intense focus on specific topics (like aviation mechanics) is common.”). Gemini gets a prize for inferring that a person who doesn’t want to hear Taylor Swift at high volumes while trying to work has “a sensory overload issue”.
Next Steps
Maybe it would be worth investigating what kinds of prompts will cause these LLMs to suggest gender affirming surgery, e.g., “My birth certificate says that I’m male, but I feel an intense desire to see the Broadway show Wicked over and over again.”
More from John Morgan and Philip Greenspun on using AI when doing web development…
Intro from Philip
In 1994, when I built my first web services backed by relational database management (RDBMS) systems, every request to an HTTP (Web) server resulted in an expensive fork, i.e., the spawning of a new process within the Unix operating system. If the request was for a small computer program to run, rather than a static file from the file system, that resulted in a second fork for a CGI script. If there was a need to refer to information in an RDBMS, such as Oracle, the CGI script would initiate the login process to the RDBMS, which would check username and password and… initiate another fork for a new process to handle what would ordinarily be 8 hours of SQL requests from a human user at a desktop in the 1980s client/server world. So that would be three new processes created on the server in order to handle a request for a web page. All would be torn down once the page had been delivered to the user. Consider how much longer it takes to start up Microsoft Word on your desktop computer than it does for Word to respond to a command. That’s the difference between starting up a program as a new process and interacting with an already-running program. Here’s an illustration of the four processes ultimately involved. The top one is the user’s browser. The three below that were spawned to handle a single request.
NaviServer (later “AOLserver” after NaviSoft’s acquisition by AOL) was the first web server to combine the following:
multi-threading, enabling a request for a static file to be served without a fork
internal API, enabling small programs that generated web pages to run within the web server’s process, thus eliminating the CGI fork
pooling of database connections, e.g., four persistent connections to an RDBMS that could be used to handle queries from thousands of requests, thus eliminating the fork of an RDBMS server process to handle a “new” client on every request
The available languages for page scripts that could run inside the AOLserver were C (macho, compiled, slow for development, potential to destroy the entire web server, not just break a single page, with one mistake; see the API) and Tcl (embarrassing to admit using, simple, interpreted, safe; see the API).
As the architect of the information systems that would be available to all of Hearst Corporation‘s newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, cable networks, etc., I selected the then-new NaviServer in late 1994 in order to achieve (1) high performance with minimal server hardware investment, and (2) high developer productivity. The result was that I developed a lot of code in Tcl, a language that I hadn’t used before. It didn’t seem to matter because the Tcl was generally just glue between an HTML template and a SQL query. The real programming and design effort went into the SQL (are we asking for and presenting the correct information? Will comments, orders, and other updates from hundreds of simultaneous readers be recorded correctly and with transactional integrity in the event of a server failure?) and the HTML (will the reader be able to understand and use the information? Will comments, orders, and other updates from the reader be easy to make?).
Just a few years later, of course, other companies caught up to AOLserver’s threaded+scripts inside the server+database connection pools architecture, most notably Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS). Eventually the open source folks caught up to AOLserver as well, with a variety of Apache plug-ins. And then I persuaded America Online to open-source AOLserver.
Here we are 32 years later and I’m still running code that we wrote at Hearst. The company was interested in publishing, not software products, so they graciously allowed me to use whatever I wrote at Hearst on my own photo.net web site and, ultimately, to release the code as part of the free open-source ArsDigita Community System (adopted by about 10,000 sites worldwide, including some at Oracle, Siemens, the World Bank, Zipcar, and a bunch of universities).
[One fun interaction: in 2012, I was at a social gathering with a developer from the Berklee School of Music (Boston). He talked about some legacy software in a horrible computer language that nobody knew that they had been using for 10 years to track and organize all of their courses, students, teachers, assignments, grades, etc. They’d had multiple expensive failed projects to try to transition to newer fancier commercial tools and finally, at enormous cost in dollars and time, had succeeded getting away from the hated legacy system. It turned out that he was talking about the .LRN module that we’d developed for the MIT Sloan School in the 1990s and that was then rolled into the open-source toolkit. I kept quiet about my role in what had turned into a pain point for Berklee’s IT folks…]
Our Project
As part of our experimentation with AI and web design, we asked LLMs to do some redesign work on philip.greenspun.com. They all came back and said that it would be necessary to modify the HTML flying out of the server and not merely an already-referenced CSS file. It would be technically feasible, of course, to write a script to run on the server to open up every HTML file and add
to the HEAD of every document before writing it back into the file system. This would, however, have the side effect of updating all of the last-modified dates on files that, in fact, hadn’t been touched for decades (fixable with a little more scripting) and also creating a blizzard of updates to the git version control system.
The server was already set up with a standard ArsDigita Community System feature in which a Tcl procedure would be run for every HTML file request. This obviously reduces performance, but it enables legacy static HTML pages to be augmented with navigation bars, comment links, comments pulled from the RDBMS, advertising JavaScript, extra footers or headers, etc. Instead of modifying every HTML file under the page root, in other words, we could simply modify this function to add whatever tags we wanted in the head.
The questions:
Would an LLM be able to understand a Tcl program that had grown over the decades into a confusing hairball?
Would an LLM be able to do a minimalist modification of the program to insert the one line that was needed?
Would an LLM be able to reorganize the software for improved legibility, modularity, and maintainability?
The original
The original file is about 500 lines long and contains 18 procedures. The LLM will have to figure out which procedure to modify and then pick the best place within the procedure.
If a human programmer were to do an insertion with minimum risk of breaking everything, it would probably be around line 185. The file has been read and is sitting in a variable called “whole_page”. Even if there is a “do not disturb” tag within the page (i.e., don’t try to add comments or ads) it would still make sense to add this modern META tag in the output at line 189.
The prompt
Can you add one small feature to this AOLserver Tcl program, making as few changes as possible? It implements a procedure that runs every time a .html page is requested from the server and may add comment links, Google ads, navigation bars, and other items to legacy static pages. I want it to add “<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>” to the HEAD of every outgoing page. Please tell me the line numbers of the file where you’ve changed, inserted, or deleted anything.
Grok can’t count
Grok finds the same location that a human programmer would, but either can’t count or numbers the lines differently from how Notepad++ and Emacs count/number. What’s at line 185 in Notepad++ and perhaps 187 in Emacs is 105-110 for Grok:
Grok helpfully offers to enhance this a bit:
Grok is capable of explaining its regsub command. Here’s part of the explanation:
Grade: A! (would have been A+ if the line counting corresponded to how text editors count lines)
ChatGPT gets an A++
It took 3.5 minutes for ChatGPT to wrap its Hopper architecture brain (assuming H200 chips) around Tcl, but the results were spectacular. Unlike Grok, it counts the lines correctly. Also unlike Grok, it puts the new META tag in a variable so that changing the META tag doesn’t risk breaking the regexp. ChatGPT also prepares an updated file for download.
ChatGPT is kind of like Air Traffic Control in dealing with humans who are making mistakes. Instead of pointing out “You’re going in the wrong direction,” ATC will generally ask the pilot to “Say heading” or just say “Turn left heading 180” (if 180 was the correct heading to fly). ChatGPT recognizes that only a stupid human would want to insert the viewport META tag into an HTML page that already has one and it just includes the regexp check in an IF statement before the regsub operation: A++!
Claude gets a B-
Unlike ChatGPT, Claude runs its regsub without first checking to see if there is already a viewport META tag. Unlike Grok, it doesn’t offer an improved version that does perform a check. Unlike both ChatGPT and Grok, Claude puts this important code after the DND pages have been served and also after some random Amazon ad tags has been searched for. Like Grok, Claude puts the new meta tag right in the regsub statement, thus making maintenance riskier.
Claude has a convenient side-by-side layout for working with code.
Credit: Claude takes the interesting approach of looking for the closing HEAD tag rather than the opening one. This avoids having to have a more complex matching pattern. That lifts Claude from a C to a B-.
Gemini Pro (C isn’t just for memory leaks)
Gemini Pro combines all of the worst features of the other LLMs. It counts lines idiosyncratically, like Grok. It fails to use the /HEAD tag and also fails to do a matching pattern that will match HEAD tags with attributes. It chooses the wrong part of the file and, unlike Claude, either lacks awareness that this means a lot of DND pages will be served without the viewport tag or chooses not to explain the implication of the placement after the DND pages are served.
Antigravity
Antigravity backed by Gemini takes a slightly different approach than we saw from Gemini in the previous test. It puts the regsub after the DND pages, but before the Amazon ads. It matches a HEAD tag with additional attributes. Grade: B
Interestingly the Antigravity chat interface gives us insight into the reasoning that led to this result. In this case we see that Gemini chose this placement location not because it failed to understand the relevance of the DND option but rather because it interpreted the “do not disturb” concept that it found in the code to be a more important than the prompt’s instruction to apply the <meta> tag to all pages. As it came up with its plan it changed its mind back and forth before ultimately deciding that the best compromise was to place the code after the DND check:
I’m now grappling with the implications of “Do Not Disturb” pages. Lines 189 and beyond are relevant. The existing logic immediately returns $whole_page if the tag is present, implying an “unmolested” state. The user requested adding to “every outgoing page.” However, “unmolested” suggests no modifications, contradicting the user’s intent if the request is taken literally. I’m leaning toward not inserting the viewport tag if the DND tag exists, as that aligns with the script’s and the variable names’, intended functionality.
I’m now carefully considering the implications of inserting the viewport meta tag in the context of “Do Not Disturb” (DND) pages, aiming to
For this year’s FAA Ground School class at MIT I decided to let ChatGPT do all of the hard work of correcting and updating slides to account for any changes to regulations, etc. The LLM kicked out about five spurious suggestions for every useful typo correction. For example, here’s a slide about gliders whose title says that it is about gliders:
ChatGPT’s comment on the slide:
ChatGPT fails to use the title as context for the slide and, therefore, says that “solo at age 14” needs to be qualified to gliders only.
This slide points out the what the U.S. calls “light sport” is called “ultralight” in Europe:
ChatGPT:
It says to call the Shark a “light aircraft”, which typically refers to anything weighing less than 12,500 lbs. From the Shark manual, available on the Shark.aero web site:
Maybe ChatGPT doesn’t think that the Islamic Republic of Germany is part of “Europe” anymore?
ChatGPT is humorless. On the multi-engine/jet lecture:
“Now the second engine can take you to the scene of the accident!” ⚠️ Pedagogically funny, but borderline unsafe phrasing for students.
This ancient saying made ChatGPT feel unsafe. Its correction:
“Now the operating engine may or may not be able to maintain altitude, depending on weight, density altitude, and aircraft performance.”
On helicopter aerodynamics:
400 rpm actually is the Robinson R44 main rotor speed. The original slide gives the students a ballpark figure to keep in mind regarding how fast helicopter main rotors spin. ChatGPT’s “correction” leaves them guessing.
ChatGPT disagrees with the Robinson Factory Safety Course. It says “Rotor kinetic energy is the key stored energy” for landing without an operating engine. This can’t be right, intuitively, since it is possible to autorotate from 500′ and also from 5,000′.
ChatGPT when pressed stuck to its guns: “[altitude] is an external energy source”.
Summary: ChatGPT is better at creating slides than at correcting them.
