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.
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.
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:
From @TheAthletic: Where does Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance rank among the greats? We re-watched every Super Bowl halftime show since 1991, from New Kids on the Block to Kendrick Lamar last year. https://t.co/HrWppqgC9B
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
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:
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)
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.
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):
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:
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
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.
Images Tamed: Old HTML uses
width="230"
attributes and
align="right"
. The new CSS overrides this on mobile, forcing images to scale
Some gratitude to the good people of Minneapolis. The city’s martyrs of ICE resistance, such as Alex Pretti and Renée Good, are apparently forgotten because Donald Trump briefly posted part of a “king of the jungle” video (apparently suppressed by the righteous who run YouTube, but available from the haters at X). Front page of the NYT today condemning Trump for his racism; nothing anywhere on the front page about Minneapolis, as if the sacrifices were for nothing:
I will celebrate Minneapolis, therefore, with a shout-out to SANUS, headquartered in suburban Minneapolis (a 3-minute drive from the Al-Amaan mosque). Mere hours before we were to our Super Bowl extravaganza guests are arriving, our four-year-old $900 Costco 86″ TV wouldn’t turn on. Thanks to the Sanus BLT3-B1 “tilt 4D” mount, however, I was able to pull the recalcitrant machine from the wall and use my Ph.D. in EECS skills to unplug it and plug it back in. The kids are watching the Puppy Bowl and, if the Costco gods are with us, the party will proceed as planned.
I suppose that we also have to celebrate our brothers and sisters in China (not too many binary-resisters there) for actually making the Sanus BLT3-B1 so that it cost $100 instead of $300.
(I do wish that ICE would detain and deport whoever made the Xfinity XG1v4 box, which I picked up because of its advertised 4K capability. It needs to be power-cycled almost every time that we want to use it and the boot-up process is almost 10 minutes.)
Let this be a cautionary tale for anyone who is considering a super-slim wall-hugging TV mount that requires professional skills and multiple humans to execute a dismount and reach-around. (I guess we could have accomplished the power-cycle via flipping breakers. I’ve never seen a behind-the-TV outlet that is associated with a convenient switch that could be used for a convenient power-cycle.)
Finally, maybe this is the time to start an extended warranty claim on the TV? It was a floor model at Costco and they threw in a five-year warranty from Allstate. The warranty was already used once to replace the TV’s main board, possibly a casualty of a lightning storm putting high voltage into the Xfinity cable (another good reason to go with a fiber connection if you’re lucky enough to live in a place where fiber is available).
Loosely related
From the masjid around the corner from Sanus, a Facebook post from one month after the Gazans’ peaceful October 7, 2023 excursion into Israel:
Allah is the All-Mighty, the Most Merciful, the One Who has the absolute ability to save the oppressed, inflict punishment on the criminals and stop the brutal massacre and genocide happening in Gaza.
It’s a challenging theological question. Allah is “All-Mighty, the Most Merciful” and with “the absolute ability to save the oppressed” (redundant with “All-Mighty”?). Yet the genocide happening in Gaza wasn’t stopped until the Gazans had suffered the loss of most of their military capability. Why did Allah wait two more years and, perhaps more importantly, not assist the Gazans in realizing their military goals, including the destruction of the Zionist entity and the establishment of Hamas rule from the river to the sea?
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, a day when tens of millions Americans with jobs will sit on their sofas instead of working and paying taxes associated with working, e.g., payroll and personal income tax.
We have been gifted by far-sighted and generous politicians whose dreams of an improved cradle-to-grave welfare state for roughly 50 percent of Americans have been spoiled by the laziness of Americans who have jobs but don’t work enough hours to fully fund progressive dreams.
Imagine the boost to tax revenue if working Americans worked all weekend instead of watching games on TV. What if we augmented televisions and streaming services with EBT card readers and only those with active SNAP/EBT/food stamps would be able to watch NFL, NBA, MLB, etc.? (It’s easier to get someone who works 50 hours per week to instead work 60 hours per week than it is to get someone who works 0 hours per week to toil for 10 tedious hours per week.)
I pointed this out yesterday, but it is worth pointing out again today: Santa Clara County just recently issued a mask order to reduce the spread of COVID-19 (below) and today they’re going to host a COVID-19 superspreader event. #Science!
As our young football fans clean up the house for tomorrow’s guests and prepare the chip bowls, I wonder if Bad Bunny will sing his big hit “Monaco” tomorrow at the Super Bowl. That should start some conversations at American elementary schools. Sample lyrics:
You don’t know what it’s like to be out at high sea with two hundred hoes To have the flight attendant suck you off in the sky What it’s like to throw five hundred thousand at the strip club That’s why I don’t care about your opinion That’s why you’re 101 in the top 100, and I’m first You’re not rappers anymore, now you’re podcasters My barber charges more than you Fucking and traveling around the world
When I die, I’m gonna leave a hundred plots of land to my grandchildren To all my ladies, the butts and the breast And an F-40 for my haters but without brakes Why? So they crash He, so they kill themselves Red or white, matt black, what you want? Rest in peace, I’m still on the yacht
I light a phillie, the family is in Monaco
ChatGPT:
It’s not meant to be taken literally; he’s not claiming there are exactly 200 women on the yacht. Instead, it’s an exaggerated fantasy of abundance — so rich, so famous, so untouchable that he could fill a boat with models just for fun.
The phrase “I light a Phillie” (sometimes written “light up a Phillie”) comes from slang referring to lighting a Phillie Blunt, which is a cigar brand (“Phillies”) that’s often used to roll and smoke marijuana.
[Regarding the flight attendant line] That lyric describes conduct that would violate multiple aviation rules and laws. Interference with flight crew (14 CFR §91.11): Anything that distracts or interferes with a crewmember’s duties is prohibited. Engaging a flight attendant in sexual activity would clearly qualify. … Consent & power dynamics: Any sexual activity involving a working crewmember raises serious legal issues, including coercion and workplace sexual misconduct. … Sexual acts in public conveyances: Aircraft are considered public spaces under U.S. law. Sexual activity onboard can constitute indecent exposure or lewd conduct, which is prosecutable.
[The AI seems to be confused regarding the fact that a private jet can have, and in some cases require, flight attendant, e.g., when certified for more than 19 passenger seats.]
Why isn’t the Super Bowl always in a tax-free state? (this year it will be the opposite and maybe Bad Bunny will get hit with California taxes? Separately, why does the San Francisco Bay Area want to host a Covid superspreader event such as the Super Bowl? Perhaps 200,000 people will gather for this event if we include hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. See New York Times article, below.)
Another collaborative post from Philip Greenspun and John Morgan…
Let’s see what the Giants of Coding can do in the world of HTML and CSS design. Web page design should be much easier than generating C, Java, Python, etc. because people with no programming experience are often capable of writing HTML/CSS. On the other hand, HTML/CSS also entails the challenge of taste. There is no technical obstacle to making every word on a page bold and bright red, but should every word be bold/red?
Let’s start with Berkshire Hathaway, market cap $1 trillion. “Berkshire has failed to outperform the S&P 500 since 2008—not because Buffett lost his touch, but because deploying an unwieldy $1 trillion in capital effectively is exponentially harder than investing millions” says Morningstar. The underperformance relative to the S&P can’t be attributed to diverting effort into web page design. The home page is a hideous example of misleading user interface. The text that isn’t hyperlinked is in blue, the standard color for hyperlinks, and unvisited links are in purple, the standard color for already-visited hyperlinks. This isn’t a site that was competently built in the mid-1990s and then didn’t evolve with the rest of the Web; it would have been an example of substandard web design taste even in the mid-1990s.
How does it perform on mobile (iPhone 17 Pro Max; Chrome)? It’s a literal waste of (screen) space:
Tiny barely legible fonts and half the screen left blank.
The Prompt
Here’s an HTML file [upload] with no style sheet reference that doesn’t render well on mobile. Please create a .css file that it can reference and also tell me what changes will be needed in the .html (please keep this to a minimum) to make the site responsive and also look as good as it can on both desktop and mobile.
from Grok
Here’s a practical approach to make the Berkshire Hathaway homepage look decent on both desktop and mobile with minimal HTML changes and one new CSS file.
Minimal HTML changes required
Add these two lines inside the <head> (right after the <title> is fine):
Mobile First: On a phone, those two columns of links will now stack vertically so you don’t have to “pinch and zoom” to read them.
Readability: It replaces the default Times New Roman with modern system fonts that are much easier on the eyes.
Touch Friendly: By adding padding and a light background color to the table cells (
td
), we turn the links into “cards” that are much easier to tap with a thumb.
Minimal Intrusion: We didn’t have to rewrite the table structure or delete any of the original content, which honors the “no-nonsense” spirit of the original site.
Would you like me to help you refactor the HTML further to remove the legacy
<font>
and
<center>
tags entirely for better SEO?
after Gemini
Desktop:
Mobile (less compact than Grok’s layout, but arguably more attractive and consistent):
from Claude (slick two-window presentation! Multi-minute analysis)
after Claude
Desktop:
Mobile (failure to notice that the text will overlap; perhaps the AI doesn’t have its own headless browser where it can test and see whether HTML/CSS renders properly?):
from ChatGPT
Below is a drop-in stylesheet + the smallest HTML tweaks needed to make your page render cleanly on phones while still looking good on desktop (your file is very “classic” HTML with
<font>
tags + a two-column
<table>
layout berkshire-hathaway).
1) Create
styles.css
Save this as
styles.css
in the same folder as your
.htm
file:
/* styles.css - responsive polish for legacy table/layout HTML */
/* --- sensible defaults --- */
:root {
--page-max: 980px;
--pad: 16px;
--text: #0a2a6a; /* close to the original text color */
--bg: #ffffff;
--link: #5a1a7a; /* close to the original link color */
--visited: #b00000; /* close to the original vlink */
--rule: rgba(0,0,0,0.18);
}
...
/* Lists look cramped by default in many browsers */
ul {
margin: 0.4rem 0 0.8rem 0;
padding-left: 1.25rem;
}
li { margin: 0.35rem 0; }
...
/* --- mobile: convert the 2-col table into stacked sections --- */
@media (max-width: 640px) {
:root { --pad: 14px; }
/* Turn table rows/cells into blocks so each "column" stacks */
table, tbody, tr, td { display: block; width: 100% !important; }
td {
padding: 6px var(--pad);
}
/* Reduce overly-large headline spacing on small screens */
p[align="center"] {
margin: 12px auto;
}
/* Better tap targets for links inside list items */
li a {
display: inline-block;
padding: 6px 0;
}
}
What this accomplishes:
Keeps the old-school Berkshire look (colors, centered header, simple typography), but
Prevents horizontal squish/overflow, and
Stacks the two columns into a single column on phones (because your core layout is a 2-column table with
width="50%"
tds berkshire-hathaway).
2) Minimal HTML changes needed
A) Add viewport + CSS link (recommended)
In your
<head>...</head>
add these two lines (anywhere before
</head>
):
Why: without a viewport meta tag, mobile browsers often render “desktop width” then shrink it, making everything tiny.
B) (Optional but nice) add a language attribute
Change:
<html>
to:
<html lang="en">
That’s it—no restructuring required. The stylesheet is designed to “wrap” and modernize the existing markup (including the
<table width="90%">
layout berkshire-hathaway) without you having to rewrite the HTML.
If you want, I can also provide a second CSS variant that’s more “modern” (card-like sections, a little more whitespace, subtle background tint) while still preserving the minimalist vibe—still with minimal/no HTML changes.
after ChatGPT
Desktop:
Mobile (another failure via overlap):
after ChatGPT again (accepted the offer of a more modern CSS)
Desktop:
Mobile (still overlapping):
Summary
Despite the apparent simplicity of the challenge, Gemini was the only LLM that was able to create a web site that rendered well on mobile. Grok came in second with a mobile rendering that featured odd spacing and horizontal lines placed seemingly randomly but at least kept the text legible. Both ChatGPT and Claude’s styling resulted in mobile rendering that can only be described as broken with multiple instances of overlapping text.
These LLMs probably could do much better if they ran an open-source web browser, such as Firefox, internally and used the browser to render whatever they’d designed and then used their image understanding capabilities to spot obvious problems, e.g., overlapping blocks of text.
Stay turned for more comparisons among LLMs in the web development domain, including a look at the Brave New World of artificial intelligence in integrated development environments (AI in IDEs).
The news in the Bitcoin world isn’t all bad. The tensor processing units (proprietary Google LLM chips) behind Gemini 3.0 fixed our Bitcoin v. Medical School page just in time for the Big Slide:
(adjusted for Bidenflation, Bitcoin is now down substantially from the mid-March 2021 price when everyone was filled with hope regarding the Biden-Harris administration leading us forward and out of the bad times of the Trump dictatorship (v1.0))
I wonder what this means for the Cirrus waiting list and aircraft values in general. A crypto investor seems like a natural personal airplane customer: (a) independent personality, (b) not averse to irrational purchases, (3) maybe a need to go back and forth to Puerto Rico frequently.
Stake in the ground: I’m not going to sell any Bitcoin!
Separately: “This Bitcoin crash is worse than a divorce. I lost half of my money and my wife is still around.” (source)
Readers: who has favorite X posts to share? I’ll start:
In times of market turmoil and geopolitical tension, you need to find safe assets… pic.twitter.com/2Y5GUHyDS5
I checked the content of the four pages you listed, but from the snippets returned there is no visible <link rel=”stylesheet” …> line in the parts shown — that’s because the portions we could fetch start at the body text and don’t include the <head> section where CSS is normally referenced. … If you want precise verification, I can fetch and show the full <head> source (including the exact <link …> line) for each of the four URLs — just let me know.
[after “Yes please fetch the full HEAD source for each one and verify.”]
I tried to fetch the full HTML <head> source of each of the four pages you listed — specifically to look for the <link rel=”stylesheet” …> tag that shows which CSS file (if any) each page references. However, the tool returns only the rendered body content and not the complete <head> section, so I couldn’t directly inspect the <link> tags for CSS in the fetched results.
from Claude
I should note that the web_fetch tool extracts text content and may not always show the complete HTML <head> section where CSS references typically appear. The pages I did fetch appear to be very minimalist in design, consistent with early-to-mid 1990s web design when these pages were originally created.
Without being able to see the complete HTML source including the <head> sections of all four pages, I cannot definitively confirm whether they all reference the same CSS file.
[prompted further]
Now I have all four pages. Let me examine them for CSS file references. Looking at the extracted HTML content from all four pages, I notice that none of them contain explicit <link> tags to external CSS files in the content that was extracted.
from Gemini
[Us: Google’s smartest child has trouble counting and trouble understanding HTML, but it is great at presentation. It says that three pages reference no external CSS and then shows a table featuring two files that reference CSS. It is dead wrong about the interior page, which references margins-and-ads.css. It either cross-contaminated its own thinking by looking at the samantha-X file, which does reference philg.css or found a reference to the file in the BODY of https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/html.]
No, they do not all reference the same CSS file. In fact, three of the pages appear to use no external CSS at all, while one of them uses a specific stylesheet for that section of the site.
Details: As part of the photography tutorial section, it shares the same stylesheet as the photography index.
Limitation Rationale
Why are these LLMs so hobbled? Apparently, it is intentional for the LLM to see only what a user might see. This ensures that dynamic sites are properly understood and also may prevent some security risks.
When prompted, ChatGPT replied that this limitation is due to its web content fetching tool not returning the full payload and instead querying “search indexes, reader-mode extracts, preprocessed HTML snapshots, [and] content extraction pipelines” that are “optimized for reading and summarizing, not inspection.” It explained that “in those pipelines, the <head> is usually stripped entirely or reduced to a title and a few meta fields [because] CSS links, JS, analytics, preload hints, etc. are irrelevant to text extraction [and] keeping them increases size and complexity with no benefit for search/reading.” If true, this suggests that the tool was not built with full HTML analysis in mind but rather optimized for the admittedly more common text extraction use case.
Next Steps
Since our future AI overlords won’t download a web page from the Internet and click “view source”, the next step was to see what these LLMs could do if we downloaded HTML and CSS files to our desktop computers and then uploaded the files back up to the LLMs along with our questions.
