This is a modern motherfucking website
58 points by FedericoSchonborn
58 points by FedericoSchonborn
I absolutely love how the subdomain length broke lobsters css on mobile for me.
it even advices to set a max-width
Responsive layout: max-width. One property. Your phone is already fine.
but doesn't :-/
Lots of very short sentence fragments though.
Welp. At least I learnt something new about preloading and such.
I was about to make a similar comment. Readability is something that has been researched extensively for decades and there are some very solid basic principles that are so often ignored. Previous comment I made about it, not going to copy paste the entire thing.
Being LLM-generated makes this fail to land, because the tone goes from sarcastic to performative, and that's boring.
the tone goes from sarcastic to performative
I have no love for or interest in defending this slop, but was the original ever not performative itself? I found the original (and its many derivatives) useful and agreeable in principle, but their presentation was always eyeroll-worthy at best.
Myself and a lot of others think the original was fairly unique, and it gets the funny pass for doing that gimmick first.
Something I'm curious about: how true is the claim that as long as you stick to semantic HTML, you get screen reader accessibility "for free"?
Sadly it’s not 100% true. Browsers don’t ship with all the accessibility features and some JS is unfortunately needed, and pretending like this doesn’t exist does more harm than good, albeit with good intentions.
https://react-aria.adobe.com/blog/ is a goldmine of such examples.
Edit: forgot to mention that also browser implementations are not 100% consistent, which is another reason for custom code to paper over those. And these are moving targets requiring maintenance, not something you commit once today and never look back.
It elides a fair bit of detail and/ or assumes someone subscribing to the general point of both this site and its inspiration would not get clever and put things out of order. Use the hierarchy of tags as The Elder Gods intended and mark superfluous/ purely visual elements as such (except for images, give them alt text) and you’re already doing better than 99% of sites from a screen reader perspective.
As said by someone who does not use one. They aren’t giving JAWS away for free, or weren’t the last time I cared to check.
and it makes reader mode work
Ironically, the site itself does not work in reader mode. Trying to load it manually just shows "Failed to load article from page" in Firefox.
while the content here is quite useful, it being llm generated/assisted is just sad. people care so little these days that they don't even take the time to think and type out, like, 1-2k words?
There's a reason i don't share a shitton of my knowledge:
It takes a load of time to write an article like the one above. For me, the effective time between "starting to type the first word" and "it's available on the web" is easily a month or so.
Writing is hard for some of us, and free time is sparse (in my case).
I may have a day in a month to do more than 20 minutes of non-tired, non-interrupted writing time. As someone else already said, it's easier to read than to write.
Just writing the whole text without any external link or references would take me a whole afternoon.
So if i'd share an LLM-assisted written article which shares deep, correct knowledge about some topic with proper cross-references for further reading, would you be happy thst you've learned something interesting or would you complain that the text sounds like it was written by an LLM?
Writing is hard, but like anything, working at it will make it less hard over time. But if you don't have time to write well, you don't have time (although people go to great lengths to make time for things that are important to them.) LLMs are not a shortcut. They generate bad writing that yes, people will skip past and complain about, because it is bad and they're tired of seeing it. If you have a point worth communicating that's not a good route to do it.
If I served you a nutritionally superb meal that looked and tasted like straight ass, would you thank me for feeding you, or complain?
In technical writing, there's the facts, and there's the art of making it a good read. You are saying you can supply the facts, but if you get a computer to do the art, well it's simply not art, and it's not going to be a good read. I'd rather just read your notes.
That’s it
Give me your notes and your prompt. If you can’t finish your job just don’t fake it. I will finish it.
I’d stop as soon as I realize it’s LLM. Working too much with LLMs told me to never trust any output. It is very effective at bull shitting and can’t be trusted. Bullshit will get past yourself unless you really rewrite it word by word.
So if i'd share an LLM-assisted written article which shares deep, correct knowledge about some topic with proper cross-references for further reading, would you be happy thst you've learned something interesting or would you complain that the text sounds like it was written by an LLM?
The problem is that your prompt to the LLM contains the entirety of the valuable insight you have, the LLM just pads it out with fluff. I'd rather read that as a handwritten one-paragraph microblog post than the same content stretched out to 10 paragraphs by an LLM.
Sadly obviously LLM generated
How is that obvious?
For me it was this:
That’s not a build system. That’s writing a fucking file that you then serve.
Pangram seems to agree, that it’s entirely AI written.
I’m curious why did the author felt like doing it this way. It only carries any weight if there’s any thought and effort behind it. I can slop up the opposite of this article in mere seconds that probably will be very compelling, but without any weight either.
For me a tell was "But be honest:", but at some point it's just a hunch you develop from reading too much slop.
I wanna tell you a little secret, being a slopspotter is just like being in love. No one needs to tell you you are a slopspotter, you just know it, through and through.
And like being in love, you become completely blind to everything else.
What is the point of bringing this up here? Is the content suddenly without any value whatsoever? You probably don't know, because you immediately stopped reading.
I actually read it fully, but to answer your point: There is an unwritten social contract that when you read someone's writing you assume that they spent more time writing it than you spend reading it, permitting the assumption that reading something brings you a benefit and a minimum of care was taken to assemble the text.
This contract is breached and inverted with LLMs: It takes almost zero time to generate slop, putting into question the quality of the content. Even moreso, because LLMs can output text that looks good on first glance.
That assumes that there is only way of using LLMs and that is to one-shot everything by writing a prompt that you spend no longer than ten seconds thinking about.
There are, of course, more options and almost all of them take more time. Just because some em-dash has survived the editing process (for instance), that does not mean that a social contract was broken. If anything, I'd say that there has been substantial editing done here. A vanilla LLM would have produced much more fluff for this amount of content.
This is a lot more than a stray em dash.
People don't want to consume slop in any form - writing, media, even code - because it's generally a signal that the author has cut corners somewhere in order to produce something quickly, which will likely affect quality. People get tired of assuming good faith and trying to find a point in something that it turns out lacks one.
Slop writing is also bad writing - it's not fit for its actual purpose of communicating effectively. What is "good writing" then? It's hard to spell out exactly but LLMs genuinely make it worse.
If the author did put in significant effort to create this article, then used an LLM to generate large amounts of prose - sacrificing their own voice and publishing something that everyone can quickly detect is slop - it was a bad tradeoff.
Is the content suddenly without any value whatsoever?
Sort of? If the author didn't care enough about the problem to write this, should we care enough about the problem to read it, or to implement the advice?
You don't know how much of it is generated. It could've been plain "write me a modern motherfucking website" or it could've been "here's the content for the website, adjust it into the motherfucking website style", or anywhere in between.
I get pointing out LLM usage in bad cases. But here it distracts from actually good content.
Suppose it is generated. Then see if you can spot any irony.
Now you need Node, a package manager, 1,100 dependencies, a bundler, a transpiler, a meta‐framework, a hydration strategy, and a CI pipeline to put a paragraph on a screen.
You type them. With your fingers. Into a file.
readable top to bottom by a human being, the way the web was meant to be.
I'll not be lectured on wastage by a generated ream of eDgY swears without a hint of self-awareness. It might contain some truths but it lacks value as media.
Unless I’m missing something, the OpenGraph part is misleading. Sure, it’s just a few tags, but how do you trivially create the linked image?
I am not entirely sure what you mean
<meta property="og:image" content="https://modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems/www.webp">
There is an image there, see for yourself https://modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems/www.webp
As others have pointed out this is LLM generated so it misses the mark. So it misses some steps to add a favicon properly as well which I'd say is a requirement if you care enough about meta tags. And obviously any logo image you'd need to create yourself somehow.
My point is that it’s not just a line of markup. You have to create an image, and ideally a different preview image for each page, to provide the best user experience. And what size/format should be used? Is it even worth my time? (I don’t bother with OG images, myself.) There’s a lot of missing information.
It is so easy problem for a blog or any static site.
What would you suggest for e-commerce? Social network? Banking?
I suspect that a lot of e-commerce sites would be more enjoyable to use (and possibly generate more sales) were they statically generated and used clean HTML. Likewise banking.
Dunno about social networking sites, although even a lot of those could be statically generated on each update.
