my most recent website is fully static html and css. it contains several pages and a menu that is duplicated in all pages.
that menu is maintained manually, and every time a page is added, all copies of the menu have to be updated. at some point that will get tedious. then i have a few options:
i generate the menu using a backend framework. the downside: the website is no longer fully static. i now depend on a backend framework for hosting. static hosting is out. i also have to edit the content through the backend, and i have to continuously maintain the backend for the lifetime of the site.
i generate the menu using a static site builder. the downside: i can no longer edit the content directly in html. i have to keep a source version for the static site generator, and more critically, i have to keep a copy of the site generator in my repo because i want to be able to make changes to this site 10 years from now and not find that the version of the site generator i was using is no longer available for download and my source is not compatible with the new version of the site generator.
i generate the menu using xslt. works, but xslt is no better than javascript security wise. it's possibly even worse. and xslt support may be removed from browsers in the future.
the final option is javascript. using some framework that doesn't need build tools, or something homegrown. i am afraid javascript is the only option that is futureproof while letting me avoid manual work to maintain the menu.
While purists will disagree, a little bit of javascript is fine. Having said that, you are talking about a personal website. Most companies will have a backend of some sort anyway.
Also, here is a little secret. If you want something that is future proof, try something that has been around for decades and still runs large parts of the internet. People will scoff at this, but PHP is actually really neat for personal websites and has been for decades.
A while ago I also found myself looking at static site generators, workflows from github to my host, etc. Eventually I realized I don't update things nearly enough, don't blog, etc.
For similar reasons as you I didn't want to go completely static as that is just too much hassle when doing multiple pages. So I decided to utilize that good old lamp stack to basically do something like this.
Slightly more, but the base principle is the same. Just 10 lines of php code, and now I can just add pages by uploading their contents and adding them to the json file for whitelisting. For your use case it would be trivial to add a menu based on the json file and I'd be confident that it will still work in 10 years with minimal adjustments.
As a bonus I also rediscovered PHP in itself works really well as a templating language (as you can see) so no need for extra stuff like handlebars. As an extra extra bonus, I can just go to any shared webhosting party and get it running with no issue at all.
I am not saying you'd need to go down this road. But I just want to illustrate how stupidly simple a website can be with "old" basic technologies even if you want some form of backend.
This seems like a very complicated way to maintain a menu on a static website. Have you considered using old school server side includes? It’s what they were designed for.
server side includes are just a variant of the backend framework. they have the same problem. i'd still be locked in. and i'd depend on and have to maintain a backend for the lifetime of the site.
In the US this always seems to be called "overdraft protection", as in "do you want overdraft protection on your account?"
I can never remember if overdraft protection means "we won't let your account overdraft", or "we will let your account overdraft"
It is an incredibly confusing name to me
I could look up the answer now, but I know I will just forget it again. I must have looked it up and then forgotten at least 10 separate times over the years
Normally means that if your checking accout balance hits zero, they will pull from your savings account rather than returning a check presented for payment. They may (probably will) still charge you a fee when this happens, but it might be less than an overdraft.
Or, it might be a case where they grant you a short-term personal loan to cover the overdraft (up to some limit) rather than return checks. Again there will be fees and interest on this.
In either case, since they are not rejecting payments, you avoid getting hit with fees from whomever you wrote the check to. So your only fees/penalties are paid to the bank.
Of course the best answer is just keep better track of your checking account balance.
Of course, the funny part about that is that they charge you to check your balance at the ATM. It's almost as if they don't want you to and have to pay their fee.
Which of course is about as odorous fee as possible. You don't have enough money, so we're going to charge you more money?
It probably depends on the bank, but setting one's overdraft limit to zero doesn't necessarily help and may actually make things worse: some payments may still go through even if you don't have the funds, putting you in unauthorised overdraft, which tends to have a high daily fee.
google search results were true in that they accurately reflected the content of the pages that were found. it would then be up to me to decide if i trust those actual pages.
that trust level obviously varies, but for example if the page found is from wikipedia i know that the content has been reviewed by multiple people, so i can trust that more than say a blog post on the same topic.
on the other hand, AI results are not certain to be an accurate reflection of that wikipedia content, and therefore it is less useful than the page itself.
practically speaking i don't even look at the results in detail. i just check if my search keywords match and then i open the pages and read them myself.
the AI summary does not tell me which keywords on the pages matched. it is therefore completely useless.
the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills
how?
errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
google would be right to remove all AI results from germany
By checking the citations rather than taking what’s generated at face value.
If it’s important, check it. If it’s not important, then it is pretty much just entertainment.
LLMs can be very useful in a general web search and save some time, but if you don’t put those literacy & critical thinking skills to the test and actually confirm anything, then you might as well not even have bothered with the search at all unless you’re hoping it can just replace all of your original thinking too.
If google didn't intend it's answers to be taken at face value it would just present the citations in a list of links rather than generating an answer.
Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.
The AI summary is still useful for narrowing down the results, even if you fully check the citations.
> Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.
To lazy people yes. That would be a marketing point. It’s not that though, so you use it to save time, but you don’t get to skip the verification step.
Google should not be publishing a statement that they haven't verified. This is different to listing search results links, they are the ones publishing the content here.
A journalist could not make up a harmful statement about someone and get away by saying the readers should have all read the sources. AI companies want to take all the benefits and profits, while holding none of the liability and responsibility for the harms they are causing.
"A journalist could not make up a harmful statement about someone and get away by saying the readers should have all read the sources."
Journalists do that all the time. We even have a whole collection of words to describe it. Muckraking for instance is probably about 100 years old. Its even in the Google auto-complete in the browser I am posting from.
If you re-read the article, you might see that it mentions that the citations do not necessarily cover the AI summary. The linked pages do not make the claims that the AI summary makes. That is the context of the ruling. Google made up the claims, and provided false citations. They are not, in fact, providing a summary, but a whole new narrative. Therefore they own it.
I read the article and I’m aware of the failure modes of Google’s AI summary. They’re actually one of the worst in the space on this shit which is why I don’t use Gemini and it’s fine that they get slapped for this, but what I was responding to initially was this:
> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
Because if someone goes through the citations and it doesn’t substantiate what was generated, then what was generated was obviously bollocks. Being able to recognize those contradictions is an essential skill to using LLMs with web search at all. It’s not rocket science.
> Being able to recognize those contradictions is an essential skill
My eyes are brown.
I dislike coffee.
My phone is on the desk next to me right now.
One of these is false, and the other two are true. Can you recognise which is which? Or do you not have this "essential skill"?
When you're being given information about a topic you don't already know about, there's no skill to be able to recognise which pieces of that information are correct and which aren't. Either you know the information already, or you don't.
nobody has that skill. in order to recognize a contradiction you have to already know something contradictory. if you don't then you can't recognize anything. the only other reason to make you check is that you are very suspicious of this AI thing. you and me are, but who else is?
you can repeat a thousand times that people should not trust an AI summary and they will not get it. they have neither the motivation nor the energy to do that research.
it's like saying people should not use a computer if they don't know how to keep it secure.
you have to look at the reality, which is that people are not educated or critical enough to use AI safely. and that misinformation can cause people to get killed.
just yesterday there was a post about a man being falsely accused of a crime by AI tools and losing his job and his family as a consequence.
these mistakes destroy lives, and most people are far to trusting to use AI tools safely
Important for whom exactly? If it's you who are called convicted pedo by Google AI summary, it's you who has vital interest in additional research but not me who reads it. There's intentions mismatch. Which probably would destroy your life, and you won't call it "entertainment" then, I think.
If those are things you legitimately care about before you spend one penny on a T-Shirt, then you are. Or you did your research before hand. Or you’re just not buying the T-Shirt.
Or you don’t care about those things at all, and you will buy the T-Shirt that’s in front of you right now rather than wait later and buy one that better reflects your supposed values when you’ve done an appropriate amount of research. Using AI may even reduce the amount of time you spend on that part.
Your T-Shirt buying patterns & values are not my concern though.
You are confusing who is the party that is injured--as many in this thread are. We are not talking about the consumer who buys a non-fairtrade t-shirt, when he would rather had a fairtrade one. It's about the t-shirt producers who is legitimately fairtrade but whose business is now in the shitter because of a lying AI.
LLMs can’t lie. They are incapable of telling either the truth or lying. To the extent that they are in any way useful, it’s recognizing that they are text generators attached to crawlers and other tools that can with the right inputs produce useful generated text that may also incidentally be correct or incorrect.
Businesses might (well, will) suffer because people are misusing AI, but it is a misuse to do anything with it without an additional verification step.
To be clear here, I have no issue with Google taking it on the chin in cases like this, but what the comment I was originally responding to had this:
> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.
And my point is this: if it matters, verification is not optional. If it doesn’t matter, then fine, skip the verification step, but if you’re taking whatever text is generated by a GPT at face value without understanding what that is or being able to determine the source inputs for the “claims” it outputs, then you’re part of the problem because sometimes the source is just a GPT-generated web page, and that’s obviously not trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a MediaWiki site page that doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s MediaWiki it’s not going to return a 404. Using a tool requires understanding it including its failure modes, and in the case of LLMs that means: trust nothing, verify everything.
what's most grating is that heise as a technical publication that is much more familiar with these issues should really know about this.
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