Comment by tempworkac 3 days ago
strange comment - this should be a website that would presumably be hosting, where exactly?
the average person would not be able to make something even close to this sheet. where are they going to host it? do they have a domain? certs? do they even know how to write html? css? during a spiky event such as a wildfire, will their website even stay up?
I don't think it's strange at all.
Wouldn't this be a near perfect use-case for AI generated websites?
>Wouldn't this be a near perfect use-case for AI generated websites?
A non-tech user prompting ChatGPT to write out HTML+CSS+Javascript still doesn't cover the other logistical challenges of hosting it on a server somewhere. E.g. Buy a domain? Then buy web hosting package? Or use Netlify? Amazon S3?
Maybe someday OpenAI will have AI agents with authority to pay with customers' credit-cards and opens Cloudflare or DigitalOcean accounts on the users' behalf. That's a long time into the future where such a workflow would be trusted by non-technical end users. And then you still have the irony of using another proprietary entity of AI to empower users to put up web pages.
Whether the internet was 1990s Geocities or something like Github Pages today, a user sharing content on a personal webpage is not a trivial task. So non-techies compensate with commercial services such as MySpace pages, Twitter tweets, Facebook pages, or examples like this thread's Google Docs spreadsheet. A common theme of all those commercial services is: they handled the complexities of web hosting.
EDIT reply: >I feel like this response contains within it a great deal of contempt for average people
No, you misinterpreted. I was trying to get techies to empathize with typical end users and understand the reasons why they don't host their own web pages. If that empathy was fully internalized, we'd already predict that a ChatGPT-CoPilot assisted HTML tool isn't the only issue. The gp you replied to highlighted that in his first paragraph.
I have true admiration and not contempt for the end users at this charity using Google Spreadsheets to empower themselves to share a doc without waiting for a "real programmer or webmaster" to do it for them.
>Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere,
What's the current best answer for "website for free somewhere" that doesn't have the same criticism of being a proprietary entity that this subthread's gp was lamenting?
I feel like this response contains within it a great deal of contempt for average people and their problem solving ability.
Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere, and do the same for any logistical challenges that arise beyond that?
People could do that. Or they can click "new doc" in Docs, start typing, then copy the URL and send it to a friend. Look at that, they published a page, no problem solving necessary. Thus people, no matter their ability, will probably default to that approach.
I don't think it's a value judgement to say one thing is easier than another and hence people will. Choose the easier thing.
If we want more folks to use and build websites, it needs to be Google-Docs level easy, otherwise people will use Google Docs.
In addition this includes tracking your own info in it. So now we're going to need auth and a backend to store the data on top of that.