Post #3707020

2026-07-10 01:29 UTC

I created my homepage https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/ back in 1997 (web.archive.org's earliest version is at https://web.archive.org/web/19970521060812/http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/ ). Over time, I added to it substantially, for instance creating detailed subpages to hold 300+ of my papers, links to my past travel and teaching, my CV, and the like. But it has stayed the same "Web 1.0" architecture since 1997, updated by hand using vi in my departmental UNIX account. (The one concession I made to the 21st century was to switch to a modern web editor to generate the HTML files, though this came at the cost of being far more bloated than my original hand-typed HTML.) Over the last three decades, the web page became increasingly unmanageable to maintain, with many dead links, outdated or inconsistent information, and the like. In the mid 2000s I did transfer a small amount of the pages to my blog - notably my pages on books, career advice, and applets (although the latter are almost all unusable now due to the obsolesence of Java 1.0); this helped somewhat, as I could update blog pages on via a web interface, but still rather clunky and prone to errors. (1/2)

Replies (2)

@tao@mathstodon.xyz 2026-07-10 01:29

It only occurred to me recently, though, that with modern AI agents it should be a routine matter to migrate this nearly 30-year-old system of files and data to a much more modern and easily maintainable framework. And indeed, after a day of (rather painlessly) working with such an agent, much of this data is now migrated to https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/, with the pages now generated from several YAML files serving as the ground truth, as opposed to each page being separately maintained by hand. In the process multiple inconsistencies with the old human-maintained web sites were discovered. Modern AI still has some tendency to hallucinate, of course, so it is possible that some new errors were also introduced; but upon my inspection it certainly does seem that the error rate is now lower than it was before, and more importantly large-scale corrections are significantly easier to implement. While web page maintainance is perhaps one of the least glamorous or exciting aspects of academic workflow, this type of tedious, routine task seems particularly well suited to modern platforms (such as Github), as well as automated tools (including both modern AI and traditional deterministic scripts). (2/2)

Open ##3707022
@weaselx86@mastodon.social 2026-07-10 04:11

@tao@mathstodon.xyz I ran the first UCLA Math departmental computer when I was a grad student under David Cantor from 1979 to 1982. We had a DEC PDP-11/23 with 512KB RAM, a 70MB disk, and 9600-baud serial ASCII terminals. I brought up Unix v6 and then v7 by generating bootable root images on 2.5MB removable RK05 disks on a computer down in the Comp Sci department. Just as I was leaving in 1982, the department replaced the PDP-11/23 with a VAX, and another grad student, Peter Reiher, took over as sysadmin.

Open ##4296006