Though I empathise with the OP, I feel that SaaS tools now need to add much more value in order to be sellable or appeal to the audience.
The factors that used to influence the build vs. buy decision are now changing. Earlier, even small tools like Canny (which shows your product roadmap to your customers), link-in-bio tools, or even Calendly used to sell well. I foresee that changing.
And, frankly, fuck 'em if they can't keep up. It's truly the best and most ethical outcome for everyone if the people the economy no longer needs to the way of work horses. Maybe there's a business opportunity in organ harvesting. Sam Altman should fund some startups.
There was someone on HN who shared a collection of dozens of single purpose local/offline web apps for things like file conversions, I think image cropping, and other one-offs like that. Anyone remember?
Nice thing about local PWAs is you serve them statically, CDNs make bandwidth cheap, way fewer vulnerabilities for the host, and all the compute cost is paid by the user's browser.
> FreeFormatter.com [was] a popular online utility website that provides free formatting, validation, conversion, and minification tools for developers, data professionals, and web administrators working with code and data structures like JSON, XML, HTML, SQL, and Java
So I had to copy-paste my source code into a web site, submit, then copy-paste the text back out into my document? I'm not putting down the work the author did, but that workflow was always going to be completely obsolete at some point.
I didn't say I found no utility, it could have tons of utility, but technology changes over time. Perhaps the gentleman author could have produced a desktop Electron app or something similar running locally.
I think this is something to keep in mind whenever approaching a new project, especially solo. Eventually, the end of the road is unavoidable.
I started teaching an (older) adult Sunday school class almost exactly one year ago this coming Sunday. I post the notes on one of my blogs. They're generated as a static site via Astro, and I have a few Markdown helpers for making it easier to link to scripture, etc., and while it's not a lot of work, I know I'll tire of it eventually. Or something else will come up.
I doubt I'll be happy whenever it does, but I'm extremely appreciative of your comment for this reason. I hope I'll remember what you've written when that day arrives.
In this particular case - good riddance. Such tools should not require a round-trip to an ad-infested website on the other side of the world. The crucial issue is that in the process you have to trust the owner (and perhaps ad network owners) with your data.
Even if you want a round trip, you could have a static page somewhere on GitHub.
The fact that the models made this business model obsolete is not necessarily a bad thing.
I don't know if this website specifically did it, but a lot of other similar websites provide such services in a very bad way, for example base64encode.org and base64decode.org send your data to the server instead of using JS, and no one knows what they do with it.
I do understand that some still prefer browsers with JS disabled, but a website could probably detect this and default to in-browser processing, while reserving server-side to those edge cases.
I'm not sure I understand the intended message here. The author seems to describe their own project as "cover[ed] ... with invasive advertising" while saying that new technology accomplishes the same outcomes "faster, cheaper, and [with less maintenance burden]". So what exactly has been ruined?
Rather than saying LLM directly replaced it... isn't it because people can now use LLM to obtain tools like converters they previously couldn't find (due to the hassle), or create them themselves through code generation?
I really liked freeformatter.com . Used it all the time. To those that build, host, and serve single-function websites, that (yes) can be easily replicated with AI, I salute you. Thank you for your service.
What a shame. This was a really valuable resource and now it's just gone. Not because the author doesn't want to compete, not because they don't want to do it anymore, but because industry rolled over them
This has a very similar feel to me like local stores closing up because Walmart showed up next door, or beloved used bookstores dying because Amazon exists. Everything good in life right now is being churned into productivity and profit by hyper capital. The result is we all live "better" but poorer lives
Sorry for the rant. I'm also on the verge of giving up, so this hits me very hard
Right, this is why you go to the farrier to get your horse reshod every month....
There are plenty of Amish communities around, maybe you can join one of them to see what life looks like with slow technology progress. See how fulfilled you are there.
So it has to be one or the other then? Completely eschew technology and return to subsistence living, or aggressive hypercapitalism that is monetizing every single inch of our public lives and commoditizing our very existence?
I can imagine thousands of other options, but game theory tells me which ones are the most likely globally.
Aggressive hypercapitalism is a multipolar problem. It will optimize for itself, it will attack and remove groups that stand up to it, it has the ability to capture large amounts of wealth and power, and it will take a massive and organized group of people and organizations to keep it in check.
So, please tell me how we stop aggressive hypercapitalism, I'd like to know.
From the sounds of it - Devutils on MacOS is an excellent offline (native app) slop-free alternative and the license is worth it for the extra functions and supporting the developer. Boop is free, open source and also great.
Not sure what to suggest for Linux or Windows. I think I remember seeing something similar on Flathub for Linux but the name eludes me atm.
Another great resource gone. I often use tools like this for quick conversions or cleanups. Always admired sites like this and wondered how people paid for and maintained them for so long. Continues the sad trend of sites and people going offline.
People who believe AI will remain user friendly and affordable forever are like people who believed streaming would remain cheap and friendly to password sharing forever.
If you're right (and thank you for this comment by the way - I hadn't spotted any AI tells, but I think you may be, as they say, absolutely right about the maintenance backlog achieving immortality - a useful reminder that I need more practice), I'm not sure it's actually ironic. Since the statement does actually say that you can get AI to do all this stuff now, and doesn't appear to be complaining about this aspect of the situation.
This wasn't written with AI... obviously... I feel like there might need to be a new definition for whatever this paranoia is called because it's getting a bit out of hand.
Not what? It's incredibly ironic that the creator is complaining about AI yet they used AI just to write a tiny text announcement. Apparently such a tiny snippet didn't deserve human writing.
"It was written with AI!" is boring (and often wrong). It shows up on almost every post, and doesn't require any skill or insight. That's why GP said "Can you please not?" It's just not interesting.
I only post it when I'm sure and I cross verified. And in this case specifically it's not boring, quite the opposite, it just shows that humans can be quite inconsistent. I really hope HN would extend its no LLM rule to articles/text, although this is too hard to enforce. When I look at HN, I want to read human text, I don't mind the use of LLMs for actual code and use it a lot myself. My issue is with people who generate whole articles with LLMs and present them as if they were written by a real human.
It is so obviously AI that it is scary how duped these morons have become. I guess HN is another corner of the internet ruined... which is what I initially thought this headline was going to be about. HN has been absolutely destroyed by the ignorant reddit hivemind type.
You are a fool if you think you can detect AI reliably from such a short sample. It seems not to have occurred to you that some people can write with expression and wit, and AI emulates their style.
You are a fool if you really think that the linked text is human written. I interact with LLMs basically daily, it's incredibly easy to spot their default styles. And, honestly, you should trust Pangram over me.
Ooh, you interact with them basically daily! Amazing! Tell us more, we long term residents of a technology news forum are ignorant of such wonders. We know nothing of 'gradient descent' or the 'vibe coding' that travelers speak of.
I mean, I've seen HN detecting AI written articles at a 300 to 500% rate, like that time they were saying an article originally written in 2015 was by AI.
So do this, if you think it's AI written send a complaint to the hackernews email address to have it removed. If you don't want to do that, don't spam up the comments calling articles AI.
And those AI detectors are hot worthless garbage. Just like YouTube detecting Kurzgesagt as AI last week. Useless.
Can you show some examples of Pangram being "hot worthless garbage"? This reputation is true for most other detectors, but Pangram spends considerable effort to have an extremely low false positive rate. I think you just used some of them in 2023 and now think that they can't be made better.
Language is a living thing. At one time saying 'cool' to mean something was neat wasn't a thing. Then someone used it that way and it spread throughout humanity (or least English speakers in the US).
This means as people use AI and read AI we'll start speaking like AI just as much as AI speaks like us. ESL people tend to have it even worse as they commonly speak a more proper subset of English and get identified as AI quite often.
The Panagram CEO was saying some rather dumb shit recently that they have high detection rates of AI because they can put in documents from X years ago and they are not detected as AI. This tells you absolutely nothing about if a recently written document is human or AI written at all!
Okay, I have a test for you. It's a bit undocumented, but I'm pretty sure HN is using Pangram or a similar tool to auto flag AI written comments. Can you copy the entire text from the linked article and reply with it here, and see what happens to your reply, would it get flagged or not? I think this will show you what reality we live in.
Can you actually just do the test I explained? You seem to be basing your evaluation of Pangram on some old experiences. It's a very reliable service, used by research conferences and universities.
It's baffling that people would rather call BS on me than try the actual tool being talked about.
It is not a reliable service. The CEO likes to say that it failed 1 time out of 10,000. In Panagrams own research the failure rate was shown at 2%. That's a pretty massive difference.
How about you do this, write your own words on a topic, but use AI-isms in it. A few 'not X but Y' an a few EM dashes and watch it say you're text is AI written.
Writing using AI stylisms has nothing to do if a text is actually written by AI or not. The tests are mostly bullshit because just adding some informalisms in the text corpus tends to get it counted as non-AI. It's not detecting what you think it is.
Who cares about Pangram? Why do you care about Pangram? Why not leverage our own intelligence? How does this post read to you? To me, it does not read like it was written by AI.
... Come on now. This is obviously because I quoted the LLM written parts from the article. Remove the quoted parts and try again. Do people not understand what LLM detectors do?
And, to be fair, short texts are one of the areas where even Pangram struggles, with a longer text it would be able to identify it as a mix of human and AI written text. They clearly disclose that short text detection is less reliable.
The fact that anyone as any faith in an AI language detector at all blows my mind. It seems that every AI detector that gets productized gets as bad as the AI CEOs themselves and starts making claims their products cannot accomplish. They try to sell it as a black and white detection product while covering up the error bars are huge.
Though I empathise with the OP, I feel that SaaS tools now need to add much more value in order to be sellable or appeal to the audience.
The factors that used to influence the build vs. buy decision are now changing. Earlier, even small tools like Canny (which shows your product roadmap to your customers), link-in-bio tools, or even Calendly used to sell well. I foresee that changing.
Is it the same as the proverbial buggy whip manufacturers of 100 years ago complaining about how their business is yet another ruined by cars?
In your example, humans are the horses
> In your example, humans are the horses
And, frankly, fuck 'em if they can't keep up. It's truly the best and most ethical outcome for everyone if the people the economy no longer needs to the way of work horses. Maybe there's a business opportunity in organ harvesting. Sam Altman should fund some startups.
If you want a future, get on board with it.
There was someone on HN who shared a collection of dozens of single purpose local/offline web apps for things like file conversions, I think image cropping, and other one-offs like that. Anyone remember?
Nice thing about local PWAs is you serve them statically, CDNs make bandwidth cheap, way fewer vulnerabilities for the host, and all the compute cost is paid by the user's browser.
> There was someone on HN who shared a collection of dozens of single purpose local/offline web apps
Maybe this one?
Useful patterns for building HTML tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223882
The direct link to the collection of HTML tools: https://tools.simonwillison.net
I see at least one pr. day here (but I only read /newest)
IT-Tools, maybe? https://github.com/CorentinTh/it-tools
CyberChef? https://cyberchef.io/
Not that one
From Gemini,
> FreeFormatter.com [was] a popular online utility website that provides free formatting, validation, conversion, and minification tools for developers, data professionals, and web administrators working with code and data structures like JSON, XML, HTML, SQL, and Java
Makes sense. Great exit letter.
So I had to copy-paste my source code into a web site, submit, then copy-paste the text back out into my document? I'm not putting down the work the author did, but that workflow was always going to be completely obsolete at some point.
for one-shots and non-developers, it was useful. Simply because you found no utility in it doesn't mean there isn't one.
I didn't say I found no utility, it could have tons of utility, but technology changes over time. Perhaps the gentleman author could have produced a desktop Electron app or something similar running locally.
Or a static HTML file served by (GitHub|Codeberg|Cloudflare|Vercel|Netlify) Pages, and run the formatting logic client-side.
It’s also entirely ok to manage something for a long period of time and reach your end. No shame in walking away.
I think this is something to keep in mind whenever approaching a new project, especially solo. Eventually, the end of the road is unavoidable.
I started teaching an (older) adult Sunday school class almost exactly one year ago this coming Sunday. I post the notes on one of my blogs. They're generated as a static site via Astro, and I have a few Markdown helpers for making it easier to link to scripture, etc., and while it's not a lot of work, I know I'll tire of it eventually. Or something else will come up.
I doubt I'll be happy whenever it does, but I'm extremely appreciative of your comment for this reason. I hope I'll remember what you've written when that day arrives.
Thank you, I parsed the url as "free for matter" and was very confused
In this particular case - good riddance. Such tools should not require a round-trip to an ad-infested website on the other side of the world. The crucial issue is that in the process you have to trust the owner (and perhaps ad network owners) with your data. Even if you want a round trip, you could have a static page somewhere on GitHub. The fact that the models made this business model obsolete is not necessarily a bad thing.
I liked Boop's[1] strapline for this:
> Stop pasting company secrets into random websites.
[1]<https://boop.okat.best/>
Last non-retired archived version: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260722191742/https://www.freef...>
I don't know if this website specifically did it, but a lot of other similar websites provide such services in a very bad way, for example base64encode.org and base64decode.org send your data to the server instead of using JS, and no one knows what they do with it.
I do understand that some still prefer browsers with JS disabled, but a website could probably detect this and default to in-browser processing, while reserving server-side to those edge cases.
That's surprising. Isn't that a quite famous service? Is there a service implemented using only clientside js without sending?
famous? not sure about that, but they have the best SEO so it's always the goto.
There is sort of a file sharing community in Korea, and it is customary to encode links in base64 there.
I'm not really sure why they do that. It's not even a tech-related community. Anyway, they tell you to use base64encode.org.
Sure enough, even after the demise of the internet, the humble cookie consent banner still asks to share our personal information.
I'm not sure I understand the intended message here. The author seems to describe their own project as "cover[ed] ... with invasive advertising" while saying that new technology accomplishes the same outcomes "faster, cheaper, and [with less maintenance burden]". So what exactly has been ruined?
Exactly. And having AI to work out the 2am dependency issues actually makes maintenance a lot easier. This seems like an odd message.
What kind of urgent dependency updates could happen at 2am for a json formatter anyway?
On that particular point, I wondered whether there was supposed to have been a "not" before "cover"; otherwise, it definitely doesn't seem to follow.
Rather than saying LLM directly replaced it... isn't it because people can now use LLM to obtain tools like converters they previously couldn't find (due to the hassle), or create them themselves through code generation?
I really liked freeformatter.com . Used it all the time. To those that build, host, and serve single-function websites, that (yes) can be easily replicated with AI, I salute you. Thank you for your service.
I could be sad this was gone if I had any idea what it was.
Why the free advertising for AI? There are thousands of code formatters starting with GNU indent, linters etc.
Oh wow, my little online tool only just launched...
I suspect it will reincarnate in a different form.
Gotta love the complaining about cookie banners while also showing a cookie banner.
What a shame. This was a really valuable resource and now it's just gone. Not because the author doesn't want to compete, not because they don't want to do it anymore, but because industry rolled over them
This has a very similar feel to me like local stores closing up because Walmart showed up next door, or beloved used bookstores dying because Amazon exists. Everything good in life right now is being churned into productivity and profit by hyper capital. The result is we all live "better" but poorer lives
Sorry for the rant. I'm also on the verge of giving up, so this hits me very hard
Right, this is why you go to the farrier to get your horse reshod every month....
There are plenty of Amish communities around, maybe you can join one of them to see what life looks like with slow technology progress. See how fulfilled you are there.
Technology progress != Shareholder value extraction
So it has to be one or the other then? Completely eschew technology and return to subsistence living, or aggressive hypercapitalism that is monetizing every single inch of our public lives and commoditizing our very existence?
You're incapable of imagining any other options?
I can imagine thousands of other options, but game theory tells me which ones are the most likely globally.
Aggressive hypercapitalism is a multipolar problem. It will optimize for itself, it will attack and remove groups that stand up to it, it has the ability to capture large amounts of wealth and power, and it will take a massive and organized group of people and organizations to keep it in check.
So, please tell me how we stop aggressive hypercapitalism, I'd like to know.
[dead]
From the sounds of it - Devutils on MacOS is an excellent offline (native app) slop-free alternative and the license is worth it for the extra functions and supporting the developer. Boop is free, open source and also great.
Not sure what to suggest for Linux or Windows. I think I remember seeing something similar on Flathub for Linux but the name eludes me atm.
Another great resource gone. I often use tools like this for quick conversions or cleanups. Always admired sites like this and wondered how people paid for and maintained them for so long. Continues the sad trend of sites and people going offline.
Meanwhile AI has created 10x as many corners, some even open source and without the expectation of being for-profit.
People who believe AI will remain user friendly and affordable forever are like people who believed streaming would remain cheap and friendly to password sharing forever.
LLMs are only useful if they are affordable.
I’m paying OpenAI pennies on the dollar for the value I receive.
I didn't say that about AI, AI will likely get more expensive and it has already worsened affordability of consumer electronics in general..
However, in this particular case, AI has certainly helped us get much more tools, including those without the expectation of profit.
[flagged]
If you're right (and thank you for this comment by the way - I hadn't spotted any AI tells, but I think you may be, as they say, absolutely right about the maintenance backlog achieving immortality - a useful reminder that I need more practice), I'm not sure it's actually ironic. Since the statement does actually say that you can get AI to do all this stuff now, and doesn't appear to be complaining about this aspect of the situation.
This wasn't written with AI... obviously... I feel like there might need to be a new definition for whatever this paranoia is called because it's getting a bit out of hand.
AI is trained on how people on the internet talk. The message just sounds like a pissed off dude whose style was copied by slopbots.
It's annoying that such comments are now part of every post now.
Can you not?
Not what? It's incredibly ironic that the creator is complaining about AI yet they used AI just to write a tiny text announcement. Apparently such a tiny snippet didn't deserve human writing.
"It was written with AI!" is boring (and often wrong). It shows up on almost every post, and doesn't require any skill or insight. That's why GP said "Can you please not?" It's just not interesting.
I only post it when I'm sure and I cross verified. And in this case specifically it's not boring, quite the opposite, it just shows that humans can be quite inconsistent. I really hope HN would extend its no LLM rule to articles/text, although this is too hard to enforce. When I look at HN, I want to read human text, I don't mind the use of LLMs for actual code and use it a lot myself. My issue is with people who generate whole articles with LLMs and present them as if they were written by a real human.
To anyone who's willing to do a short HN test, please see and try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212433
You're in for a nice surprise.
You are so sure they used AI. It looks like you didn't bother asking them, yet know more about what they do than themselves.
BTW, this sarcastic comment didn't use AI. I can put some em dashes if that helps you on your little crusade — — — — —.
You have no idea. Stop it.
If you cannot see that the linked text is LLM written, I've got bad news for you.
It is so obviously AI that it is scary how duped these morons have become. I guess HN is another corner of the internet ruined... which is what I initially thought this headline was going to be about. HN has been absolutely destroyed by the ignorant reddit hivemind type.
You are a fool if you think you can detect AI reliably from such a short sample. It seems not to have occurred to you that some people can write with expression and wit, and AI emulates their style.
You are a fool if you really think that the linked text is human written. I interact with LLMs basically daily, it's incredibly easy to spot their default styles. And, honestly, you should trust Pangram over me.
Ooh, you interact with them basically daily! Amazing! Tell us more, we long term residents of a technology news forum are ignorant of such wonders. We know nothing of 'gradient descent' or the 'vibe coding' that travelers speak of.
"AI Writing Detectors" are absolutely full of false positives, as anyone working in education or related fields can attest.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212433 and try yourself. And Pangram has been confirmed to be working by reputable educational institution, too.
I mean, I've seen HN detecting AI written articles at a 300 to 500% rate, like that time they were saying an article originally written in 2015 was by AI.
So do this, if you think it's AI written send a complaint to the hackernews email address to have it removed. If you don't want to do that, don't spam up the comments calling articles AI.
And those AI detectors are hot worthless garbage. Just like YouTube detecting Kurzgesagt as AI last week. Useless.
Can you show some examples of Pangram being "hot worthless garbage"? This reputation is true for most other detectors, but Pangram spends considerable effort to have an extremely low false positive rate. I think you just used some of them in 2023 and now think that they can't be made better.
Language is a living thing. At one time saying 'cool' to mean something was neat wasn't a thing. Then someone used it that way and it spread throughout humanity (or least English speakers in the US).
This means as people use AI and read AI we'll start speaking like AI just as much as AI speaks like us. ESL people tend to have it even worse as they commonly speak a more proper subset of English and get identified as AI quite often.
The Panagram CEO was saying some rather dumb shit recently that they have high detection rates of AI because they can put in documents from X years ago and they are not detected as AI. This tells you absolutely nothing about if a recently written document is human or AI written at all!
Total snake oil.
Okay, I have a test for you. It's a bit undocumented, but I'm pretty sure HN is using Pangram or a similar tool to auto flag AI written comments. Can you copy the entire text from the linked article and reply with it here, and see what happens to your reply, would it get flagged or not? I think this will show you what reality we live in.
Pangram is just some BS man can you please stop
Can you actually just do the test I explained? You seem to be basing your evaluation of Pangram on some old experiences. It's a very reliable service, used by research conferences and universities.
It's baffling that people would rather call BS on me than try the actual tool being talked about.
It is not a reliable service. The CEO likes to say that it failed 1 time out of 10,000. In Panagrams own research the failure rate was shown at 2%. That's a pretty massive difference.
How about you do this, write your own words on a topic, but use AI-isms in it. A few 'not X but Y' an a few EM dashes and watch it say you're text is AI written.
Writing using AI stylisms has nothing to do if a text is actually written by AI or not. The tests are mostly bullshit because just adding some informalisms in the text corpus tends to get it counted as non-AI. It's not detecting what you think it is.
Who cares about Pangram? Why do you care about Pangram? Why not leverage our own intelligence? How does this post read to you? To me, it does not read like it was written by AI.
I put your initial comment into Pangram and it said "We believe that this entire text is AI." So.
... Come on now. This is obviously because I quoted the LLM written parts from the article. Remove the quoted parts and try again. Do people not understand what LLM detectors do?
And, to be fair, short texts are one of the areas where even Pangram struggles, with a longer text it would be able to identify it as a mix of human and AI written text. They clearly disclose that short text detection is less reliable.
The fact that anyone as any faith in an AI language detector at all blows my mind. It seems that every AI detector that gets productized gets as bad as the AI CEOs themselves and starts making claims their products cannot accomplish. They try to sell it as a black and white detection product while covering up the error bars are huge.
It's ironic since your comment was clearly written with AI.
Apparently even an HN comment didn't deserve human writing.