Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined | Hacker News Reader

Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined

freeformatter.com

66 pointseappleby80 comments

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.

CyberChef? https://cyberchef.io/

Not that one

IT-Tools, maybe? https://github.com/CorentinTh/it-tools

> 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)

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.

you know: you're the work horse of this conversation right now. you add nothing of value to it.

This is what everyone says until hardship befalls them and they are forced to see reality in every facet. After which they have a drastic change of heart. I think adults all go through this at some point.

For about 3 or 4 decades I felt this way. I have found many of us "futurists" to just be exceedingly naive in that we do not see the whole picture; rather--we cherry-pick what we think the world is (or should be) and impose that view onto everyone.

Then we meet someone who does see the whole picture and feel attacked. Even more so if what they are saying sounds perfectly sound in logic.

The thing that people hate most is being told things that make sense that force them to abandon their way of thinking.

The go-to is to find other naive people who think the same thing and form a negative consensus to combat what we already knew as true. Strength in numbers. If 90% of the people said the sky is green, it would be green no question about it.

If the current events of the world don't prove that, I don't know what does.

Last non-retired archived version: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260722191742/https://www.freef...>

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/>

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.

Thank you, I parsed the url as "free for matter" and was very confused

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.

Sure enough, even after the demise of the internet, the humble cookie consent banner still asks to share our personal information.

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.

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.

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.

Why the free advertising for AI? There are thousands of code formatters starting with GNU indent, linters etc.

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?

Gotta love the complaining about cookie banners while also showing a cookie banner.

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.

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.

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.

LLMs are only useful if they are affordable.

I’m paying OpenAI pennies on the dollar for the value I receive.

Oh wow, my little online tool only just launched...

I suspect it will reincarnate in a different form.

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.

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