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Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined

freeformatter.com

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined

#32
post #3

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.

Re: Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined

#34

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

Re: Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined

#35
post #27

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 p…

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

Re: Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined

#37
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.

Re: Another Corner of the Internet Has Been Ruined

#39
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I put your initial comment into Pangram and it said "We believe that this entire text is AI." So.
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