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Meanwhile AI has created 10x as many corners, some even open source and without the expectation of being for-profit.
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.
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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.
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.
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 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 res…
That's surprising. Isn't that a quite famous service? Is there a service implemented using only clientside js without sending?
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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 A…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
However, in this particular case, AI has certainly helped us get much more tools, including those without the expectation of profit.
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.
You're incapable of imagining any other options?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
It's baffling that people would rather call BS on me than try the actual tool being talked about.