Tiny Little Office
tinylittleoffice.com
tinylittleoffice.com
If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.
A civil violation can result in financial penalties but not criminal penalties (prison)
Patent infringement is a tort, not a crime (in nearly all circumstances in nearly all countries).
How so?
Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).
The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.
People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.
And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.
not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).
By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.
The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.
Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.
you'll be spending tokens on getting it maintained, and if you don't spend enough you get pwned by guys who do. who exactly is winning in this scenario?
"democratizing software"...
you mean real oss maintained by professionals and security experts, as opposed to the cannibalized gpl-washed version llm spit out?
Always online, internet of shit and perma update crap came at that same time, first for the OS and later for everything. Oh, plus two decades of using shady Russian software for virus scanning. Shit went up, update everything became everywhere and everyday. Plus gigabyte frameworks for functionality that was kilobytes before.
My point in cursing too much? (Sorry, mentally screaming FUD here.) That tiny code projects, even without an active maintainer, in the LLM-era are probably a lot more secure when run by the people they target (we run containers, and sandboxes, the cool kids run immutable distros). This is democratizing software, and it has the great feel of old.
Please everyone, vibe code tiny project with tiny codebases everyday. Dump them on GitHub in a free tier. Make so many that the people have a free choice again! And go watch Cliff Stoll again for that hacker energy!
So just for select .1% of pros who know how to do that and the rest can get f#cked. "democratizing" software...
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
However for unique, bespoke software (vibe-coded or not), the payoff is as small as a single endpoint. You’ve found an exploit in MikesOwnOfficeSuite and now have access to Mike’s PC. You’ve got to spend the same tokens again to find an exploit in SuesAwesomeOfficeApps. It still might be worth it in a spear-phishing scenario.
Security through obscurity is back!
when the software is supposedly maintained, too
The bottom of the README has instructions to run locally and self-host.
Looks good to me.
That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.
“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.
> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]
For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.
So is mine.
> Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force
Making and distributing software was already “broadly accessible”. The people who could build and host software before (those with access to computing device) are the same who can do it now.
Of course they could, don’t engage in bad faith and properly steel man the argument. They might not have known how but they could certainly learn and there was absolutely nothing stopping them to do so and crack on. All the resources were already ample and free. They just didn’t want to spend the time on it. Which is fine, not everyone should learn to code, but it’s absurd to claim they couldn’t do it before and can now.
No, no they could not. Access to books was very limited then and not that many could read and write. That comparison does not work in the slightest.
Warning: I study medieval writings, from fiction books to clerical notes on supplies. Don't give me that "everyone died at 25 and ate mud" BS.
No one has said that. You’ve already demonstrated you are arguing in profound bad faith (in all three of your comments) so forgive me if I choose to not engage you any further in your quest for a “gotcha” moment. You can keep your internet points.
Of course they could, they just had to learn how, and that’s the point. There was no “gatekeeping”¹ and there was nothing “undemocratic”² about it. The information was already ample and freely available to all. Those who had the means (a computing device) before have the means now and the opposite isn’t true (you still need access to a computing device to prompt and a server to host the things which need hosting).
¹ You didn’t use that word, but it’s a common argument in these conversations.
² For something to be “democratising”, what came before had to be undemocratic.
To me, this is democratization.
Sure anyone could have, but that's always a scale.
Of course. My objection is that the word democratisation was specifically chosen to manipulate us. That’s what bad actors do, they pick positive words to describe bad things so it’s hard to argue against them.
It’s fascinating how a community who can clearly see through “think of the children” as the ruse that it is¹ just gobbles up “democratisation” until they choke. Tech people love to believe they’re immune to manipulation, when doing so is the easiest trick in the book. All you have to do is make the problem interesting enough and the critical part of the brain shuts off.
¹ Because of course we should protect children, that’s positive. The issue becomes when bad actors use that as an excuse to promote actions which do not have protecting children as their true intent.
Also, I don't recognize your authority to gatekeep word definitions. Here in my little hovel, words mean whatever the general mass of readers think they do.
Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.
>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.
> > a great democratizing force
> a great democratizing force
Where have I heard this before? This will surely end well.
Is software a utility or an artistic outlet?
Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.
At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.
I find it completely logical.
Always is a very strong claim.
Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.
I could make other examples: websites of online shops that have been around for a while and that are just medium-sized, local businesses, tend to look much worse than your average influencer webshop. But the medium-sized local business tends to have the much better value for money ratio, and I can tell it from their website.
Design says something. AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you, and that imitation annoys people, rightfully so. That has little to do with AI per se and everything with the immitation the human behind it does.
Now I see your point. Fair enough
It could be the case that marketing is high quality, but the actual project low (tho, of course, this doesn't have to be the case).
And vice versa with low quality (looking) landing page.
It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.
But if it works for people who just want to share their software and avoid working around the packaging and presentation, then I guess "it is what it is".
My issue isn't cookie-cutter, but if by gloss you mean unnecessarily animated, then yeah. But I've had this issue for over a decade. AI without direction is just mimicking popular site designs that were doing this same crap before.
> At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
How do you feel about WordPress / Hugo themes?
I knew a web dev who exclusively made WordPress websites for local small businesses. They always looked great. The themes were put together by hand with care from a designer, and the developer/end user filled them and tweaked them *purposefully*.
Sure if you have some web dev experience you start spotting them, but that never turned me off from a business in the same way that the above page does. I expected every business to have a website, but not for every business to commission a wholly bespoke design system. The themes available were numerous and of high enough quality that they were fit for purpose and didn't have this nauseating effect, at least for me.
I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).
And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
Here's a deck I had it generate about how the URL format works: https://bit.ly/4yRBc1v
Personally I like to keep my LaTeX tooling local so it can integrate with everything I already use, and I own simple plaintext files.
Just one example: Every university and academic publication in the world give LaTeX formatting templates, examples courses etc.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but typst is past the very early phase and LLMs are decent at generating it. Also, many formatting templates have been converted to typst as well.
That last slide with a QR code that purports to embed the entire document/deck is intriguing.
I presume there are practical limits to the file size here?
And images inside slides must be impossible to fit it right away?
It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.
Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.
It's travel for pleasure (especially with groups) where all the complexity comes in: there's a lot more stuff to schedule, more slop in what exactly happens when, more competing preferences, more need to have multiple things on deck so you can react to changing energy levels, etc.
Not too hard to see why a lot of people just give up and book an all-inclusive where every day is the same and everyone can just "do whatever", but with better tools, maybe rolling your own vacation could be made more practical and coherent for a normal busy person to put together.
On the matter of transactions in particular, I think airlines largely solve this with 24hr no-questions refund periods. So, book your airfare, then your lodgings, and if there's some problem with the lodgings, then refund the airfare and start over.
An aggregator or AI assistant like Muse might have better luck although the mechanism for those will require charging whatever credit card you give it. For flights, it should work just fine in the US. There is a mandatory fully-refundable 24 hour cancellation period on all flights booked more than 7 days in advance through US point-of-sale, or they have to honor a 24 hour hold without payment but not both. Hotels get a bit dicier since the policy there will be dependent on each hotel.
Random selection of one of the many, many pieces of text in the user interface for whatever this is. What does that mean? Does that mean anything?
I wonder how this would fare on a cheap VPS. Probably better, is my guess.
A single Linode VPS is $5 and includes a terabyte of transfer. Probably wouldn't fall over under slashdotting if you served static pages.
Counting or not counting the time spent on babysitting the distro and all its shenanigans, including but not limited to systemd?
That is probably it. Nothing to do with the ecosystem or convenience (an esoteric concept known as valuing your time, which is rarely appreciated here*). The only thing missing is "RTFM".
While I'm nominally capable of maintaining a Linux box myself, it isn't my day job. This box is important but there's no revenue attached to it. Since I'm not super fluent with the commands and flags, fixing stuff when it goes wrong is frustrating and anxiety-inducing. And this is a totally one-off machine, so it's impractical to do a nice idempotent configuration with Terraform or whatever.
So I made a sysadmin bot, gave it my scratchpad of historical setup notes, gave it its own root SSH key, checked out my monorepo (with setup notes, config files, web roots), and it did everything else. And now I treat this Grok bot like a command-line interface with sane syntax.
"restart nginx now and confirm site works"
"pin mariadb to 12.3.*"
"any security best practices not implemented?"
"turn on firewall, allow ports 22, 80, 443 only, make sure ssh has fail2ban on and isn't accepting any passwords"
"add example.com to lets encrypt"
"run health checks every hour, confirm that example.com root page has the phrase `Products`, if it doesn't, log in and fix it"
"run updates on monday mornings at 6am, restart if needed, confirm that the site is online afterwards, you can roll back updates if necessary"
But honestly, the best part is that Grok Bot is also an app on my phone, so I can get it to fix pretty much any problem no matter where I am, even if it means troubleshooting and fixing site code bugs. The anxiety of being a sysadmin has completely disappeared. If I needed to spin up a completely different box from scratch on a completely different service with a completely different distro, it's no problem.
As someone who admins several Linux boxes professionally and personally and has spent so little time working with systemd it's a rounding error, what are you talking about?
This recently came across my radar as Home Assistant has migrated to the vector tiles hosted directly by OSMF for all deployments: https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/53816
For my own needs I usually just go for https://openfreemap.org/ though, I like the default style, and it feels maybe a little faster.
https://aboard.com/introducing-tinylittleoffice-com/
It seems they had the idea originally 6 years ago and did versions of it, but
> We moved on, and sadly, those sites fell off the web, and the old links all broke.
Most people will be able to host it locally and test it this way.
The entire 'document' is encoded in the URL and so there a quick limit to document size
Text documents max out at about 2,000 characters or so
The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).
Go to contacts add a new item, type a few letters, Go to word processor, type a few letters, go back to contacts and it's right where you left it, go back to WP, same thing. I think this would be a great tool for that idea where every single things is sticky.
It's a great idea, but this limits the size of the serialized document to 2048 kiB for Chrome, and 64 kiB for Firefox.
But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.
Edit: realized it looks like the data is stored in the url, which is a neat approach but I guess its not really that close.
Permalinks are needed to share documents, which would be something like a link shortener, with the target updating as the document is updated.
If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.
That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.
We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.
Why someone spends time on making this, and why someone would want to spend time using this?
Much more advanced software is available for free for all platforms. Why not just go and install LibreOffice?
But I prefer trusted binaries over "private" web app in open internet. And even locally - html and all layers of http stack is inferior to pixels. Or vectors.
what does this even mean?
and the functionality has been available already for decades. solved problems, kiddos
How is it easy to share megabytes encoded in a link?