It's always interesting to me that these plaintext sites are flagged as "insecure" and "risky" by modern browsers. I don't have a good solution, but it reminds me of [1]
They are insecure, because your ISP can change website responses and text format doesn't protect from that. So basically browser can't guarantee that you're looking at original web server response.
It rather supports the site's core point, because that point is about plain text files, not HTML and CSS. Plain text is as readable as it is possible to be.
Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments the loss of - unique, quirky, basic and rough around the edges.
> Plain text is as readable as it is possible to be.
Which is nonsense, of course, just like this site illustrates. Trivial formatting and layout changes make it more readable.
> Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments
And this is exactly the beside-the-point response you sometimes encounter on HN. I'm not a representative of the collective HN, so why does it matter that some other people did some lamenting some time ago?
Comically the use of curl | bash managed to shoehorn them in there, and there were the occasional terminal escape characters that could do funny and sometimes mischievous things.
There used to be something of a game of making specific files that would change screen colors or play songs off terminal bells, etc, tailored for specific terminals or command prompt windows. I remember a few short animated sequences using various backspaces and colors that only really worked if you could expect the text to be loaded at specific baud rates or in specific BBS software.
Many years ago someone "infected" my computer with a "manual virus": A printed-out sheet of paper placed on top of the computer, telling me to delete all my hard drive's files myself, then photocopy the sheet and put both copies on nearby computers.
It was obviously a joke. But in the "modern" agentic era, the same thing in a text file is slightly more realistic as a threat...
No macro viruses but if your family lawyer uses some LLM-powered thingy in his workflow it might add a new dimension: prompt manipulation/injection attacks. A good spot to hide these would be at about ⅔ distance inside some wall of legalese at the beginning or end of a document since hardly anyone ever reads those.
I've known people one-shot by pure text, like Atlas Shrugged, The Communist Manifesto, The Bible, The Qur'an, The Selfish Gene, Godel Escher and Bach, etc. Don't underestimate text.
A clever quip, but I have to point out that most adherents for a given ideology have never actually read the canonical text of their ideology. The Bible particularly was generally inaccessible to laypeople for a ~1000 year period, who would typically learn everything they knew about it filtered through the preachers of the Church. Even today with easy access, a majority of Christians have not read it.
Famous American detective TV show True Detective had the hero annoy his colleague by referring to religion as "language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain" and thereby "dulls critical thinking". In other words, a lot people read shit and it fries their mixers. Obviously, it can also work the other way. Et cetera.
Infected by a packet of ideas that profoundly alters your outlook on life, for good or ill like a mind virus. I've been shot several times, it's thrilling. For me it's always text that does it.
[1](https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites...)
The format being text, html, video, or an executable program has nothing to do with it.
Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments the loss of - unique, quirky, basic and rough around the edges.
Which is nonsense, of course, just like this site illustrates. Trivial formatting and layout changes make it more readable.
> Besides, this is exactly the kind of site HN constantly laments
And this is exactly the beside-the-point response you sometimes encounter on HN. I'm not a representative of the collective HN, so why does it matter that some other people did some lamenting some time ago?
There used to be something of a game of making specific files that would change screen colors or play songs off terminal bells, etc, tailored for specific terminals or command prompt windows. I remember a few short animated sequences using various backspaces and colors that only really worked if you could expect the text to be loaded at specific baud rates or in specific BBS software.
Many years ago someone "infected" my computer with a "manual virus": A printed-out sheet of paper placed on top of the computer, telling me to delete all my hard drive's files myself, then photocopy the sheet and put both copies on nearby computers.
It was obviously a joke. But in the "modern" agentic era, the same thing in a text file is slightly more realistic as a threat...
not j/k.
I'd rather read in my beautiful gpu-powered terminal emulator than a website with bad taste and/or bloated nightmare under the covers.