I work with AI tools often and I find myself constantly swapping between file types to navigate different sites and use cases. I built anydoc — I imagined a universal document format drive layer that would allow me to essentially have a file that is many different file types at once. CSV for organizing, markdown for feeding into LLMs, HTML for fast sharing... so here it is and I am working on making it better all of the time. Just shipped an update that makes the most relevant format types available faster on a document upload @boshjerns on X

I think calling it a "drive" will confuse a lot of people. I expected a device driver, and not technical people have no idea of drives, they just have documents and photos.

I tried with a text file

  X Y
  1 2
  3 4

and for some reason the convert version has 1 2 3 4 in the same row.

So it turns one file into many? Or is it actually one file that is simultaneously a valid HTML document and PNG?

I like the idea if it was deterministic. So if there are standard ways to convert to/from document types, like Pandoc, being able to write to any one of them and have it update the rest would be interesting.

I hate it if it's built with "AI". Can't imagine a use case for this apart from just shit you don't care about. Why would I be hoarding data I don't care about?

the page is really laggy on Edge, kills any interest in wanting to explore more (strangely, it's much snappier on Chrome)

AI as a use case doesn’t make sense to me.

You’re using AI to create a transpilation of whatever modality. It’s a wasted step if the purpose is to feed back into AI.

So I can have my exe convert into a shapefile and an mp3?

i ve read the title 5 times, and can't make sense of it. Is this even valid English ?

It's a fancy file format conversion utility.

Am I missing something?

Could have called it quantumdoc

Now make it an HTTP API where content negotiation always succeeds

Back in the day there were a bunch of `x2y` programs[1], like html2pdf, xls2csv, rst2odt, jpg2png, png2jpg, etc...

You could imagine something like `any2zip`, or `any2tgz` or `iso2mp4` or something.

It seems like there could/should be some sort of virtual filesystem where you could say "cat inventory.xls.csv", or "wine.exe excel.exe inventory.csv.xls" (please bear with me on these examples). Effectively "$BLOB.format.format", where "." becomes a sort of "convert to this $TYPE".

Imagine being able to say:

    `echo "# Hello\n\n * World" > README.md ; cat README.md.html"`
    (effectively invoking `md2html`)
    
    `printer README.md.html.pdf`
    (eg: `cat README.md | md2html | html2pdf | printer`)

...if you requested `README.md.pdf`, maybe it could intuit the intermediate `md2html2pdf` (HTML) portion?

I really wish local linux filesystems (for end-users) would at least match Apple's capabilities. eg: `$RECENT`, spotlight, auto-OCR. We've really regressed since the era of `locate`, but I'd _LOVE_ some sort of modern equivalent.

Imagine: `inotify`, `auditd`, just anything that can avoid full-disk scans during "normal end user" daily operation... wired up to `llm-summary $FILE >> sqlite.db ; `llava-describe $IMAGE >> sqlite.db ; etc...`

For bonus points, catch anything missed with some sort of full daily/weekly backup operation. We're on the cusp of a much more intimate "partnership" with the compute boxes underneath our desks, but so much is getting sucked into the void of "the network is the computer".

[1]: compgen -c | grep 2 | grep -v '2$' | grep -v '\.2' | grep -v '2\.'

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locate_(Unix)

I got "No video with supported format and MIME type found." in the How It Works section.

I thought this was something like a FUSE driver that would on-the-fly generate any file you tried to read, with some consistency. Like if you open stories/zombie-party.txt it will have some generative network make it, and cache it. If you later ask for stories/zombie-party.odt it can just do a conversion.

I vibe-coded a demo of such a thing, with the idea of making game assets like textures/outdoor/wall.jpg etc. You can do it easily enough, but you need to be patient, and not particularly discerning.

Wouldn't this make every file a lot bigger?

You might not want to use https://anydocai.com/result/<incremental number> for URLs like that. Anyone can enumerate the ~300 files from the home page and look at what others have uploaded.

That said, the website doesn't seem to work anymore. It just errors out.

Imagine no file types

♪ It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Visualize whirled peas Ah ah ah oooo!

You may say I'm a dreamer...