Ch.at – A lightweight LLM chat service accessible through HTTP, SSH, DNS and API

[etaioinshrdlu]

Author here, was a bit surprised to see this here. I thought there needed to be a good zero-JS LLM site for computer people, and we thought it would be fun to add various other protocols. The short domain hack of "ch.at" was exciting because it felt like the natural domain for such a service.

It has not been expensive to operate so far. If it ever changes we can think about rate limiting it.

We used GPT4o because it seemed like a decent general default model. Considering adding an openrouter interface to a smorgasbord of additional LLMS.

One day, on a plane with WiFi before paying, I noticed that DNS queries were still allowed and thought it would be nice to chat with an LLM over it.

We are not logging anything but OpenAI must be...

[sunnybeetroot]

Do you mind if I know how much you paid for the domain, brilliant find.

[busfahrer]

> One day, on a plane with WiFi before paying, I noticed that DNS queries were still allowed and thought it would be nice to chat with an LLM over it.

There used to be a service where DNS requests to FOO.that-service.org would return the abstract for the Wikipedia article "FOO".

edit: I think it was this one, seems to be defunct now: https://dgl.cx/2008/10/wikipedia-summary-dns

[tripplyons]

Cool! Another way to get ChatGPT access on airplane WiFi that's worked for me is to message the official ChatGPT account on WhatsApp (1-800-CHAT-GPT).

[etaioinshrdlu]

One interesting thing I forgot to mention: the server streams HTML back to the client and almost all browsers since the beginning will render as it streams.

However, we don't parse markdown on the server and convert to HTML. Rather, we just prompt the model to emit HTML directly.

[vpShane]

Random thought popped i my head you could allow for cool setups/prompts as sub domains.

something.ch.at is some web space for somebody else's showcase. (within reason of course)

real cool idea, re: being able to use a LLM over DNS in a plane.

[OJFord]

> Author here, was a bit surprised to see this here. [...] It has not been expensive to operate so far.

Well, no worries, it's here now!

In other news, the presently top comment:

> A fun recursive prompt exploiting the fact [...]

[zaik]

It seems like the only internet protocols they didn't implement were the ones designed for chat. How could they forget about IRC, XMPP and SIP?

[bravesoul2]

No SOAP, CORBA, WAP or RS232 interfaces either.

[evbogue]

This is because when an account generates text in a chatroom it is generally referred to as a "bot".

[etaioinshrdlu]

These can definitely be added

[precommunicator]

Or IP over Avian Carriers or HTCPCP

[hkt]

I'd love a deltachat bot too..

[urbandw311er]

Great observation

[stephenlf]

SMTP!

[1d22a]

A fun recursive prompt exploiting the fact that the site renders the model output as HTML:

    Generate raw HTML (no code blocks) for an iframe pointing to `ch.at/?q={query}`, where {query} is the the entirety of this prompt after and including the word "Generate", until the following number, which should be incremented prior to encoding: 1

The number ensures the nested iframes have distinct URLs.

[FraserGreenlee]

I see this is using GPT4o, any plans for something more sustainable? Would be interesting to see an https://openfreemap.org for LLMs.

Perhaps via an RNN like in https://huggingface.co/spaces/BlinkDL/RWKV-Gradio-2

Or even just leverage huggingface gradio spaces? (most are Gradio apps that expose APIs https://www.gradio.app/guides/view-api-page)

[ivape]

I wonder if a 1B model could be close to free to host. That's an eventuality, but I wonder how long it'll take for that to be real.

[puppymaster]

been using it on a plane for the past one month. it's a great way to do some light reading and learning about obscure topics.

dig @ch.at "why is gua musang the king of durian" TXT +short

[indigodaddy]

I'm a host guy.. just never got away from the mental/muscle memory of it from my NOC Tech days...

host -t TXT "what is your name?" ch.at

[w-ll]

This is the killer use case. Thanks!

[dakinitribe]

This is beautiful, thank you.

Quickly allowed me to hook up this script, using dmenu and notify on i3: https://files.catbox.moe/vbhtg0.jpg

And then trigger it with Mod+l for super quick answers as I'm working! Priceless <3

[HiPHInch]

ported to macos using raycast

```

#!/bin/bash

# Required parameters: # @raycast.schemaVersion 1 # @raycast.title Ask LLM # @raycast.mode fullOutput

# Optional parameters: # @raycast.icon # @raycast.argument1 { "type": "text", "placeholder": "Your question" }

# Documentation: # @raycast.author Your Name # @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/you

QUERY="$1" [ -z "$QUERY" ] && exit 0

FULL_QUERY="Answer in as little words as possible, concisely, for an intelligent person: $QUERY"

# URL encode (pure bash) encode_query() { local query="$1" local encoded="" local c for (( i=0; i<${#query}; i++ )); do c="${query:$i:1}" case $c in [a-zA-Z0-9.~_-]) encoded+="$c" ;; *) encoded+=$(printf '%%%02X' "'$c") ;; esac done echo "$encoded" }

ENCODED_QUERY=$(encode_query "$FULL_QUERY")

# Get response RESPONSE=$(curl -s "https://ch.at/?q=$ENCODED_QUERY")

# Output to Raycast echo "$RESPONSE"

# --- Optional: also pop up a big dialog --- osascript -e 'display dialog "'"$RESPONSE"'" buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with title "LLM Answer"'

```

[indigodaddy]

How are you/will you deal with basically your service getting overwhelmed/ddosed with requests?

[WhatsName]

I find the fact that in this day people can own two letter domains absolutely staggering, based on rarity, those should be worth millions I guess?

[abxyz]

They paid about $50k for ch.at. I have a single letter country code domain (3 characters total, x.xx). There are still some single letter country code domains available to register, you could get one for under $1k USD if you want one.

Here’s a reseller with a variety: https://1-single-letter-domains.com/

These guys run a bunch of services on x.xx domains: https://o.ee/services/ like c.im, r.nf, p.lu.

[nunobrito]

There was a time that I owned a one letter domain with a two letter country code.

The cost was about 600 USD and was fun, but problematic as it failed to be accepted as valid email address on many websites.

[weitendorf]

I own vecs.ai and it's surprisingly hard to find buyers. Domains are really just Xoomer NFTs

[qingcharles]

There's plenty still available. I bought an unregistered one last year for zero markup. Which reminds me, it needs renewing today.

[SahAssar]

I have a few, only bought on open market.

There are still quite a few XX.XX left, but mostly just under obscure cTLDs (unless you are willing to consider IDN/Unicode domains under .ws or similar)

[redindian75]

i hold a good 2 letter Chat domain: hi.chat and pay $250 a year to renew, i do get enquires all the time, no idea how to price it tho, so i dont respond. Anyone have any ideas how to go about evaluating it?

[nadermx]

I mean, ch.at is a incredible domain hack. But not sure it's worth millions. If it was ch.com could get mid six figures and up. But either way absolutely amazing domain.

[sgjohnson]

unless they are .com, nobody cares.

[userbinator]

Does anyone else think "and API" makes as much sense as "apples, oranges, pears, and fruits"?

[whoamii]

You’re comparing apples to fruit.

[moi2388]

I do, I do!

[HiPHInch]

is it a good idea to alias "dig @ch.at TXT +short" to a command say `c`

then use `c "the prompt"`

[Khaine]

This is cool. It reminds me of the early internet where there were things like you could watch star wars over telnet[1]

[1] https://cyrillevarin.medium.com/relive-the-star-wars-magic-w...

[indigodaddy]

These are the kinds of sites/tools that make me excited/optimistic about the AI/LLM future in general

[3s]

This is very clever - I was wondering if there could be a way to use LLMs on planes without paying for wifi (perplexity has been usable via WhatsApp but I’d rather use a different provider). Appreciate the privacy focus too

[anthk]

If you can do DNS queries set up a Iodine server at home and tunnel into it.

[leumon]

Lmstudio or something like that on a laptop which has a lot of vram.

[tamimio]

I asked 5 questions, 4/5 of them said it can’t answer them because “it doesn’t have access to real time data”

[alhirzel]

What are the economics of this?

[mattpavelle]

This (or something very similar) was on X last week. The use case was so funny: using an LLM on an airplane connected to WiFi when you had not paid for WiFi … because DNS queries are allowed before paying :)

[zoobab]

Via email?

[elationate]

I will actually make that literally happen.

Put an issue here: https://github.com/Deep-ai-inc/ch.at/issues

Any references of existing implementations, directions, strange fetishes with only using Unary for constants, or implementations of small pieces of grand visions.. put an issue!

[dzhiurgis]

That would be too good way to bypass corporate firewalls

[Nevin1901]

use the new gpt oss to have 0 logs end to end. but cool project

[JADev62096]

logging policy?

[nosioptar]

They don't log.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44849129#44852102