Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 19, 2024

Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

Taught session 4 of the class
Started editing slides for lesson 5
Did a short workshop on two sample articles students submitted
- This turned out to be very popular, and students are asking for more of these
- I’m trying to figure out how to adjust the course to fit in more workshops
Started working on “Popularity Contest”
- Screenshot
- Wrote better scripts to parse out the domain and aggregate identical domains correctly
  - For certain domains, blog.someperson.com and someperson.com count as the same person, but for things like someperson.medium.com, the subdomain matters.
  - And for certain domains, the path matters too, like buttondown.email/hillelwayne
- Used LLMs to deduce names, write short bios and tags for each website
- Did a lot of manual filtering of domains that are not personal blogs
- Added in Bootstrap for theming
Reached out to a writer for a guest interview

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

Claimed my fluent drop
- It seems super sketchy because I need to use my SSH private key, but the paranoid instructions seem pretty hard to exploit the key
  - A lot of people are complaining in the repo issues that what they’re doing is dangerous and bad practice (which it is) and question why it isn’t an OAuth flow, but it seems like they’re constrained by trying to do something that can be evaluated by a smart contract based on everyone’s SSH public keys at the time the contract was formed, so they can’t do OAuth since the smart contract is already deployed and can’t be changed at this point
- We’ll see in two months if anything actually comes of it.