Wildcard: Customize HN using a spreadsheet view (2020)

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/

by vortex_ape • 2 years ago

115 11 2 years ago

I love the idea of having a plug-in spreadsheet on every website, so I can work with the data without having to do any scraping or programming.

Unfortunately, it looks like the project was abandoned after the initial talk and paper in 2020.

I assume that we'll get there soon with small LLMs running directly in the browser (like Gemini nano) that will make it easy to query/structure website data.

TeMPOraL2• 2 years ago

Thanks for linking it. I've said many times that many, if not most websites and SaaS businesses would be better and more ergonomic for the users if done as Excel spreadsheets instead. Great to see it actually being tried!

baxtr• 2 years ago

I am curious to understand why you think that. What’s the use case? To create custom views like in the video?

TeMPOraL2• 2 years ago

Searching, filtering, slice&dice, using a well-known, ergonomic and efficient interface.

Almost all webshit still struggle with showing tables that have > 100 rows without stuttering, and that's with the virtualized rows optimizations. Functionality offered is limited, both because it needs to be reimplemented, and because giving more control to users disturbs the careful shearing&milking funnel set up by the business.

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

I would prefer to create a custom view on every website I use daily, including for curses/cli interfaces and including interaction. Or, I would just like every website (and saas) to look and work like HN. I simply don't like what people call UX where I search 4 hours for a vital function which someone is 'conveniently hidden' under 400 submenus of stuff I will never use (but makes more money for them).

dustingetz2• 2 years ago

this is excellent

notpushkin• 2 years ago

Neat! Seems that development has stopped in 2020 though :-( https://github.com/geoffreylitt/wildcard

AIrtemis• 2 years ago

Neat project! The link to signup for the mailing list points to a blank mailchimp page.

gklitt2• 2 years ago

Creator of Wildcard here! Neat to see this pop up on HN after several years. As others have noted, this project isn't under active development anymore.

One reason: while I still think there's great potential in browser extensions, I ultimately felt limited by scraping and fetching bits of data from a server, and grew more interested in a deeper overhaul of how we build applications in order to locate more data on the client. Eg: check out this demo [1] of a Wildcard-esque data manipulation but in an app that stores all its data in a client-side database. I'm still continuing this work today, exploring "local-first" architectures at the Ink & Switch research lab, in support of malleable customizable interfaces.

It would be interesting to revisit Wildcard now that LLMs exist—I suspect that many of the scraping parts (building "site adapters" in Wildcard parlance) would be far more possible to automate now. A few years ago we explored some semi-automated programming-by-example interactions for scraping [2] but the friction was always really noticeable without any AI support.

[1] https://riffle.systems/essays/prelude/#data-centric-design-e...

[2] https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/Joker-LIVE-2022.pdf

dustingetz2• 2 years ago

did you guys decide to publish code for Woldcard? i might take a whack at building something cool on top of this if y’all are interested in permitting that

gklitt2• 2 years ago

Code is here! Totally support any riffing on this concept.

https://github.com/geoffreylitt/wildcard

Wildcard: Customize HN using a spreadsheet view (2020)

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