This:

  And with regards to AI taking jobs - it obviously will become a serious problem in future. But being a doomer right now is like lying down in a parking lot waiting to get run over - you're surrendering to a pointless outcome while the rest of the world keeps moving.

Inspiring to see you take on a different career path and go for it, I feel i'm on a similar journey right now, thanks for taking the time to write it up.

> I built wikitok.io in about 2 hours (but not the iphone app that doesn't work, nor the play store rip off, nor wikitok.net but I'm getting ahead of myself). It all came from this tweet.

This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of "TikTok but it's Wikipedia". I see the author is OP, so my suggestion might be to consider rephrasing a bit as it comes off a bit accusatory.

I did try my hand on this project after seeing this bare-bones viral version. (I had the same idea in my notes app dated a couple years ago.) I went a different route, opting to pre-parse wikitext via my own API to deliver the app an AST that can be rendered natively & prettier than your standard Wikipedia page. Not a fun format to parse. Not fun at all. I don't recommend it. And it took significantly longer than 2 hours and was never released, so props to the author for turning this project around so fast.

It's great that LLMs provide opportunity for non-software engineers to make tech products, but I wonder how those "vibe-coded" products will fare when faced with actually maintaining the code (and also accounting for tech debt..)

I feel like I could easily be caught by one of those journalist scams. Especially when low on sleep.

Disagree on the “algorithm” bit but that’s ok.

“Random” is an algorithm. It just says that the next article you should read has no relationship with anything you’ve read before. That is a point of view. It’s good for an “explore” phase, where you want to expose yourself to as much variety as possible.

But eventually most people want to “exploit” their impressions from before. Just like I don’t want to always roll the dice on restaurants, sometimes I want to go back to one that I know is good.

Hey, I'm also a former civil engineer-turned SWE in the NJ/NYC area! Nice to know that there are more of us out there. I already spend hours looking through Wikipedia articles, so when your site dropped I was on it right away. I dodged the AI conversation entirely by getting into a state government position where my job is all but guaranteed by the union.

There's no date on the article so its hard to know when its from.

I like this point of view:

> And with regards to AI taking jobs - it obviously will become a serious problem in future. But being a doomer right now is like lying down in a parking lot waiting to get run over - you're surrendering to a pointless outcome while the rest of the world keeps moving. There's still so much to build and accomplish.

I really like this idea! Thank you for making it! I personally prefer web-apps to phone-apps but wouldn't mind installing one if its in the pipeline from OP!

It's shocking how unhinged scammers can be... Unstoppable farting dog? Seriously...?