This:<p><pre><code> 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.
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Great sentiment. I've had a similar experience with LLMs and writing code - helpful when keeping the requests small, and a background in the area is essential for knowing what is and isn't total crap. Feel the fear and do it anyway.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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..)
Disagree on the “algorithm” bit but that’s ok.<p>“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.<p>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.
I like this point of view:<p>> 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!