Reflecting on WikiTok

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&#x27;re surrendering to a pointless outcome while the rest of the world keeps moving. </code></pre> Great sentiment. I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m on a similar journey right now, thanks for taking the time to write it up.

&gt; I built wikitok.io in about 2 hours (but not the iphone app that doesn&#x27;t work, nor the play store rip off, nor wikitok.net but I&#x27;m getting ahead of myself). It all came from this tweet.<p>This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of &quot;TikTok but it&#x27;s Wikipedia&quot;. 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 &amp; prettier than your standard Wikipedia page. Not a fun format to parse. Not fun at all. I don&#x27;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&#x27;s great that LLMs provide opportunity for non-software engineers to make tech products, but I wonder how those &quot;vibe-coded&quot; 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.<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&#x27;m also a former civil engineer-turned SWE in the NJ&#x2F;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&#x27;s no date on the article so its hard to know when its from.

I like this point of view:<p>&gt; 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&#x27;re surrendering to a pointless outcome while the rest of the world keeps moving. There&#x27;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&#x27;t mind installing one if its in the pipeline from OP!

It&#x27;s shocking how unhinged scammers can be... Unstoppable farting dog? Seriously...?