This is a very neat idea. I am not sure why the page needs to load 40mb of data and make me wait 5 mins before the first view. I'd probably also add some ranking criteria to surface good quality articles that maximize the "I learnt something new today" factor. Overall kudos to the developer for original thinking.
Presumably the 40mb of data is not from Wikipedia, but the Javascript tracking code bundle needed to turn it into a doomscrollable social media feed. ;) By those standards, I think it’s pretty lightweight! For comparison, the Instagram iOS app is 468.9mb, more than ten times the size…
The 40MB of data is Wikipedia data, the site itself is 21kB.
40mb is way too much for a JS bundle... Even with a framework you could do this with 5mb or less.
> you could do this with 5mb or less
How quick the times change... Back in my days, we put the limit on bundles being maximum 1MB, and it felt large even then.
Don't get me wrong. 5mb is a lot for this, yes. This app, coded with love and interest could easily be made under 1mb.
This app IS made in under 1mb. The entire app, including all the assets minus all the actual Wikipedia data, is 21kB (no minification or compression). And all of it is in a single html file with human-readable code.
Interesting. I haven't investigated, so I don't know where the 40mb comes from.
It's JSON.
Now imagine how big the builds are for Instagram's server side doomscrollable feed algorithm, given their inverse incentives to this project.
Yeah. Should be able to load in the background once you start scrolling
Yeah, the implementation is odd. Cool idea though. Also see:
https://www.wikitok.io/
Thanks! That's me :)
probably vibe coded
I wrote this project by hand in Sublime Text, which is more of a text editor than an IDE. I don't use ai, even for autocomplete.
All of the code is unminified/unobfuscated in the index.html file, you can right click the page and view-source it.
I do the same as you, except in vim. But increasingly I'm getting the nagging feeling that I'm wasting my time.
You’re not wasting time by being deliberate about what you build and having to choose what to dedicate yourself to. Vibe coding is not synonymous with productivity, and a lot of what we call “productive” today is just a different form of wasting life that is more socially acceptable.
I made this project from start to finish in less than a day, and I feel it was well worth my time and effort.
Thank you for spending your time and effort on something fun you believe in and that explores a point about human nature, and for showing we often underestimate how much we can get done in so little time on our own when we set our attention to it.
Should that be a criteria for deciding whether it's cool or not?
Criterion.
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