Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok

https://quack.sdan.io

330•sdan•4w ago

Hey - I've been playing with LLMs since GPT-2 and recently experimented with fully generative UIs where the HTML/Canvas are generated just-in-time.

Every post on the feed( on slop/duck/storytime) you see is streamed and generated just-in-time with HTML and into a Canvas with Gemini 3 Flash.

Comments and DMs are bidirectionally linked with a Cloudflare Workers Durable Object which is why they feel so fast. Every generated post is saved into a DO SQLite which is then served into the "Following" feed so it can be served quicker.

This was inspired by Wikitok, a VSCode Extension I made around brainrot, and another fully generative UI site I made.

Comments

xnx•4w ago

Sounds like WikTok (2023, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723) or WikiTok (early 2025, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936723).

SirFatty•4w ago

"This was inspired by Wikitok, a VSCode Extension I made around brainrot, and another fully generative UI site I made."

xnx•4w ago

I saw that but got the submitter and commenter names mixed up, so I didn't realize it was the same person.

aizk•4w ago

mellosouls•4w ago

I also thought immediately of WikiTok and was confused by this exchange and the grammar in the quote here; I thought they were claiming to have made a VSCode extension called Wikitok. I understand now!

sdan•4w ago

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SuryaDan...

for clarification :)

personjerry•4w ago

The animations + audio are great. I feel like these meaningfully differentiate from some other similar projects. There's a lot of potential here.

furyofantares•4w ago

Reading it with sound off is really hard because of the way the words come up one at a time, rather than the whole sentence at once.

recallingmemory•4w ago

Neat idea, and love the Undertale menu mp3: https://brainrot-vscode-ext.sdan.io/quack/music/undertale-me...

ram_rattle•4w ago

Looks super cool

emsign•4w ago

Nice tech demo but in practice utterly annoying and without purpose. I mean don't you think enshitifying Wiki knowledge kind of beats the purpose of acquiring knowledge?

odie5533•4w ago

It's a proof of concept to pave the way. I could see benefit in having series which deep dive into material. This felt too shallow to me.

emsign•4w ago

Deep dives with TikTok mechanics? That's not going to work, that TikTok UI was optimized for dopamine release. You want to teach junkies new things? All they learn is how to get their kicks, so outside that settings nothing will stick. When they have to apply the infotainment snippets in a real world setting the won't be these high reward stimuli. I mean if you want to hook them on feeling great while believing they've learned something...

Edmond•4w ago

Work related versions of this, expense report:

https://youtu.be/h0Bg-lqNlkU

In general Just-In-Time app generation is a bad idea. The right approach is to create human-in-loop tools that a bot would recognize and invoke as needed, of course the human-in-loop tool would itself be AI generated.

Example of human-in-loop tool in use:

https://youtu.be/srG5Ze7mS7s

lukebechtel•4w ago

Honestly, pretty cool.

kerisi•4w ago

you can use LTX to generate the videos, this video took 15s on a 4090

https://vimeo.com/1152992073?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

sdan•4w ago

nice did you make this just for the comment? haha

kerisi•4w ago

yep haha

gregjw•4w ago

we live in an era of frictionless slop creation. yay.

vedmakk•4w ago

This is really cool. I'm interested in the GenUI part. Is the web app itself static and the stories are generated on-demand?

Do you give gemini some UI components/templates to build with or is it just prompting to get consistent results across multiple stories?

pests•4w ago

Google AI Studio has a Gallery[0] with some similar apps. It's an editor so you can view the code, they are usually react apps with gemini integration via genai package. Like this one here[1] is similar. It generates interesting stories to share about a route you are driving / walking / biking along. This is one of the pre-made examples I believe, I didn't make it or anything. Just to show some how some of this might work.

[0] https://aistudio.google.com/apps?source=showcase&showcaseTag...

[1] https://aistudio.google.com/apps/bundled/echo_paths?showPrev...

sdan•4w ago

Yes I have base css/js that I inject on top of whatever codegen gemini 3 comes back with -- It runs via ai-sdk so the specific function is streamObject which is prompted to generate inner HTML elements

nseth•4w ago

Another sick Surya project, well done dude!

[Neall]

sdan•4w ago

thanks

aizk•4w ago

Hi there, creator of Wikitok here! Very happy to hear that my random little project inspired you :) The attention to detail in the UI is good - I'm so over every default AI generated UI being rounded corners, centered divs, blue and purple gradients, etc. Nice work.

sdan•4w ago

Thanks! Half of the work here was getting gemini to generate reasonable canvas animations within the window. I'm still experimenting which "style" I should keep/add

cons0le•4w ago

This is amazing! I think this could actually catch on!

Plz give an easy way to follow some tags so it's not showing me football stuff. If it was just topics I was interested in, I could scroll this for hours.

sdan•4w ago

Huge- good to hear will see if I can add a way to type in what you want or to go dig further into just certain hashtags.

Rad007•4w ago

It's pretty cool.

This is even scalable if you consider caching some of these requests and allow users to choose if they want a just-in-time version. Also the comments really are snappy and quick to load.

fpsvogel•4w ago

One way to get usable and consistent categories for a Wikipedia article is Lift Wing: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/LiftWin...

I once used it to create a "Wikipedia StumbleUpon": https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble#demo

Here is the code related to Lift Wing: https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble/blob/main/app/model...

Mentioning this in case you're looking for something as a basis for tags.

EDIT: Here is a list of all the categories from Lift Wing: https://github.com/fpsvogel/wiki-stumble/blob/main/app/model...

bstsb•4w ago

wow, my attention span is terrible - the first time i tried watching a generated video, i instinctively held the right side of the screen to speed it up to 2x…

is there scope for allowing users to search for / ask about specific topics? although then you do have to think about security issues with prompt injection

cornonthecobra•4w ago

The caption highlight timing is very inaccurate. It looks like it just steps through each word on a fixed timer, rather than using timing information from the TTS engine?

sdan•4w ago

Yes just fixed timer, and using browser TTS nothing fancy here on purpose - when I did some research on tiktok videos generally simpler/worse quality seemed to be better XD

cornonthecobra•4w ago

In this case, static text without the highlighter would have been better. Because the timing is so far off, the highlighter interferes with reading the captions for hearing assistance.

vishnuharidas•4w ago

Coincidentally, I was vibe-coding a doom-scroller for Hacker News Top Stories today: https://vishnuharidas.github.io/hn-reels/

oceansky•4w ago

Very cool! But text moves way too fast

jaredsohn•4w ago

Next step is allow viewing TikTok like wikipedia. Take a bunch of popular tiktok posts, use an LLM to describe what's happening via text/screenshots (with references to memes, etc), and link them to other relevant tiktoks.

Some meme sites might be somewhat similar to this.

NoteyComplexity•4w ago

Instead of LLM and just like Wikipedia, there should be users to submit the descriptions of the videos, and see people fighting for getting the most “correct” description.

It will be hilarious to see what people will come up with when they see brain rot content.

lysp•4w ago

> Next step is allow viewing TikTok like wikipedia

I tried that and this is what I got:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam tincidunt at dui vel suscipit. Donec finibus viverra tempus. Ut ut tellus ac mi ultricies fermentum a quis nulla. Vivamus urna mi, laoreet ac purus sed, ultricies tincidunt nisi. Quisque vulputate massa nec hendrerit consequat. Suspendisse potenti. Phasellus dapibus suscipit vulputate. Suspendisse id semper turpis, sit amet rhoncus nisl. Aenean auctor purus orci, eget ullamcorper lorem volutpat sit amet.

baby•4w ago

There's already memepedia

nephihaha•4w ago

Allow TikTok to be run like Wikipedia... So that people with no interest or knowledge of a particular subject can go round deleting said content, or blocking every shared IP from uploading content while saying anyone can edit it.

nolok•3w ago

That's a very wrong view of how Wikipedia works, and frankly vastly I prefer its limited but generalized gatekeeping than "everybody is allowed to lie and bullshit and as long as it makes engagement your feed is going to be filled with it" the TikTok way.

nephihaha•3w ago

I have at least twenty years of experience of Wikipedia, and it is exactly how it works much of the time. I lost count of the occasions when people with no knowledge of a particular subject kept trying to delete articles on it. Then there were the continuously changing rules, jargon and oligarchical structures...

Some subject areas have much better coverage than others: linguistics is much better dealt with than sport for example.

Nowadays I rarely edit Wikipedia, because they block most shared IPs. I used a named account for at least ten years and it was counterproductive.

Gander5739•3w ago

Would you be willing to give the name of the account?

Timwi•3w ago

> That's a very wrong view of how Wikipedia works

I think it's spot on. I used to be excited to contribute to Wikipedia, now I feel unwelcome and actively alienated. Everyone else I know doesn't even attempt to make any edits because “it all gets deleted anyway”. It's an incredibly hostile, unproductive and unwelcoming environment for anyone trying to make goodwill contributions.

rhplus•3w ago

TikTok like Wikipedia, huh? So we’d finally get to see how much of the recommendation algorithm was edited by IP addresses from US gov, Chinese gov and Russian bots?

maxbond•4w ago

Having a generated voice tell me about some historical massacre in a chipper tone with a generated infographic and set to TikTok music was. Especially dystopian.

As an experience I found it nauseating and am never doing it again, but as an art piece I give it high marks. Good job.

gregjw•4w ago

Indeed.

tylervigen•4w ago

Hilarious. The one AI voice is a little too grating for me, but with a little variation I might actually scroll it for a while.

Imustaskforhelp•4w ago

Yea I didn't like the voice as well, it felt very coarse to me and not very enjoyable

To be really honest, I still occasionally browse shorts sometimes because of some youtubers/niche content (there is this really good etymology shorts guy and a fun fact guy I watch usually)

So like the other day I was asking fun fact about niche legal laws just out of curiosity if anyone of them might be interesting/genuinely helpful to me lol to chatgpt about different countries

There were lot of niche things but one which I found interesting was that its possible in finland and other norweigian countries to browse even private land / private forests etc. and finland even has a digital right to internet

> Finland was the first country in the world to make access to high-speed internet a legal right, establishing this policy in July 2010. The law requires all service providers to offer a minimum internet speed of one megabit per second to every household, with a goal of providing access to 100 megabits per second by 2015. PBS edri.org (from Duckduckgo AI)

sdan•4w ago

A few months ago I made a (theoretically) infinitely learning geo-guessing model that updated the policy with each user guess: https://geospot.sdan.io/

Hoping to implement a simple RL loop here and optimize whats generated by the LLM to create the perfect slop machine :)

ingatorp•4w ago

They could have used Kokoro which is open source, fast and way more human-like.

grugagag•4w ago

Good. However, on a smaller phone such as Iphone SE the viewport gets cropped all around and I don’t see around 20% of the content.

sdan•4w ago

Note there's a rate limit on generated content for the time being, why you're unable to see any new content on the rest of the feeds. LLMs are expensive!

baby•4w ago

Ad ads like instagram reels have!

mappum•4w ago

Missed an opportunity to name it WikWok or Tikipedia.

raleighm•4w ago

WikWok is tremendous

sdan•4w ago

great suggestion ! i might change it to wikwok, so good

asciii•4w ago

This is so awesome - i wish I could modify that annoying voice :)

alexpadula•4w ago

It’s a cool idea but the content needs to be more useful imo.

sdan•4w ago

how could i make it more useful? different formats? would you want to keep you engaged for longer? entertained for longer?

garyfirestorm•4w ago

Relevant content - what is relevant to me may not be relevant to you.

breadchris•4w ago

I love this! I made a cooking knowledge brain rot app for myself from my favorite youtuber https://recipes.justshare.io/random-dan

anotherpaul•4w ago

Oh I hate it it's so brain rotty. Well done. Well done indeed.

omegabravo•4w ago

I was confused why someone would possibly configure the voice to be quiet and raspy.

Seems like there's an issue with Firefox that was causing it. Chrome voice sounds "normal" - like TikTok.

baby•4w ago

Wow this is so freaking awesome! I guess the pages I ended up scrolling on weren't too interesting though, how do you figure out what stories to create/show?

sdan•4w ago

Wikipedia articles are randomly sampled, theres no algorithm per-se yet but hoping to collaborate with others to see that through

exomonk•4w ago

Can you request a specific wiki article?

I'd like to see https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...

-i•4w ago

747.run is a realtime infinite Ai wikipedia, every word is a link to a unique article based on the word in the URL, Ai frequently checks all URL's and writes a new article based on the word you click.

You can also write articles and all your words become links, use the website address bar to type any word after 747.run/ or type 747.run/ behind any domain to generate unique articles based on domain.

Have a group chat with unlimited people and Ai, share any link to chat with anyone, press space to chat with the Ai, have an Ai chatbot on your website or chat with users privately by embedding it on your website with iFrame (set BG color or leave it transparent)

The Ai sometimes drifts & hallucinates.

thiht•4w ago

I thought the scroll didn’t work at first, apparently only the bottom of the screen is scrollable. I see other comments talking about a voice, I don’t have it, just the music? Also the content is really irrelevant and uninteresting (I’m assuming it uses a random article? It should aim for the most popular instead), it really needs some curation.

The subtitles are also hard to read, they should be displayed sentence by sentence, not word by word.

IMO you didn’t capture what makes some interesting content work on TikTok. The scientific content on TikTok doesn’t have the brainrot music, it’s just interesting because of the short format. It looks to me like a clone of TikTok made by someone who hates TikTok and built it out of assumptions on what TikTok is.

Honestly interesting Wikipedia articles summarized as TikTok content is a killer idea, but the implementation is not there yet

saltwatercowboy•4w ago

I think you are taking this more seriously than the creator. It's just a bit of fun.

thiht•4w ago

Yeah because I think it’s a seriously good idea. Making knowledge and science somewhat addictive is a cool goal

I could see myself using that

saltwatercowboy•3w ago

It is a cool goal... but I don't think it's a realistic one.

looofooo0•3w ago

Graph structure of wiki could be exploited for user specific content.

sdan•3w ago

thanks! i spent last weekend building out the engine to create content but agree UI needs more polish. this is all great feedback will try getting out v2 of quickquack rebranded to wikwok :)

cramcgrab•4w ago

How appropriate

nephihaha•4w ago

Google should buy Wikipedia and be done with it. Or we could cut out Google altogether and just search Wikipedia because it is one of the few sites Google will show you.

tyleo•3w ago

Day 1: Google buys Wikipedia

Day 100: Wikipedia is shut down

thevillagechief•3w ago

Google knol

nephihaha•3w ago

Google would probably asset strip it for all the info it could sell on or import into AI models.

eastbound•4w ago

It lacks superlatives. “Discover how [the amazing] [secret|mystery] that no-one [wants to tell you|ever discovers]” should be the first sentence.

Hopefully it will not make its way upstream in Wikipedia.

keepamovin•3w ago

That's awesome man that is REALLY cool. Useful :)

fitnessapp•3w ago

The idea is really interesting the implementation sucks.

mandeepj•3w ago

> fully generative UIs where the HTML/Canvas are generated just-in-time

Why? The UI is a template and the core structure never changes, in the context of TikTok’s feed, so what’s the benefit you are trying to reap by dynamically generating the UI?

sdan•3w ago

sorry not the UI but specifically the content. every new post on the feeds that are not "Following" are created in realtime. just a demo showing whats possible but I could just generate them before hand in bulk too.

FergusArgyll•3w ago

I've never used tiktok, if this is an accurate representation, it's jarring!

casey2•3w ago

Bit too much text I'd suggest using an RSPV style

cable_•2w ago

Cute and fun idea. Not something I would use personally but I enjoyed checking it out.

What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

OldMapsOnline

What It's Like to Be a Worm

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

Bogus Pipeline

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

Cycling in France

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

AI Skills Marketplace

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

eInk UI Components in CSS

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Martian Meteorite

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

France's homegrown open source online office suite

SpaceX Delays Mars Plans to Focus on Moon

What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

OldMapsOnline

What It's Like to Be a Worm

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

Bogus Pipeline

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

Cycling in France

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

AI Skills Marketplace

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

eInk UI Components in CSS

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Martian Meteorite

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

France's homegrown open source online office suite

SpaceX Delays Mars Plans to Focus on Moon

Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok

Comments