Dev here: Unfortunately, that was one thing I never managed to figure out with WikiTok - content filtering. Wikipedia has no categorization of whether or not their articles are NSFW (imagine how much debate that would require for millions of different articles), nor something I could use in their API. That said, anecdotally, I have found the percentage of rather NSFW articles to be quite low all things considered so it's been mostly fine. I think the best option would be to have a quick disclaimer before your scroll, but nobody has seriously asked me for that.

Thanks for the shoutout :)

Thanks! That's me :)

Wikitok lives again! :)

Very cool to read an article about windows 95 still being used in production - a nice contrast to the infinite AI hype cycle over everything. Tech may move fast in flashy areas but not in the more "boring" parts of the industry.

I knew of a Windows 95 host running virtualized in a corp environment until at least 2014 or so. It was surprisingly sturdy, I only had to remote into it once or twice when the old software it was running hung up on something. It was old medical software and we apparently had a couple clients still interfaced to it.

Win95 is only 30 years old and runs natively on some modern hardware.

Apparently there is important stuff still running in emulated PDP-11s, almost double the age.

It needs quite a few fixes to even run in a VM. But it can be done: https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x

This post doesn't go to to great detail, but seems to run natively:

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/1n1no1k/august_202...

It might be possible to use the rest of that RAM above the 4GB barrier as a ridiculously fast RAM disk, with an XMS driver like this one:

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HimemSX

Huh, so someone actually built this? I was thinking about something similar the other day, in the form of a Windows 9x driver that would use that inaccessible RAM as a "page file".

I did a similar thing on my DOS PC. Lots of DOS software gets confused when there is more than 64MB of XMS/EMS free. So I just gave 64MB of the 128MB to smartdrv. It's more RAM drive I ever had when using DOS for work back in the day.

Win95 complains about needing REAL mode compatibility for a RAM disk though. I wonder how much performance degradation is noticeable with a RAM disk though.

Yes certain software for Canadian made nuclear power plants, comes to mind. Was a post on the VCF forums about a job listing that required PDP-11 knowledge.

The screenshots show the program was made for DOS. Very likely Windows was used just for network file sharing.

Ya, RPG assumed character based IO so probably a safe bet that they just ported stuff that ran on IBM character based terminals and just made it run in DOS. (I worked in RPG in the 80's)

There are subtantial amounts of large industrial processes still in operation using equipment from the late 19th century.

Do you mean 20th? Even current looms, steam engines, stills aren't from the 18 hundreds

No, I do mean the late 1800s. Operations processing "low level" materials like agricultural, steel, and mining.

There are an awful lot of pieces of hardware around still using atoms from when the Big Bang detonated.

Hi HN, I wanted to share decomp.dev - a nifty site that tracks video game decompilation efforts, mostly games from from the early 2000s. I find it very fun to look at older c/c++ code from video games I used play, but also how the code was designed around very limited hardware requirements. I come from a TS/Python background so a lot of the techniques are alien to me (for example, using bitflags everywhere to save memory). That example is probably trivial to the more experienced devs here, but it's still interesting. All source code is written from scratch, done with matching decompilation efforts to slowly compile the code into the original binary, by a team of very talented volunteers.

Really the only thing that will move this is market share. With Claude Code and other tools making it super easy to interact with a computer, and Microsoft repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot adding AI everywhere to Windows 11, I've seen a noticeable amount of people actually switch to Linux, despite every year being the year people switch to Linux - AI in your OS that you can't control seems to be the actual tipping point. First it would start with the personal / hobbyists, then very slowly the corporate world (they will always play things safely and slowly), assuming Windows continues to decline, which it almost certainly will.

My personal site https://www.aizk.sh/ and also, more as a joke that I don't really update https://isaacgemal.github.io/

:)

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.

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