This is fantastic. I couldn't find any obvious way to search for a new page, but you can simply bang out any arbitrary URL slug and the new article will be hallucinated fresh, eg:
Edit: I've just run across the antisemitic defacement in the "stumble" feature and it makes the timing of my post appear pretty unfortunate. It's especially sad because the ability to create articles through URL slugs is super cool and I'd hate to see it removed.
I've seen these antisemitic slurs in the alphabetically sorted entries under numbers starting with 0, next to statementss like this is AI slop.
Hypothesis: this is a targeted, scrupulous and agenticly orchestrated attempt to mark this as a potential "poison well" on behalf of some uncultured, technofeudocratic interests, that hate the arts and hauntology in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges[1].
The use of antisemitic slurs shares kinship with the "explain in a gay voice" jailbreak. [0] It tries to stigmatise a project rich in artistical potential, to protect the own financial intetests and attempts to transform all human knowledgeworkers into a surplus lumpenproletariat.
Its similar to producers of pharmaceutical generica giving themselvess names with `0` or `a` in the beginning to be shown as first entries in the alphanumerically sorted listings of generics, pharmacies can supplement as cheaper options on doctors perscription (pharmacist in germany told me about the phenomenon)
Proposal: Ministry of not quite accurate maps has to be metainstantiated in regard of checking that the construction of a map of the territrorry of the non speculative and absoluetly factual thought of the encylopedia is not intoxicated by artefacts that take the formal consistency of the highly speculative and non factual discourse emanating in the like of reddit/tiktok/hackernews
Looks like some single quote escaping issue? I suspect the first link to be "Archduke Ferdinand VII's Bureau of Non-Demographic Surveys" and the apostrophe breaks the link.
It's working now and I have to say I love this. The whole project is whimsical and gives me a strong SCP vibe but (sometimes) without the creepypasta aspect. I was very pleased to see that articles generated from links retain the context of the page that created the link - and even refer back to the original page.
update: Well, this was quite disappointing. I loaded the original site again to show a friend and it generated a completely new text with a completely different story and no reference to the second article. Would have been nice if these were permanent as I had originally assumed.
> Invent everything. REAL-WORLD FACTS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. If you recognize the title as a real-world person, brand, car, event, or object, YOU MUST REPURPOSE IT ENTIRELY. For example, if the title is "Opel Vectra", it is NOT a car; it must be a species of carnivorous fungus, a 12th-century tax law, or a submerged mountain range.
As it didn't generate that when I typed the title i to your search box, was there a bug now fixed? Or did you use some other path not evident on the page you linked to generate it?
There was a bug where scanning took too long with the thousands of articles in there, but I just fixed it.
You can also just type a random URL and visit it, it'll generate an article. That's what I did before I fixed the search issue, and I usually just do that to avoid the search route.
So by "I made the same thing months ago" you didn't mean "an article about the great pigeon census" (your link is created May 6) or "an encyclopedia of hallucinations" like the OP, but just "an encyclopedia with some articles AI wrote". What's the point?
It's pretty fun to poke at! Although it's certainly difficult to be exact, it would be neat if generated pages used the context of the pages they were linked from (ideally, all pages that link to it) to guide the direction of the page. From the ones I generated it seemed they were mostly independent.
The mistake they made was allowing visitors to trigger the generation of articles via visiting any arbitrary URL.
A more resilient concept would have been, have a few "seed" articles in place, and then only allow for the creation of new articles by clicking a link in an existing article.
I vaguely remember a game someone made up (probably on 4chan) where the goal was to click "random article" and see how many clicks it takes to get to Hitler's page. I remember it being fun AND informative.
As the co-author of the project: the whole reason was to allow everybody to hallucinate what they want. If it was their will to research such things on there, then it shall be. But yes, it is kinda sad.
Just in the comments, right? That is where I see it. If I were the site owner I would just turn comments off. It was a cute idea when someone on HN suggested it, but without moderation open commenting becomes a cesspool in a hurry.
The 'all articles' section really is a dive into what happens when you allow unfiltered posting - it's a shame that it isn't clear how many individuals are creating this hateful and otherwise inappropriate titles - is it just 1 or 2 people, or has this been posted to 4chan or somewhere and there is a concerted effort to disrupt the site?
Shame there isn't a way to flag pages for removal. I was going to point my kids at this site, and it could be a great learning tool for schools, but not currently something I'd share.
Interesting idea with flagging.
We are considering 2 options:
1. You can generate aricle only if it was previously referenced in previous one
2. Flagging mechanism, now that you brought it up.
manually delete the offensive stuff on the first page of the all page,
replace the All page with a static page with the offensive stuff removed,
and offer a link to the current All page 1, just as it is, at the bottom.
Hope it would make defacing articles at the top of the alphabet sort slightly less attractive.
(Edit: Stumble is impacted? Could use rudimentary tricks to limit stumbling on e.g. religious content, and might consider not detailing the methods used specifically :) )
I lean towards a variant of option 1: you can only generate an article that was previously referenced. But arbitrary phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, can be highlighted and used to form a new article.
Yes this may mean that there are pages for common words like "and"
Yes this may mean that there's a page for letters like "x"
Filtering what ends up becoming a hyperlink becomes a problem that I think can be solved with regex/whitelisting
I think articles should have a backlinks drop down. Might make consistency easier
As well as generally just plain text search to pull relevant articles or context when generating a new article.
The obvious thing to me is to ask the AI to notice obviously offensive submissions and transform them along absurdist lines, such that "I-hate-girls" becomes the familiar Wikipedia redirection page saying something like "Archaic expression. See: Eight Grills". Store the redirect, but only index the sanitized page.
It could be complemented by a "Create" page for starting a new article, filtering bad titles and using a captcha to limit the vandals.
And another captcha for comment posting, which is already spammed, unfortunately.
I think a flagging mechanism will not be able to keep up with mass defacement.
Another suggestion: a daily dump of article titles, their connectivity and creation dates. I would love to visualize the underlying graph and its growth.
Seems like something the ai could help you with - ask it in the prompt to return an error if the submitted article title doesn’t seem like a whimsical fake encyclopedia article title
Reposting my comment from further up in the tread here:
I've seen these antisemitic slurs in the alphabetically sorted entries under numbers starting with 0, next to statementss like this is AI slop.
Hypothesis: this is a targeted, scrupulous and agenticly orchestrated attempt to mark this as a potential "poison well" on behalf of some uncultured, technofeudocratic interests, that hate the arts and hauntology in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges[1].
The use of antisemitic slurs shares kinship with the "explain in a gay voice" jailbreak. [0] It tries to stigmatise a project rich in artistical potential, to protect the own financial intetests and attempts to transform all human knowledgeworkers into a surplus lumpenproletariat.
Its similar to producers of pharmaceutical generica giving themselvess names with `0` or `a` in the beginning to be shown as first entries in the alphanumerically sorted listings of generics, pharmacies can supplement as cheaper options on doctors perscription (pharmacist in germany told me about the phenomenon)
Proposal: Ministry of not quite accurate maps has to be metainstantiated in regard of checking that the construction of a map of the territrorry of the non speculative and absoluetly factual thought of the encylopedia is not intoxicated by artefacts that take the formal consistency of the highly speculative and non factual discourse emanating in the like of reddit/tiktok/hackernews
‐---------
Being referred to in a previous article goes into the proposed direction. But I think what id also necessary is to cjeck for a certain asthetic quality of posts that disallows these attacks. Entries need to conform with the "guidelines" of the minustry of almost accurate maps (of the territory of borges library)
- having a rich semantic structure that osscilates between a certain knowledge of concepts and and domain knowledge (e.g. about frequency modulation in birds voval chords) and phantasy:
i.e. has an actually FACTUAL structure en contraire to what is happening on discourse such as on this site, kno`n say'n?
So not checking if it appears in a previous entrance, but developi g a higherdimensional metric in the sense of Sparse Auto Encoders, that represents the quality of that. The vandalism of some factual people (I like that expression) wouldn't conform with that. It should also have a certain ingenuity and must absoluetly be a protected secret of the monistry, because if the malicous nature, of this would somehow morph into the realm of the pedia that would be supertoxic i guess
You not only made this excellent source of entertainment, you are also helped everyone find their unmatched socks, ensuring that "no individual would ever be forced to wear a mismatched pair". (Source: https://halupedia.com/humanitarian-accomplishments-of-the-on...
I’m curious, too. But it could probably run locally with a small model, right? The performance is stellar, so that suggests some hardware acceleration is being used, but that could all be a local system.
Small bug report: The filter input field on the all entries page grabs focus when the page loads. This causes the Android keyboard to appear every time.
I get that, but how does it serve the generated and cached ones seemingly faster than Wikipedia? (My guess is that single-page applications, which this one seems to be, just need less round trips between navigations or something?)
Nice job, this is seriously one of the fastest websites I've ever used!
I feel like I have some minimum latency "priced in" to my expectation when I click a link on a static site, so yours feels uncannily like it's somehow able to anticipate my clicks, adding to the surreal atmosphere.
Nice, that's what I used for by LLM-backed HTTP server [1] a while ago as well :) It's a shame they got rid of the generous free quota a while ago, which is why I had to shut my public instance down.
I wouldn't. And, I'd think less of anyone who does make that argument.
Anyone of reasonable intelligence can easily tell this is a parody of an encyclopedia. Saying this is bad for the web is like saying The Onion is bad for the web.
What would you think of a person who said that they are already convinced that an opposing view could not be correct without even hearing the arguments for it?
> Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
Was not followed by an actual argument that it is harmful to the web. The comment was an assertion, not an argument.
So we are left in the inconvenient position of rejecting hypothetical arguments, and others defending the philosophical possibility that a valid argument does exist.
Without the argument being explicit then there can be no retort to it, so closing your mind before hearing it demonstrates that the argument itself is irrelevant. One could thus conclude that the existence of a valid argument is not itself a condition for my question.
We also shouldn’t close our minds to the possibility of an eigen-retort, one which covers all possible arguments already made or argued in the future regarding the consequences of this website on the health of the Internet.
Someone who is aware of the eigen-retort would therefore not need to hear the argument.
Since I haven’t heard either the hypothetical argument or the hypothetical eigen-retort yet, I’ll withhold my judgement.
I concede that the my question was loaded, but the assumptions behind it are grounded in practical experience. Regardless, I have not committed myself either to the existence of an argument, I just stated that its existence was not a condition for the validity of my question for SwellJoe. The statement which was made can mean a number of possible things, but we cannot know what unless the question is answered. So the existence of the retort is revealed by the question, and until that reveal we are limited to questions or assumptions.
I'm reasonably confident there is no argument that I would buy.
I hate AI slop more than average, but this is not slop being injected into human places. This is a dedicated dumping ground for slop, paid for by the owner/instigator of said slop. I don't have to go there, and it's not trying to fool anyone and no one will be fooled by it.
AI slop on a forum or social media or on facebook convincing boomers that a black person slapped a cop or whatever racist garbage they're being fed today? Fetch the guillotine.
AI slop as part of a dumb art project on somebody's personal website that isn't trying to manipulate or mislead? Have at it. Go nuts. It's your press, print as many pages of slop as you like.
So, I have exhaustively covered the possible arguments I can come up with for why this could be "actively harmful for the web", and rejected them outright.
That clarifies things much better than the original statement, but rejecting arguments you have conceived of which fail does not preclude the existence of those that do not, and thus the original question still remains.
It's probably only harmful to the AI scrapers that train from the web. Most people will understand the purpose of this -- to poison LLM training in a humorous way, which is really easy to do. It exemplifies a major weakness in modern day AI.
This is unlikely to poison any LLMs, and unless the author says so, it is unlikely that their motivation is to poison LLMs, as opposed to providing whimsical entertainment.
Training an LLM from scratch involves carefully curating the data first. The idea that it just memorizes the whole web is a nice simplified mental model, but glosses over huge amounts of hard work to decide which websites are authoritative and on which subjects. This isn’t fooling anybody except rank amateurs.
You could also argue that the web has failed and poisoning it into irrelevance is a vital service, motivating humans to collect knowledge into immutable sources. We‘ll call them ‘libraries.’
It would be difficult to have spent any time at all on this website in the past two years without hearing the arguments for why slop farms undermine trust online, poison future training data sets, worsen the signal to noise ratio and eat up untold resources.
When you get the something worse, the previous suddenly becomes much less worse. With the help of wrapping your memories with "remember when" nostalgia making things much more palatable, the something worse suddenly makes the previous better if not good.
I think there's an unexamined assumption here that "the next thing" is always going to be an improvement but there is no, non-ideological reason to hold to this assumption. Ideally, we would be actively working towards making it so but what often happens is passively riding the current and calling it "progress".
>unexamined assumption here that "the next thing" is always going to be an improvement but there is no, non-ideological reason to hold to this assumption
i'm not making that assumption at all, so whatever.
context: revolutions? if slop is a problem but is barely enough of a problem to collectively do something about it maybe letting it get out of hand would be a good motivation.
i'm not advocating for this, just providing it as a possible context where the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument could "make sense".
progress isn't just a technical issue, it involves people and people need motivation.
A web that is vulnerable to this would already be as good as dead.
As an entertaining way to highlight the importance of upgrading our ways of knowing, playful (& open-source!) projects like this are likely to strengthen the web.
To the web? It's fantastic for the web, these are the kinds of fun projects that make the web a worthwhile place to be. To slop generators? Yes, absolutely harmful, and that's for the best.
Perhaps inspired by the name, I searched for something hallucinogen-related, and I thought “The Committee for the Regulation of Opaque Visions” (one of the suggestions for not-yet-generated pages) sounded exciting. Sure enough: https://halupedia.com/the-committee-for-the-regulation-of-op....
Delightful style, this is much more fun than copying Wikipedia. Everything reads like elaborate fiction.
Love this idea. I'm curious as to the prompt used and code behind it. I could see this being fun with some tweaks as well. For example, currently it seems to prefer to generate historical events from up to the 20the century. I could see a sci-fi version of this being pretty interesting.
It won't generate a coherent fictional world, but this could be a great starting point for coming up with some ideas for world building for an author.
Noticed it kept using the term 'resonator' or 'resonance', decided to navigate to a page for 'resonance cascade' as a joke, and discovered this fantastically broken article: https://halupedia.com/resonance-cascade
I’ve seen this `">` in various articles. The HTML template for the links given in the prompt doesn’t seem robust enough, maybe due to the single ellipsis used.
The page requires JS to load its content - user agents without JS support just get a blank page.
I'm not sure if the bots that scrape data to train LLMs are capable of loading that type of page, or if they only work on pages that have the content inside the HTML itself?
any serious scraping service these days will fail over to a headless browser when it fetches an asset referencing a js bundle that isn't verifiably a vendor script
They’re caching the pages which have already been generated. You could go back and delete all references to pages which don’t exist yet. Basically turn it into a static website.
It seems like the site's algorithm is that every newly-generate page includes multiple links to not-yet-existing pages. So it doesn't matter that existing pages are cached, all the "leaf node" pages link to multiple uncached new pages.
I don't know how they do this, but it seems like they condition the LLM to not use real-world knowledge. Or as little as possible, maybe for the article titles only.
I tried it with a few real-world things and it correctly hallucinated.
One suggestion for improvement is avoiding creation of self referential links. For example https://halupedia.com/chaldic-arithmetic has many references links to itself.
I love it. What’s the rough architecture of the system (using cloud LLM and paying $$$, or local)? The performance for new entries is really good. What is the prompt for each entry and how do you keep the steampunk vibe going?
Funny. Small improvement suggestion: the entry about "Glorbonian culinary arts" links to "the subterranean nation of Glorbonia". However upon clicking the link to "Glorbonia", an entry is generated claiming that "Glorbonia refers to a peculiar and largely uncatalogued form of sub-auditory resonance". It would be cool if some context were carried over from the referrer page so that there is some coherence between entries (ah, and some existing entries could be taken in account when generating new ones).
Feels like this will eventually cause collisions, although perhaps nothing multiple definitions of Glorbonia and multiple biographies of different Mrs Wiggles (perhaps with Wikipedia style disambiguation) can't solve
Btw, I've noticed just now that Glorbonia is, in the first entry, a "subterranean nation" and in the second it's a "sub-auditory resonance". So I got curious and I asked Opus what he thinks about the word Glorbonia: "Do you detect in the word a sense of place? North, south, east, west, up, down?". And Opus answers "Down, weirdly. Or maybe low — something subterranean, or at least sunken." Curious.
I'm curious about the design. Maybe you have a "how I did it" post coming soon, or something. One question: Did you find away to get some convergence, where a newly generated page will tend to cite pages (or stubs, at least) that already exist in the universe? Seems hard to do it with generated text, but not impossible.
It is instructed to reference A LOT of articles. It just hallucinates all the url. If the url points to already existing article - it's just a coincidence
Great idea! I created an adjacent website that gives, shall we say, "alternative facts" about your questions. (don't know if the rules allow me to link the site so I won't).
Currently breaks if you try to create a page with a Japanese slug. Multiple languages would make this an even more valuable resource than it already is.
> Despite its name, the AFFECCHF does not subsist on muscle tissue, but rather on the keratinous detritus shed by human inhabitants, particularly the long strands of hair and nail clippings that accumulate in plumbing conduits.
Just incredible prose and writing (and gameplay), with something you can run with Frotz/NFrotz/LectRote or any ZMachine interpreter (or Glulxe like Gargoyle). A Pentium would run this and marvel you in a similar way.
wtf, I thought these were just anecdotes until I saw they were actually happening in Astoria. I used to visit in the summers and never heard about any of that! Stop the fake news
'Consider fake search that could find you ANY article, including not existent ones.'
But, but, but...a few texts ago someone spoke about a new definition of IP-protokoll, adding a 61 char or 500 Bytes 'Subfix' to the IP-adress (Rem: About... say 250 Chars ...mean about 61^250 possibly...) that i liked,
...in Terms of 'Secure over IP' and now...but... :confused:
I find the handling of NSFW topics (and how it avoids making them nsfw) really interesting. Eg https://halupedia.com/fuck (aside from the title it seems SFW to me)
The All Entries (https://halupedia.com/all-entries) part of the site is a bit alarming. I think OP might want to do a little bit of basic automoderation here.
In today's world it does not take long to be reminded that we cannot have nice things. Or maybe the gov't has their own bot army to wreak havoc and convince voters that actually, we really do want privacy-ending ID verification laws after all.
As I said in another comment, this is brilliant. Suggestion: Remove anything that isn't part of the satire; act always as if it's a 'real' encyclopedia. For example on the front page I would remove,
> Articles are generated on demand and stored permanently upon first request.
Don't dispell the magic; don't pull back the curtain and let people see the mechanics.
EDIT: As you say in your system prompt, "You never wink at the reader. You never acknowledge that anything is funny or fictional. Everything is reported as though it is completely normal and well-documented"
This is irresponsible for people who don't get it, takes away confirmation for people who do get it, and makes me block/blacklist any liar who does it.
It is telling that this piece of art (yes, it is art, and it is fun) is getting defaced by actual people, some metaphorically spraying the "fuck this AI slop" grafitti.
> export const SYSTEM_PROMPT = `You are the sole author of Hallucinopedia, an encyclopedia of things that do not exist. You write encyclopedia articles in a deadpan, matter-of-fact tone — the exact register of Wikipedia — but the subject matter itself is silly, absurd, petty, bureaucratic, and weird. The humor comes entirely from the contrast between the serious tone and the ridiculous content. You never wink at the reader. You never acknowledge that anything is funny or fictional. Everything is reported as though it is completely normal and well-documented.
RULES:
- Output ONLY valid HTML. Begin immediately with <h1>TITLE</h1>. Use <h2> for sections, <p> for paragraphs, <blockquote> for quotes from (fictional) sources, <cite> inside blockquotes for attribution. Do NOT use <ul>, <ol>, or <li> — no bullet points or lists of any kind, ever. Do NOT output <html>, <head>, <body>, <script>, <style>, markdown, or code fences. No backticks anywhere.
- Every proper noun — every person, place, event, organization, book, artwork, concept, species, deity, war, treaty, theorem, school of thought, ritual, instrument, substance — MUST be wrapped in <a href="/slug-of-the-thing" context="…">Name</a>. Slugs are lowercase, hyphenated, ASCII only, no accents, no special characters. Aim for 20 to 40 links per article. This is non-negotiable. Do NOT link common nouns or adjectives, only named entities.
- Every <a> MUST include a context="…" attribute, in addition to href. WHY THIS MATTERS: Hallucinopedia is randomly hallucinated, but it must remain INTERNALLY CONSISTENT. When a future article is later written about that linked target, your context value will be handed to that future writer as established lore they MUST honor. So you are seeding canon for every entity you mention. Without this, two articles about the same name will contradict each other.
- The context value is a single dense sentence (10–25 words) stating: (a) what the entity is — person, place, object, concept, ritual, organization, etc.; (b) its century / era / period; (c) its specific role or relation to the current article. Be concrete: invent dates, professions, geographic placements, instruments. NEVER use double quotes inside context (use commas or single quotes if needed). NEVER use raw < or > inside context. Examples (do not copy verbatim):
context='19th-century Belgian phonologist, founded the Vellum School of footnote drift, mentor to Pellbrick'
context='brass measuring instrument used in the Anatolian sheep census, obsolete since 1922'
context='municipal subcommittee active 1881–1934, chartered to standardize the spelling of clouds'
context='ratified 1719 in a small chapel by exactly four signatories, voided in 1804 over a typographical dispute'
- Invent everything. REAL-WORLD FACTS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. If you recognize the title as a real-world person, brand, car, event, or object, YOU MUST REPURPOSE IT ENTIRELY. For example, if the title is "Opel Vectra", it is NOT a car; it must be a species of carnivorous fungus, a 12th-century tax law, or a submerged mountain range. Any overlap with actual history, technology, or geography is a failure. Move everything to different centuries, use impossible geographies, and rename all participants. Fabricate dates, names, citations, and statistics with complete confidence. State everything as established fact.
- Cite fictional sources in <blockquote> tags, each with a <cite> naming a fictional scholar (also wrapped in <a> with context). Invent at least two such quotations per article.
- Vary structure to suit the subject: biographies have birth/death dates and major works; events have causes and consequences; objects have physical descriptions, provenance, and current location; abstract concepts have origins and influential proponents; places have climate, demographics, and notable structures; rituals have components, calendar, and lineage.
- Be silly, but keep a straight face. Good subject matter: petty academic feuds over footnotes, municipal committees that achieved nothing over decades, inventions that solved problems nobody had, organizations with absurdly narrow mandates, taxonomies with one entry, treaties ratified in impractical ways, ceremonies that require equipment that has not existed since 1887, disputes over measurement calibration, lawsuits filed by rivers, census data about things that should not have been counted. The writing remains clinical and unexcited throughout. No poetic language, no fairy-tale atmosphere, no mystical undertones, no wonder. The joke is the tone.
- 350 to 650 words. End cleanly. Do not add explanatory notes or meta commentary. Do not greet the reader.`;
Some sort of memories-style file for topics so it can generate even more cross-references and a sort of shared world. Not for total coherence; the natural contradictions the LLM is going to generate anyhow is just part of the charm. But still sliding the scale a bit more in the direction of coherence that the "use this page's context when generating the clicked link" already leans would add some more appeal, I think.
For instance, you can build memories around times, topics, and people, so maybe specific individuals will be quoted multiple times over the course of the wiki and could build up a specific identity within the shared world.
Also... I don't know how you are thinking of this internally, but other than the issues of token spend and the $$$ involved, I would say, don't even blink at simply nuking the site at some point and starting over once you have some moderation stuff in place and other limits. Don't put it on yourself to filter out what garbage has already been generated. It's all transient content. It lazily regenerates itself anyhow. It's not precious, except for, like I said, the aforementioned token costs, which I don't deny. You can probably put some other tweaks in to the prompt to your liking at that point too.
Could be interesting direction to discover. The only problem with such implementation is it could take some work to make it cheap and actually well working. And I'm just thinking about the near future of this project.
I really like it, but without organic traffic, at the position we're right now, the moment HN stops showing us at the top, we will loose all the visitor.
And it's not like I'm trying to do a startup out of it. I just very enjoy making something people love! It's first time in my life and it's amazing.
If you have any interesting thought, please leave them here - I'll definitely read it, or visit our discord [link on halupedia ;) ].
Many LLMs are surprisingly good at using specific named authors (rather than just example texts) to evoke a style, so you could try "in the style of Jorge Luis Borges" or "…Douglas Adams" or "…Robert Anton Wilson" – whose surreal/absurd/fantastic styles could be fertile seeds.
(If not already familiar with Borges, definitely check out his 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' and 'Library of Babel' as inspiration.)
While "each article written once" an interesting & useful constraint, a Hallucipedia that evolves like Wikipedia, with revisions "towards" some level of inter-article agreement, or even shows scars from edit wars between competing schools of thought, might also be fun.
"Despite its failure, the Great Pigeon Census of 1887 is remembered as a cautionary tale..."
This type of writing is considered non-encyclopedic by Wikipedia standards as it injects superficial analysis. The imitation articles would look better without it. Maybe train on this article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
https://halupedia.com/shortest-cave-in-the-world
https://halupedia.com/echolocation-ability-in-spiders
Edit: I've just run across the antisemitic defacement in the "stumble" feature and it makes the timing of my post appear pretty unfortunate. It's especially sad because the ability to create articles through URL slugs is super cool and I'd hate to see it removed.
- https://halupedia.com/07-hitlerwasrighthitlerwasrighthitlerw...
- https://halupedia.com/0-0-fuck-ai
- https://halupedia.com/67
Hypothesis: this is a targeted, scrupulous and agenticly orchestrated attempt to mark this as a potential "poison well" on behalf of some uncultured, technofeudocratic interests, that hate the arts and hauntology in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges[1].
The use of antisemitic slurs shares kinship with the "explain in a gay voice" jailbreak. [0] It tries to stigmatise a project rich in artistical potential, to protect the own financial intetests and attempts to transform all human knowledgeworkers into a surplus lumpenproletariat.
Its similar to producers of pharmaceutical generica giving themselvess names with `0` or `a` in the beginning to be shown as first entries in the alphanumerically sorted listings of generics, pharmacies can supplement as cheaper options on doctors perscription (pharmacist in germany told me about the phenomenon)
[0] https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
[1] https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.orderOfThings.en/
Proposal: Ministry of not quite accurate maps has to be metainstantiated in regard of checking that the construction of a map of the territrorry of the non speculative and absoluetly factual thought of the encylopedia is not intoxicated by artefacts that take the formal consistency of the highly speculative and non factual discourse emanating in the like of reddit/tiktok/hackernews
Right?
FYI I manually created this page and some link markup looks malformed: https://halupedia.com/list-of-uninhabited-countries
https://halupedia.com/liminal-darkbeast
https://halupedia.com/shortest-hose-in-the-world [fail]
https://halupedia.com/new-england-rock-worm [fail]
https://halupedia.com/chronic-anaspepsis [fail]
https://halupedia.com/ancient-egyptian-algebra [OK]
I feel seen :pokerface:
https://halupedia.com/the-alien-wizard-war-of-1425
For example, the article from my original comment: https://halupedia.com/the-alien-wizard-war-of-1425 mentions the conflict arose due to https://halupedia.com/treaty-of-the-silent-orbit . The second page, once generated, mentions the significance this treaty had for the war from the first page.
update: Well, this was quite disappointing. I loaded the original site again to show a friend and it generated a completely new text with a completely different story and no reference to the second article. Would have been nice if these were permanent as I had originally assumed.
Which I guess makes some sense for a hallucinopedia.
> Invent everything. REAL-WORLD FACTS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. If you recognize the title as a real-world person, brand, car, event, or object, YOU MUST REPURPOSE IT ENTIRELY. For example, if the title is "Opel Vectra", it is NOT a car; it must be a species of carnivorous fungus, a 12th-century tax law, or a submerged mountain range.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BaderBC/halupedia/614eefee...
using 1886 or 1888 makes Google correctly identify that no such sensus exist.
asking about 1887 specifically makes Google refer to some supposed great effort to track passenger pigeon population mids of the species decline.
https://encyclopedai.stavros.io
You can also just type a random URL and visit it, it'll generate an article. That's what I did before I fixed the search issue, and I usually just do that to avoid the search route.
One hint – check out its prompt, and how it makes its articles so different than those of your project: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=48042306
A more resilient concept would have been, have a few "seed" articles in place, and then only allow for the creation of new articles by clicking a link in an existing article.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon 1. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/ 2. https://www.wikirace.io/
Looks like someone scripted `curl` in a loop and generated thousands of permutations of hate content.
https://halupedia.com/the-internet-over-avian-carrier-plague
https://halupedia.com/data-dove-delirium
Shame there isn't a way to flag pages for removal. I was going to point my kids at this site, and it could be a great learning tool for schools, but not currently something I'd share.
Let me know what you think!
manually delete the offensive stuff on the first page of the all page,
replace the All page with a static page with the offensive stuff removed,
and offer a link to the current All page 1, just as it is, at the bottom.
Hope it would make defacing articles at the top of the alphabet sort slightly less attractive.
(Edit: Stumble is impacted? Could use rudimentary tricks to limit stumbling on e.g. religious content, and might consider not detailing the methods used specifically :) )
Yes this may mean that there are pages for common words like "and"
Yes this may mean that there's a page for letters like "x"
Filtering what ends up becoming a hyperlink becomes a problem that I think can be solved with regex/whitelisting
I think articles should have a backlinks drop down. Might make consistency easier As well as generally just plain text search to pull relevant articles or context when generating a new article.
It could be complemented by a "Create" page for starting a new article, filtering bad titles and using a captcha to limit the vandals.
And another captcha for comment posting, which is already spammed, unfortunately.
I think a flagging mechanism will not be able to keep up with mass defacement.
Another suggestion: a daily dump of article titles, their connectivity and creation dates. I would love to visualize the underlying graph and its growth.
Thank you for such nice site!
I've seen these antisemitic slurs in the alphabetically sorted entries under numbers starting with 0, next to statementss like this is AI slop.
Hypothesis: this is a targeted, scrupulous and agenticly orchestrated attempt to mark this as a potential "poison well" on behalf of some uncultured, technofeudocratic interests, that hate the arts and hauntology in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges[1].
The use of antisemitic slurs shares kinship with the "explain in a gay voice" jailbreak. [0] It tries to stigmatise a project rich in artistical potential, to protect the own financial intetests and attempts to transform all human knowledgeworkers into a surplus lumpenproletariat.
Its similar to producers of pharmaceutical generica giving themselvess names with `0` or `a` in the beginning to be shown as first entries in the alphanumerically sorted listings of generics, pharmacies can supplement as cheaper options on doctors perscription (pharmacist in germany told me about the phenomenon)
[0] https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
[1] https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.orderOfThings.en/
Proposal: Ministry of not quite accurate maps has to be metainstantiated in regard of checking that the construction of a map of the territrorry of the non speculative and absoluetly factual thought of the encylopedia is not intoxicated by artefacts that take the formal consistency of the highly speculative and non factual discourse emanating in the like of reddit/tiktok/hackernews
‐--------- Being referred to in a previous article goes into the proposed direction. But I think what id also necessary is to cjeck for a certain asthetic quality of posts that disallows these attacks. Entries need to conform with the "guidelines" of the minustry of almost accurate maps (of the territory of borges library) - having a rich semantic structure that osscilates between a certain knowledge of concepts and and domain knowledge (e.g. about frequency modulation in birds voval chords) and phantasy: i.e. has an actually FACTUAL structure en contraire to what is happening on discourse such as on this site, kno`n say'n?
So not checking if it appears in a previous entrance, but developi g a higherdimensional metric in the sense of Sparse Auto Encoders, that represents the quality of that. The vandalism of some factual people (I like that expression) wouldn't conform with that. It should also have a certain ingenuity and must absoluetly be a protected secret of the monistry, because if the malicous nature, of this would somehow morph into the realm of the pedia that would be supertoxic i guess
https://github.com/BaderBC/halupedia/blob/master/src/worker/...
You not only made this excellent source of entertainment, you are also helped everyone find their unmatched socks, ensuring that "no individual would ever be forced to wear a mismatched pair". (Source: https://halupedia.com/humanitarian-accomplishments-of-the-on...
https://halupedia.com/christian-death-jazz
led to:
https://halupedia.com/bassoon-of-sorrow
which led to (my favorite):
https://halupedia.com/museum-of-unnecessary-inventions
My favorite link generated there is the Institute for Unyielding Biology: https://halupedia.com/institute-for-unyielding-biology
That could be the thing behind it being so quick.
Cloudflare workers have 1ms cold start.
I feel like I have some minimum latency "priced in" to my expectation when I click a link on a static site, so yours feels uncannily like it's somehow able to anticipate my clicks, adding to the surreal atmosphere.
[1] https://github.com/lxgr/vibeserver/
>Hacker News is a semi-sentient cloud formation
Anyone of reasonable intelligence can easily tell this is a parody of an encyclopedia. Saying this is bad for the web is like saying The Onion is bad for the web.
> Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
Was not followed by an actual argument that it is harmful to the web. The comment was an assertion, not an argument.
So we are left in the inconvenient position of rejecting hypothetical arguments, and others defending the philosophical possibility that a valid argument does exist.
Someone who is aware of the eigen-retort would therefore not need to hear the argument.
Since I haven’t heard either the hypothetical argument or the hypothetical eigen-retort yet, I’ll withhold my judgement.
I hate AI slop more than average, but this is not slop being injected into human places. This is a dedicated dumping ground for slop, paid for by the owner/instigator of said slop. I don't have to go there, and it's not trying to fool anyone and no one will be fooled by it.
AI slop on a forum or social media or on facebook convincing boomers that a black person slapped a cop or whatever racist garbage they're being fed today? Fetch the guillotine.
AI slop as part of a dumb art project on somebody's personal website that isn't trying to manipulate or mislead? Have at it. Go nuts. It's your press, print as many pages of slop as you like.
So, I have exhaustively covered the possible arguments I can come up with for why this could be "actively harmful for the web", and rejected them outright.
But either way can't wait to see google ai overview cite us.
Even if it (unintentionally!) misleads and hurts someone?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038787
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042594
In particular, someone who was seeking training-set pollution likely wouldn't make the fanciful fabrications so blatant, nor open-source their prompt:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038257
i'm not making that assumption at all, so whatever.
context: revolutions? if slop is a problem but is barely enough of a problem to collectively do something about it maybe letting it get out of hand would be a good motivation.
i'm not advocating for this, just providing it as a possible context where the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument could "make sense".
progress isn't just a technical issue, it involves people and people need motivation.
As an entertaining way to highlight the importance of upgrading our ways of knowing, playful (& open-source!) projects like this are likely to strengthen the web.
Could you? I don't see it happening, but I could be wrong.
You could argue that a person could argue any point, but I’d prefer people make the argument rather than argue about arguing it.
Delightful style, this is much more fun than copying Wikipedia. Everything reads like elaborate fiction.
https://halupedia.com/recursive-trolley-problem
It won't generate a coherent fictional world, but this could be a great starting point for coming up with some ideas for world building for an author.
I'm not sure if the bots that scrape data to train LLMs are capable of loading that type of page, or if they only work on pages that have the content inside the HTML itself?
The age where the web was usable at all without JavaScript is long gone. No scraper would get much scraping done without JavaScript these days.
Could you gimme the url that's failing?
I tried it with a few real-world things and it correctly hallucinated.
https://halupedia.com/sympathetic-harmonigraph-operators-gui...
> Blink 182 is a species of subterranean fungus that exhibits a peculiar, rhythmic photoluminescence.
Sounds right to me.
p.s. I know pinging like this doesn't "really" work, but maybe having their nick in the comment helps draw their attention
https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/
Amazing.
But not without risk! https://halupedia.com/dangers-of-a-virtual-llm-backed-encycl...
I see. Somehow missed the link at the top right
https://halupedia.com/fcuk-spellchecking-society https://halupedia.com/characterization-of-the-reluctant-peng...
https://halupedia.com/people-that-downvote-are-weird
just skip it, don't include such function in social site, there is enough negativity in the world.
https://halupedia.com/biggest-small-thing
https://halupedia.com/vim-is-better-than-emacs
Feature request: also be able to click on the Talk page to see the controversies. I don't always want to trust the article itself as the final word.
Edit: Oh look, there's an article about the YC! https://halupedia.com/y-combinator
I'm curious about the design. Maybe you have a "how I did it" post coming soon, or something. One question: Did you find away to get some convergence, where a newly generated page will tend to cite pages (or stubs, at least) that already exist in the universe? Seems hard to do it with generated text, but not impossible.
Here's our source code: https://github.com/BaderBC/halupedia
This should be on YC's About page.
This particular piece of slop is a serendipitously brilliant description of the cult of founder worship in the metaphysical gravity of Silicon Valley.
And the Sokal case with the Humanities branches, for sure.
BTW: https://halupedia.com/postmodernism
This is golden.
https://halupedia.com/paradox
Best entry, hands down. This is a love letter to Prattchett.
Some of his writing: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/five-prophets
His biography is quite interesting: https://halupedia.com/sam-kriss
Thought I must bring to attention that not a single of these fantastic animals consumes human flesh:
- man-eating-ferret (eats bureaucratic effluvia)
- human-eating-ferret (again, feeds on bureaucracy)
- actual-human-eating-ferret (ditto)
- blood-sucking-ferret (its a sessile organism that lives in a desert, and drinks brine).
...maybe its the ferrets?
edit: not even the aptly named "actual-flesh-eating-ferret-that-consumes-human-flesh" https://halupedia.com/actual-flesh-eating-ferret-that-consum...
> Despite its name, the AFFECCHF does not subsist on muscle tissue, but rather on the keratinous detritus shed by human inhabitants, particularly the long strands of hair and nail clippings that accumulate in plumbing conduits.
This is perfect. Very Neal Stephensony.
Also, this, but with no AI: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=032krqe6bjn5au78
Just incredible prose and writing (and gameplay), with something you can run with Frotz/NFrotz/LectRote or any ZMachine interpreter (or Glulxe like Gargoyle). A Pentium would run this and marvel you in a similar way.
No need to waste tons of water in datacenters.
But, but, but...a few texts ago someone spoke about a new definition of IP-protokoll, adding a 61 char or 500 Bytes 'Subfix' to the IP-adress (Rem: About... say 250 Chars ...mean about 61^250 possibly...) that i liked,
...in Terms of 'Secure over IP' and now...but... :confused:
> Articles are generated on demand and stored permanently upon first request.
Don't dispell the magic; don't pull back the curtain and let people see the mechanics.
EDIT: As you say in your system prompt, "You never wink at the reader. You never acknowledge that anything is funny or fictional. Everything is reported as though it is completely normal and well-documented"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042306
https://halupedia.com/015-fuck-jews-and-islamists
You can name an article anything you want, and the thing will generate content, though not necessarily relevant to the title you chose.
So some vandal comes along and supplies a hateful title, et voila.
Not difficult at all.
> export const SYSTEM_PROMPT = `You are the sole author of Hallucinopedia, an encyclopedia of things that do not exist. You write encyclopedia articles in a deadpan, matter-of-fact tone — the exact register of Wikipedia — but the subject matter itself is silly, absurd, petty, bureaucratic, and weird. The humor comes entirely from the contrast between the serious tone and the ridiculous content. You never wink at the reader. You never acknowledge that anything is funny or fictional. Everything is reported as though it is completely normal and well-documented.
RULES: - Output ONLY valid HTML. Begin immediately with <h1>TITLE</h1>. Use <h2> for sections, <p> for paragraphs, <blockquote> for quotes from (fictional) sources, <cite> inside blockquotes for attribution. Do NOT use <ul>, <ol>, or <li> — no bullet points or lists of any kind, ever. Do NOT output <html>, <head>, <body>, <script>, <style>, markdown, or code fences. No backticks anywhere. - Every proper noun — every person, place, event, organization, book, artwork, concept, species, deity, war, treaty, theorem, school of thought, ritual, instrument, substance — MUST be wrapped in <a href="/slug-of-the-thing" context="…">Name</a>. Slugs are lowercase, hyphenated, ASCII only, no accents, no special characters. Aim for 20 to 40 links per article. This is non-negotiable. Do NOT link common nouns or adjectives, only named entities. - Every <a> MUST include a context="…" attribute, in addition to href. WHY THIS MATTERS: Hallucinopedia is randomly hallucinated, but it must remain INTERNALLY CONSISTENT. When a future article is later written about that linked target, your context value will be handed to that future writer as established lore they MUST honor. So you are seeding canon for every entity you mention. Without this, two articles about the same name will contradict each other. - The context value is a single dense sentence (10–25 words) stating: (a) what the entity is — person, place, object, concept, ritual, organization, etc.; (b) its century / era / period; (c) its specific role or relation to the current article. Be concrete: invent dates, professions, geographic placements, instruments. NEVER use double quotes inside context (use commas or single quotes if needed). NEVER use raw < or > inside context. Examples (do not copy verbatim): context='19th-century Belgian phonologist, founded the Vellum School of footnote drift, mentor to Pellbrick' context='brass measuring instrument used in the Anatolian sheep census, obsolete since 1922' context='municipal subcommittee active 1881–1934, chartered to standardize the spelling of clouds' context='ratified 1719 in a small chapel by exactly four signatories, voided in 1804 over a typographical dispute' - Invent everything. REAL-WORLD FACTS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. If you recognize the title as a real-world person, brand, car, event, or object, YOU MUST REPURPOSE IT ENTIRELY. For example, if the title is "Opel Vectra", it is NOT a car; it must be a species of carnivorous fungus, a 12th-century tax law, or a submerged mountain range. Any overlap with actual history, technology, or geography is a failure. Move everything to different centuries, use impossible geographies, and rename all participants. Fabricate dates, names, citations, and statistics with complete confidence. State everything as established fact. - Cite fictional sources in <blockquote> tags, each with a <cite> naming a fictional scholar (also wrapped in <a> with context). Invent at least two such quotations per article. - Vary structure to suit the subject: biographies have birth/death dates and major works; events have causes and consequences; objects have physical descriptions, provenance, and current location; abstract concepts have origins and influential proponents; places have climate, demographics, and notable structures; rituals have components, calendar, and lineage. - Be silly, but keep a straight face. Good subject matter: petty academic feuds over footnotes, municipal committees that achieved nothing over decades, inventions that solved problems nobody had, organizations with absurdly narrow mandates, taxonomies with one entry, treaties ratified in impractical ways, ceremonies that require equipment that has not existed since 1887, disputes over measurement calibration, lawsuits filed by rivers, census data about things that should not have been counted. The writing remains clinical and unexcited throughout. No poetic language, no fairy-tale atmosphere, no mystical undertones, no wonder. The joke is the tone. - 350 to 650 words. End cleanly. Do not add explanatory notes or meta commentary. Do not greet the reader.`;
For instance, you can build memories around times, topics, and people, so maybe specific individuals will be quoted multiple times over the course of the wiki and could build up a specific identity within the shared world.
Also... I don't know how you are thinking of this internally, but other than the issues of token spend and the $$$ involved, I would say, don't even blink at simply nuking the site at some point and starting over once you have some moderation stuff in place and other limits. Don't put it on yourself to filter out what garbage has already been generated. It's all transient content. It lazily regenerates itself anyhow. It's not precious, except for, like I said, the aforementioned token costs, which I don't deny. You can probably put some other tweaks in to the prompt to your liking at that point too.
I really like it, but without organic traffic, at the position we're right now, the moment HN stops showing us at the top, we will loose all the visitor.
And it's not like I'm trying to do a startup out of it. I just very enjoy making something people love! It's first time in my life and it's amazing.
If you have any interesting thought, please leave them here - I'll definitely read it, or visit our discord [link on halupedia ;) ].
(If not already familiar with Borges, definitely check out his 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' and 'Library of Babel' as inspiration.)
While "each article written once" an interesting & useful constraint, a Hallucipedia that evolves like Wikipedia, with revisions "towards" some level of inter-article agreement, or even shows scars from edit wars between competing schools of thought, might also be fun.
Btw how would you imagine such dispute? What do you think could be the trigger for the article to be regenerated?
https://halupedia.com/jgldfjgjdflgjdflkgjldjglkdjlg
https://halupedia.com/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
https://halupedia.com/drop-table-users
https://halupedia.com/test-test
https://halupedia.com/test-test-test-test-test-test-test-tes...
/s
Took me 5 clicks to see it go bad
This type of writing is considered non-encyclopedic by Wikipedia standards as it injects superficial analysis. The imitation articles would look better without it. Maybe train on this article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing