Show HN: Hallucinopedia
halupedia.com
halupedia.com
FYI I manually created this page and some link markup looks malformed: https://halupedia.com/list-of-uninhabited-countries
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.
Right?
- https://halupedia.com/07-hitlerwasrighthitlerwasrighthitlerw...
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
https://halupedia.com/shortest-hose-in-the-world [fail]
https://halupedia.com/new-england-rock-worm [fail]
I feel seen :pokerface:
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
And the Sokal case with the Humanities branches, for sure.
BTW: https://halupedia.com/postmodernism
This is golden.
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
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.
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...
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.
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 :) )
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
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.
My favorite link generated there is the Institute for Unyielding Biology: https://halupedia.com/institute-for-unyielding-biology
https://halupedia.com/the-internet-over-avian-carrier-plague
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.
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.
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.
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=48042594
In particular, someone who was seeking training-set pollution likely wouldn't make the fanciful fabrications so blatant, nor open-source their prompt:
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.
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.
https://github.com/BaderBC/halupedia/blob/master/src/worker/...
> 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"
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.
>Hacker News is a semi-sentient cloud formation
https://halupedia.com/christian-death-jazz
led to:
https://halupedia.com/bassoon-of-sorrow
which led to (my favorite):
Could you gimme the url that's failing?
Delightful style, this is much more fun than copying Wikipedia. Everything reads like elaborate fiction.
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 tried it with a few real-world things and it correctly hallucinated.
But not without risk! https://halupedia.com/dangers-of-a-virtual-llm-backed-encycl...
I see. Somehow missed the link at the top right
p.s. I know pinging like this doesn't "really" work, but maybe having their nick in the comment helps draw their attention
https://halupedia.com/fcuk-spellchecking-society https://halupedia.com/characterization-of-the-reluctant-peng...
https://halupedia.com/sympathetic-harmonigraph-operators-gui...
Here's one I just made: https://halupedia.com/buildings-within-buildings
Only problem I'm seeing is that you'd want pages to recognise when they're talking about the same thing, so that you don't have duplicates with slightly different titles and content. You'd want to avoid it re-introducing the same concept if it could refer to an existing matching concept on another page.
E.g. if I make another page https://halupedia.com/buildings-within-buildings-2, I'd expect it to refer to /buildings-within-buildings. Currently it doesn't mention it at all.
I'd also expect /architectural-recursion to mention Archibald Plinth, since he's the author of /observations-on-architectural-recursion. Instead, it mentions Archibald Flicker.
Maybe this can be solved with some kind of graph structure?
> Blink 182 is a species of subterranean fungus that exhibits a peculiar, rhythmic photoluminescence.
Sounds right to me.
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.
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.
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:
> 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?
* readers can request reviews from certain perspectives: "new discovery", "historic reinterpretation", etc. The reviews specifically search for related sibling articles, and seek to create ever-larger areas of consistency. (The same prompt admonition against "nothing actually true" could be paired with "but other Halupedia articles are diegetically true"
* a background process clusters articles, and picks pairs within some neighborhood for dual-harmonization - where they avoid contradictions & adopt meaningful (& deep-anchor) cross-links to each others' sections. Repeated, or to the extent contexts allow expansion of synchronized revision to N-tuples of articles, this creates a tropism towards a shared (un)reality.
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.
/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