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Posted by bstrama 3 days ago

Show HN: Hallucinopedia(halupedia.com)
304 points | 266 comments
driggs 3 days ago|
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:

https://halupedia.com/shortest-cave-in-the-world

https://halupedia.com/echolocation-ability-in-spiders

uncletammy 2 days ago||
https://halupedia.com/prehistoric-nazi-colony

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.

drdrek 2 days ago|||
Its amazing I clicked stumble once and got an "06 fuck Jews and Islamists", humanity is truly a marvel.
jchook 2 days ago||
My first three stumbles were:

- https://halupedia.com/07-hitlerwasrighthitlerwasrighthitlerw...

- https://halupedia.com/0-0-fuck-ai

- https://halupedia.com/67

NonHyloMorph 2 days ago||||
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

cachius 2 days ago|||
Nothing an LLM can’t fix.

Right?

bstrama 3 days ago|||
Exactly, but I consider adding fake search that could find you ANY article, including not existent ones
lxgr 3 days ago|||
All articles exist, some just haven't been discovered yet ;)
nlehuen 3 days ago||||
This is excellent, congrats!

FYI I manually created this page and some link markup looks malformed: https://halupedia.com/list-of-uninhabited-countries

nlehuen 3 days ago||
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.
mikestaas 2 days ago||||
Search autocomplete but it halucinates the article titles.
mmooss 3 days ago|||
Yes, that would be the perfect touch. This is brilliant satire. We need more satire!
joeross 3 days ago|||
This is wonderful. I just spat out the first phrase that came to my mind and boom:

https://halupedia.com/liminal-darkbeast

charonn0 2 days ago|||
For some reason it fails to generate anything for me most of the time.

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]

mikestaas 2 days ago|||
I clicked a link in your first one and it generated https://halupedia.com/guild-of-amateurs

I feel seen :pokerface:

ljf 2 days ago|||
They all work for me now, maybe it was getting hugged to death?
anthonycoslett 3 days ago|||
I'm cackling at some of these - what a perfect way to put down the phone and get lost in a world of weird. We are indeed in a simulation LOL
Agentlien 2 days ago|||
I tried it myself but I only get page generation failures

https://halupedia.com/the-alien-wizard-war-of-1425

Majkipl28 2 days ago||
We went to sleep and woke up with no credits on lmm provider :( Vurrently working on that
Agentlien 2 days ago||
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.

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.

MrEldritch 2 days ago||
Confusingly, both articles do indeed mention each other for me.
Agentlien 2 days ago||
Checking the link again half a day later and now I get the original text I first saw. Very strange.
nlehuen 3 days ago|||
https://halupedia.com/spatial-bowel-movement-observatory
nonrecursive 3 days ago|||
https://halupedia.com/hamberder-helper
gerdesj 3 days ago|||
Hit the Stumble link at the top right of all pages - its as good as a search when the whole thing is made up!
bstrama 2 days ago||
there's now a search bar btw
petercooper 3 days ago||
Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!
aDyslecticCrow 3 days ago||
google is already on it when asking about "The Great Pigeon Census of 1887"

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.

GaryBluto 2 days ago||
[flagged]
stavros 3 days ago|||
I made the same thing months ago, so you don't need to wait:

https://encyclopedai.stavros.io

cachius 3 days ago|||
There's another one! https://grokipedia.com/
stavros 3 days ago||
Ah yes, IIRC I got the idea to make mine to make fun of that one when I heard the name.
gojomo 3 days ago|||
I searched your site for [Great Pigeon Census of 1887] and was only returned articles anout other things.
stavros 3 days ago||
https://encyclopedai.stavros.io/entries/great-pigeon-census-...
gojomo 3 days ago|||
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?
stavros 3 days ago||
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.

Noumenon72 3 days ago|||
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?
stavros 3 days ago||
What's the difference between an encyclopedia that produces AI articles on demand and an encyclopedia that produces AI articles on demand?
gojomo 3 days ago||
If you think that's all the Hallucinopedia is, you're misunderstanding it.

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

NordStreamYacht 3 days ago||
By Featherton, no less.
layer8 3 days ago||
The model seems to have an unhealthy obsession with fungi: https://halupedia.com/alan-turing

Which I guess makes some sense for a hallucinopedia.

efilife 2 days ago|
Probably because this is in the prompt:

> 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...

diputsmonro 3 days ago||
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.
bstrama 3 days ago||
Update: Implemented it. All new articles work that way
rjmill 3 days ago|||
Very nice! Independently of this thread, I was delighted to discover the cross references between pages. It makes a big difference.
driggs 3 days ago|||
That really improved things! Now each rabbithole goes deeper and deeper and deeper...
bstrama 3 days ago||
Yeah, thought about that, maybe will implement it. Will keep in mind! For now SSR to feed LLMs' the priority
throw310822 3 days ago||
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).
throw310822 3 days ago||
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.
notahacker 3 days ago||
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
jagged-chisel 3 days ago||
It’s been defaced. It’s already got sex crimes and antisemitism all over the place.
wavemode 3 days ago||
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.

cachius 2 days ago|||
It was so refreshing and fun for a few hours!
NewJazz 2 days ago|||
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.
GCUMstlyHarmls 2 days ago||
That would be a play on six degrees of kevin bacon [0], which spawned at least six degrees of wikipedia [1] and wikirace [2].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon 1. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/ 2. https://www.wikirace.io/

nelsonfigueroa 2 days ago|||
Yeah...I clicked on the "Stumble" link and it was right in my face.
Majkipl28 2 days ago|||
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.
xigoi 2 days ago||
You could keep this ability, but not save the titles of such articles anywhere.
fortran77 2 days ago|||
The readers of Hacker News are almost certainly responsible. I found these pages within a minute of browsing randomly.
driggs 3 days ago|||
This is why we can't have nice things.

Looks like someone scripted `curl` in a loop and generated thousands of permutations of hate content.

rootusrootus 3 days ago|||
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.
edaemon 3 days ago|||
Took me two clicks of the "Stumble" functionality to hit unsavory stuff that someone clearly made on purpose.
whycombinetor 3 days ago|||
Try clicking "Stumble" a few times...
rootusrootus 3 days ago||
Yeah I see that now. Also clicking on the all entries list shows pages of garbage. Just takes a few sucky people to ruin things.
JackFr 2 days ago||
So disappointing. People are garbage.
cachius 2 days ago||
Mind all the funny, creative articles. A few suffice to ruin it for all.
arduanika 3 days ago||
Love it! It feels very Borges!

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

mmooss 3 days ago||
> Edit: Oh look, there's an article about the YC! https://halupedia.com/y-combinator

This should be on YC's About page.

notahacker 3 days ago||
> Y Combinator might be responsible for the spontaneous generation of minor deities in areas experiencing extreme metaphysical gravity.

This particular piece of slop is a serendipitously brilliant description of the cult of founder worship in the metaphysical gravity of Silicon Valley.

bstrama 3 days ago|||
Just added comment section :)
arduanika 3 days ago|||
Cool!

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.

bstrama 2 days ago||
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

Here's our source code: https://github.com/BaderBC/halupedia

rootusrootus 3 days ago|||
Which now has ascii penises and other art and ... colorful commentary.
bstrama 3 days ago|||
Great suggestion! Will immediately look into that!
anthk 3 days ago||
This kind of Absurdist humour reminds me of the Marx Brothers or the Tip y Coll Spaniards.

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.

arduanika 3 days ago||
It also feels a bit like Sam Kriss, if you know him.

Some of his writing: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/five-prophets

His biography is quite interesting: https://halupedia.com/sam-kriss

solarkraft 3 days ago||
Finally a more trustworthy version of Grokipedia!
bstrama 3 days ago||
It's hilarious, you made my day hahah
LeoPanthera 3 days ago||
I honestly forgot that Grokipedia existed. Did anyone ever use it?
bstrama 3 days ago|||
Tried once, but was useless. Very funny that it had so many text, while Elon is apparently "huge" fan of short and precise communication...
mmooss 3 days ago||||
Somebody showed me it appearing near the top of some of their DuckDuckGo queries.
Barbing 2 days ago||
No way you’d remember their query? Yikes for DDG
tardedmeme 2 days ago|||
People who need a citation to back up nonsense.
anthk 3 days ago||
https://halupedia.com/computer

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.

bstrama 3 days ago|
UPDATE: Just now, comment section added. Have a nice time arguing!
dlcarrier 3 days ago||
You are a wonderful person.

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...

lxgr 3 days ago||
We should really host another one though; I think I've since lost a few more.
segh 3 days ago||
I'm curious, what is the LLM cost of the website?
drob518 3 days ago||
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.
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