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Show HN: Hallucinopedia

halupedia.com

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Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#61
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I'm not sure how the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument really makes any sense

context. sometimes things simply have to be broken to give way for something better. ymmv.

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".

Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#63

Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.

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.

Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#64
post #40
post #38

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

Exactly, but I consider adding fake search that could find you ANY article, including not existent ones

This is excellent, congrats!

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

Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#65

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 entr…

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

Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#66
post #64
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, but I consider adding fake search that could find you ANY article, including not existent ones

This is excellent, congrats! FYI I manually created this page and some link markup looks malformed: https://halupedia.com/list-of-uninhabited-countries

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.

Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#67
post #35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It generates articles only once. So once it's generated, it never perish. Logic looks like: If article exist -> show it If not -> generate and save

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?)

Also now that I think, we store articles in decwntralized cloudflare KV store and access from serverless workers running also on their servers.

That could be the thing behind it being so quick.

Cloudflare workers have 1ms cold start.

Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#68
post #50

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

> Edit: Oh look, there's an article about the YC! https://halupedia.com/y-combinator This should be on YC's About page.

> 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.

Re: Show HN: Hallucinopedia

#69
Was curious about the prompt –& especially if it referenced Borges – and found in https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BaderBC/halupedia/614eefee...>:

> 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 TITLE. Use for sections,

for paragraphs,

for quotes from (fictional) sources, inside blockquotes for attribution. Do NOT use , , or — no bullet points or lists of any kind, ever. Do NOT output , , , , , 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 Name. 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 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 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
tags, each with a naming a fictional scholar (also wrapped in 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.`;
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