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:
Which I guess makes some sense for a hallucinopedia.
MrEldritch
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
jagged-chisel
It’s been defaced. It’s already got sex crimes and antisemitism all over the place.
show comments
petercooper
Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!
show comments
diputsmonro
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.
great. someone has abused the "arbitrary URL" driggs@ mentioned, and now every entry has an offensive title prefixed by a number.
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bstrama
Can't wait to see the next generation of LLMs after feeding it all of that hahaha
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senko
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.
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driggs
This site is going to be expensive when a web crawler hits it. A honey pot that burns tokens.
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drob518
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?
SideburnsOfDoom
Using the model to accelerate model collapse.
n00bskoolbus
One suggestion for improvement is avoiding creation of self referential links. For example https://halupedia.com/chaldic-arithmetic has many references links to itself.
nickvec
Seeing “Something broke, which is ironic for a made-up encyclopedia: Load failed” when trying to access some of the suggested starting points
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).
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arduanika
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.
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).
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sofayam
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.
rootusrootus
I wonder how long it will be before Canis dementialis becomes a standalone meme.
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.
gavmor
Hm, the page generated seems inconsistent with the usage of the original link.
pinkmuffinere
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)
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RIMR
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.
show comments
dmje
I LOVE IT. Superb.
mmooss
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 what every LLM will converge into without curated human input.
FergusArgyll
Who says llms can't be funny?!
jijilao
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
> 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.`;
show comments
ivanvoid
kinda cool but kinda lame, no overall consistency over articles
"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
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
This is really cool, I just wish people wouldn't deface the website by submitting hateful speech as titles.
The model seems to have an unhealthy obsession with fungi: https://halupedia.com/alan-turing
Which I guess makes some sense for a hallucinopedia.
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
It’s been defaced. It’s already got sex crimes and antisemitism all over the place.
Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!
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.
I made an SCP foundation inspired page: https://halupedia.com/hard-to-detroy-reptile
My favorite link generated there is the Institute for Unyielding Biology: https://halupedia.com/institute-for-unyielding-biology
Finally a more trustworthy version of Grokipedia!
I really like this first sentence: The Nights Templar were a monastic order active during the 9th century, primarily based in the Soot Valley.
UPDATE: Just now, comment section added. Have a nice time arguing!
My favorite of the several I generated this evening:
https://halupedia.com/recursive-trolley-problem
Ironically, this seems much faster (for pages already, erm, "researched") than the real one! How?
Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
I guess we finally know now
https://halupedia.com/vim-is-better-than-emacs
great. someone has abused the "arbitrary URL" driggs@ mentioned, and now every entry has an offensive title prefixed by a number.
Can't wait to see the next generation of LLMs after feeding it all of that hahaha
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.
This site is going to be expensive when a web crawler hits it. A honey pot that burns tokens.
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?
Using the model to accelerate model collapse.
One suggestion for improvement is avoiding creation of self referential links. For example https://halupedia.com/chaldic-arithmetic has many references links to itself.
Seeing “Something broke, which is ironic for a made-up encyclopedia: Load failed” when trying to access some of the suggested starting points
https://halupedia.com/this-experiment-may-not-last-long
>Something broke, which is ironic for a made-up encyclopedia: generation failed
Reminded me of this old, pre-LLM git docs generator:
https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/
Someone forgot to protect comments on their website before going on hn.
Very interesting how it works: https://halupedia.com/inner-workings-of-hallucinopedia
But not without risk! https://halupedia.com/dangers-of-a-virtual-llm-backed-encycl...
Fascinating https://halupedia.com/order-of-whispering-monks https://halupedia.com/church-of-the-singing-stones Many parallels here
I'm having a blast adding new seeds :)
https://halupedia.com/fcuk-spellchecking-society https://halupedia.com/characterization-of-the-reluctant-peng...
It's nice, but after a few clicks my LLM content fatigue kicks in.
Why isn't this .gov
I believe the website needs more moderation..
https://halupedia.com/2048-united-states-presidential-electi...
Amazing.
Absolutely perfect. Monty Python on demand.
Lots of antisemitism on there. Search “Jews”
these read like they're from Discworld
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).
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
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.
I wonder how long it will be before Canis dementialis becomes a standalone meme.
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.
Hm, the page generated seems inconsistent with the usage of the original link.
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.
I LOVE IT. Superb.
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"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042306
This is what every LLM will converge into without curated human input.
Who says llms can't be funny?!
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
Care to elaborate?
https://halupedia.com/015-fuck-jews-and-islamists
this is excellent haha
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 <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.`;
kinda cool but kinda lame, no overall consistency over articles
My contributions:
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...
Great resource: https://halupedia.com/013-hitlerwasrighthitlerwasrighthitler...
/s
Took me 5 clicks to see it go bad
"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