Show HN: Hallucinopedia

(halupedia.com)

83 points | by bstrama 5 hours ago

33 comments

  • nlehuen 1 minute ago
  • cachius 13 minutes ago
  • driggs 4 hours 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

    • bstrama 4 hours ago
      Exactly, but I consider adding fake search that could find you ANY article, including not existent ones
      • nlehuen 49 minutes 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 46 minutes 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.
      • lxgr 3 hours ago
        All articles exist, some just haven't been discovered yet ;)
      • mmooss 4 hours ago
        Yes, that would be the perfect touch. This is brilliant satire. We need more satire!
  • n00bskoolbus 35 minutes ago
    One suggestion for improvement is avoiding creation of self referential links. For example https://halupedia.com/chaldic-arithmetic has many references links to itself.
  • jakub_g 30 minutes ago
    Reminded me of this old, pre-LLM git docs generator:

    https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

    • anthk 21 minutes ago
      Plan 9/9front's bullshit(1) tool works kinda like these but without requiring an $6k machine.
  • diputsmonro 4 hours 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 28 minutes ago
      Update: Implemented it. All new articles work that way
    • bstrama 4 hours ago
      Yeah, thought about that, maybe will implement it. Will keep in mind! For now SSR to feed LLMs' the priority
  • petercooper 5 hours ago
    Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!
    • aDyslecticCrow 9 minutes 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.

    • stavros 53 minutes ago
      I made the same thing months ago, so you don't need to wait:

      https://encyclopedai.stavros.io

      • gojomo 39 minutes ago
        I searched your site for [Great Pigeon Census of 1887] and was only returned articles anout other things.
        • stavros 14 minutes ago
          • Noumenon72 5 minutes 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 2 minutes ago
              What's the difference between an encyclopedia that produces AI articles on demand and an encyclopedia that produces AI articles on demand?
  • rootusrootus 22 minutes ago
    I wonder how long it will be before Canis dementialis becomes a standalone meme.
  • lxgr 4 hours ago
    Ironically, this seems much faster (for pages already, erm, "researched") than the real one! How?
    • bstrama 4 hours ago
      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
      • lxgr 4 hours ago
        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?)
        • bstrama 45 minutes ago
          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.

          • lxgr 39 minutes ago
            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.

        • bstrama 4 hours ago
          Yep, just a react. Also we use gemini 2.5 flash lite, so it's fast, cheap and dumb.
          • lxgr 3 hours ago
            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.

            [1] https://github.com/lxgr/vibeserver/

  • solarkraft 4 hours ago
    Finally a more trustworthy version of Grokipedia!
    • bstrama 4 hours ago
      It's hilarious, you made my day hahah
    • LeoPanthera 4 hours ago
      I honestly forgot that Grokipedia existed. Did anyone ever use it?
      • bstrama 4 hours 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 4 hours ago
        Somebody showed me it appearing near the top of some of their DuckDuckGo queries.
  • bstrama 3 hours ago
    UPDATE: Just now, comment section added. Have a nice time arguing!
    • dlcarrier 3 hours 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 hours ago
        We should really host another one though; I think I've since lost a few more.
  • JohnMakin 5 hours ago
    Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
    • SwellJoe 52 minutes ago
      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.

      • Eisenstein 23 minutes ago
        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?
    • anonymousiam 4 hours ago
      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.
      • gojomo 37 minutes ago
        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.
    • gojomo 35 minutes ago
      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.

    • r3trohack3r 4 hours ago
      Interesting, but you could argue comments like this are actively harmful to the web.
      • AlecSchueler 4 hours ago
        But the argument wouldn't be nearly as strong.
        • dymk 28 minutes ago
          Hard to say when nobody is actually offering arguments
    • isoprophlex 4 hours ago
      The sooner the current web dies, the better. Something better either rises from its ashes, or we lose... something that was already lost.
      • b00ty4breakfast 4 hours ago
        or something way worse shows up.
        • JohnMakin 4 hours ago
          Yea, I'm not sure how the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument really makes any sense
          • dylan604 15 minutes ago
            When you get the something worse, the previous suddenly becomes much less worse. With the help of wrapping your memories with "remember when" making things much more palatable, the something worse suddenly makes the previous better if not good.
          • znort_ 4 hours ago
            context. sometimes things simply have to be broken to give way for something better. ymmv.
            • b00ty4breakfast 2 hours ago
              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".
    • dayofthedaleks 4 hours ago
      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.’
    • lxgr 4 hours ago
      On the other hand, one could argue that anything that can be destroyed by relatively clearly labeled satire, deserves to be.
    • wildzzz 2 hours ago
      Any training data scraper that blindly takes stuff from websites deserves to have their model poisoned by this nonsense.
    • stronglikedan 4 hours ago
      > you could argue

      Could you? I don't see it happening, but I could be wrong.

    • parliament32 4 hours ago
      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.
    • slig 4 hours ago
      Grokipedia is already doing that.
    • Jtarii 4 hours ago
      Pissing on a pile of shit
  • driggs 4 hours ago
    This site is going to be expensive when a web crawler hits it. A honey pot that burns tokens.
  • pinkmuffinere 40 minutes ago
    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)
    • bstrama 30 minutes ago
      Best part - I didn't implement such logic. It just for some reason works that way.
      • pinkmuffinere 28 minutes ago
        Huh that is interesting, I was expecting it to show some sort of error on generation, or something like that
  • bstrama 5 hours ago
    Can't wait to see the next generation of LLMs after feeding it all of that hahaha
    • everyos_ 5 hours ago
      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?

      • aDyslecticCrow 2 minutes ago
        Not using JavaScript would also make the crawler fail on squarespace and wix website builders.

        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.

      • replygirl 4 hours ago
        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
      • bstrama 4 hours ago
        I'm aware and will implement SSR soon ;)
      • m3047 4 hours ago
        It's entirely possible they simply ingest the JS as-is.
  • mmooss 18 minutes ago
    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

    • Noumenon72 3 minutes ago
      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.
  • anthk 38 minutes 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.

  • anthk 41 minutes ago
    This is what every LLM will converge into without curated human input.
  • nickvec 4 hours ago
    Seeing “Something broke, which is ironic for a made-up encyclopedia: Load failed” when trying to access some of the suggested starting points
    • bstrama 4 hours ago
      Works on my PC.

      Could you gimme the url that's failing?

  • throw310822 4 hours 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).
    • notahacker 47 minutes 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
    • throw310822 32 minutes 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.
  • sofayam 3 hours ago
    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.
  • janwillemb 4 hours ago
    It's nice, but after a few clicks my LLM content fatigue kicks in.
  • meghneelgore 4 hours ago
    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).
    • busymom0 3 hours ago
      Now I want to know the site.
  • arduanika 4 hours 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

    • bstrama 3 hours ago
      Just added comment section :)
    • bstrama 4 hours ago
      Great suggestion! Will immediately look into that!
    • anthk 16 minutes 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.

    • mmooss 4 hours 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 44 minutes 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.

  • gavmor 4 hours ago
    Hm, the page generated seems inconsistent with the usage of the original link.
  • dmje 4 hours ago
    I LOVE IT. Superb.
  • jijilao 4 hours ago
    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
    • tukunjil 4 hours ago
      All the world are going mad with artificial intelligence and LLMs. Just disgusting!
  • FergusArgyll 4 hours ago
    Who says llms can't be funny?!
  • jordanpg 25 minutes ago
  • staticshock 26 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • yodon 4 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • gojomo 43 minutes ago
    [flagged]