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:
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.
One suggestion for improvement is avoiding creation of self referential links. For example https://halupedia.com/chaldic-arithmetic has many references links to itself.
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 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?)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.’
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.
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"
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.
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?
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
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)
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).
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
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.
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.
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).
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
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...
Reminds me of a (perhaps) more fanciful risk of fictional encyclopaedias: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
Actually interesting response. You can also check out github.
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
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.
All articles exist, some just haven't been discovered yet ;)
Yes, that would be the perfect touch. This is brilliant satire. We need more satire!
One suggestion for improvement is avoiding creation of self referential links. For example https://halupedia.com/chaldic-arithmetic has many references links to itself.
Reminded me of this old, pre-LLM git docs generator:
https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/
Plan 9/9front's bullshit(1) tool works kinda like these but without requiring an $6k machine.
I wonder how long it will be before Canis dementialis becomes a standalone meme.
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.
Update: Implemented it. All new articles work that way
Yeah, thought about that, maybe will implement it. Will keep in mind! For now SSR to feed LLMs' the priority
Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!
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.
I made the same thing months ago, so you don't need to wait:
https://encyclopedai.stavros.io
I searched your site for [Great Pigeon Census of 1887] and was only returned articles anout other things.
https://encyclopedai.stavros.io/entries/great-pigeon-census-...
Ironically, this seems much faster (for pages already, erm, "researched") than the real one! How?
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.
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.
Yep, just a react. Also we use gemini 2.5 flash lite, so it's fast, cheap and dumb.
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/
UPDATE: Just now, comment section added. Have a nice time arguing!
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...
We should really host another one though; I think I've since lost a few more.
Finally a more trustworthy version of Grokipedia!
It's hilarious, you made my day hahah
I honestly forgot that Grokipedia existed. Did anyone ever use it?
Tried once, but was useless. Very funny that it had so many text, while Elon is apparently "huge" fan of short and precise communication...
Somebody showed me it appearing near the top of some of their DuckDuckGo queries.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I were just drunk and idea seemed funny. That's the idea behind haha.
But either way can't wait to see google ai overview cite us.
you mean like this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038787
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.
Interesting, but you could argue comments like this are actively harmful to the web.
But the argument wouldn't be nearly as strong.
Hard to say when nobody is actually offering arguments
The sooner the current web dies, the better. Something better either rises from its ashes, or we lose... something that was already lost.
or something way worse shows up.
Yea, I'm not sure how the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument really makes any sense
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.
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".
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.’
On the other hand, one could argue that anything that can be destroyed by relatively clearly labeled satire, deserves to be.
> you could argue
Could you? I don't see it happening, but I could be wrong.
Any training data scraper that blindly takes stuff from websites deserves to have their model poisoned by this nonsense.
Grokipedia is already doing that.
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.
Pissing on a pile of shit
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 site is going to be expensive when a web crawler hits it. A honey pot that burns tokens.
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.
Can't wait to see the next generation of LLMs after feeding it all of that hahaha
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?
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
I'm aware and will implement SSR soon ;)
It's entirely possible they simply ingest the JS as-is.
Seeing “Something broke, which is ironic for a made-up encyclopedia: Load failed” when trying to access some of the suggested starting points
Works on my PC.
Could you gimme the url that's failing?
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)
Best part - I didn't implement such logic. It just for some reason works that way.
Huh that is interesting, I was expecting it to show some sort of error on generation, or something like that
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).
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
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.
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.
It's nice, but after a few clicks my LLM content fatigue kicks in.
This is what every LLM will converge into without curated human input.
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).
Now I want to know the site.
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
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.
Just added comment section :)
Great suggestion! Will immediately look into that!
> 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.
Hm, the page generated seems inconsistent with the usage of the original link.
I LOVE IT. Superb.
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...
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
All the world are going mad with artificial intelligence and LLMs. Just disgusting!
Who says llms can't be funny?!