Comment by ineptech
Very interesting, I hope you do. Anything new and weird is always fun to learn about the design, and I'm curious just how much of the text is LLM how much is hand-written. (Fair warning people will assume the worst if you are not explicit about that) The continuity is very good but I had assumed there must be some LLM involvement just due to the time it takes to load each page. Actually, now that I think of it, even if all/most of the text were from an LLM, I'm surprised it wouldn't be generated beforehand and loaded as static text. So what is being done when the spinner spins?
I also really enjoyed the Popov "biography", I'm a sucker for that kind of is-it-true-or-is-it-performance-art stuff online. Reminds me of the Velocity Gnome saga[0].
I'm not sure why your comments were being flagged but hopefully the HN algorithm knows you're not spam at this point.
0: Very sad to see this site is dead - https://web.archive.org/web/20250317181550/https://thefuture...
It isn't as obvious as it maybe should be, but in classic text-based adventure fashion you can also type your own 'actions' (in addition to the four default choices). We use LLMs to basically manage incorporating any player actions without letting them derail the story (too much).
There's also some caching involved which resets every 24 hours, so you will have a slightly different experience each time you play through (even if you choose the same character).
I also love the whole early 2000s ARG stuff I think it was a big part of the inspiration for the movie.