Developer's 'Séance' App Lets Users Chat With Simulated Dead Software

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A developer built a small local web app called It Looks Like You're Trying to Hold a Séance for a Hacktoberfest challenge. Users create a summoning card describing a piece of defunct software, and a locally run open-weight model via Ollama plays that spirit in character. The spirit is restricted to the information the user supplies, so it admits when it does not know something rather than inventing answers. The app also includes Clippy, who appears uninvited and gradually decays as the conversation goes on. Everything runs on the user's own machine with no cloud service or account required.

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