LegacySéance: A Halloween Web Altar Lets Visitors Chat With Retired Tech Spirits

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A developer built LegacySéance, an interactive memorial site for discontinued technologies, submitted to Hacktoberfest's Week 4 "Ghost in the Machine" challenge. The site uses Google's open-weight Gemma 2 27B model to role-play departed tools such as Macromedia Flash, Internet Explorer 6, and GeoCities inside a retro CRT-style terminal. Visitors can leave tributes like candles, floppy disks, and coffee cups, which are stored and counted in MongoDB Atlas. The project also includes a community memorial wall where users post short eulogies for the technologies that shaped programming. It was framed around Halloween and Día de los Muertos, and its source code is publicly available on GitHub.

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