Hey all, we have a quick update for everyone who participated in the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine.
We were blown away by the creativity of the submissions for our final Hacktoberfest challenge. From haunted terminals to heartfelt projects honoring loved ones, you all brought the spirit of the season to life with open-source AI. With 21 winners to select across our overall prize and 20 partner categories, we need a bit more time to carefully review everything and make our final decisions.
We'll be back with the winner announcement by the end of next week. Thank you so much for your patience, and for putting so much effort into your builds. 👻🌼
In the meantime, check out the Presage SmartSpectra SDK Challenge running now!
Happy coding!
Top comments (24)
You sure there isn't a Ghost in your development team that is delaying this?
Jokes aside, couldn't wait to see the Winners :D
Nah, they have a sloth (Sloan). They need a ghost or something like a Genie 🧞♂️ 🤣
Joke apart, the number of submissions is indeed overwhelming.
The delay is totally understandable.
Hats off to the DEV Team 🥰
It's because they realized I made a new open web protocol (an SDK) to allow a centralized site to act as a dummy cross-origin permission manager for browser-storage-partition to store and share open-weights models allowing airgapped edge compute via web browser with webGPU ans WASM-fallback, and it never touches my (or any) server except to trigger the local browser native request for shared strorage permission... request one time per site (e.g., authorize), and did so accidentally, and their minds blew up, as did mine 🤯.
Looking forward to the announcement!
Pls. take your time, we have your back 🥰
A good judgement is often far better than a quick one ✊
Good luck 😃
Thanks! I'll need that luck to win this one 🥰
There are like millions of submissions, LOL 🤣
But to be honest, this is the first DEV Challenge projects I've built that I'm using now every single day, and improving it as I speak. So it's already a win for me.
Once it's feature rich enough, and stable enough, I'm planning to release it.
So this is one of those projects I won't lose either way!
I'll make a demo video soon and post here on DEV.
You'll see. It's really useful 🥰
Your submission is one in a million! There may be millions of submissions, but yours is truly special. Never forget that! ❤️
I'm really looking forward to this video. I'm always excited to watch your videos, haha! Please make sure to mention me when you post it so I don't miss it.
Wishing you lots of good luck! Whatever happens, I'm sure everything will work out for the best. 😊❤️
Thanks! That means a lot 🥰
I've been not-so-patiently waiting for the winners to be announced, lol. This was my first Hacktoberfest and my first ever DEV Challenge, well first challenge EVER period. I had fun building and learning during the live streams. Thank you to DEV and MLH and all the sponsors and partners for hosting this event. My submission project is still up and running on its very own website thanks to Render. There were so many entries after mine, I'm worried the judges won't see my submission because I've been buried alive in the bottom of the submitted projects graveyard!!
So just in case.... Link to my project post:
dev.to/mandyb0716/ghost-of-develop... Link to my project's Webpage:
ghost-of-developers-past.onrender....
I would love to hear feedback from anyone please. Do you like it, hate it, would be better if you.., any and all feedback - good or bad - I welcome it. This is how we learn!!
Thanks for the update, and no rush! This challenge was a lot of fun. I built a tiny hand-drawn ghost that warns you before you run a scary PowerShell command 👻
Command Casperr
Always happy to hear feedback !
21 categories and that many winners? You absolutely get a pass for the delay. The mix of "haunted terminals" and heartfelt projects sounds incredible—take all the time you need to judge them fairly. Can't wait for the announcement!
Take your time🙌
building ossuary for dead domain is the real challenge for me, making your ai refuse to lie.
You can't make it "not lie" because AI is a calculator, really. You can, however, give it preset expectation and do 'verdicial enforcement'.
For example: PathMap Alchemy uses small models to build a PubMed dataset. Then AI is told to find a literature based discovery and extract 10 supporting verbatim quotes from the dataset.
At this point, if AI "lies" and gives 6 verbatim quotes and 4 paraphrased or misstated it is a total failure. Suppose AI misstated a dosage on a drug or a formula... could kill someone if trusted.
So, use JS/php/python or whatever to do a btye-perfect check for the 10 verbatim quotes. On fail, retry with feedback loop with limit, and keep the dynamic content (feedback) at end of prompt and resending dataset exactly as before for RAG optimization.
It does work. I can make 4,000,000+ plant-derived molecular pathway discoveries using Gemma 4 26B. If I had a mac studio M2, I would anti-patent the future of medicine in a month.
Use programmatic validation, never trust AI outright, nor any human for that matter... we are just biological organic-intelligence calculators... ugh...
The 'biological organic-intelligence calculators' line is hilariously accurate. 😂
But I think you misunderstood how OSSUARY actually works under the hood. I don't just 'preset expectations' for the AI— I completely stripped the AI of its voting rights.
The AI is never allowed to determine if a website is dead, alive, or pivoted. If I let the AI decide, it would hallucinate. Instead, I built a strict programmatic Gate:
cannot_determineerror. I'd rather give the user nothing than a hallucination.Your PathMap Alchemy approach is brilliant for medical data where you need byte-perfect quotes for PubMed. For my project, the 'byte-perfect check' is DNS + Wayback CDX. The AI is only allowed to speak after the programmatic truth is verified.
I am 100% on the same page: programmatic validation > AI guesswork. Hope you get that Mac Studio M2 to scale PathMap!
Thanks for explaining! I see... so if AI only speaks after verification of truth you can guarantee a good response/dataset. Do you capture a bad dataset as well where AI was found to be inaccurate initially and add a fail code? You could probably soft-train a model for that. I can see several case uses where for a small fee you can get an honest and accurate validation of a domain or its public details or history/status.
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I appreciate the SaaS founder mindset, Joshua, but I think you’re missing the point of a graveyard. OSSUARY isn't a B2B validation API you pay for. It's an interactive art séance.
You said: 'I'd rather give the user nothing than a hallucination.' Well, in my app, 'nothing' is literally the product. It’s a digital tombstone. The user is looking at a dead website; giving them a beautiful AI-generated lie about how the corpse is 'still breathing' isn't a feature, it's a zombie outbreak.
To answer your tech question: No, I don't soft-train the AI to capture 'bad datasets'. Soft-training an LLM to act as a database is like hiring a psychic to perform an autopsy. Sure, the story might be interesting, but the cause of death is still a guess.
In your medical app, a wrong dosage kills a patient. In my app, a wrong narrative creates a fake ghost. The cannot_determine (422) state is the app saying: 'The body is too mangled to identify.'
I'll leave the paid validation APIs to the SaaS bros. I'm just here to make sure the corpse stays dead and the ghosts don't lie. 😂
Best of luck in the hackathon, man! Hope PathMap disrupts the medical industry.
Thanks! I know PathMap can change and protect the future of affordable nanomedicines but also solve complex pathologies with human help. I never took anatomy but I confidently state that I can explain and differentiate pathogensis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis accurately and the current generation of patients who will likely be dead in <18 months (RIP Eric Dane ❤️) and the barrier to the cure is no longer the siloed data - is is GREED. So I am attacking the world we all know and love so well... a quaint silence to the abuses, the frauds they commit, and the pain they bring this world with greed.
I have even had the honor of being contacted by the FBI for investigation because I said "I could mod PathMap in 3 steps and make a biological weapon" but that was out of context... I live in poverty and likely didnt even have sugar in my cabinet at the time... my point wasn't to do it, my point was that anyone can do these things and the "good people" are paywalled out while those will ill-intent continue to shove it in our faces.
In fact the bio weapon I envisioned PM could have made is from what I learned about ALS.... Plant derived extracellular vesicles can go STRAIGHT to the brain via nasai passage and cribriform plate. I used this as a hack to suggest spermidine-modified ginger-derived extracellular vesicles via intranasal delivery for Cas9 CRISPR gene therapy as a direct pathway to a cure for C9orf72 affected ALS/FTD. It's in their literature already. (Notably, onion-derived EVs may be even better as both have anti-microglial activation properties and can pass cribriform, but OEVs can bring about 4x the payload).
I recommended using washout as a hack with ginger EVs for breastcancer (local lymphatic targeted chemo delivery sparing female reproductive/cardio damage), ginger EVs as prophalaxis again Ebola spread (6-shogaol blocks VP40 budding, dry ginger... cheap and stable, no pharma profits so never see the light of day).
My next move is checkmate... i am not destroying your world in the fire-brimstone politics way. I am breaking the paradigm.
Air-gapped offline local AI free... for everyone with a capable device...
Sweep the leg...
Okay, Joshua. I literally just got back from watering my carrots and onions, and spraying pesticides. Now I'm opening my laptop to kill some bugs in my potato laptop. I read your comment, and I have to do a quick sanity check for my small brain.
You're talking about dodging the FBI, building biological weapons, and curing fatal diseases... while I'm just a farmer trying to make sure my carrots are growing well and my code can compile. It sounds like you're living in a sci-fi movie, and I'm just writing code under the sun.
I genuinely respect the passion. Go save the world, man. 'Sweep the leg'? I'll leave the sweeping to you. I have real dirt to sweep in my garden.
Well as a farmer this is for you as well. The pesticides you may use, a class called Dithiocarbamates, contain barrier permeating zinc modifiers (chelate/shuttle). They won't tell you about ALS and neurological safety because food production, preservation, and profit come first in this little world of ours. Sporadic ALS is predictable if you its pattern and I would accept any challenege from a real neuroscientist to debate and justify.
Good luck with the gardening. Sweep the leg is karate kid... I can't win if I play at their level... so I went so-low... solo.
cheers.
🫣
Anyone working on the Presage hackathon yet? I think I found a way to run it no egress (airgapped) on a tablet/handheld using a double-wrapper. I am gonna do a game platform for pediatric BPM/HRV metrics because it is gard to get them to sit still, airgappimg gives it a prayer for HIPPA compliance (though who knows).
The wrapper will be open-source and conceptually built to build a local runtime for a primary app with a sandboxed partner/helper runtime (could also add local AI airgapped this way like bringyourownbrain.org project).
If that gives you an idea for your project, I should have the double-wrapper code on Git this weekend. 👍