Permanently Deleted

      • Quimby [any, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The library of babel site is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. It doesn't quite do what it claims.

        But yeah, IP is still theft of the commons. no one creates anything on their own.

        • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          It doesn’t quite do what it claims.

          No? How so? I know the concept is solid, though obviously we'd have to bump up the number of characters to catch all possible permutations. I figured out the concept when I was younger but I used binary in my thought exercises as a catchall. It actually occurred to me when I was writing a subdomain bruteforcer like 20 years ago. Was a major step to me realizing the bullshit of IP and moving further left.

          • Quimby [any, any]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            the "library of babel", such as it is, is a two way hash algorithm. restated, the claim of the library of babel is "if you give me a piece of text, I can generate a corresponding hash of that text". which doesn't sound as cool as all the flowery language about Borges and whatnot that fills the website.

            You don't "search" the library for text in the way that he wants people to imagine you do. The site takes your input string and hashes it to return an output string. Put another way, we could say that every piece of text is located at the index represented by itself. but that we be a lot less "cool". So the site does a pointless hash function to make it look like you've "found" the text within the library.

            EDIT: a much better way to put it is that it claims to generate text randomly. but if your random "seed" is the same size as your generated output, then that's a hash.

            • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Ah, gotcha. I'm not too familiar with the workings of the the site itself just the knowledge that all information already exists within a phase space and we provide context to it. Thanks for the insight.👍

              • Quimby [any, any]
                ·
                3 years ago

                of course, no worries. sorry for raining on your parade, so to speak. enjoying things is cool and good.

                • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Oh, no. Totally cool. I'll probably keep pointing to it until I can find a better example, but it's good to know. I was just looking at the about page and saw that I also missed the mentioned of Borges right wing leanings. All the more reason to find (or build) something else that illustrates the concept. I seem to remember there was a site way, way back in the day that was generating all the pixel color permutations of a fixed size jpg, and someone recently-ish public domain-ed all possible chord combination possibilities, so there's totally other ways of demonstrating it all.

      • ass [he/him,comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        this picture on the website is cool though https://libraryofbabel.info/img/desmazierescolor.jpg

    • MerryChristmas [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This is my biggest problem with NFTs. I actually see value in the tech for things like central planning if they can ever find a way to reduce the environmental costs, but creating artificially scarce digital goods is the dumbest possible use case. Art - as in, the creative pursuit - is dope, but art under international finance capitalism is one of the biggest grifts of all time.

      Who in their right mind would pay $1M for an internet meme that will be stale by the time their transaction completes? Who would pay $10M for a painting when you could make a high-res scan at your local print and copy shop for whatever crumpled bills you have in your pocket? The "value creation" comes exclusively from its use as an instrument for laundering large sums of money.

    • crime [she/her, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Thought you were talking about internet protocol for a minute and was still nodding along