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.
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.
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.👍
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.
Intellectual Property is theft of The Commons. The Library of Babel belongs to us all.
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.
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.
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.
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.👍
of course, no worries. sorry for raining on your parade, so to speak. enjoying things is cool and good.
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.
this picture on the website is cool though https://libraryofbabel.info/img/desmazierescolor.jpg