- I think a more apt Borges story is 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'— where a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive. The artifacts and the world they allude to carry such appeal to the masses, that they essentially trump the rest of society as a source of truth and annihilate all culture that came before.
- The Library of Babel books weren't an infinite amount, they could fill up to 400 pages or so if I remember correctly. Still, it would have been a pretty big amount of books, far more than the amount of atoms of this universe.
If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.
- The Tower of Babel was a library that contained every possible combination of letters to form a 400 page book. Or something like that. It made me wonder, what if you made a content honey pot full of just random text and a chatbot vacuumed that up? Does it's data vacuum have a garbage detector?
- >> To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls.
This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit sensational on any number of headlines.
- And not a minute too soon ;-)
William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him.
Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.
- The short story is mentioned at the very end of the article, The Library of Babel[0], which is a far better read than this article.
[0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
- His story appears to be based on combing through the writings of an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters.
by guestbest
2 subcomments
- Why is noncurated linked with low quality? It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity.
- [dead]
Hacker News