tere, she/her | "let me help." a hundred years or so from now, i believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. he'll recommend those three words even over "i love you."
The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.
So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.
But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.
But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.
Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.
I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.
on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.
The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.
I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.
if you ever see me tag a post with a character and you’re like hm. i don’t know if that really applies here. well you do not have access to my complex interior world and the additional context i have devised
the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because “tasty” means something tastes good. conversely, from the words “smelly” and “noisy” we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck
before I played Disco Elysium, I thought Harry du Bois was a co-worker in the precinct you work at and, reading about him being such a fucked up guy, I was literally planning on avoiding him as much as possible in my playthrough… colour me surprised when I found the badge and found out the main character’s name
i honestly dont think I’ve willingly used a chatbot since….. cleverbot in 2012. i genuinely dont know why so many people care about this ai bullshit. sorry im with the boomers on this one. i need human creation, emotion, and thought to be interested, pal
Plus since ChatGPT is sanitized you could never get interactions like these
ALT
