Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by GMoromisato 1024 days ago
I had an idea once to implement Borges's Library of Babel just like this: all the text is in the URL. With more sophisticated encoding, you can optimize English words. Then hook it up to a "search system" so you can search for your own name, clips of text, etc.

Eventually you'd hit the URL size limit, of course, but maybe we add a layer on top for curators to bundle sets of URLs together to produce larger texts. Maybe add some LLM magic to generate the bundles.

You'd end up with a library that has, not just every book ever written, but every book that could ever be written.

[Just kidding, of course: I know this is like saying that Notepad already has every book in existence--you just have to type them in.]

2 comments

This reminds me rather of https://libraryofbabel.info/
Nice! That's exactly what I had in mind.

As usual, no idea is unique--it's all about who executes first!

No idea is unique, because the library of babel has all of the ideas humans can ever think of ;)
lol!
Nice, I had a similar idea a while ago! I wanted to support other media types, such as images, audio and webpages. It was a really fun experiment!

https://mkaandorp.github.io/hdd-of-babel/

Very cool!