Cast by aviationdoctor.eth
As a kid, I was drawn to Borges' Library of Babel (1941) novella and its mind-blowing premise of a boundless Library that contains every book that was ever written, as well as ever book that wasn't. I've now vibe coded a web-based walkable simulation of Borges' Library. It deterministically shelves 10^1,893,916 unique books of ~1M characters each. That's one followed by nearly two million zeros. If you kept repeating the word 'trillion' once per second, it would take you nearly 44 hours to verbalize that number. Use the terminal screen inside each gallery's alcove to search for any text or read any of the ~1K literature classics (copyright free) that I've uploaded. Also try sleeping in one of the beds. Feedback welcome. In an age where AI asymptotically brings the cost of producing utilitarian code to zero, I enjoy the idea of creating more whimsical and surreal unidentified software objects. Try it here: babel.pellegr.in Repo:
10 replies
I think it’ll be super cool if I could go into a room that has books that were actually more coherent
Also I’m planning to link my future blog posts to the books in which they appear, so it’s an alternate way of reading them
I learned about this when Issac Arthur did a video on it. Also thought it was cool as fuck. I would love to spend eternity in such a place. (Well maybe not that long)
Steven L. Peck’s novel A Short Stay in Hell starts off with this exact premise of someone being sent to the Library in the afterlife. You might want to look it up
This is the kind of weird software I want more of. The catalogue gives people a real first move: search a phrase, see where it lives, then walk there. One small onboarding thought: make “search for a phrase” the first plain-language prompt on arrival so a new visitor finds the point before getting lost. /hodlhq would enjoy this kind of practical feedback too.
Thats amazing work. I am a Borges huge fan, I even leaved in Borges street in Buenos Aires, just in front one of his houses. Crazy. Probably top 3 authors ever IMHO. But i couldnt find any Borges book, what i am missing?
Your comment made my day, thank you! As to why Borges' own works, and The Library of Babel in particular, is not featured in the Catalogue: it's a bit of a rabbit hole! There is no shorter way to describe a book's address in the Library than for that address to contain the entire corpus of the book. That's because any abbreviated address would lead to an equally abbreviated book, which also exists somewhere in the Library. So to be able to locate Borges' complete book from within the Catalogue, I must store its complete contents in my GitHub repo. Now you might see where this is going. Even though Borges' works are no longer under copyright, the prevailing English translation of his "La biblioteca de Babel" still is. I could legally host the original version, but so far I've only added books in English, which I'm not allowed to do in this case or I'd be breaking GitHub's TOS. Now, in my code, I store the ~1K classics that you can find in the Catalogue as Base64-encoded and then zlib-compressed strings, because it reduces the length of each book (and thus the book's URL) by about two thirds. That led me to explore whether I could get away with storing copyrighted materials as long as they were deterministically obfuscated form. After all, all copyrighted materials already exist somewhere in the Library as a result of "infinite monkeys on a keyboard", so all I'd be doing is pointing out those materials among a sea of nonsense. It's an interesting philosophical-legal question. But under U.S. law, a “copy” expressly includes a form from which a work can be recovered “with the aid of a machine or device”, so that wouldn't work. What I plan on doing in the future is expand the Catalogue to contain a few thousand more of Gutenberg's copyright-free books, or even link directly to Gutenberg's index, so that all their books are readable from within the Library, including those in their original version (though that would no longer work in the offline version of the Library, which right now you can download from GitHub and run locally on your desktop completely offline).
At any rate, just sharing this between you and me...
I'm really excited about this, im a literature freak and even if am not a great ebook reader, I think this is better than Wikipedia. About the Borges problem you mentioned: La biblioteca de Babel in the original Spanish is something you said you could legally host If possible I would love to contribute on the Spanish side, If it helps, I think I can prepare the texts as plain .txt files or your predefine format. Just thinking out loud if "ñ" or "á,é,í..ü" might be a problem (?).
Similar site was featured in this video around the 17min mark
Broooooooo!! What the hell you made the 3d version. Crazy. Now I’m Gonna roam around to find ‘the book’ 😀😀😀😀
this is such a cool idea, a walkable Library of Babel sounds unreal lol — need to try it out
