aviationdoctor.eth

Network states can’t have a police force, because that’s a prerogative of physical sovereignty. So, their power must come from something other than physical violence (or the threat thereof). Traditionally, that alternate source of power has been cultural hegemony: the hijacking of beliefs, norms, values, and mores for the benefit of the rulers, at the expense of diversity and freedom of thought. An onchain purity pledge is just a manifestation of that.

I found the original in the Library: tinyurl.com/hdsbsv2y The accented characters are automatically replaced by their non-accented (and uppercase) equivalent when searching for a text in the Library. I *could* change the Library settings to accept more than 64 different symbols, to let's say 128–1,024, so that we could include accented letters (keep in mind that even ASCII at 1,024 doesn't include accents, so we'd need to come up with a bespoke set). But then the size of the library would balloon — for example from 64^(2^20) right now (where 2^20 is the number of characters in one book) to e.g., 1,024^(2^20), which in an increase from ~10^1,893,917 to ~10^3,156,528 possible books 🫠 Alternatively we stick with the current 64 symbols and the tradeoff is capital letters only, no accents. I'll need to think deeper about this. Eventually I'd like to have some version of the TinyURL scheme where I can store shortcuts to books — wouldn't be a bijection, only a limited number of shorter URLs can represent a limited number of books given the math of addressing a book. This will make linking much easier, and we could have a whole database in the Library where you can properly add or look up any book.

At any rate, just sharing this between you and me...

Try this book:

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:

Same with mathematicians right now. Lots of existential dread flying around. I fell for all of them. Nobody deserves to be put in that position, even if the whole world benefits long term from the advent of AI (those two positions can both be true). I created a walkable 3D render of Jose Luis Borges’ Library of Babel last weekend. Fully programmatically and deterministicallt generated universe. Claude just oneshot the whole thing from the first prompt. I did not see nor touch a single LOC. It’s just insane.

Waiting for some major development in the Middle East, but I don’t know in which direction. On the one hand, Trump negotiating privately with Russia and China suggests he’s willing to give up Ukraine in return for a truce with Iran and a reopening of Hormuz ahead of the midterms. On the other, all non-emergency personnel and their families are being evacuated from US diplomatic missions across the Middle East, rather signaling a possible escalation.