41–50 of 88 posts
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
To your first bullet, I believe this is one of the central points of the original Borges story :)
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The Library of Babel made me aware that choosing/finding is not super distinct from making/creating. Or discovery and invention. In math, there is distinction between "there exists" and "we can construct", but "we can construct" is similar to "we can find".
I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work. All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count. digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2)) digits(32)…
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
This isn't quite true. Natural language text compresses extremely well and you would only need length equivalent to the compressed form, not the original form. And if you wanted to go further, you could use a mapping where extremely short strings map to known popular books and only unknown works have longer encodings.
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I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work. All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count. digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2)) digits(32)…
I admit thinking this way is tempting, but in your model the number represents some kind of language, whether human-readable or machine-readable. If we accept the number is a non-lossy encoding of some language, we reach an equivalency stating there is no creating, just discovering language "through convoluted mental and technological processes". But can we really equate language and knowledge? I believe Gödel proved…
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...
> There is no validation that an infohash corresponds to a real torrent—any client can announce anything. Many crawlers and indexers continuously pick random or sequential infohashes and announce themselves so they can later detect other announcers, and malicious clients or poorly written bots can spam the network with anything they like. There are also valid clients for completely unrelated protocols using the BitTo…
Which? I'm always fascinated by the use of public p2p nets to serve other protocols. The first complete standalone program I wrote was a gnutella p2p client.
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I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work. All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count. digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2)) digits(32)…
Yes, I mean exactly this type of insight. Basically taking a digital photo with a camera technically also just picks out the "address" of your current environment within the space of all images. Any 4K 2-hour-length feature film in a digital format is also just an address in the space of all possible videos. The director, the actors, the whole crew did all that work in order to select that point from the space of pos…
> It's like the idea that the sculptor doesn't create the sculpture, the sculpture was there all along, he just had to remove the superfluous matter to reveal what was already there (i.e. the atoms belonging to the final sculpture).
I understand this argument but I have far more trouble applying this logic to real things. I'm not sure the same logic applies once the information is instantiated in the real world as a physical object. I haven't thought very deeply about it. I think the true sculpture exists only in the ideal world and the real world object is merely an approximation of it.
> Of course this is silly
It's an existential issue for me. At some point it became a political issue. I became a copyright abolitionist because of this insight. Copyright is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. The sheer absurdity of it led me to reject the very idea of intellectual property as delusional nonsense.
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You are only downloading metadata, and csam content is filtered. But yes, I would also rate it as a legally risky activity
> csam content is filtered Filtered how? By some keywords I don't want to know? What about encrypted zips of CSAM? There's no way to filter that in reality. If you want to learn more about why and you can either speak German or can handle youtubes auto translate i recommend this documentation on the matter[0]. The Pedo Criminals are using scene methods to share their illegal content. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch…
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You are only downloading metadata, and csam content is filtered. But yes, I would also rate it as a legally risky activity
> csam content is filtered Filtered how? By some keywords I don't want to know? What about encrypted zips of CSAM? There's no way to filter that in reality. If you want to learn more about why and you can either speak German or can handle youtubes auto translate i recommend this documentation on the matter[0]. The Pedo Criminals are using scene methods to share their illegal content. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Library of Babel made me aware that choosing/finding is not super distinct from making/creating. Or discovery and invention. In math, there is distinction between "there exists" and "we can construct", but "we can construct" is similar to "we can find".
I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work. All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count. digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2)) digits(32)…