Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket • Hacker News Board

Re: Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

#51

Post by jmux » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

gglitch wrote: post #34

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried three times to read it and got a few pages in before giving up on it. Would it make more sense to just dive into the middle and see what converges out then? What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.

Wallace was a masterful writer of short fiction, and I think IJ is best read as a (very) long series of short pieces with much that interrelates them. Past a certain point on my first successful read through, maybe ~300 pgs in, I started realizing that, with very few exceptions, the more abstruse, boring, or frustrating the vignette, the more powerfully it ended; and at that point, I couldn’t put it down. So, in my o…

I feel like ~300pgs in is where infinite jest reaches critical mass. before that, it felt like a slog.

after i had enough context to start making connections, I couldn’t put it down

Re: Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

#52

Post by chiply » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

vessenes wrote: post #50

chiply wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, maybe I made my claim unclear. So my claim is that the 3 vertices are the institutions (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins), not plots. I agree that IJ is kind of plotless, and that to me is what the voids in the Sierpinski Gasket could represent, but this article was more about the two-ways-to-construct-the-triangle thing. But I like your vertices (family, education, and society). You're making me think…

I read IJ in a two (three?) day binge shortly after it was published and never returned. Although I will say I really liked it. Since you're an experienced reader, I'll ask a question bugging me since the 1990s -- my intuition post-read was that you would get a totally different plot line out of the novel if you skipped the endnotes. Holding the novel in one's head is a lot to ask, especially of someone who just read…

I don't have anything sophisticated to say about this, but I know the footnotes are critical. There are some plot points in there. They are also an important aspect of the book's structure and the methodology of reading the text. I'd say skipping the end notes would be a disservice to the reader as they would miss so much.

Something I want to do is read the footnotes alone in 1 whack and see what that experience feels like. I haven't done this yet, but I feel like it could illuminate exactly how much of what I latently remember about the novel is located in the footnotes.

Re: Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

#53

Post by LearnYouALisp » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

chiply wrote: post #2

"David Foster Wallace (DFW) designed Infinite Jest as a Sierpinski Gasket using the classical top-down construction, placing three institutional vertices (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins) and subdividing the structure at many scales below. Readers, on each reread, fill in the same Gasket using the chaos game, a non-sequential sampling that converges on the Sierpinski Gasket over many iterations. This expla…

Is this an AI summary though?

Re: Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

#54

Post by LearnYouALisp » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

This feels very LLM. It has the shape of sense but doesn't actually make any coherent points, other than "how to draw the Sierpiński triangle". It even has some non-sensical AI diagrams to finish it off.

Well the summary hit 100/0/0 on GPT-Z, let me see what the others say Sapling: 1.4%

Anyway, the text of the article doesn't feel LLM to me and on first scan, neither the structure. They don't care about minutiae in this way nor do they follow threads. Theirs is a bunch of oh-so-pompously-and-fake-eruditely dispensed rehashes with little pounce.

Re: Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

#55

Post by LearnYouALisp » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #7

chiply wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote this. If you ask an LLM what to make of IJ as a Sierpinski Gasket, it doesn't yield anything too interesting (it mainly talks about the voids representing the absence of plot points / missing characters). As far as I know the two-ways angle is novel. The only AI piece is the banner image, because I can't draw. All other images are attributed (Wikipedia, YouTube). I got the idea for this post after listening t…

For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't have commented without the AI image. I just tend to assume that articles with AI graphics also have AI text. That assumption is almost never wrong.

*Has almost never been

Re: Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

#56

Post by LearnYouALisp » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

endymion-light wrote: post #10

chiply wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point. The banner image is something I've been doing on all my articles, and it's creating the wrong perception. I'm probably going to stop adding these. All my other content is software engineering related, and I've started adding more visual content like diagrams, screenshots, and YouTube videos. So I probably don't need to lean on the banner images anymore, and it seems like they're doing more harm…

Yeah agreed - Just as a future context I tend to close out of articles quickly if they have an AI generated image. Highly reccomend something like Unsplash or Comsos.so - They both have some brilliant visuals, especially public.work - cosmos.so/public-work Even old archives are great to search for visuals and shows the passion that you've put in to the writing.

Y'all need sense of smell tho