Digital librarianship—the digitization, collection, and cataloguing of texts—was one of the earliest uses of networked computers. By most accounts, the first digital library was Project Gutenberg, which began making public domain works available in 1971 via the Arpanet, the ...
  • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
    2·
    21 hours ago

    It contains every combination of the english alphabet characters possible.

    So you can find a lot of junk, but also everything that has ever been said or written and everything that ever will be said or written in the future.

    It may be disjointed, but it’s there, every passage of every book.

    And everything has it’s special place that always stays the same. The way it is generated and searchable is really interesting.

    If you go to that hexagon, that wall, that shelf, that book and that page - you will find your own comment. (And you will also find it in millions of other pages surrounded by different variations of characters).

    You might click around randomly and find every passage from the bible. But also every passage from the bible where the word “Jesus” is replaced with your own name… etc. there are only finite possibilities of combinations of characters.

    Hope that makes sense.

    • sheepishly@fedia.io
      3·
      4 hours ago

      Love that site. Just now I clicked on a random page and got something with “robux” in the top line, kek

    • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      21 hours ago

      Thank you. I just finished up researching it since I didn’t now what it was. And I never heard of the project before, so very cool little thought experiment!

      Caution: Don’t put in your date of death. I did. I typed in “The date of <UniveralMonk’s> death is” and then took the gibberish word that was after that and put into ai to turn it into a date using numbers of alphabet, etc.

      My death is set for May 10, 2025.

      I was very unhappy with this knowledge. Then realized that every possible variation of the wrong date (include every single date in the world ever) would be listed as well as a correct one. So whew! (I hope!)