Labyrinths
Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by the writer Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett. It includes, among other stories, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Garden of Forking Paths", and "The Library of Babel", three of Borges' most famous stories. Stories Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius The Garden of Forking Paths The Lottery in Babylon Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote The Circular Ruins The Library of Babel Funes the Memorious The Shape of the Sword Theme of the Traitor and the Hero Death and the Compass The Secret Miracle Three Versions of Judas The Sect of the Phoenix The Immortal The Theologians Story of the Warrior and the Captive Emma Zunz The House of Asterion Deutsches Requiem Averroes' Search The Zahir The Waiting The God's Script Stories 1-13 are from Ficciones; 14-23 are from The Aleph.
Stats for nerds
24recommend
26mentions
26people
2008–2026years
92% recommend8% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- What a coincidence - I'm currently reading his collection Labyrinths. If you've enjoyed the short stories of Ted Chiang I'd highly recommend it.
- I love this book so much (Labyrinths, by Borges).
I once calculated the number of books in The Library of Bable, and had to try a number of numerical libraries to do so. one after another they kept puking on the large integers.
I also think of "the secret miracle" often.
- If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.
Regarding the content of this interview:
>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.
In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)
- Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges probably tops the list for me.
- Labyrinths - Jorge Borges (I've gifted this many times)
Duino Elegies - Rainer Rilke, translated by Robert Hunter
- I'm a big Calvino fan and can thoroughly recommend Cosmicomics as a great collection of shorts. If you enjoy Calvino you may also enjoy Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.
Related
Collected Fictions
13 recommend · 18
Ficciones
26 recommend · 41
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
15 recommend · 39
Selected non-fictions
6 recommend · 7
The Garden of Forking Paths
6 recommend · 15
2013–2026
Lottery in Babylon
9 recommend · 12
2666
6 recommend · 10
