Notes from the Library of Babel

The Library of Babel is a short story by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, that refers to a universe, in the shape of a library, which contains books for all the different possible permutations of the language. This means: every thought, word, or idea ever imagined.

When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist.

[…]

That unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.

Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges

Counter-Culture in the Gen-AI Era

Finding useful information on the web nowadays feels like scouring through the Library of Babel. Ad incentives, SEO hacking, and autogenerated content plummeted the quality of information to the ground. Add to the mix an ever-growing workplace culture of nihilism, un-professionalism, and overall laziness (oh, I just pushed this vibe-coded feature straight to production, who cares what will happen hehe) and the result is a ticking time bomb waiting for the worst moment to detonate.

You need to become immune to the doomeristic AI propaganda. Economic opportunism, over-hyped valuations, and stakes far higher than we can imagine pushed companies and CEOs to make big promises to keep the ball rolling just one more time. Rest assured that the Sword of Damocles is probably not hanging over your head, but theirs.

Besides, if we software engineers become easily replaceable, what kind of guarantees do other white-collar professions have? We’ll have greater things to worry about. Keep in mind that by white-collar, I’m even talking about the C-suite.

What’s the best way to fight this? By finding, reading, consuming, and creating good quality, human-made, hand-crafted resources. Yes, nowadays reading a good book is an act of rebellion, an act of counter-culture.

This repository, article, or whatever you want to call it, will serve as a guide, a life jacket, or a lifeline to help you and I navigate the seemingly never-ending modern-day Library of Babel. Here I’ll make a list of personally vouched, curated, and good-quality resources.

My only request to you is to collaborate. Step your foot on the break and take a moment to think. Stand against the system, and stop creating and consuming AI-generated slop. And remember, this is not an anti-AI crusade, it’s just a reminder that we should use these tools as a crutch, without letting them consume half our brains. So please, if this resonates with you, consider creating a Pull Request or Forking this to curate your own list of resources.

My idea is not to put just any good resource, but instead the best of the best, la crème de la crème.

You can find the full Github repository here: Notes From the Library of Babel. It will contain all the updated, curated and filtered resources.