Badness 0 (Apostrophe's version)

June 7, 2024 8:43 AM

Researcher/humorist Tom7 explores history, hype, rigor, and justification in a 22-minute tour-de-force that smoothly interpolates between computer science heroes and/or villains Donald Knuth and Lorem Epsom.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved (19 comments total)

Heh, I was waiting for somebody else to post this. I used to do the justified text posts back in the Usenet days in talk.bizarre and sometimes even did it much later at work whenever a couple of lines worked out. A bit of mild OCD.

Also a big fan of TeX and LaTeX and Knuth. Tom 7 is always a good watch.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:41 AM on June 7 [1 favorite]

Lorem Epsom is a beautiful stand in for all the AI grifters out there. This is truly the only justified usage of LLMs.
posted by crossswords at 9:42 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]

I learned x86 assembler from Allan B. Cruse, and he had a habit of doing monospace justification like this in all of his comments and documentation text blocks. He advised us not to pick up this habit, and admitted that he was trying to add "flaws" in the text to prevent this from consuming all his thoughts while coding.

You can see some of this in example code from his course materials a couple decades back.

Anyway, it didn't matter how much he advised we avoid this, we all picked up the habit. It's kind of funny how easy it can be to fall into it as a pattern. You only really notice when you get that one difficult phrase that you can't swap around to fit the letter count!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 10:14 AM on June 7 [10 favorites]

I started watching this video to see if I had an excuse to link to the manually justified, monospaced super metroid guide, and it's in the video.
posted by Alex404 at 10:49 AM on June 7 [7 favorites]

of all the insane nested trolls on display here "using SVN in 2024" is the mightiest
posted by phooky at 10:49 AM on June 7 [3 favorites]

Cruse's website is a terrific example of Prof. Dr. Style
posted by jedicus at 10:51 AM on June 7 [1 favorite]

I've been impatient for this video since I saw the two Badness 0 entries in this year's SIGBOVIK
posted by tylermoody at 10:58 AM on June 7

I mean turns out it's the basis of the video. Thanks for posting this. Exactly my kind of rabbit hole.
posted by Alex404 at 11:08 AM on June 7

I laughed out loud. Especially at his use of backslashes in his URL.
posted by adamrice at 12:29 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]

I think I got perhaps 10% of this but the stinger at the end was just perfect. I feel like I saw it coming early on but got so distracted by the rest of the video that I forgot and then got CSI Miami slammed at the end with the pun.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:19 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this so I don’t have to (it’s missing the SuperMetroid and Chess tags obviously)
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:12 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]

LLMers glue is a joke that should either be displayed in the Louvre or the Hague. Probably first one then the other.
posted by MengerSponge at 10:39 PM on June 7 [6 favorites]

Overfull hbox! Badness 10000!

Sorry, it's a reflex.
posted by nat at 11:39 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]

Oh this is glorious. Thank you very much.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:50 AM on June 8

It's Epson with an n, goddammit.
posted by flabdablet at 1:10 AM on June 8 [1 favorite]

Lorem Epsom generator. It's a real thing, not just a typo!
posted by Dysk at 2:39 AM on June 8 [1 favorite]

It's Epson with an n, goddammit.

Is it, thou?
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 3:13 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]

It's Epson with an n, goddammit.

kerning doesn't work as well that way
posted by cortex at 11:47 AM on June 13

"llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
…
This also means that you can use your font to chat with your font."

The above-linked page includes an explanatory Youtube video that references Tom7's video.
posted by adamrice at 2:55 PM on June 23