Your font makers were so preoccupied with whether they could

June 23, 2024 5:28 PM

Hey, remember that time someone implemented a Pokémon clone inside of a font, by taking advantage of the fact that fonts are effectively just programs running in interpreters? Turns out now someone has gone and built an LLM into a font, called Llama, for some reason.
posted by DoctorFedora (15 comments total)

Huh? Can anyone suggest what this is trying to accomplish? A 15 minute video…
posted by njohnson23 at 5:58 PM on June 23

@njohnson23,
Somebody done put a robot where a robot aught not be.

On the surface it just looks like an AI text generator sort of thing, but the clever thing is the thing that does the AI stuff is the font itself because there is room in font files for arbitrary code which can include an entirely not font related text generator sort of thing.
posted by robotmachine at 6:05 PM on June 23 [2 favorites]

We are cursed.
posted by meehawl at 6:05 PM on June 23 [4 favorites]

Talk about generative text . . .
posted by mollweide at 6:14 PM on June 23 [4 favorites]

Meanwhile, Tom7 has produced the only known fully justified application of LLMs
posted by pwnguin at 6:26 PM on June 23 [10 favorites]

sounds interesting, but i'm playing fontman. i got a GAME badge!
posted by HearHere at 6:47 PM on June 23

Somebody done put a robot where a robot aught not be.

I've traveled this whole world over, ten thousand miles or more
But Llama in a TTF I never did see before!
posted by Not A Thing at 7:01 PM on June 23 [1 favorite]

Don't talk to me until someone installs an instance of Doom.
posted by evilDoug at 7:29 PM on June 23 [3 favorites]

re: pwnguin, Tom7 has also been known to combine machine learning and fonts.
posted by nosewings at 9:22 PM on June 23

Talk about letting the words speak for themselves!
posted by unearthed at 11:44 PM on June 23 [3 favorites]

Can anyone suggest what this is trying to accomplish?

Two things:

• Ligature processing that will render any sufficiently long string of !!!!!!!!!! as LLM-generated text prompted by whatever came before it on the same line (suggested workflow: start typing something, get writer's block, lean on !, watch your Notepad-level, Copilot-free text editor construct your text for you)
• Probing for font loading and rendering bugs by constructing a TTF font file that's 280GB long

The LLM and associated text generator are implemented in WASM and included in the font file, so all text generation is done purely locally; your font is not selling you out to OpenAI.
posted by flabdablet at 12:37 AM on June 24 [3 favorites]

Project clearly needs to include an easter egg that automatically renders hunter2 as *******
posted by flabdablet at 12:44 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]

yer so bad
> “justified” iswydt 8:00
16:50, of course, it might not be right. like, it might change yes into no, or the math might not be right…
posted by HearHere at 3:31 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]

(I imagine the reason the LLM is called Llama is because if you simply remove the two ‘a’s for llama you get LLM / it’s the simplest real English word one can make out of the acronym LLM.)
posted by eviemath at 9:54 AM on June 24

LLaMA is Meta AI’s family of open-weight large language models. They are probably the best available openly so a standard choice for messing around doing… whatever this is.
posted by atoxyl at 11:08 AM on June 24