4 ms·
Gotta love how much this write-up refers to the serifs on the lowercase L, but is rendered in a font (on Windows at least) that entirely omits those serifs.
by happytoexplain 7y ago
Gotta love how much this write-up refers to the serifs on the lowercase L, but is rendered in a font (on Windows at least) that entirely omits those serifs.
- salutonmundo 7y agoMost sans-serif fonts poorly distinguish between "I" and "l", I've found. (This led to my dad thinking that artificial intelligence was called "Al", as in "Albert".)
- roywiggins 7y agoMy fantasy company would promote their wonderful new Al method of doing X, where X is just done by some guy named Al.
- coding123 7y agoInvestor: OH wow is that a Neural Network you guys are building? You: Yeah, Al here is our resident Network engineer. Go ahead and ask him a question. Investor: So do you use any kind of drop-out or just as-is? Al: Yeah, we don't have too much packet-los- You: OK Moving along...
- andreareina 7y agoJust say you trained a bunch of neural nets. https://xkcd.com/2173/ https://xkcd.com/2173/
- hermitdev 7y agoThis is why I prefer a fixed width font when it can be ambiguous. They don't typically have the ambiguities between "l" (lower case "L") and "I" (upper case "i") or even the number "1", similarly between the letter "O" and number "0". Personally, when handwriting, I got in the habit of striking a hyphen through the number "7" to disambuate against a possible number "1". Likewise, I'd strike through the letter "Z" to disambiguate from the number "2", and a diagonal strike through the number "0" to differentiate from the letter "O". My handwriting is terrible, and it has saved me a lot of grief over the years, but especially in my engineering courses in college.
- repiret 7y agoI don't know if that's actually traditionally true of fixed-width fonts. Courier, for example, is pretty bad, and widely used by people who aren't using a fixed-width font because they're programming.
- stan_rogers 7y agoTraditionally you'd use a lower-case ell for a numeral one, since there was no numeral one on your keyboard. Nor was there a separate zero. All of this "different characters for different uses" nonsense is for that newfangled electronic stuff.
- ncmncm 7y ago"I had to code a database using just ones and zeroes." "Oh, you had ones? We had to use the letter ell."
- darwingr 7y agoI’ve adopted all of these as well. Doing statistics in my undergrad, not understanding what you or someone else wrote was just the worst. The change of style just became an obvious necessity.
- burfog 7y ago7 and Z have far less disruptive fixes. For 7, just make the top long and the slash slanty. Don't do that for 1. For Z, give the top a very slight curve, and optionally do the same for the bottom. That is, bend the middle of the line in toward the center of the letter. It might be enough to just imagine doing this, so that you don't end up with a curve going the other way. Give the 2 a proper curve instead of a sharp corner, and it will look different.
- gerdesj 7y agoThat's fine but the reason I use the extra bits is to try and make a character unambiguous for a reader who does not know my handwriting habits. In the case of Z I do both - your suggestion and put a bar across it. 2 gets a small loop at the bottom left.
- orthoxerox 7y agoAre you the son of Scott Bakula?