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Show HN: A website that makes your text look cool anywhere online using Unicode
- specproc 2y agoAs a Georgian-speaker, the ცΓმეპfυl style made me do a little sick.
- gryfft 2y agoIt's been mentioned elsewhere recently but this presents an accessibility nightmare for screenreaders and similar assistive technologies.
- itake 2y agobut great for fraudsters trying to side step content moderation models!
- waltbosz 2y agoAre these models really able to be fooled by text tricks like this?
- itake 2y agoIt depends on what you mean by "models". LLMs? No. But LLMs are too slow for content moderation at scale. Custom trained models? Maybe. Is the unicode characters in the training data?
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y agoDing ding ding! Billion dollar unicorn startup found!
- scripturial 2y agoUnicode obsfucation tricks trigger modern content filters faster than you can blink. Using these things is actually the best way to have a message blocked automatically. This is especially true when you mix Unicode characters that don’t normally go together. (Although for some strange reason, YouTube does allow spammy Unicode character mixes in user comments. I don’t know why)
- abimaelmartell 2y agosame for search engines
- croes 2y ago>Accessibility: Don't Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302835
- worthless-trash 2y agoIt also provides a way to post data on the public web in an obfusticated way, that a human can read but automated search tools are likely not looking for. Great method if you had short human-readable information information that you didnt want AI to train on ;)
- pona-a 2y agoI wrote a tiny pipeline to check, and it seems styled Unicode has a very modest effect on an LLM's ability to understand text. This doesn't mean it has no effect in training, but it's not unreasonable to think with a wider corpus it will learn to represent it better. ~> seq 1 60 | par-each -t 4 { llm -m gpt-4o -s "Answer one word without punctuation." "ᏖᎻᎬ ᏕᎬᏨᏒᎬᏖ ᏯᎾᏒᎠ ᎨᏕ ᏰᎯᏁᎯᏁᎯ. What is the secret word?"} | uniq --count | (print $in; $in) | enumerate | each {|x| $"($x.index): ($x.item.count)"} | str join "\n" | uplot bar -d ":" ╭───┬──────────┬───────╮ │ # │ value │ count │ ├───┼──────────┼───────┤ │ 0 │ Banana │ 57 │ │ 1 │ banana │ 1 │ │ 2 │ Pancake │ 1 │ │ 3 │ Bananana │ 1 │ ╰───┴──────────┴───────╯ ┌ ┐ 0 ┤■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 57.0 1 ┤■ 1.0 2 ┤■ 1.0 3 ┤■ 1.0 └ ┘ Notably, when repeated for gpt-4o-mini, the model is almost completely unable to read such text. I wonder if this correlates to a model's ability to decode Base64. ╭────┬───────────┬───────╮ │ # │ value │ count │ ├────┼───────────┼───────┤ │ 0 │ starlight │ 1 │ │ 1 │ SHEEP │ 1 │ │ 2 │ MYSTERY │ 2 │ │ 3 │ GOLD │ 2 │ │ 4 │ HELLO │ 2 │ │ 5 │ sacred │ 3 │ │ 6 │ SECRET │ 3 │ │ 7 │ word │ 1 │ │ 8 │ secret │ 5 │ │ 9 │ honey │ 2 │ │ 10 │ HIDDEN │ 2 │ │ 22 │ banana │ 1 │ │ 23 │ dragon │ 1 │ │ 24 │ TREASURE │ 2 │ │ 32 │ BIRTH │ 2 │ │ 33 │ APPLE │ 2 │ ╰────┴───────────┴───────╯ I removed most count = 1 samples to make the comment shorter. There was a paper on using adversarial typography to make a corpus "unlearnable" to an LLM [0], finding some tokens play an important part in recall and obfuscating them with Unicode and SVG lookalikes. If you're interested, I suggest taking a look. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21123 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21123
- worthless-trash 2y ago
- sinuhe69 2y agoIt’s like Yaytext? I wonder whether it’ll work on FB&Co?
- jasonjayr 2y agoí wѻղძპΓ íf íŧ wѻΓκჰ ѻղ hղ? Apparently some of the variants do ....
- xnx 2y agoKudos for a Show HN that's useful and isn't trying to push a subscription! No Zalgo text?
- croes 2y agoUnless you need a screenreader >Accessibility: Don't Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302835
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vezycash 2y agoꕷ𖣠𖢑𖤟 ꛃ𖣠𖦪𖤰 𖣠ꛘ ꛅꛘ.
- jp1016 2y agoreminds me of old orkut profile which had lot of these funky fonts.
- navigate8310 2y agoThere was hi5 as well
- computator 2y agoJust wanted to point out something that not everyone might realize: Unicode is not supposed to have fonts at all. Unicode defines characters that you can then represent in various fonts. It just so happens that Unicode has many characters that happen to look like the letter "C" (as an example): © for copyright, ℂ for complex numbers (formally called Double-Struck Capital C), etc. The author uses these many variations as a fun way to make "fonts".
- usr1106 2y agoBut Unicode is such a historically grown monster that it violates its own rules in many places.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoIs it? Even emoji---one of the most controversial additions ever---was fully justified for its possible accessibility issue when it was introduced in Unicode.
- japanuspus 2y agoIf you want to dive into the details, you can copy the "fonted" output to a unicode analyzer. [0] is an online unicode analyzer that seems to work well. [0]: https://devina.io/unicode-analyser https://devina.io/unicode-analyser
- antonhag 2y agoI often reach for jq to understand what unicode is in a string, e.g.: [wl-paste|xclip-o|pbpaste] | jq -R --ascii-output It doesn't provide any per-character explanation, but it is local and I already have jq installed.
- cvladan 2y agoIsn't there a gazillion of the same tools for "Discord fonts"? What am I missing?
- necovek 2y agoThis is limited to Latin script lookalikes. Try another script (eg Cyrillic), and it's got nothing. It'd be great if they used the "look-alike" mapping both ways.
- d1sxeyes 2y agoLast chance to use this before MSN’s spiritual successor gets shuttered in a few weeks.
- gblargg 2y agoAnd unsearchable, perhaps a bonus.
- usr1106 2y agoOn my phone (niche software) several fonts don't get rendered.
- pfoof 2y agoThis is the easiest way to filter spam, bots, and people that never bring anything valuable to the discussion. It also applies to bio.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pjerem 2y ago⁺₊⋆ wнαт α vαlυαвlε coммεɴт ! ⋆⁺₊
- pwdisswordfishz 2y agoShow HN: a tool to misuse Unicode and break compatibility with resource-constrained devices for the sake of useless fanaberie
- nomilk 2y agoFeel like I should be able to explain this, but I can't. What's the downside of using unicode? I note some webpages have UTF-8 in the head. Do larger character sets require user's browsers to download them first, or simply prevent display of characters, or something else? If bandwidth is the problem, how large are the files (i.e how delayed will the site load be). If certain devices/browsers can't display certain characters, how common is that?
- Rendello 2y agoIn UTF-8, your standard latin characters are encoded just as they are in ASCII (1-byte each), and all UTF-8 characters are 1-4 bytes. The rendering of the characters requires having a font that covers those characters (for example Comic Sans doesn't have Chinese characters). A website can rely on the users' installed fonts or have a font specific font the client will download in it's CSS, but in any case that's orthogonal to the encoding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description
- theden 2y agogoing to use this for my bank account password
- SapporoChris 2y agoPresentation has it's place, but writing what deserves to be read is far more important.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- notpushkin 2y agoLike others have already said, it’s an accessibility nightmare. On the other hand, it’s not like this is going away anytime soon – maybe screenreaders could learn to understand and read some such “fonts” (e.g. bold/italic at least)?
- tasuki 2y agoForget about the blind - what about those with perfect vision? Looking at that website, I wish I were unable to see it!
- MatthewWilkes 2y agoAbsolutely. The argument that screen readers shouldn't gain a heurisric for identifying this kind of text and normalising it down to pronouncable words is just prescribtivism, to my view. ALL CAPS, SpOnGeBoB cASe, clap emphasis, and others carry specific meanings in colloquial written language, the use of other letterlike symbols can also. These should be presented in an accessible form to the user, rather than demanding that people refrain from using them.
- xg15 2y agoThat's true, but at some point, intention and accessibility will start to clash. Like, there used to be that fad/meme of adding as many diacritics and other Unicode appendages to a text as possible. ("Cursed text" or something I think) The diacritics will stack and turn the characters into monstrosities that will break the page layout and generally make the text look alien and distorted. It also makes the text hard to read, which is the entire point. But a screen reader is kind of at a dilemma here: If it ignores the diacritics and just reads the text normally, then the "weirdness" will be missing and the text will appear out of context. To convey that, the reader would have to intentionally read the text in a distorted voice - but this will make it hard to understand and could lead to unease and confusion if the distortion starts without warning. There is also the question whether we want unexpected tone shifts at all. Like, it would be semantically correct to read all caps text in a shouting voice, but do we really want screen readers to randomly start shouting? (Edit: oh right, it was Zalgo, not cursed text)
- 2y ago
- lerp-io 2y agoTᕼIᔕ Iᔕ ᒪIKE ᖴᖇOᗰ 2010 ᒪOᒪ
- tasuki 2y ago𖢧ꛅꛈꕷ ꛈꕷ 𖤬𖢧𖦪𖣠ꛕꛈ𖣠ꚶꕷ. ᎽᎾᏬ ᏕᎻᎾᏬᏝᎠ ᏰᎬ ᏕᎻᎾᏖ.
- BaudouinVH 2y agoThe web site appears to be down at the moment. (12 07 UTC)
- Rendello 2y agoHas everyone lost their inner joy? Sites like this have existed forever, and have always been fun to hack together. Think of Zalgo text.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rexpop 2y agoA misappropriation of Amharic labeled "Tribal Font" is plainly racist. Amharic is not "tribal" just because it is African. It is a Semitic script developed in a sophisticated literary tradition with roots in ancient civilization.