10 ms·

“I just chose words carefully”

• quanto 1mo ago
  A human victory by sheer willpower. I find the story oddly uplifting.
• Boxxed 1mo ago
  I do this at work with the comments in my code. No one's ever noticed <thumbs-down-emoji>
• sho_hn 1mo ago
  There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files, saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence. 1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans
  • xerox13ster 1mo ago
    I just realized I have nearly always avoided widows and orphans because it felt bad to write that way. I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.
  • consumer451 1mo ago
    Here is the interview where she mentions it, with the correct timestamp, backed-up just enough to give it context. https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162 https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162
    • cpeterso 1mo ago
      “Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series. “And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle. “So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
      • rectang 1mo ago
        Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog. I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense. I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.html https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...
        • wombatpm 1mo ago
          Widows are when the final line of a paragraph starts the next page. Orphans are when the first line of a paragraph ends a page.
          • Biganon 1mo ago
            Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.
            • 1718627440 1mo ago
              How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?
              • dash2 1mo ago
                Fewer people want to foster than to have their own kids?
    • xnickb 1mo ago
      A bit weird to observe how the facade cracks when they're talking about it. Maybe I'm wrong but the whole thing felt very weird to me. Can't put my finger on it.. I want to say immature, but it's probably just unempathetic. I think my brain reached out for "immature" because I saw a lot of it among the "popular" kids at school.
      • butlike 1mo ago
        They're not singling out the nerd, they're talking about someone's idiosyncrasy. Tomorrow, proverbially, they could be talking about one of Gillian's idiosyncrasies. I don't think it's immature or callous. It's just a group of people reasoning about something.
  • diurnalist 1mo ago
    I also saw that interview, then out of curiosity I tried to find any evidence of this. There are some fan sites with ostensibly original X-Files scripts out there[1]. Looking through some written by Carter[2], I wonder if this is apocryphal, or if he was messing with her a bit. [1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-3 https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2BS62cQ/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...
    • consumer451 1mo ago
      Wow, thanks for doing this digging. In the interview Gillian recounts Chris Carter saying "Look, no widows." Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?
    • tobr 1mo ago
      Hey, I looked into this too! And I came to the conclusion that it's completely true. The movie she mentioned in the anecdote was I Want To Believe. Here is the actual scanned screenplay, rather than re-typed: https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Files-I-Want-to-Believe-03.18.2008-Final-Shooting-Script.pdf https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Fil... Just scroll through and look. In almost every paragraph or dialogue block, the last line ends very close to the right margin. Pretty much the only places that doesn't happen is when there's a single short line of dialogue by itself, meaning it doesn't wrap to a second line. Looking through scripts on Boggsfiles, it's much more inconsistent, but it does happen, and perhaps more frequently in the later seasons. Here's one, from season 9; take a look at page 10 (page 13 in the PDF) for example, but it really happens throughout. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSlP1Fyj/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...
      • diurnalist 1mo ago
        Hah! I was wondering if it was maybe something he started doing over time and should have looked more at the later seasons I guess. It's comforting that it's not just a fun story.
  • fasterik 1mo ago
    I'm also reminded of how David Milch supposedly wrote a lot of Deadwood in iambic pentameter. I only learned about this after seeing the show, but I did pick up the "Shakespearean" feel of some of the dialogue. Constraints often force creativity.
    • delis-thumbs-7e 1mo ago
      Interesting claim. ELLSWORTH (CONT'D) I tell you what -- I may have fucked ~~ life up flatter"n hammered shit, but I stand before you today beholden to no human cocksucker and working a paying fucking gold claim -- and not the U.S. Government saying I'm trespassing or the savage fucking Red Man himself or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors had better try to stop me. I can’t hear it, although it certainly has certain rhythm to it (like any good dialogue does). Iambic rhythm however is so typical to English that you can kinda force most dialogue into it? I also believe writers make these rules to brake them the first change they get. Or perhaps I couldn’t find it skimming the pilot script: https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/deadwood-101-deadwood-2004.pdf?v=1745342218 https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/deadwood-101-...
      • fasterik 1mo ago
        The claim comes from Milch himself. I don't know how much he was exaggerating, or how much of it may be true but didn't make it into the final shooting script. E.B.'s soliloquy isn't in strict blank verse, but there is clearly some sort of metric structure. You have been tested, Al Swearengen. And your deepest purposes proved, there’s gold On the woman’s claim. You might as well have shouted It from the rooftops. That’s why I’m jumpin’ Through hoops to get it back. Thorough as I fleeced The fool she married, I will fleece his widow, too. Using loyal associates like Eustace Bailey Farnum as my go-betweens and dupes. To explain why I want her bought out I’ll make A pretext of my fear of the Pinkertons. I’ll throw Farnum a token thief. Why should I reward E.B. with some small fractional Participation in the claim? Or let him Even lay by a little security And source of continuing income, for His declining years. What’s he ever done for me? Except let me terrify him every Goddamned day of his life ’til the idea Of bowel regularity is a forlorn Fuckin’ hope. Not to mention orderin’ A man killed in one of E.B.’s rooms. So every fuckin’ free moment of his life E.B. has to spend scrubbin’ the bloodstains Off the goddamned floor! To keep from havin’ To lower his rates. Goddamned that motherfucker!
  • rectang 1mo ago
    "No widows" on its own isn't enough to create a distinctive dialog cadence. "Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical. I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk. I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha. ETA: I speculate that Carter was avoiding "widows" to be considerate to the actors by not splitting lines across page turns.
    • frereubu 1mo ago
      I had the same thought, but I think the idea is that it didn't so much create a specific cadence as the cadence was a bit odd because the language needed to fit the visual layout rather than feel natural when spoken.
      • raffael_de 1mo ago
        the distinctive cadence is not a direct consequence from eliminating widows but from the mental process used to achieve this efficiently. language goes from natural fluidity to stacking Lego bricks.
  • thinkafter 1mo ago
    Meanwhile Xfiles has a montage on YouTube of all the times the boom mic crept into the shot. So I can’t super accept that these are geniuses - it was cheap TV. In hindsight sure, whole cult following etc. but doesn’t mean it is well designed or even thought out.
    • bluefirebrand 1mo ago
      What does the writing quality, genius or otherwise, have to do with the boom mic though?
      • defrost 1mo ago
        Bugger all - particularly given the boom mic operator and other framing "gaffs" are (as I recall) all part of the "wide screen" 16:9 later release on BluRay etc that were somewhat rushed out the door. A number of shows of that era were filmed wide (16:9) and post processed / coloured / reframed and broadcast on TV in a box 4:3 aspect ratio No visible boom mic operators, etc - careful eyes in the initial post production for TV phase saw to that. Later wide screen releases were rushed with no real post production budget to address these and other issues - that's on the studios wanting a second grab at money, not the original creative teams. Similar complaints abound for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and (IIRC) The Wire (?) and their wide screen releases.
        • iaaan 1mo ago
          There's a famous example of this in Malcolm in the Middle where the camera cuts to a different shot and a stand-in for Dewey is visible in the 16:9 release, but was not visible in the original 4:3 broadcast. So in one shot you have Dewey's normal actor, then in the next there is some random kid.
          • ZeroGravitas 1mo ago
            A recent similar example was Mad Men rerelease in 4k where the VFX weren't redone properly after a rescan of the film and you can see the man operating the machine with the pipe that spews sick out of a characters mouth.
  • vanity0 1mo ago
    That's interesting, I didn't know that's what they were called. I definitely try to avoid widows and orphans in my own writing, and have definitely chosen words carefully to that same effect. I thought it was just my own OCD.
• ivw 1mo ago
  suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically https://tom7.org/bovex/ https://tom7.org/bovex/
  • ivanjermakov 1mo ago
    No mention of Tom7's "Badness 0" by the author is the a crime!
    • uolmir 1mo ago
      He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.
    • gowld 1mo ago
      The OP is just a small snippet of plagiarism of an old fact.
  • hankbond 1mo ago
    towards the end of the knuth version > This presents a problem for the typical way that academic papers are written, which is to do all the work in a coffee-fueled fugue in the last few days before the deadline, then stay up all night writing the paper and finding citations for the pro-forma “related work” section which you did last but you know that the reviewers will insist upon I have zero exposure to academia but chuckled because thats often what I do for blog posts :P
    • eru 1mo ago
      AIs these days are pretty good for the 'find prior art and related work' part I find. Of course, you should treat their output like that of an over-eager but somewhat unreliable intern.
  • asddubs 1mo ago
    and in latex too, not just monospace
  • JoshTriplett 1mo ago
• epistasis 1mo ago
  I am filled with both a deep admiration and horror at this. It's shockingly impressive.
  • cm2012 1mo ago
    And that it was done for an amateur game guide! This is like a legendary work of art.
• lukeh 1mo ago
  Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)
  • boothby 1mo ago
    It's a guilty pleasure of mine, spending a few minutes to clean up the aesthetics of docstrings and comments. I justify (heh) it to myself by catching unclear wording on this last cleanup pass -- and not taking it too far, obstrusifying for the aesthetic.
  • rmunn 1mo ago
    I must admit to occasionally rearranging words or choosing different synonyms to make a column of spaces line up in a monospaced paragraph, so that you could draw a straight line down one column the screen without passing through any letters or punctuation. Or making a diagonal line of spaces, top-left to bottom-right. I usually only did that when the text already was close to lining up that way, though.
• oxonia 1mo ago
  Ye gods! The fact that this was done by hand... I have no words.
• gkoberger 1mo ago
  The Super Metroid guide is the kind of thing that AI will render obsolete, which makes me sad. One of my favorite quotes is from Penn and Teller, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". AI has shifted that a bit. But lots of technology has rendered formerly human-lead things obsolete, and I'm sure we'll find new ways to express creativity.
  • LtWorf 1mo ago
    LaTeX has existed for a certain amount of years already.
    • gkoberger 1mo ago
      Sure but that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about the guy who wrote a 17,000 guide manually in monospace so that it was justified.
      • garciansmith 1mo ago
        But he didn't need to do that before either. He did it because he cared (in a weird way, sure). And some people will still care. Video game text FAQs in general though were a dying genre before gen AI anyhow. Something I bemoan when I try to find one little piece of info and I'm faced with guides that are spread out on dozens of webpages for impressions of ads that I don't even see, or long videos that I have try to scroll through and take a ton of time just to find out if the person even went to the area I'm interested in. I sure miss Ctrl+F on GameFAQs.
        • gkoberger 1mo ago
          Yup that's my point, and maybe the bigger issue isn't if people care or not but rather... can we distinguish between "they cared" and "they spent 30 seconds on a prompt".
    • kkfkekfoked 1mo ago
      [flagged]
• fhub 1mo ago
  Two definitions that I had to look up. * Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column. * Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.
  • Leonard_of_Q 1mo ago
    Those who lived through the (text-mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features which was advertised for this program, i.e it could be set to either move that orphaned first line of a new paragraph to the next page or move a few extra lines or a whole paragraph to the next page to keep the widow company.
    • nosioptar 1mo ago
      Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.
      • kkfkekfoked 1mo ago
        [dead]
    • schoen 1mo ago
      I remember using WordPerfect in that era and never understanding what that feature was. It seemed implausible to me that it was actually protecting human widows and orphans, but I couldn't imagine what it had to do with text layout!
      • jolmg 1mo ago
        Kinda cool when you learn the answer to something you were wondering about decades ago.
        • schoen 1mo ago
          Absolutely! Unfortunately for me, I probably wondered about this 35 years ago and learned the answer 15 years ago. Otherwise, I could be one of today's lucky 10,000 in the xkcd 1053 sense.
• _jackdk_ 1mo ago
  I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide. Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_9x16 https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
  • mananaysiempre 1mo ago
    Judging by the lowercase “m” it’s the 8x16 variation[1] and not the 9x16 one you linked, but otherwise yes, looks like the plain old VGA font? (Incorrectly displayed, as the site points out: the VGA didn’t have square pixels in either of those modes.) The site uses (AVIF) images in place of text, but it’s like 15 minutes to write a program that typesets an ASCII file in a given monospace bitmap font and writes out the result as say a PPM (and I’m sure ImageMagick can do it if you’d rather dig through docs than program), so this doesn’t seem to require any further explanation? [1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_8x16 https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
  • kibwen 1mo ago
    > learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles" I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
    • somat 1mo ago
      Or Andrew Jackson approaching the problem from the other end. “It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.” As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.
      • jimmydddd 1mo ago
        I few years ago I saw a TV interview where some gen-z kid confidently stated: "the dictdionary is supposed to reflect how I talk, not the other was around."
• techknight 1mo ago
  If I remember correctly, this is the tweet (and HN post) that brought it to the attention of the world back in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093
• RobRivera 1mo ago
  Man. I kinda want to stress test my memory of super metroid before reading this guide. I could do a sub 3hr run through at 100% when I was a child. I know I couldn't today.
• msephton 1mo ago
  BITD I used Protext word processor on Atari ST (and later DOS/Windows PC) which automatically justified monospace text. It also had a pretty good dictionary (all in 512KB of RAM) and I remember doing this word dance to get lines to flow better. Manual: https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/protext_5_04_arnor.pdf https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/protext_5_04_arnor.pdf Screenshot of manual section: https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
• initramfs 1mo ago
  I used to go to my computer laboratory in high school and at my mom's work to print out GameFAQ walkthroughs in the late 90s. They were excellent. I wrote this to remind myself of simple fun that's been superseded by grander ambitions, and sometimes I think I am wrong for choosing the latter.
• bywater 1mo ago
  Learned this the hard way explaining a bug fix; a single ambiguous term derailed an hour-long discussion.
• zellyn 1mo ago
  I remember reading Project Gutenberg email updates from Michael S. Hart in the mid to late 90s that were famously formatted like this. It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
  • dchest 1mo ago
    Indeed: https://hart.pglaf.org/ https://hart.pglaf.org/ From Wikipedia: "Michael Hart's email messages and blog posts had equal line length paragraphs in monospaced font: he chose the wording in such a way that each line had the same number of characters."
• stevage 1mo ago
  The part that horrifies me about this is the disincentive to revise any part of the text due to the flow-on effects.
• crate_88 1mo ago
  [dead]
• semiinfinitely 1mo ago
  this is the kind of content I come to hackernews for
• CarVac 1mo ago
  My dad told a story of a classmate in high school going through the effort of manually justifying text in a paper he wrote and being rewarded with a plagiarism accusation. That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.
• underyx 1mo ago
  So maybe it is possible to use alternate words in writing without compromising on writing quality after all.
• lanyard-textile 1mo ago
  I have never felt more seen. I do this with comments all the time, rewording things to look nice on that 80 or 100 column mark.
  • kkfkekfoked 1mo ago
    [dead]
• gyomu 1mo ago
  > At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface? I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :') See also: localizing your interface to German
  • crooked-v 1mo ago
    Yep, any concern about text widows and orphans in modern app layouts becomes irrelevant as soon as you have to localize. Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.
    • xboxnolifes 1mo ago
      Or if you're really insane, localize the entire UI.
      • Groxx 1mo ago
        And accessibilize it. Pixel perfect per zoom level per language per font variant per font. Don't forget increased-contrast too!
      • Agentlien 1mo ago
        Is that insane? Every game[0][1] I ever helped ship has had fully localized UI. In game development that seems to be the standard way of doing things. And it requires a lot of testing and sometimes comes with workflows to automatically test that all strings fit their intended box. [0] Before I worked on game development I actually worked in virtual surgery simulation, and there we also had a localized UI with a very large number of supported languages and tooling to detect issues. [1] Need For Speed (2015), NFS: Payback, NFS: Heat, Lost in Random, Wavetale
  • someguyiguess 1mo ago
    Anyone who ever worked as a front end developer definitely felt this.
• card_zero 1mo ago
  This might potentially rejuvenate the writing by disrupting habitual patterns, which forces more original choices.
  • cottsak 1mo ago
    Could be a saving grace in the age where the robots come up with all the copy.
    • scott_weber 1mo ago
      And here I at first thought the direction the original post was going was "here's how I got a LLM to do this automatically". Seems like it would not be so difficult. Might still be be a win over their innate dispositions.
      • deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      • nvme0n1p1 1mo ago
        Tom 7 did something like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc > BoVeX gives us a controlled tradeoff between these two states. By changing how much it costs for the text to be semantically wrong, we have a dial that allows us to smoothly interpolate between Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth.
        • sipjca 1mo ago
          it's unbelievable this was not pointed out earlier in this thread, long live tom 7
    • someguyiguess 1mo ago
      Robots would excel at writing that sort of copy I’d assume. (I haven’t tested it but doubt an LLM couldn’t handle that)
• imnotr0b0t 1mo ago
  Sometimes I think I'm too detail-oriented. Then I remember that someone once spent weeks manually rewording a game FAQ so the right margin would look pretty in a text file. And I feel better about myself...
• GeertB 1mo ago
  I've definitely been guilty of wording my multi-line doc comments in a way that would ensure they'd flow without awkward right margins. I would have a macro in vim that would call the fmt program to reflow the comment to 79 (later 98) characters, and then would iterate on word choice until the comments looked good. Not exactly right-justified, but no very ragged edge either.
• brcmthrowaway 1mo ago
  There is some bizarre stuff that gets posted on weekends. It's like reading the New Yorker.
• brooke2k 1mo ago
  this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting
  • cute_boi 1mo ago
    Same here, justified text feels difficult to read. And, I had academia where where students are forced to justify text....
  • JeremyMorgan 1mo ago
    I've never given this much thought, but I agree with you 100%. After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it". For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest. Still super impressive that people do this though.
  • jolmg 1mo ago
    It's just neatness. Like ironing clothes or putting on a tie, it's not about it serving a functional purpose. It's just to show off straight lines.
    • benterris 1mo ago
      I know, but it feels much more neat to me to have even spacing between words
  • Mikhail_Edoshin 1mo ago
    Differences are supposed to convey information. E.g. a paragraph's first line is indented to indicate that this is a start of a paragraph. Differences in line width convey no useful information, so the are suppressed. Same goes for overall text height on a page, although this rule is broken more often. Typesetters are known to be very specific about small details. E. g. tables are typeset with meticulous alignment rules. It may look superfluous, but it is not. The nature of the craft is that it has to be invisible unless you know where to look.
• BubbleRings 1mo ago
  I’ve been searching all over for a classic example of this that I first found around 1986, but I can’t locate it. It went on for a page or two, hand justified lines of maybe 40 characters, and then at the end of it he started making each line one character shorter, until the essay ended with these, the only words I remember from it: dumb is what I think this end is ! If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.
  • ricardobeat 1mo ago
    Lewis Carrol was about 123 years ahead! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.
  • a_bonobo 1mo ago
    You may be thinking of one of the poems of Christian Morgenstern? He used many tricks of formatting for jokes, famous example that fits with yours is The Funnels https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christian-1871/Die_Trichter/en/32693-The_Funnels_%282%29 https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...
• ChannelFence 1mo ago
  Before LLMs, there were Markov chain bots. We used SeeBorg on IRC and over time its dictionary would fill up with whatever everyone said. Most of it was nonsense, but every once in a while it would say something perfectly timed. Almost everything It said making sense or not was hilarious though. (source: https://github.com/allanlw/seeborg https://github.com/allanlw/seeborg)
• nathell 1mo ago
  Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/276/ https://xkcd.com/276/
• Funes- 1mo ago
  I must admit I've indulged in constrained writing when I was a teenager with the same purpose: circumventing spontaneous layout errors in Word when writing a paper for school, feeling a non-negligible amount of anxiety due to the deadline being around the corner. Terrifying.
  • johnxianren 1mo ago
    I still do that. I'll tweak the wording just so a single name doesn't sit on its own line.
• yetanotherjosh 1mo ago
  In a very real sense this is exactly what LLM watermarking does. It "chooss the words carefully" in order to get text to "line up," but not with a visible margin... instead with a verifiable word distribution that proves the author knew a secret key.
• domador 1mo ago
  I recently started reading a book sample for "Superintelligence" on Kindle, but stopped reading because all the text was noticeably justified, often with large gaps between words in many sentences. This was very annoying, especially since the option to disable justification was unjustifiably disabled. Strangely enough, this same book doesn't have the same problem on other platforms.
• cpeterso 1mo ago
  In a recent interview on Conan O'Brien's podcast, Gillian Anderson said X-Files creator Chris Carter wrote his scripts visually so they didn't have any widows (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page): Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series. And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle. So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
• iLemming 1mo ago
  Almost irrelevant to the story itself, but here's what it feels like to use Emacs these days. The story talks about monospace fonts and how unappealing they could be for reading prose. It is a fascinating post on itself, but here's what happened - it caught my eye while I was busy, I clicked the link, it opened the page, I kept it hanging around and forgot about it. Then HN page got buried in my browser history. After a while, I found the tab, I read the story and it made me thinking if anyone shared any thoughts on HN. Instead of digging it up from browser history - I ran consult-hn and found the thread - it showed up in an org-mode-derived buffer of hn-reader.el. I was reading through the comments, and I was like: "yah, this probably would be easier and faster to read if I used a different font". I enabled variable-pitch-mode, but it didn't get much better - the default font I set for the face isn't great - I just needed something that existed in both Linux and Mac. I should've picked a better one. "Let me try a different font", I thought. And how do you change the font family in Emacs? There's probably a way doing it through the UI, but thank you, no thank you - I have a programmable editor. I instinctively opened a scratch buffer and started typing: (set-face-attribute ... And at that point I realized: "Well, this would, a) Change the font everywhere b) What the heck were the parameters for this sucker?". Of course, why not ask the LLM? I started typing the prompt, right in that buffer. I could've just finish typing and call (gptel-send). But, "what if this becomes a longer chat?". I mean, I still could continue chatting in that buffer, but there are benefits for having specialized gptel buffer, for instance, all my gptel-dedicated buffers get automatically saved. So, instead, I invoked (gptel-inline) - if the answer is short - I'd dismiss the popup and if I have follow-ups, I'll just continue. LLM told me how to change the font in the current buffer. But I said: "I want to change it for any chosen buffer, since I'd be invoking this from the scratch buffer". At this point I was thinking: "I'm just fooling around, but let's see where it takes me..." It gave me this code snippet. (with-current-buffer "target-buffer-name" (setq buffer-face-mode-face '(:family "Georgia" :height 140)) (buffer-face-mode 1)) Since a gptel buffer is just an ordinary buffer, I changed `target-buffer-name` to `HNComments` and evaled it. The font in the buffer immediately changed. "Meh, I don't like this one, I want to try another...", then I changed the font name. And at that point, I felt so stupid for wasting my time, I typed: "Can you just build me a consult picker, to select a font for a given buffer with a live preview." And it just did. ~25 LOC. It took me far longer to write about it, in reality, the transition from a fleeting thought, from a mere idea to a concrete implementation took me seconds. Seconds! And now I have a command that I can either keep in my scratch buffer, or stick into my config. Or literally just discard until next time I need to temporarily change the font in a given buffer. Note: this is not a post about "how awesome it is to use AI in Emacs", no. It is all about how enormously flexible Emacs is to bend around to deal with any kind of text.
• d--b 1mo ago
  Made me think of constrained writing like what was done by the Oulipo group in France.
  • cisophrene 1mo ago
    Exactly, I was about to mention George Perec, one of its members, who wrote novels under very hard constraints such as "La disparition", a whole readable novel without the letter "e", which is as hard as or harder than an English speaker would expect. He also wrote "Les Revenentes", which is a novel only using words with no other vowel than "e" (and some liberties he had to take with the language to make that work). Interestingly, the novel with no "e" was actually translated into English multiple times (most famous one is called 'A Void'), proof that constrained writing is something quite a few people seem to enjoy.
• AgentOrange1234 1mo ago
  In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.
  • CarVac 1mo ago
    Row/col works but width/height doesn't, alas.
    • zxcvgm 1mo ago
      I sometimes use abbreviations like wd/ht. Should be understood with surrounding context.
      • KajMagnus 1mo ago
        I hope! And I abbreviate w w w.
    • eps 1mo ago
      But w/h does.
    • fwlr 1mo ago
      I use wide/tall for that. It reads alright: “row 5, col 4; 15 wide, 8 tall”.
  • thaumasiotes 1mo ago
    > It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. You're just matching them wrong. On/off and yes/no may look unequal, but what about yes/off or on/no?
    • jjsjsjsiw 1mo ago
      This reminds me of all the (fun) times I had coming across “enable toggle” and “disabler enabler”. Bonus points for taking “YES” (looking at you FreeBSD) or “1” or “ON”.
• alsetmusic 1mo ago
  That's the sort of attention to detail that makes me love an app. Apple used to have this. It's why I became one of their users. My hope is that John Ternus understands why this sort of "spinning of wheels" is essential when he takes over. I read that Steve Jobs picked the order of the icons in the Dock himself. Some people know that little things matter.
• xamuel 1mo ago
  I did something similar in my paper "Meno II: A self-referential Socratic dialogue about memory and computer programming" [1] (published in The Reasoner). Every length-200 block of text is carefully chosen so as to steganographically encode one character of a computer program, and Socrates and Meno decode the program in real time by examining the words they've said. I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets. The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be. [1] http://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMIA-4.pdf http://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMIA-4.pdf
• utopcell 1mo ago
  Definitely in the pool of people that used to do this extensively. I would occasionally increase/decrease the colum limit by a few characters and try again if the words didn't align.
• tyffanypastecf 1mo ago
  [dead]
• gblargg 1mo ago
  And do this manual justification as your very last step.
• runtime_lens 1mo ago
  [dead]
• knuckleheads 1mo ago
  Agents get a little upset when you ask them to do this and then check their work with a hook. They do not enjoy the process and create some weird looking text!
  • efskap 1mo ago
    Well, estimating string length of tokens is much like counting R's in strawberry.
  • lproven 1mo ago
    > They do not enjoy the process Dude, it's a text prediction engine. It can no more "enjoy" a process than a stapler enjoys poking wire through paper. Don't kid yourself. It's the first step down a slippery slope, one that ends in assigning gender to a bunch of statistics, falling in love with it, and a lot of terrible software, writing, pictures, and so on. It's a machine. Make sure not to anthropomorphise inanimate machinery.
• Nevermark 1mo ago
  I remember doing this by hand. A long time ago. It gave me a nice ADHD fidget-subtask while my brain worked out the higher level organization of what I was writing. I completely forgot I did that. My life has 1000's of strange untold stories of absentminded activity. I've done things you people wouldn't believe. Someday I will fall asleep and get so distracted I will forget to wake up. All those moments will be lost in time, like bits on bad tape.
• floki165 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• pranav_tech26 1mo ago
  [dead]
• sodimel 1mo ago
  I was in awe when I discovered this, and decided to apply this simple rule to the help text of a small command line tool I was working on: https://git.bitmycode.com/sodimel/n#help https://git.bitmycode.com/sodimel/n#help
• NeoByte 1mo ago
  [dead]
• wraptile 1mo ago
  It's a good illustration what a terrible idea text justification is. It should never even become an acceptable formatting technique as the entire purpose of reading is predictability and varying space length is very much the opposite of predictable. To this day I commit no-text-align-justify CSS lint rule to every repo I'm part of.
• Schlagbohrer 1mo ago
  One more example of the utopian idea that, because there are so many dedicated nerds out there for any possible thing imaginable, if we gave people more free time there would always be someone who would volunteer to do xyz task if it was needed and if they had a community who supported them. That's what comes to my mind anytime I see some huge labor of love like that guy rewriting 17k words to fit nicely.
• bradley13 1mo ago
  Wow, autism in action ;-P Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. Imagine the backtracking required...
  • embedding-shape 1mo ago
    > Imagine the backtracking required... Do things the "waterfall" way and you won't need any backtracking, as every previous line will have been adjusted as you're moving forward, not backwards, to adjust the chosen words.
  • lproven 1mo ago
    > Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. No it doesn't. If you're careful about how you speak and how you write then it takes next to no additional effort at all. I used to do this with all of my online responses, and it's been fun to do it again in this thread today. Note my responses in this comment thread as a whole. Even though I have not done this more than once or twice this century, it barely slows me down. At a guess, maybe it adds 10% or so to the time it takes to type a comment...? > Imagine the backtracking required... Virtually none. For some lines I might occasionally have to go back a three or four words, that's all. It's quite fun: some dusty rusty old bits of the old grey matter have been woken up and exercised, and they're rather liking being up in the sunlight again. :-)
• qhwudbebd 1mo ago
  I remember procps top --help did this. I hated the resulting clunky, inconsistent wording enough to add a local patch in my procps build recipe to rewrite it. Apparently I'm still carrying the patch, so the current version must still do it.
• unicorn_platfor 1mo ago
  I like the idea that arbitrary constraints can actually improve writing. Without a constraint, it's easy to fall back on familiar phrasing, while having to work around something unusual forces you to reconsider each word. I wonder if this applies to programming and other creative work too.
  • dchftcs 1mo ago
    Live is short, required time to market is even shorter. Arbitrary constraints might work if you have nothing better to do, but if you have a goal, or specific ideas you want to train, you'll get more natural constraints.
    • duopixel 1mo ago
      History is full of half-baked products that were better executed by a competitor later. While I agree that manually balancing the text of manual is probably not the best use of time, it's this obsessive mindset that creates great products. If Super Metroid would have optimized for time-to-market we wouldn't even remember the game.
    • trashb 1mo ago
      I would argue that limitations, forced or arbitrary lead to more interesting (and perhaps in the end more useful) products. In the GDC 2016 talk "8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box" by Mark Ferrari he mentions something similar. (paraphrasing) "If you can make anything you like (with modern Photoshop) you won't need to stop to consider the core of your idea." A lot of our thoughts are not as original as we like to believe and constraints can push your to consider your ideas and designs from another perspective leading to better understanding or design of the core concept. Often because the ideal path to realizing your idea is not available so you will have to reconsider the need or how to creatively implement something that approaches your desired outcome. Now the GDC talk is about pixel art but the same is true in writing or any creative process (for example painting or coding). Famously some writers limit their selves to typewriters, for example George Orwell or Matty Healy.
    • latexr 1mo ago
• ncruces 1mo ago
  Also Cosmopolitan lib: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/README.md?plain=1 https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/README... Note how all the "wrong" lines are down to markdown formatting.
• pcblues 1mo ago
  It's the holy grail for text adventures :) Funny article, and there is probably a similar post in an ILoveKerning site.
• zebreus 1mo ago
  just use BoVeX
• dolmen 1mo ago
  Nowadays LLMs are driven to "choose words carefully" (well, tokens) for watermarking.
• syllogism 1mo ago
  If you're submitting an eight page conference paper you're very often hunting runts (short lines ending paragraphs) and rewording for better justification, especially on the first page and even more so in the abstract. First-page space is at a premium because you want the reviewer to scan the introduction well, and it's great if you can fit a key figure that explains the concept on the first page. The game's probably very different now that there's such a flood of submissions but when I was reviewing I always saw messy alignment on the first page as a sign the paper was probably rushed, and usually I could see that elsewhere in the paper too.
• ColinWright 1mo ago
  Although they are rarely read in monospace, I write all my emails in monospace, and frequently "choose my words carefully" to have the text left and right justified. Every now and again someone notices. I invite you to have a look at my profile ... I cheated once.
• kreco 1mo ago
  From the title, I knew what it was about. This Super Metroid guide is some crazy stuff I'll always remember. I was reading it and then a 10 minutes later I noticed, it was such unique feeling. Definitely a piece of art.
• easydidit 1mo ago
  In a similar vein, Taylor Otwell from Laravel writes his comment blocks exactly three lines long and each line is three characters shorter than the line above, e.g. /* |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Application Name |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | This value is the name of your application, which will be used when the | framework needs to place the application's name in a notification or | other UI elements where an application name needs to be displayed. | */ https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/13.x/config/app.php https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/13.x/config/app.ph...
  • someothherguyy 1mo ago
    that is anxiety, not design
  • rokkamokka 1mo ago
    The good thing about this is that it forces you to think about what to write. The bad thing is that it doesn't force you to think about how to write it so it's easy to read and understand, just so it's exactly the right length...
  • ale42 1mo ago
    comment by him on a podcast [1]: "Started doing the 3-line comments just for visual appeal, became an iconic part of Laravel over time. And then I just kept rolling with it, and it became like a a [sic] Laravel meme of sorts." [1] https://syntax.fm/show/824/taylor-otwell-s-opinions-on-php-react-laravel-and-lamborghini-memes/transcript#started-doing-the-3-line-comments-just-for-visual-appeal-became-an-iconic-part-of-laravel-over-time https://syntax.fm/show/824/taylor-otwell-s-opinions-on-php-r...
  • brap 1mo ago
    Incredible. This is the kind of weaponized OCD I want in my team
• zkmon 1mo ago
  Skillful people did amazing things in the past because of 3 reasons - they have ample time available (slow world), don't have the basic struggle such as thinking about next meal (must be in a peaceful country), no technology to divert their attention (no need of learning new stuff on daily basis).
• lproven 1mo ago
  4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see... I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having own personal email address. My primary email is from 1991 and I used it, and DOS-based tools, to go online from 1991 until the late 1990s. At 1st I ran DOS tools from a floppy, then on my own PC with OS/2 2, then under Win95, then under NT 4. Gradually all the tools that were current at the time became Windows-based, so I switched. It just became too hard to not use Windows, and that meant proportional fonts, and that meant that folk couldn't see that I was writing fully-justified text... so I stopped. If this works (it looks all right in the editing window to me) then this is the first time in a decade that I've tried writing justified text. At the time when I did it constantly, it barely slowed me down. It helps if you have a good vocabulary and you can just substitute longer or shorter words on the fly.
  • lproven 1mo ago
    Heh. It worked. Maybe I should start writing all my HN responses like this. :-) In the early '90s I occasionally wrote circular messages, and once, I recall spending a good chunk of an hour composing one in the shape of a Christmas-tree: stacked triangles, gradually getting wider from the top to the bottom of the "tree". One letter wide at the very tip, and then 2 at the top of the next triangle. The bottom of each triangle 2 letters wider each time, I think. You get the gist. I widened the top as there are not many 1-letter words in English and few 2-letter ones to choose from.
    • deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    • jagged-chisel 1mo ago
      No, please. It doesn’t wrap correctly on narrow mobile screens.
      • thavalai 1mo ago
        It seems to wrap correctly in landscape mode.
• dash2 1mo ago
  I dunno man, on the one hand this is blooming awesome. On the other hand could he have spent some of this time writing better prose? I sure would not want to read 1700 words of that, let alone 17,000!
• matja 1mo ago
  Obligatory mention, the GNU JUSTIFIED PUBLIC LICENSE: https://tom7.org/bovex/JCOPYING https://tom7.org/bovex/JCOPYING (for the rabbit hole: https://tom7.org/bovex/ https://tom7.org/bovex/)
  • jwilk 1mo ago
    Hmm… To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest 1 to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively 2 state the exclusion of warranty 3; and 4 each 5 file 6 should 7 have 8 at 9 10 least 11 the 12 "copyright 13 line 14 and 15 a 16 pointer 17 to 18 where 19 the 20 full 21 notice 22 is 23 found 24. What's up with the numbers?
    • matja 1mo ago
      Looks like it messed-up and they're just for padding, remove them and it makes sense. I never noticed that before. As such, I propose a replacement :) : To accomplish this, append the following warnings to the software. It is safest to place them at the beginning of each source document to clearly declare the exclusion of guarantees; plus every single file must include a minimum of the "copyright" text and a link detailing the full warning.
• amai 1mo ago
  Can LLMs nowadays do that for us? Rewriting the text so that it fits perfectly into the paragraph?
  • amai 1mo ago
    It seems one can do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc
• bhaak 1mo ago
  I am somewhat surprised not seeing any mentioning of hanging punctuation when doing the full alignment to the right side. As everybody can see in the article, punctutation marks on the right side results in uneven text. Putting non letter symbols one space further to the right than the other letters, it looks much better. Of course for monospaced text it is still just a gimmick. But a visually pleasing gimmick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_punctuation
• TripleFFF 1mo ago
  I wonder if this has parallels in subconscious email formatting? Weird line breaks in emails used to really bug me until I realised most people were composing inside an email program that only showed them a reduced width editor, but because I wasn't used to formatting myself it took a long time for me to get used to things like forum posts, where the lines continue over and you don't think much about it unless you are making a sylistic point
  • WA 1mo ago
    Oh there is always a certain group of users whose posts had weird sentence structure, because they'd press return in a <textarea> after every line.
• njspix 1mo ago
  I've done something like this when writing grant applications, etc. When space is at a premium, strategically shortening/deleting words to eliminate a widow can gain you a whole line :)
• singpolyma3 1mo ago
  Full justification is a plague
• atroon 1mo ago
  It would be fascinating if this were the method AI was using to watermark text.
• benji-york 1mo ago
  The maintainer of top fully-justifies his commit messages, e.g., https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/e6f22569e9db16d https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/e6f22569e9db16d... commit e6f22569e9db16dbef7d9bdee5bb41b8cb7a03ca Author: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net> Date: Tue Jul 23 00:00:00 2024 -0500 top: attempt once again to allow help text translation Back when our release 4.0.1 was being readied, sources were sent to the TP (Translation Project). However one person named Benno Schulenberg refused to release them for translation. His stated reason was the top command line help text which then finally included long forms. He demanded that the help text be broken into separate strings instead of a single large string. But, all the top text (some much more complex) has just one string. So that stated reason was, at the least, inconsistent. [ I suspect the real reason was that Mr. Schulenberg ] [ thought that the carefully right-justified English ] [ wording would also be required of translations too ] The bottom line was that Benno took it upon himself to change the TP motto from "you code, we translate" into "first we tell you how to code and then we translate". Rather than bend a knee to that despot, I disabled the text entirely, admittedly denying users a translation. Now, with this commit we enable translatable help text but with a hint included to ignore the justified text. Reference)s): . Oct, 2022 - finalized translation exclusion commit ab05a3785f29cc4b754e17c53bfb3d8ba054563e Signed-off-by: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>
  • 0134340 1mo ago
    I too feel that fully justified text can be fully justified. I used to use it back when blogs were a thing.
• davedx 1mo ago
  It's just a shame we still don't have the computer for the PITS, isn't it? I guess the closest thing we have is an iPad - my mother can just about use tablets, but I have to say onboarding onto a tablet these days is full of gotchas and fraught with peril too if you don't understand computing. I'm reminded of "The Dream Machine" by Licklider - if we read that today, we'd get this odd sense of having come very close, but yet missing by miles, many of the goals set back then. Anyway, yes, monospace typesetting...
• AndrewSwift 1mo ago
  Presumably this is a very similar technique to watermarking AI-generated text.
• yipinwong 1mo ago
  ** unpopular opinion ** The author finds the beauty in stuffy blocks, while I find beauty with more whitespaces.
• howToTestFE 1mo ago
  Pretty sure Laravel source code comments above functions were always something like 3 lines, with each line slightly less length than the previous one. Not sure if this is still done or enforced at all, but it was always neat to see. Here is an example - https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Connection.php#L232-L234 https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Connectio... - looks like each one is 3 characters shorter.
  • KerryJones 1mo ago
    I think about this all the time. The first several years of Laravel had just absolutely beautiful code to see (both from an engineering, OCD and aesthetic perspective)
• quuxplusone 1mo ago
  Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot (1997), pages xviii–xix: > Because I have always had a very clear sense of how thing should look on a page, I dearly wanted to be able to control every tiny detail of my book's overall look, ranging from the cover art to the typefaces used to the size of the pages to the way displays are indented, and so on. Fortunately, the people at Basic Books have grown used to me and my idiosyncrasies over the years I have worked with them, and they assented to my unusual request. > [new page] Consequently, I have enjoyed total control over such things as line-breaks, page-breaks, hyphenations, widows, orphans, density of word spacing within lines, fine-grained intercharacter spacing ("kerning"), and so forth and so on — things that most people usually are unaware of and simply leave to their publisher or their word processor. I am a fanatic, though, and these things matter a great deal to me. Not only do they matter to me, they have had an overwhelming impact on this book from start to finish. This may sound crazy, but it is the gospel truth. > [section heading] Who Is Really Controlling Whom? > Above, I very casually remarked that I have enjoyed total control over page-breaks and such things; yet the truth of the matter would be far more accurately captured by turning the phrase around and saying that the page-breaks and word spacing and such things have enjoyed total control over me! By this, I mean that I have been forced to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite passages in order to make a page boundary come out exactly where I wanted it. It is not just by some happy accident, for instance, that the poems inside chapters are never, ever broken across page boundaries. > The amount of influence exerted on my text by concerns of purely visual esthetics is incalculable — and by "my text", I don't merely mean how I wound up phrasing my ideas, I mean the ideas themselves. Content has been determined by considerations of elegant form so often that I couldn't begin to imagine it. Every single line of text, for instance, is characterized by its spacing — how wide the blanks between words are. I can clearly see the spacing as I type on my screen, and I rewrite and rewrite in order to make sure that no line is too tightly or too loosely spaced. In the course of such rewritings — here extracting a word, there using a shorter or a longer one, elsewhere inserting a word where none was — words and phrases that I would otherwise not have thought of pop to mind, suggesting ideas I would not have thought of, and those ideas suggest unexpected paragraphs, and those paragraphs are in turn linked to other ones, and so on...
• eudamoniac 1mo ago
  I occasionally do this in code comments that I believe will be relatively permanent. It's a nod to the reader, a signal that an author was here and that he cared for this code. When you open a file headed by this sort of text, you relax, for you know you are among friends and you aren't about to see some slop or hacky shit thrown together carelessly. When I first started doing it, LLMs were not able to replicate it; I don't know if they can now.
• aghilmort 1mo ago
  interesting approach to tune models for readable text in monospace CLI terminals where basically +/- tune for this does or doesn't meet some fixed width view could probably do view LoRA at some reasonable level likely also applications for time-series prediction, ARC-like or other puzzle solving, etc. especially if got into fixed height along with fixed width, terminal readable --more-- with good pagination paragraph separation, etc. QWEN-40-char-terminal DiffusionGemma-80-char etc.
• verdverm 1mo ago
  I've been making zines and this is definitely something we do, also the length limit (per-page) and other spacing restrictions (headings/look-feel) drive some word choices
• sarthak927 1mo ago
  The title is a nice intro tagline for LLMs