Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

vole.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 310 posts

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#191

Post by plttn »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #186
alpaca128 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or rearranged their "room" with decoration that spelt out letters, or simply drew cock and balls, etc. A whole Lego MMO was once cancelled because they couldn't come up with an automated way to detect such things in virtual Lego buildings and using employees to filter the content became too expensive.

I don't understand that at all. Just have a "warning to parents: this is a sandbox game and may feature any shape - including body parts - built from Lego". 99% of parents wouldn't be bothered, surely? Every kid who has two opposite sex parents knows from toddler-hood what a penis and vulva look like, why is it such a problem??

But imagine telling your licensor "hey we had to put a warning that says players may see inappropriate body parts made out of Lego brand bricks".

That would go over like a lead ballon.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#192

Post by Baeocystin »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #68
oefrha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, not that. "in search of words containing fuck" — just not a very mature thing to do.

FUCK is still my default “Find>Replace>Find>Replace” placeholder. Need to shift a wad of spreadsheet cells laden with formulas but don’t want to risk anything? Find All “=“ Replace with “FUCK” Copy/Move Find All “FUCK” Replace with “=“ Also handy for updating words or names when word processing. The choice dates back to my first computer - I remember replacing all spaces “ “ with “FUCK” and watching gloriously as the…

You mean you don't have it mapped to 'sudo $previous_line'?

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#193

Post by lainga »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #102
StavrosK wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.stavros.io/posts/fastapi-with-django/ Commonly referred to as "transliteration", and the transliteration is spelled "shiitake".

There are at least 3 transliteration systems for Japanese. Writing foreign languages with 26 Latin letters usually loses some nuance and shows some bias towards the pronunciation of the authors' native language.

Recant! Ezra Pound showed you the way, but you would not listen!

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#194

Post by mattround »

superzadeh wrote: post #53
curuinor wrote: post #7

It doesn't seem to censor the n-word. I would think it's pretty important to censor the n-word checked, failed to censor: n-word every word in this comic (nsfw for offensive words) https://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-offenders/

Fag##t is also not censured. It is one of the core problems: Not enough diverse people involved in those projects, and the outcome is showing that the only thing "wrong" in calling someone "f###ing fag##t n#####r" is the first word, the two other ones are "fine" or "depends on context" as other mentioned in this thread. Go thoughts and intention, but needs support on execution.

Those saying you're taking this too seriously are wrong - the project is a joke, but the issues you highlight aren't.

I made the font, and if it was a serious attempt at a moderation tool or trying to comprehensively cover 'bad words' then such slurs would certainly be included. But it's VERY limited in scope, there's just enough for the joke to work (core 4-letter words plus a set of words people grumbled were missing) and it's focused around what most people would consider to be everyday swearing (rather than discriminatory or highly contextual terms). I also felt that adding slurs to such a limited word list would risk highlighting them & encouraging their use to make 'funny' screenshots etc

Please keep questioning these things, I'm well aware that even silly projects can raise serious issues and try to give them enough thought.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#195

Post by GuB-42 »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #146
sbarre wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this argument before (and I tend to agree with it), but here's a counter-point I heard recently and appreciated: Eloquence and good vocabulary are important, but there is a time and place for something vulgar and basic. Just like there's a time and place for a rapier and there's also a time and place for a folding chair or a pool cue.

This. People who swear do it so frequently it looses the power. It shows a lack of vocabulary more than any sort of moral failing. If you only swear rarely you get a lot more impact when you do, vs. the person who cannot avoid every 3rd word being a blue one. Also, there are some truly eloquent swears out there!

TV Tropes has an article on that: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrecisionFStrike

Contrast: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClusterFBomb

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#196

Post by umvi »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #146
sbarre wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this argument before (and I tend to agree with it), but here's a counter-point I heard recently and appreciated: Eloquence and good vocabulary are important, but there is a time and place for something vulgar and basic. Just like there's a time and place for a rapier and there's also a time and place for a folding chair or a pool cue.

This. People who swear do it so frequently it looses the power. It shows a lack of vocabulary more than any sort of moral failing. If you only swear rarely you get a lot more impact when you do, vs. the person who cannot avoid every 3rd word being a blue one. Also, there are some truly eloquent swears out there!

Words are vulgar because they are overused.

It's the original definition of "vulgar" - "characteristic of or belonging to the masses." Hence, it became taboo for the upper classes to utter vulgarities, because it signaled lack of learning.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#197

Post by xg15 »

Soo... the ligature trick is relatively old news - but I was somewhat surprised by the font not censoring "Scunthorpe". (And my suspicion is that this ability was what they were actually showing off)

Any idea how they did this?

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#198

Post by bntyhntr »

xg15 wrote: post #197

Soo... the ligature trick is relatively old news - but I was somewhat surprised by the font not censoring "Scunthorpe". (And my suspicion is that this ability was what they were actually showing off) Any idea how they did this?

No expert in ligatures but from a naive point of view I would assume it's another ligature that takes priority

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#199

Post by umvi »

IgorPartola wrote: post #66

As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that? I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this wa…

Censorship (in my opinion) has a time and a place. And it should always be a choice, never forced on you. This is an extremely controversial topic that seems to get a lot of people's emotions running hot, so please try and counter that before responding. In my opinion, censorship of media is a personal preference akin to food aversions. Picking the mushrooms out of a chef's dish isn't censorship, nor an insult to his art. It's personal preference.

For example, GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire series has a great story with tons of intrigue, but it is marred (in my opinion, don't all jump on me), by an over-reliance on sex jokes, explicit sex scenes, and extremely explicit violence/gore.

It turns out, you can tone down that stuff (using Calibre) and it makes the book so much better, (again, in my opinion) without losing anything of value. The story is still perfectly in tact, but now more stuff is left to the imagination (implicit instead of explicit). Instead of being described in great detail how a corpse is rotting in a cage and how the maggots are eating the various sex organs, it's now just a decaying corpse in a cage.

Same for movies. I enjoy watching censored (TV edited) movies with my teenagers, like "The Matrix".

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#200

Post by xg15 »

bntyhntr wrote: post #198
xg15 wrote: post #197

Soo... the ligature trick is relatively old news - but I was somewhat surprised by the font not censoring "Scunthorpe". (And my suspicion is that this ability was what they were actually showing off) Any idea how they did this?

No expert in ligatures but from a naive point of view I would assume it's another ligature that takes priority

That would make sense. I wasn't aware, overlapping ligatures were permitted. I wonder how well-defined this is though. I.e. will the ligature for the longest substring always "win", or if this is implementation-defined?
Post reply on HN