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Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

korigamik.dev

11–20 of 88 posts

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#11
post #5
post #3

Ai writing

Attacking the source of the message instead of the merits. Ad-HomineLLM

The attention economics are bad more than anything else. LLM articles ask us to put more time into reading it than the LLM put into writing it. Actually committing time to production is the minimum bar which suggests something is worth our time in a world where so much is already vying for our attention.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#12
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacking the source of the message instead of the merits. Ad-HomineLLM

AI writing is worse on the merits: it is lower quality and has concerning externalities associated with its production.

It's also reasonably effective proxy to determine whether somebody is actually passionate about the topic they're writing about. If you've got a very strong interest in a specific niche you're typically able to pour pages and pages of ink down talking about it. If you can't be bothered to take the necessary time to distill your thoughts, it signals to me that your thoughts on the topic aren't as worthwhile as someone who's deeply invested in it.

Of course this proxy isn't perfect, I understand many people use AI to make their writing more comprehensible when English isn't their first language.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#13

> Bitmap fonts are the ones that look perfect at their intended resolution. This seems to be the center of the author's argument. But I prefer legibility, readability, being easy on the eye. I also prefer antialiasing for its smoothness. Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No distracting jaggies. I don't want my computer to feel like…

>jaggies are a visual distraction

So are serifs, and people don't complain about those. Whether any "visual distraction" actually distracts you is a matter of what you're accustomed to. If you read enough cursive or blackletter it will start to look normal to you. I disable anti-aliasing because I'm accustomed to aliasing and it doesn't distract me at all. In exchange, I get sharp text on an 1080p monitor, effectively quadrupling my graphics performance because I no longer need 4K. I'd prefer bitmap fonts, but in practice I find full automatic hinting of vector fonts good enough.

The only cases where I can see anti-aliasing helping are with Chinese and Japanese fonts, which have characters with unusually fine details. But on any GUI using Fontconfig you can enable anti-aliasing for those fonts specifically and leave it disabled for the rest.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#14
post #5
post #3

Ai writing

Attacking the source of the message instead of the merits. Ad-HomineLLM

We need an update to the HN posting guidelines that addresses this. We already have:

    Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I'm not welcome to complain that the website is a tiny vertical strip down my screen with 6 inches of whitespace on each side, so we should also not welcome the boring, common "The article is written by AI" criticism, which is going to apply to 99% of articles by the end of 2026. It's already too common to be interesting criticism.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#17
post #13

> Bitmap fonts are the ones that look perfect at their intended resolution. This seems to be the center of the author's argument. But I prefer legibility, readability, being easy on the eye. I also prefer antialiasing for its smoothness. Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No distracting jaggies. I don't want my computer to feel like…

>jaggies are a visual distraction So are serifs, and people don't complain about those. Whether any "visual distraction" actually distracts you is a matter of what you're accustomed to. If you read enough cursive or blackletter it will start to look normal to you. I disable anti-aliasing because I'm accustomed to aliasing and it doesn't distract me at all. In exchange, I get sharp text on an 1080p monitor, effectivel…

Serifs are chosen intentionally to be harmonious with the overall letterforms. They provide a feeling of visual stability and additional cues for recognizing letterforms. They provide a kind of consistency. They're not a distraction.

Jaggies come from a limitation of the pixel grid. They arbitrarily make diagonal strokes and curves bumpy while horizontal and vertical strokes are perfectly smooth, an inconsistency that would otherwise have no rhyme or reason behind it. Before letterforms were constrained to square grids, nobody was making diagonals and curves bumpy because it was a desirable aesthetic effect.

Jaggies are a distraction from the underlying letterform we all recognize. We know they are an undesirable distortion. Serifs are not. They serve an intentional aesthetic purpose, proportioned in a carefully balanced way.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#18

I often question myself on why the aesthetics of personal computing were so special our brains that it sticks to this day.

Perhaps because we grew up with it. The VGA 8x16 font reminds me of growing up when I had my first computer that was all mine, with a plasma display where the pixels were clearly visible, yet quite restful on the eyes.
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