81–90 of 363 posts
Strangely enough, this same book doesn't have the same problem on other platforms.
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_...
I think you meant "spelt" rather than spent. A but ironic, all things considered.
Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be a saving grace in the age where the robots come up with all the copy.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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…
https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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."
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.
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_...
> 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.
It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").