“I just chose words carefully” | Hacker News Reader

“I just chose words carefully”

unsung.aresluna.org

1,255 pointszdw353 comments

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

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.

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

“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.

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.h...

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.

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.

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)?

Fewer people want to foster than to have their own kids?

For a foster parent you only need to find someone willing to adopt a child, which already register themself into a list. For marriage you need to find someone willing to marry and to marry you out of random people.

Also, marriage doesn’t imply children.

Depends, but I see what you mean.

Never "depends". Marriage doesn't guarantee children, nor even the desire to try for them, both of which can occur without marriage.

Sorta.

Neither the human orphan nor the widow is fixed by your description; they simply aren't alone either more.

The child is still an orphan; the woman a widow.

The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones: An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.

In german typography the name for widow is "Hurenkind" wich translates to "child of a whore". I was pretty surprised to hear that word on a regular basis while working in text for print. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

You will have to explain what a page is to the younger readers.

Surely they know the concept of a book

Are you sure about that?

It’s like when you click on a new link. That’s a page.

click?

> 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.

This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:

> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.

But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)

> 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.

We're going to see more of this once diffusion language models mature. They won't match the exact length but will sure choose words to fix the set number of tokens.

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.

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.

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-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...

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?

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-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/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...

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.

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.

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-...

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!

Most of the lines in that soliloquy is over 10 syllables, so it technically can’t be in pentameter. So either I am very confused about my understanding of the English poetry or this:

  Most of the show is written in iambic pentameter. I believe one way God says, “I too have a hand here” is in the rhythms and metrics of speech, that the metrics of speech are important and representative of our fellowship even in those of us who feel, mistakenly, that we are separate from each other as individuals.

  When a character in Deadwood, or anyone, talks in certain locutions, unbeknownst to themselves, they honor a divine presence.[1]

is a very contradictory statement indeed.

To be fair, I don’t care. I loved the series and now I started to read the script and oh man, it’s like a really good novel. Very much prose in no foxed meter, but damn if it isn’t great prose. I might just start reading through Deadwood scripts, since I watched the series to death anyway.

[1] https://lithub.com/david-milch-on-language-and-obscenity-in-...

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.ph...

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...

that is anxiety, not design

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-r...

Incredible. This is the kind of weaponized OCD I want in my team

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.

Row/col works but width/height doesn't, alas.

I sometimes use abbreviations like wd/ht. Should be understood with surrounding context.

I hope! And I abbreviate w w w.

But w/h does.

I use wide/tall for that. It reads alright: “row 5, col 4; 15 wide, 8 tall”.

> 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?

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”.

true/lies

Ah, but I use a normal proportional font in my editor so same and diff have different widths.

That was the fun comment. The serious ones:

1. I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience.

2. Nobody ever complained that my source code is

  a = 1
  ab = 2
  abc = 3

instead of

  a   = 1
  ab  = 2
  abc = 3

3. No tables or diagrams in comments of course but I think that I could configure my editor (emacs) to use a monospaced font there. I do use a monospaced font for the ``` ``` blocks of md files.

4. I'm using Atkinson Hyperlegible Next https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

2. You must have never written Haskell.

Or terraform.

They would complain if it's:

  a   = 1
  ab = 2
  abc = 3

> I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience.

I'm the opposite, I prefer non-proportional fonts even for prose.

Code editors should do this visually without adding actual space characters to the file.

why not go even further?

store the source minified without any extraneous whitespace and let the editor display a properly indented view in your preferred style...

An AST-based code editor. That would be neat.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one - I loved using proportional fonts. I find my ability to scan words is much faster than with monospaced, and I navigate semantically and prefer automated refactors so that I never really felt the need for multi-cursor editing or aligned blocks.

All that came to an end when I worked on a project using F#. It just doesn't work with meaningful whitespace. In the current world, with the prevalence of python, I can't really go back unfortunately. Maybe indenting with tabs is the way after all...

I am using my proportional font in Python too. The meaningful spaces are at the beginning of the line. 4 monospaced spaces become 4 narrower spaces, 8 monospaced spaces become 8 narrower spaces and they are still twice as wide as the 4 spaces.

I never had problems with Ruby, Python, JS, Elixir, Perl and probably other languages I used a little in the last 15 years or more. HTML and CSS too.

The best of both worlds would be achieved by elastic tabstops. https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

If only they took off.

You caught my OCD. I like to use upper / lower a lot.

In Japan they have the abbreviation “NG” (“not good”) that’s often used as the opposite of “OK”. I always liked how, when I worked for a Japanese machine learning company, classifiers would be between “OK” and “NG”. Maybe semantically “okay” and “not good” are not great opposites, but I always liked how having textual alignment makes the contrast immediately obvious

Log levels have me screaming internally

https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.0/libdoc/logger/rdoc/Logger....

It's not unusual in France to use OK and KO. I never liked it much because it's too easy to confuse and no semantically a good opposite either, but visually it does look very balanced.

Is it because KO and chaos are both pronounced /ka.o/?

I've always just understood it as in knockout, chaos wouldn't fit in the way OK and KO are used (as predicate adjectives, if I understand English grammar classes correctly) but it is part of why some people like to use "KO", I'm not sure.

What does KO stand for?

Korrect Oll

And that is french and means the opposite of OK?

What does OK stand for?

  The origin of OK is disputed; however, most modern reference works hold that 
  it originated around Boston as part of a fad in the late 1830s of 
  abbreviating misspellings – that it is an initialism of "oll korrect" as a 
  misspelling of "all correct". This origin was first described by linguist 
  Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK

I've seen it a lot in Spain as well. I guess it's a combination of just being the reverse of OK, and also "KO" meaning "knocked out" just feels like the opposite of OK.

“SUCCÈS” and “ERREUR” work too.

Seems like “not okay” would be the cleanest antonym. I can’t see anything that could go wrong with using it.

> Meeting at 4 pm today?

> NO

Norway (Yes this is a YAML pun)

Is this not common outside of Japan? I've often seen this used here in Canada.

Sometimes as NFG after a particularly bad day.

Also have/want if old/new is already taken.

> old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong

also some abbreviations work fine:

    min
    max

    row
    col

    beg (vs start)
    end

    key
    val

    src
    dst

    pos
    len

and we have

    public_key
    secret_key (vs private)

    from
    till

    push
    pull

    load
    save

    init
    done

    inner
    outer

-----

and if you speak Norwegian you have two options:

    ja    yes
    no    nei

but that may trigger a different kind of OCD :-)

Here’s a larger stash: https://github.com/timvieira/justified-variables (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31138306).

Forgot the ever succinct

  get
  put

There's also aye/nay but I don't think I've ever seen those in code

Muckle thanks tae ye, ah'm stealing thae richt noo

I wonder if that was part of the reason that some programming languages use constructs like "if / fi" "do / od" etc.

(Note: After writing the above, I checked with ChatGPT, it claims that the main motivation was to make it unambiguous which which "opening word" a "closing word" belonged to.)

This tracks with an old convention in languages like Pascal, which uses begin / end keywords for all blocks, where people would add "end (* if *)" as a comment to make it more explicit which block is being closed.

There's only two things I hate in this world: people who do column alignment for vars and function params, and the Dutch.

Doesn’t work that well without the context.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/379482-there-s-only-two-thi...

Someone who is unfamiliar with the quote will just be confused.

Consistency of abbreviation style is important, too. It drives me crazy that the Google Maps API uses lat/lng rather than lat/lon.

up/dn is cute

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_...

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_...

> 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.

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."

That's actually how many of the dictionary people see themselves.

    Most dictionaries are descriptivist, and
    that's why they frequently have multiple
    spellings of words. It's because of your
    teachers, style guides & internet trolls
    that anyone says the dictionary spelling
    is the only correct spelling.

The tricky part is that spoken language and written language are not the same. Even if you are a descriptionist that believes dictionaries should represent how people write, it doesn't necessarily mean that the spelling changes based on how people pronounce it.

A natural descriptivist.

Also known as descriptivism. That's what it do.

That is in fact what the dictionary is supposed to do.

Yes, but also with a bit of lag.

A dictionary would be all but useless, if it included words used for 2 months, and essentially never used in that context, way, or spelling again. That sort of means teenage slang probably shouldn't appear, and amusingly if it did appear in the dictionary, it'd probably be less 'cool' to use that slang.

And alt-spellings for 'being kool' aren't what I'd call a dictionary thing.

Put another way, slang is in the dictionary, but only long-standing slang. Such as 'cool'. I'd see it more as temp slang->more used->enters dictionary-> eventually the 'slang' note is dropped, it's just language.

I'd want to see a word used for a few years, before it enters. And really, some slang morphs endlessly, like a fire flickering and then going out. How do you capture that? Even online, it'd be out of date once published.

And lots of slang is colloquial. Do you care to add slang language used across dozens of regions in the US?

I recall 20 years ago, Oxford Dictionary took a literal physical trip across Canada, and made the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, filled with 2200 'Canadianisms'. Akin to what you're saying here, if people are using it, it should be in there. But these were things Canadians had been saying for decades...

Anyhow.

I guess my point is, the kid was wrong because transitory has no value in the dictionary. His special words won't be used by even him, in a year.

What a rude approach! I will always prefer the more classic and civilized way of waiting for the dictionary to invent new words for me to use.

Different languages went down different paths in this regard, each with their own interesting advantages and disadvantages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth

Should be missels then?

Let's settle the argument by all agreeing on mussels instead, and enjoy a nice seafood dish with garlic and a white wine sauce. Delicious.

A well renown dish in Belgium's capital.

To best be enjoyed with a muscular buddy.

https://focusonbelgium.be/en/Do%20you%20know%20these%20Belgi...

They're where they keep the nuclear wessels.

*Nucular wessels.

I'd argue that "le" is not really phonetic to how people pronounce words ending in that; "missils" would be more phonetic

> I'd argue that "le" is not really phonetic to how people pronounce words ending in that

Sorry? How do you think people pronounce words such as truffle / turtle / tremble / pickle / maple / rubble / etc. etc. etc.?

They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel". Since the "l" sound is last and preceded by a schwa, "truffle" (or "missle") obviously cannot be considered phonetic.

> They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel".

You can just look this up. The usual way to write "truffle" in a phonetic manner is of course /tɹʌfl̩/. You'll note that there is no vowel in the second syllable at all; it consists of just the L. (And that's what the small mark below the L means - "syllabic".) This is the standard phonetic analysis.

You might also notice that the IPA differs from your proposed spelling in several other ways. One, the difference between "ɹ" and "r", has no relevance in a discussion of English. But the difference between "f" and "ff" is more significant, and the difference between "u" (the vowel in GOOSE) and "ʌ" (the vowel in STRUT) is of critical importance.

And this is still just a phonemic transcription. Phonetically, you'd expect the word to be [tʃɹʌfl̩], with the initial consonant matching that of "chill" and not "till".

All of these are conventions of written English. Written "tr" is pronounced as if it were written "chr". Pronounced [tʃɹ] is always spelled "tr" and never spelled "chr". The difference in vowel quality between "moping" and "mopping" is indicated, as you probably already noticed, by the doubling of the consonant written after the vowel, and this is also the reason for the double "f" in "truffle". Why do we write an extra "f" when what we mean is that we're changing the pronunciation of the vowel before it? Not for phonetic reasons.

And what do you know, there's a standard spelling of syllabic L in English too, and that standard spelling is "-le", not "-el". That spelling is phonetic in exactly the same way that using "m" to spell the initial consonant of "mat" is phonetic - it is the established mapping between the orthography and the pronunciation.

Well I know what you mean, it's phonetic in the same way that a silent "ent" and "p" in "comptent" are "phonetic" in French, or the silent "n"s in "pannenkoeken" are in Dutch. In common language though we call that "not phonetic". But that's not what the person you were responding to was talking about, and it also has nothing to do with IPA notation: we were obviously not writing IPA here.

However to come back to IPA and "truffle", Wiktionary (not a definitive source I know, but there is no definitive source whatsoever about anything regarding the English language) does that say "truffle" rymes with /-ʌfəl/ with a schwa right there between the f and the l. The pronunciation of the word itself in Wiktionary is indicated with a syllable break rather than a schwa, which I would absolutely dispute, and indeed it looks like Cambridge dictionary[1] puts a schwa there in addition to the syllable break.

It's also written "truffel" in Dutch for what it's worth.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/truffle [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/truff...

> Well I know what you mean, it's phonetic in the same way that a silent "ent" and "p" in "comptent" are "phonetic" in French

No, that's not what I said at all. Stipulating that the -ent and the -p- are silent in the French word comptent, there is also a French word comte of identical pronunciation, which limits the amount of phonetic information that the silent -ent and -p- could be carrying. (In fact, I believe the verb ending may be realized in certain cases, as the "silent N" ending the English indefinite article is often realized.)

The doubling of the "f" in truffle is nothing like that. The hypothetical word trufle would be pronounced differently. That difference wouldn't have anything to do with the F, but nevertheless it is indicated by the spelling; the spelling is conveying phonetic information.

This is also the case for the spelling -le. It represents an English sound. It is the spelling you would expect a trained speaker to produce for a novel word featuring that sound. You can't get any more phonetic than that.

> Wiktionary (not a definitive source I know, but there is no definitive source whatsoever about anything regarding the English language) does that say "truffle" rymes with /-ʌfəl/ with a schwa right there between the f and the l.

I'll return to this in a moment.

> The pronunciation of the word itself in Wiktionary is indicated with a syllable break rather than a schwa,

Just to be clear, the "syllable break" is the period between the f and the syllabic l. The symbol that tells you the l constitutes a syllable in itself is the small mark underneath it.

> which I would absolutely dispute

Why? That's how the word is pronounced.

> and indeed it looks like Cambridge dictionary puts a schwa there in addition to the syllable break.

We're back to the first point!

First, let's observe that there is absolutely no dispute over the idea that "truffle" is two syllables long. The presence of a syllable break is universally agreed.

Second, the reason wiktionary gives a more accurate rendition of the pronunciation is that it's mostly maintained by enthusiasts.

The convention of dictionaries is cited by wikipedia:

> Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in words such as sudden [ˈsʌd.n̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈsʌd.ən/).

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant )

This is a convention, no less than the spelling "-le" is. It is advantageous in dictionaries, where you'd like each syllable to be more or less pronounceable on its own; the grapheme "-le" can't occur in isolation. The phonetic analysis is what I already told you it is, and what wikipedia repeats in that quote.

(In the case of sudden, the difference is crystal clear - if you pronounce it without detaching your tongue from the roof of your mouth between the /d/ and the /n/, you can only be producing a syllabic n. You can also do this test with subtle, but not with truffle, since /f/ doesn't share the same articulatory properties that /d/, /t/, and /l/ do.)

Many dialects of English pronounce 'tr' as 'tr' and not tshr or chr. Likewise 'dr' is 'dr', although there are some that pronounce drink like "jrink".

Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet. The reason you think that "le" makes sense and the person you are responding to thinks otherwise is that in English, the pronunciation of "le" isn't phonetically consistent.

I imagine that GP's reasoning is that in writing "missile", the consonant is followed by a vowel, while phonetically the vowel is followed by a consonant.

The issue is further compounded by the fact that there's more than one common pronunciation of "missile".

> Conversations like this are a dead end. You can't devise a phonetic spelling convention without using a phonetic alphabet.

I don't disagree with the latter point, but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words? In my mind, the entire point of a conversation like this is hypothetical changes to the language to make it phonetically consistent; of course it isn't right now, or we wouldn't need to have a conversation.

You've correctly identified what my reasoning is, but you seem to be circularly saying that since English isn't currently phonetic, it's impossible to come up with a spelling for it using sounds that roughly resemble the common sounds letters are using today in order to make it phonetic. I guess I don't know that it's literally impossible, but I don't think it's self-evident that it's not possible, and I think it's fairly straightforward changing the spelling of words ending in "le" to "el" would be more consistent to how "le" is used in other places in words where changing their spelling would be more difficult (e.g. there's not really any clear way to spell "less" without preserving "le" at the beginning).

You're definitely right that I hadn't considered that some dialects pronounce "missile" in a way where it's pronounced differently, but I'd argue that the obvious example (British pronunciation) was already basically ignored by the comment I was responding to, so I didn't really introduce the inconsistency.

> and I think it's fairly straightforward changing the spelling of words ending in "le" to "el" would be more consistent to how "le" is used in other places in words where changing their spelling would be more difficult (e.g. there's not really any clear way to spell "less" without preserving "le" at the beginning).

I don't see why that argument is supposed to make sense on its own terms. The system we have now is that -le and le- are different. You want to reform -le to be spelled -el because its pronunciation is closer to that of (-)el- than to le-.

But making that spelling change will reduce the "inconsistency" you don't like that exists between -le and le- precisely by introducing a new inconsistency between -el and el-. Why is that supposed to be an improvement of any kind?

> but the former doesn't make sense to me; unless you're saying that there wouldn't be enough phonemes representable by the letters to define spellings for all English words?

Then you're inventing a phonetic alphabet that happens to look like the English alphabet. That's what makes discussions like this are pointless. No one has established a phonetic definition of "le" or "el", which is the only basis according to which one can decide which is phonetically more appropriate.

I think they pronounce them non-phonetically, and I'm not really sure what's confusing about that. Pronunciation differing from spelling is literally what it means to say something isn't phonetic; if I accepted the spelling of other non-phonetic words as proof that something is phonetic, then everything by definition would be phonetic, and the entire concept would be pointless.

In my mind, the natural phonetic spelling of "le" is an L sound followed by an E sound. Works like "truffle" and "turtle" have an E sound followed by an L sound. I don't think that's phonetic.

> "missils" would be more phonetic

  Only for Americans. In British English, it's "MISS isle", and "MISSul" is
  a church book. I'm not Christian and I am not sure of exactly what's in a
  _missal_ but it's prayers or something.

  I do not know if American English even has missals. They're old fashioned
  things these days, I think. But in my dialect, "missile" and "missal" are
  two different words with 2 different sounds, which means that when I hear
  Americans talking about the fast moving weaponry what I hear is that they
  are launching prayer books at someone. It's not a very common word and so
  I keep forgetting.

A missal generally has bible passages organized by mass date (instead of in the usual order), as well as some hymns and a reference to the order of mass (the things that happen when you go to church)

Aha.

I was very vaguely notionally Church of England until age 11, although still had to go to Chapel daily from 12-17. I have never been to Mass and I don't really know what goes on in a Mass. I'm not even sure if Anglicans have Mass.

My local Canon certainly had plenty of small-m mass: big lad. Nonetheless, when he scattered my father's ashes in the sea, he got caught by a wave, and proved that despite this he could run backwards up a shingle beach, wearing wet robes, at surprising speed.

I was responding to the framing of the parent comment that suggested "missles", which already essentially ignored that pronunciation.

You said only:

"how people pronounce words ending in that"

You did not restrict which people you were talking about, and that's a critical omission. Nobody in my daily life, in real life where I live or on TV or radio, would ever say "missal" when they meant "missile".

In northeastern US, missile is anywhere between 'ill', and schwa 'ul', but not 'aisle'. "Hurled a miss-aisle" is sometimes heard in court.

And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i".

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").

The term for this is a "shibboleth", if it's of interest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

  A shibboleth is a little more specific: it's the pronunciation of one
  specific sound in a different way that marks out a person as from one
  specific group. 

  So, some of the go-tos... New Zealand English tends to turn an /i/ in
  even stressed positions into schwa (the sound on the end of "little",
  or "umbrella", or "gopher", and one of the key sounds to master for a
  non-native learner who wants to improve their English accent). When a
  Kiwi says "fish and chips" it sounds like "fush and chups", "swimming
  pool" becomes "swumming pool", and this is _the_ way to distinguish a
  Kiwi from an Australian, because to the rest of the Anglophone world,
  NZ English sounds very like Aus English.

  Canadians tend to pronounce the "ow" sound in words like "about" in a
  way that to my British ear sounds Scottish: it becomes "aboot". So if
  I hear someone speaking with an American sounding accent but they say
  "I found oot aboot something," I ask them if they're Canadian. I tend
  to find most Canadians and New Zealanders are delighted if someone is
  able to tell, so ask very early on and you can make new friends. :-)

> and this is _the_ way to distinguish a Kiwi from an Australian

Well, that, and Kiwis tend to say "hey bro" a lot ;)

Beached Whale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdVHZwI8pcA

  I guess I have mainly met older kiwis!

  I slightly know Terry Stewart of https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/
  from mailing lists, and while I don't follow any Youtube channels as a
  rule, I used to enjoy his videos:

  https://www.youtube.com/@tezzaNZ

  I probably heard more NZ English from Terry than anyone else!

My understanding of shibboleth is that it refers to the primary pronunciation identifying the speaker (which is how it was used biblically).

Those are also interesting but it feels a bit more special to me when it's a secondary speech characteristic because it feels a bit more like a clue in a detective novel -- it almost feels like you can hear inside the author's head and how they vocalise while they write.

In this case, "missle" is a malapropism that is only possible if you don't pronounce the second "i", and so is a secondary "speech" characteristic.

I thought the rules were clear and it depends on how the word is pronounced, with a vowel or consonant sound.

I have only heard people say H T T P, as specific letters when pronouncing HTTP, and thus the a or an should be based on how one would pronounce the letter "H". And H would be pronounced as "aitch". Starts with an a -> vowel sound -> should be "an".

But I'm a non native english speaker, so I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Some UK speakers pronounce "H" as "haitch" (with a non-silent leading 'h'), not "aitch". Which leads to "a haitch tee ...".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H#Name

Specifically, upper-class Brits pronounce the "h". See this classic Monty Python sketch which makes fun of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnq96W9jtuw&t=66s

    Praline: 'Ello. I would like to buy a fish license, please.

    Clerk: A what?

    Praline: A license for my pet fish, Eric.

    Clerk: How did you know my name was Eric?

    Praline: No, no, no, no. My _fish's_ name is Eric. Eric the fish. 'E's an 'alibut.

    Clerk: What?

    Praline (in upper-class accent): He is an halibut.

There was a lot of discourse about the (then declining) aristocracy and their mannerisms, accents and so on, in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, discussion of "U" (upper class) versus "non-U" English, highlighting the differences in language usage between classes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

The Pythons were highly attuned to this class distinction and wrote it into their sketches. Another good sketch is an upper-class family distinguishing "woody" and "tinny" sounds, but the whole sketch's premise is to laugh at the odd mannerisms of the upper-classes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3-51DhOzHE

Perhaps the most succinct explanation of British class difference is the famous Frost Report sketch featuring John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_sketch

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hhrwl

> Specifically, upper-class Brits pronounce the "h".

  I think you have this slightly muddled. It's not that upper-class Brits
  pronounce more of the "h" sounds. The idea is that upper-class types go
  to private schools and they learn French, and so they know that lots of
  English words that have a leading "h" are French loanwords and thus the
  they are unaspirated in the original, i.e. the "h" is silent – it ought
  not to be said. "Hotel", "hospital", "honour", "homage", and so on - no
  leading "huh" sound. Which means that the word starts on a vowel sound,
  and in turn, that means it takes "an" in front not "a". 

  But people who don't know French and don't know which words have a sort
  of silent H on the front and which don't try to hyper-correct – so they
  start inserting extra initial "huh" sounds on words beginning with some
  form of vowel.

  This is how old British TV comedies tried to parody policemen talking -
  they are often working class but in dealing with lawyers, judges, etc.,
  they are aware of speaking to someone from a higher social class and so
  they try to speak more "proper" and insert loads of extra "h" sounds.

  "Hin my hopinion, your onner, the suspect was hup to something."

  Drop the "h" sounds where they _should_ be, and at the same time insert
  extra ones where they shouldn't be.

  I think this is what the Pythons were playing with. Now that Britain is
  a little bit less class-conscious – and foreign accents are heard a lot
  more often – it doesn't seem funny any more so it's gone away. That's a
  good thing overall, I reckon.

  (Wondering how long I should keep this up...)

> (Wondering how long I should keep this up...)

Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining

  > Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining

  Why thank you! :-)

  There's reams of it on my late-1990s homepage, which I resurrected and
  uploaded a few years ago. I did an extremely cursory update but expect
  plenty of broken links and things.

  Finding it is an exercise for the reader... ;-)

Hey, I can go further and point out further muddles and general weird English inconsistencies.

Expensively educated people might pronounce French loanwords by dropping the h in an ostentatiously French way (and maybe making homage rhyme with fromage) to showcase their etymology knowledge and are more likely to use the grammatical convention[1] of prefixing them with 'an' rather than 'a' even even when sounding the 'h'. But the "correct", RP way their expensive education teaches them to enunciate the words you listed as English words is with a leading h and has been for a century or so, except 'honour' (also 'honest', 'heir'), which pretty much no native speaker pronounces the 'h' in.

[1]now usually an historic grammatical convention ;-) it survived longer than the silent 'h' in 'historic' in conventional English speech though...

On the other hand a leading 'h' is routinely dropped in spoken English in most words in many British dialects spoken by less expensively educated people (especially southern urban "working class" people), which has no more to do with French etymology than the glottal stop that means some of the same accents also drop a lot of 't's from the middle of words. That's where all the twentieth century jokes involving Cockney stereotypes overcorrecting by inappropriately adding 'h' when trying to speak 'proper' come from. The overcorrecting in turn came from "upper class" people being snobbish about the sort of person who 'abitually indulged in "h-dropping"...

As for the name of the letter, according to the OED and RP dialect the sort of expensive schools that emphasize correct pronunciation teach, it's is definitely called 'aitch' in British English. And has been for several hundred years. Not all people who pronounce it 'aitch' are "upper class" (there's a rapper with the stage name Aitch) but all people who are "upper class" are taught to pronounce it 'aitch'. On the other hand, it's a bit weird that the name of the letter doesn't contain the letter, so lots of British people whose education doesn't involve teachers emphasising The Correct Way To Speak feel the name for the letter 'h' should start with the letter 'h', hence 'haitch'.

Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)

So "upper class" learn to enunciate the letter 'h' without an 'h' in it, but are taught to pronounce it more or less everywhere else (with a few quirks to keep them honest) and others more likely to drop the 'h' sound from other words but add it to the letter name. Yes, English pronunication is weird

For those desperate for even more 'h' discourse, seee: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/h_n and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping

Thanks for that!

> Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)

Fascinating. I didn't know that, despite my Belfast-born dad being the reason I'm a citizen.

Not uncommon in Australia too. As a very ordinary General Australian speaker I use haitch (and therefore a, not an). I'm probably not 100% consistent in this. It's one of many words where Australian English permits two equally valid pronunciations (e.g. 'dance').

I do cringe when people insist on "an + h" where the h is in fact invariably pronounced, as in "an historic occasion". You only ever seem to hear this from Americans trying to sound educated, which makes me suspect it's affected, not organic. I doubt the person giving a speech on 'an historic occasion' would then go home and give his kid 'an history book'.

> I do cringe when people insist on "an + h" where the h is in fact invariably pronounced, as in "an historic occasion".

Some people do in fact say "istoric", which seems largely like an affectation.

You're quite right that the rules are clear and native speakers get them correct almost all of the time (I've not seen one get it wrong while speaking but some people were taught it as a spelling rule at school and so tend to write it incorrectly), but the difference is that different speakers pronounce the leading "H" differently.

In Australia we pronounce the H more like "heitch" while in the US people tend to pronounce it as "eytch" (IPA would probably more descriptive here, sorry!). In the UK it's a bit more of a mixed bag, as others have already elucidated.

"Ambiguous" was probably a poor word choice, I meant to say that because both ways of writing are technically valid based on the accent of the author there is an element of freedom in the choice that tells you something about them.

Spelling reform was associated with the Abolitionist movement; they published the Wecli Fonetic Advocat in Sinsinati.

I think you meant "spelt" rather than spent. A but ironic, all things considered.

Muphry's law, innit

oh ironny

I think you menat to spell "irony"

Nah, they were talking bout the taste of nails.

Now I'm wondering if you meant to use but instead of bit intentionally or not... I'm not great with subtle humor in writing.

You just never know these days. It could be a smartphone keyboard issue.

How much time should a person spend reviewing their comment before hitting reply?

There is a bar of quality each of us expects everyone else to follow. Sometimes we meet expectations, other times we ruffle feathers. How much should you even care?

If we all spew typos, you'll probably care less. If everyone else is carefully reviewing their posts, you might care.

In both cases, it makes no real difference unless the information being transferred is important to you (recipe, design doc, vs shitposts). How much mental friction can you tolerate?

Furthermroe, studeis shoew you can swap the arranrgment of most lettres (ecxept for the frist and last letetrs) in text and you stlil get the piont farily esaily.

Actual story: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/39i30p/harvey_weins...

And there I was wondering about used missiles!

Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.

I did, yes. A but ironic indeed.

"A but ironic" <---:

Funny tidbit: "missile" used to be an adjective, "a missile weapon" = "a weapon than can be sent/thrown".

Same with cereals, "cereal" was an adjective that meant "relative to the goddess Ceres" then "relative to bread/wheat". "Cereal plants" -> cereals.

It's called "nominalization (or substantivization) by ellipsis".

Reminds me of how some people (groups? cultures?) call a lathe a “lathe machine.”

Machine lathe sounds more natural in English, but presumably that qualification may well be to distinguish a machine lathe from a foot lathe.

* https://www.renaissancewoodworker.com/foot-powered-wood-turn...

> Funny tidbit: "missile" used to be an adjective, "a missile weapon" = "a weapon than can be sent/thrown".

Related bit of comedy:

> Note also that the correct term for 'a missile to be deployed against "anti-missile missiles"' is not "anti anti-missile missile." It's "anti anti-missile-missile missile." You're always supposed to have one more "missile" than "anti," because otherwise nothing will blow up.

-- https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-03-16

https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/Neutron_Jammer_Canceller

I wonder how often *teleports behind you* shows up in space operas.

The misspelling seems to be consistent (>200 times), though it seems like a quite common one. A 1982 DOS game was even titled "Missle Strike", long before Metroid was released.

  This might potentially
  rejuvenate the writing
  by disrupting habitual
  patterns, which forces
  more original choices.

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.

Tom 7 did something like this. 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.

it's unbelievable this was not pointed out earlier in this thread, long live tom 7

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)

"perhaps it would be best to let the browsers do it on screens, and typesetting software for printed materials, since they have access to the font, size, text region boundaries, it comes at the small cost that users don't actually get to read what an author wrote, but increasingly this is an LLM anyways, if its a website or legal contract alike"

I suspect LLMs would actually struggle significantly with doing it consistently if given purely as a prompt instruction, but you could always constrict the sampling to force words that create a legitimate chain or fine tune / RL in some signal that would assist with it.

  You are right that this is hard from a prompt alone, but for a slightly stranger
  reason than the obvious one. The model never sees columns. It sees tokens, and a
  token can be one character or nine, so "make this line 80 wide" asks it to run a
  hidden tally over pieces it cannot count by looking at them. Any slip early in a
  line compounds, and there is no backspace key to reach for once it is committed.
  That said, the failure is not total. A model can lean on a learned feel for line
  length, pick shorter or longer synonyms to land close to the target, and rewrite
  a sentence when it overshoots. It will not be perfect every time, but it lands a
  lot more often than pure chance would suggest. The sampling trick you mention is
  the real fix: mask each token that would push a line past the limit, and force a
  newline the moment the count hits the mark. That converts a fuzzy instruction to
  a hard constraint with zero training. Fine tuning helps too, but mostly sharpens
  the same internal counter rather than replacing it. This reply is a small proof;
  if any line here is off by one, feel free to consider your point demonstrated...

An raw LLM no, but given code execution it can do a good job. I had my Claude Sonnet write a sonnet in this form after 14 rounds of iteration with Python:

The autumn wind moves slow across the field,

and every falling leaf now yields its fight.

The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,

and short days now give way to longer night.

I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,

and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.

I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,

and taste again that same old, bitter grief.

The silent stars come out to watch it still,

and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.

A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,

and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until

the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,

and I still recall the love I lost with you.

Monospace formatting: start each line with two spaces to get monospace (and then you won't need double linebreaks).

For clarity:

  The autumn wind moves slow across the field,
  and every falling leaf now yields its fight.
  The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,
  and short days now give way to longer night.
  I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,
  and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.
  I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,
  and taste again that same old, bitter grief.
  The silent stars come out to watch it still,
  and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.
  A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,
  and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until
  the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,
  and I still recall the love I lost with you.

Not bad, but the meter gets corrupted

  Deliberate distractions
  from the functional end
  goal benefit other arts
  just as well, promoting
  lateral thinking. Brian
  Eno made a card deck of
  "oblique strategies" to
  help you out of blocks.

https://enoshop.co.uk/products/oblique-strategies

  Imagine a messageboard that
  required this writing style
  in order to make any posts!

  Including the making of the posts
  into nice rectangular portions of
  each thirty three characters wide ?

  Not including the double space at
  the beginning of each line or any
  of the punctuation character ends .

> 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

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.

Or if you're really insane, localize the entire UI.

And accessibilize it. Pixel perfect per zoom level per language per font variant per font.

Don't forget increased-contrast too!

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

Anyone who ever worked as a front end developer definitely felt this.

Even as a backend dev who dabbles in frontend as a hobby - I get the view looking great on desktop, then a week later I open the site on mobile and am horrified

suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically

https://tom7.org/bovex/

No mention of Tom7's "Badness 0" by the author is the a crime!

He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.

The OP is just a small snippet of plagiarism of an old fact.

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

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.

and in latex too, not just monospace

Which he described as "solving the AI alignment problem".

If you're reading this and you're put off by the "uses an LLM", don't be. This is not a low-effort video, quite the opposite. This is one of the best YouTube videos I have ever seen.

Tom7 doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “low effort”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Live is short, required time to market is even shorter.

Life is too short to think of it in terms of markets and money.

> if you have nothing better to do

The way to create something novel is through creativity, and creativity comes from restrictions because they force you to think in novel ways.

There is a time for experimentation and a time for doing. The latter is not “something better to do” than the former, they both have their place.

This is what I think about grammar. Yes, it’s a little arbitrary but it makes you think a little more about your writing. That’s why I try to use correct grammar in text messages. I don’t push this on anyone because most people don’t like to think about word choice, but I am a writer at heart. Still I have to bite my tongue every time someone sends me a text message “hi am here”

Have you considered that by adhering to the arbitrary rules of grammar you are forgoing a realm of poetic opportunity?

In other words you could say constraint is the progenitor of creativity.

> I wonder if this applies to programming and other creative work too.

It does. It’s a know aphorism that constraints bread creativity. A couple of examples (one of deliberate constraints and another of accidental constraints):

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created “Oblique Strategies” as ways to challenge yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

The Köln Concert, which is “the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano album” was improvised because there was a mixup and Keith Jarrett was given a terrible piano.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Köln_Concert

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.

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.

Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.

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!

Kinda cool when you learn the answer to something you were wondering about decades 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.

The German is more crass: Hurenkind and Schusterjunge, translates to 'child of a whore' and 'shoemaker boy'. The child of a whore does not know where it comes from (who is their father), the short final line - the shoemaker boy is so poor, he does not know where he will end up (the short first line)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116

There are also Rivers - when spaces between words on multiple lines align vertically. Harder to control for than widows and orphans.

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/Connectio... - looks like each one is 3 characters shorter.

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)

The maintainer of top fully-justifies his commit messages, e.g., 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>

I too feel that fully justified text can be fully justified. I used to use it back when blogs were a thing.

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

Same here, justified text feels difficult to read. And, I had academia where where students are forced to justify text....

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.

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.

I know, but it feels much more neat to me to have even spacing between words

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.

I guess in printed material it’s more space efficient, which is why it has historically been used. Justified text can be made look nice but it requires hyphenation and a non-greedy linebreaking algorithm, which unfortunately is not implemented in browsers or Microsoft Word.

One advantage in print; pages are often not entirely opaque. So on page 3, you see a bit of the text of page 2 shine through. If page 2 has a jagged right margin, this also makes the left margin of page 3 look uneven.

Meanwhile, the right margin of page 3 looks has a "shadow" that goes all the way to the right because the left margin of page 2 pokes out underneath it - your eye might want to glide to the end of the block, but the sentence stops earlier.

It looks better when it's aligned, which is also why you can specify a left- and right margin that alternates on odd and even pages.

This is obviously only a concern for books and papers, and not so much for e.g. glossy magazines.

People will bend over backwards to rationalize it but the actual explanation is quite simple: 16th-century typesetters saw it as beautiful, and a norm was born.

IIRC, the somewhat random allocation of trailing silent "e"s in English spelling can partly be explained by typesetters trying to fill lines.

Totally agree with you BTW. I find justification ugly as sin.

Fully justified text looks much better when it’s more narrow columns, especially multiple; full page width text is usually not the main use case

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.

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 :-)

Indeed:

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Lewis Carrol was about 123 years ahead!

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.

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_Christia...

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.

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.

I am filled with both a deep admiration and horror at this.

It's shockingly impressive.

And that it was done for an amateur game guide! This is like a legendary work of art.

    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

Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)

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.

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.

I do this at work with the comments in my code. No one's ever noticed <thumbs-down-emoji>

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also Cosmopolitan lib: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/README...

Note how all the "wrong" lines are down to markdown formatting.

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.

The part that horrifies me about this is the disincentive to revise any part of the text due to the flow-on effects.

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.

So maybe it is possible to use alternate words in writing without compromising on writing quality after all.

There is some bizarre stuff that gets posted on weekends. It's like reading the New Yorker.

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

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

Screenshot of manual section: https://jumpshare.com/share/jOnMu7M36AOEWyoL0QDl

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.

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.

LaTeX has existed for a certain amount of years already.

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.

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.

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".

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)

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).

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

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 still do that. I'll tweak the wording just so a single name doesn't sit on its own line.

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.

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.

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!

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 :)

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.

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

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

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.

Ye gods! The fact that this was done by hand... I have no words.

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!

Well, estimating string length of tokens is much like counting R's in strawberry.

> 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.

Obligatory mention, the GNU JUSTIFIED PUBLIC LICENSE: https://tom7.org/bovex/JCOPYING

(for the rabbit hole: https://tom7.org/bovex/)

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?

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.

It's the holy grail for text adventures :)

Funny article, and there is probably a similar post in an ILoveKerning site.

Wow, autism in action ;-P

Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. Imagine the backtracking required...

> 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.

  > 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. :-)

Learned this the hard way explaining a bug fix; a single ambiguous term derailed an hour-long discussion.

Can LLMs nowadays do that for us? Rewriting the text so that it fits perfectly into the paragraph?

It seems one can do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc

Nowadays LLMs are driven to "choose words carefully" (well, tokens) for watermarking.

Made me think of constrained writing like what was done by the Oulipo group in France.

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.

The title is a nice intro tagline for LLMs

It would be fascinating if this were the method AI was using to watermark text.

Presumably this is a very similar technique to watermarking AI-generated text.

A human victory by sheer willpower. I find the story oddly uplifting.

And do this manual justification as your very last step.

this is the kind of content I come to hackernews for

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/276/

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...

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.

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.

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.

just use BoVeX

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...

** unpopular opinion **

The author finds the beauty in stuffy blocks, while I find beauty with more whitespaces.

Full justification is a plague

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.

This is why so many of us are so much into Emacs. In a time where pretty much all software around us gets progressively enshittified, there’s this 50 year old Lisp interpreter masquerading as an editor that you can make truly and uniquely yours.

Yup. Watching so many of my peers struggle with some basic tasks like grabbing a url and inserting it into a chat buffer. I mean, come on. How many times a day you do this? And you just settled with always:

- going back to the browser

- clicking on address bar

- attempting to select the link with the mouse

- switching back to wherever you want the link

- inserting it

- realizing that you missed a character - mouse is imprecise for text selection

- repeating the process

- Oh shoot. It's a markdown, I need now to grab the description of the page too. And... back to the dance again.

Shit like this, for me is just pressing a key. And it nicely formats it (for whatever markup you want), grabbing the correct description, etc. I solved the problem once, and it just works and I never have to ever spare a split second neural signalling for it - there's no attention tax.

I'm forever indebted to my younger self for convincing and forcing myself to learn Lisp and spend some time understanding Emacs. Among all sorts of skills that I picked up during my tenure - CLIs, Unix, Linux internals, networking, git fundamentals, vim, various programming languages, front-end, devops, cybersec, etc. etc. - Lisp remains enormously practical, the best skill that I'm so glad I acquired.

    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.

    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.

No, please. It doesn’t wrap correctly on narrow mobile screens.

It seems to wrap correctly in landscape mode.

Newspapers figured out wide text lines are awful for reading some 100 years ago. We're still waiting for web designers to catch up...

Why are novels laid out the way they are? It's almost as though its not as simple as "bad for reading" but rather a feature of the content.

imo it highly depends on the medium. If your content is packed with distracting ads, flashing banners, other unrelated text from other stories, then its helpful to make the columns narrow to help you scan.

If you have a more focused experience around one passage of text, wider text lets you fit more on the page and make better use of paragraph breaks and subheadings

Are a lot of novels laid out with 24-30" lines of text?

Video games are routinely stomping over all known rules of good user interface in the name of art. And that's okay because it's a leisure activity, and efficiency and comfort is not the goal. I suspect the same thing is true of novels - making the text physically easier to read wouldn't make the story emotionally easier to enjoy, so they intentionally choose a suboptimal text layout for aesthetic reasons.

The only two types of books I can think of that are routinely read for purposes other than leisure - dictionaries and the Bible - are usually printed in multi-column layout from what I've seen.

Starting sentences with “It's almost as though/if” is very annoying.

Cost has always been a major factor in publishing fiction. 25% fewer words per line may boost comprehension by $x% but definitely increases cost by 25%. When markets are as price sensitive as leisure, cost is a big factor in the decision. Books don’t sell on a price per printed page basis. Mainstream publishers with existing distribution contracts are especially sensitive because of print runs.

When we published a print magazine we optimized heavily to save 1% on printing costs. 25% would have been suicide. And indie magazine buyers are traditionally a lot more price flexible than mainstream book buyers.

*Hacker news web designers.

Many websites already have a limited text width.

Old newspapers have overly narrow columns that make both full justification and hyphenation ugly. I don’t think we should be looking at 100-year old newspapers for inspiration. Maybe look at them and see how far we’ve come and how much improvement we have in modern printed matter.

Instead we should look at modern books. Without paying good money to use tools like InDesign, just use LaTeX with microtype together with the default margins. You will get the ideal width for text lines (about 60 to 80 characters), full justification with minimal hyphenation.

The problem with your argument is that if you look at 100 year old books and modern newspapers, you arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion - it seems we ditched full width text a long time ago and fully switched to narrow columns, and it must've been for a reason!

Narrow columns leave more room for ads. Ads that aren't even slightly aligned with products you're interested in.

Now explain dictionaries.

Scanability and limitations of layout technology from 100 years ago.

I wonder what you'll come up with for 21st century reprints of the Bible. Please don't say tradition.

That's easy. The columns have to be narrow enough that you can still read a full column of scripture while your éclair rests on the other half of the page. That's why a full-spread layout is referred to a "qautréclair."

A pre-internet technology that needs more ads for products you're not even slightly interested in.

Dictionaries in columns statistically reduce white space and thus reduce the page count.

Especially for the definitions that are very short, for example when they only reference a more preferred spelling or a more prominent word that has the exact meaning.

So multicolumn layout increases whitespace in newspapers but decreases it in dictionaries? Funny how it always does the exact thing needed to disprove whatever I say in this exact moment.

Well ok ... If a full width newspaper needs the whole sheet and you put columns to reduce the necessary whitespace, you would end with blank space that you can fill with more articles or ads.

You don't really want to reduce the number of sheets for your newspaper because size of the newspaper is an indicator of quality. But trimming off maybe 10% of a dictionary is worthwhile. Size of a dictionary is a quality indicator too, but the absolute production cost is more for a book so saving production costs is more pressing.

Narrow columns allow you to maximize the amount of stories that can be shown on the front page. Good for scanning, OK for reading.

This is a totally context-dependent decision.

Oh, so it works fine for masochists? That's good to know.

You can always reduce the font size a little so it isn't indented so far?

Each "line" of text takes 2.4 actual lines on my device (Samsung Fold). I'm not reducing my font size by 60%.

Or you can just not go out of your way to break the perfectly good text wrapping my browser already supports.

Using the internet on a mobile phone is not advised.

Yes, but for psychological, not ergonomic reasons.

It's for psychological, ergonomic, and privacy reasons.

Depends what you mean by privacy. Most computers are a lot less private than most phones, in terms of how many people can access your data.

I think that characterization is too broad to be considered accurate.

Right back at you re: browsing internet from a phone.

I just hate smart phones so much. I need to stop commenting on HN. Sorry for wasting your time.

    The passage has a couple commas where it shouldn't and doesn't have
    some commas where it should just for justification. So it's trading
    one type of particularity for another, and I favor grammar more. :)

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...

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