Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version)

suckerpinch · 258.3K views · 2024-06-07 · 22:15

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Overview

Tom 7's pilot episode of a series that plays with type systems and absurd programming, presented as a parody of the GPL v3 license. It mixes a typesetting experiment with a long, story-driven intro on the origin of TeX. Source code and papers are linked from the author's site.

On Hacker News

HN readers point to it as an example of Tom7's ridiculous-but-brilliant programming projects, here tied to license parody and typesetting.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2024–2026

Topics

Satire & parody Programming language design Graphic design & typography

What people said

asddubs · 2026-02 · Recommendation
You might enjoy this video: [VIDEO] The connection to knuth is tangential to the actual video subject, but it does contrast knuth to LLMs as a framing device
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progval · 2025-10 · Recommendation
If you want more of this: [VIDEO] . You can skip to 7:45 if the long intro bores you, but it's worth listening to it.
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josephg · 2024-06 · Recommendation
This was made by Tom7, who has many amazing videos about doing ridiculous things with programming on YouTube. The talk on this work is here: [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by suckerpinch, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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