Real coding on 8-bit machines was a bit more scary than using QEMU since you had to remember to save your assebly sources after each edit, as running your machine code often crashed the machine.
in your .[x]emacs file to save pressing M-x M-c or ESC + 'x' + 'compile' + ENTER (4-10 keys) to run make/compile with 1 keystroke instead.
Popular execises for beginners on the C64 were:
- write a loop that reads from A000 to C000 and writes to the same address. This seemingly useless exercise makes a copy of the CBM BASIC from ROM to RAM (the C64 has addresses multiple times in parallel "banks"), in order to subsequently edit the appearance of the characters (screen font) or to rename BASIC keywords.
- jump to a subroutine ("SYS" in BASIC) or write code to jump ("JSR"/"JMP") to an arbitrary address, and then discover why the machine behaves as it does when you do so, by reading the RAM or ROM code located there with a disassembler or HEX monitor (try "SYS 64738" versus "SYS 4222").
Anecdotally, I feel way more refreshed when waking up without an alarm, and the times vary a lot; it seems sometimes, not a very long sleep is needed to wake up naturally and other times one needs more of it. But any artifical disruption feels "wrong", not just unpleasant but "messing with nature".
This example has a lot of common-sense reasoning, linguistic ambiguity (e.g. in NP coreferences) etc. going on.
Just a few years ago, most folks at a computational linguistics conference would probably have said such abilities are impossible to achieve at least during their lifetime.
What is qualitatively different this time is that it affects intellectual abilities - there is nothing higher up in the work "food chain". Replacing physical work you could always argue you'd have time to focus on making decisions. Replacing decision making might mean telling people go sit on the beach and take your universal basic income (UBI) cheque, we don't need you anymore.
Sitting on the beach is not as nice as it sounds for some; if you don't agree, try doing it for 5 years. Most people require work to have some sense of purpose, it gives identity, and it structures their time.
Furthermore, if you replaced lorry drivers with self-driving cars, you'd destroy the most commonly held job in North America as well as South America, and don't tell me that they can be retrained to be AI engineers or social media influencers instead (some can only be on the road, some only want to be on the road).
I agree that we have been able to automate a lot of jobs, but it's not like intellectual jobs have completely replaced physical labor. Electricians, phlebotomists, linemen, firefighters, caregivers, etc, etc, are jobs that current AI approaches don't even scratch. I mean, Boston dynamics has barely been able to get a robot to walk.
So no, we don't need to retrain them to be AI engineers if we have an active shortage of electricians and plumbers. Now, perhaps there aren't enough jobs—I haven't looked at exact numbers—but we still have a long ways to go before I think everything is automated.
Everything being slop seems to be the much more likely issue in my eyes[1].
The inertia argument is real, and I would compare it to the mistaken believe of some at IBM in the 1970s that SQL would be used by managers to query relational databases directly, so no programming was needed anymore.
And what happened? Programmers make the queries and embed them into code that creates dashboards that managers look at. Or managers ask analysts who have to interpret the dashboards for them... It rather created a need for more programmers.
Compare embedded SQL with prompts - SQL queries compared to assembler or FORTRAN code is closer to English prose for sure.
Did it take some fun away? Perhaps, if manually traversing a network database is fun to anyone, instead of declaratively specifying what set of data to retrieve. But it sure gave new fun to people who wanted to see results faster (let's call them "designers" rather than "coders"), and it made programming more elegant due to the declarativity of SQL queries (although that is cancelled out again by the ugliness of mixing two languages in the code).
Maybe the question is: Does LLM-based coding enable a new kind of higher level "design flow" to replace "coding flow"? (Maybe it will make a slightly different group of people happy?)
This echoes my sentiment that LLMs are higher level programming languages. And, as every layer of abstraction, they add assumptions that may or may not fit the use case. The same way we optimize SQL queries by knowing how the database makes a query plan, we need to optimize LLM outputs, specially when the assumptions given are not ideal.
The output of the LLM is determined by the weights (parameters of the artificial neural network) estimated in the training as well as a pseudo-random number generator (unless its influence, called "temperature", is set to 0).
That means LLMs behave as "processes" rather than algorithms, unlike any code that may be generated from them, which is algorithmic (unless instrcuted otherwise; you could also tell an LLM to generate an LLM).
What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.
(It’s Berkeley mono).
I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.
shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
>shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
Not saying font designers shouldn't get paid, but they mostly aren't making things "completely by themselves", they are mostly making derivative works from things that exist, without any consideration for the original authors.
What do you suppose they should do to the original authors? Perhaps the original author is Claude Garamond who died in the sixteenth century? Or the unknown workers who carved the inscription at Trajan's column in the second century AD?
When people say "make completely by themselves", they don't mean that were not influenced by literally no prior works. Artists can say they painted an original work entirely by themselves without needing a pedant to mention that they were probably influenced by prior work.
Clearly nothing based on Latin script can be original, which itself is based on the Etruscan Old italic alphabet, which itself it based on the Euboean alphabet — ergo, any typeface developed after say the 8th century BC is just a silly derivative.
Everything is derivative, there is nothing new under the sun, and your argument proves nothing.
>at a high enough level of abstraction, all creative work is derivative.
Sure, but with fonts you have basically one level between the font they are 'developing' and the one they are copying from. There is work involved, but very little of it is creative work.
The "peak of perfection" does not support even just European languages, not having full coverage even for Latin scripts. But it's a "love letter for the golden age of computing", and the golden age had massive problems with scripts for languages other than English, so maybe it's intentional.
Hey, Berkeley Mono supports most Western European languages, can you tell me what's missing? I can add it. Btw, the tagline is about the aesthetics. :)
Hi Neil, I'm not that person you replied to but in my projects I require Cyrillic glyphs for Russian and Ukrainian texts. Also when checking out your website just now, I wasn't able to add a Berkeley Mono App License module in your ordering system. I assume I need a App License to embed the font in my app? But I also can't seem to find any information about the app license itself on your site as well.
Cyrillic is not supported so Berkeley Mono might not be suitable for your application. Are you building a Web app (Webfonts) or a Desktop/Mobile app (App license)? Please email me.
Your website is absolutely beautiful and so well laid out. The examples given really sell the font.
For someone who has never really been a font nerd and has never bought a font—yet: all the add on choices are confusing. Ligatures, I get, but the other options feel overwhelming. Perhaps I'm not quite the market.
Is it a mistake, on page 4 of the linked datasheet, that "SemiBold" is shown for two different weights? I can't help but think that something like "DemiBold" was what the lighter weight was supposed to be labeled.
Yes, that's a typo. Need to redo the entire datasheet and possibly find a way to automate it using reportlab or some other PDF library. Right now, it is in InDesign and it is a pain to keep updating it.
> shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe
Ignoring that they likely didn’t make it completely by themselves (standing on the shoulders of giants and such), it’s quite possible that those people don’t believe that a file should cost money. I’ve made a few things as close to “completely by myself” as possible and given them away for free, and those were physical objects - I lose it when I give it away! I have absolutely no problem giving away 1s and 0s for free, I can make as many copies of the original as I want with no additional effort.
Of course we don’t live in a world where everyone can follow their passions without needing money in return for sharing the result with the world, so it’s fully understandable people want to sell their art. It’s disingenuous and reductive to assume that anyone who doesn’t want to pay for art has never made anything completely by themselves, though.
Same for me, same font, same logic. The author put a lot of hands-on work into making something I stare at all day long. I even just bought a license for a friend for his birthday because I love it.
But I'm not sharing my copy with anyone else. This isn't insulin or something. They'll be just fine without it.
I've made a couple of fonts. Very bad ones. I know firsthand they absolutely take creativity and tradecraft.
A well made font, from an artistic perspective, is a thing of beauty-- particularly when it incorporates subtle visual themes and nuances. It's definitely more than just "drawing the alphabet". There are also metric ass-tons of glyphs necessary to make a usable font.
Likewise, a properly hinted digital font file, especially with little touches like ligatures, is also a thing of utilitarian beauty. It's a ton of work to get that right.
That the shapes of fonts can't be protected by copyright isn't a new idea. Anybody who makes a font today should know that going in. I wouldn't make a font with the expectation of getting paid outside of doing it for a specific commission. Doing it "for the love" and expecting to get paid seems like a losing business proposition.
>What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and companies are now trying to protect the fact that they digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.
It's not about ignorance. There are so many things you interact with every day that take "creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort" that it's impossible to be aware of the details of each one. At some point you just have to abstract that stuff away and go on with your day.
No kidding. As part of a mapping project I worked on, I created a set of 200+ custom SVG icons. I used Inkscape and hand-drew most of the shapes or modified existing glyphs from icon fonts or other raw vector graphic sources. This took months of work and planning, and I even figured out how to use Inkscape’s batch scripting API to automate some things. It was one of the most tedious things I’ve worked on and I am very proud of it. And as far as I know, it’s still in use today by the customer.
I think it is perhaps important to realise that while what you say is true, that is not what is protected by copyright. As others have said in these comments, if the font had been copied using the digital data then it may be a copyright infringement, but if the duplicate font had been constructed from scratch to be a visually identical font then it may not be a copyright infringement.
>> What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.
I get that an average computer user who just views content might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing. Like some type of commodity."
The problem is that there are so many free fonts that most people take them for granted. And honestly, I don't blame most folks for thinking that way because there isn't a good reason for the average person to pay for a font. If you're just making wedding invites or signage for an event or some other one-off thing, you probably don't care.
If you're a professional using them in your work, that's an entirely different story, and you are significantly more likely to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into making them.
Real coding on 8-bit machines was a bit more scary than using QEMU since you had to remember to save your assebly sources after each edit, as running your machine code often crashed the machine.
You may want to also use:
in your .[x]emacs file to save pressing M-x M-c or ESC + 'x' + 'compile' + ENTER (4-10 keys) to run make/compile with 1 keystroke instead.Popular execises for beginners on the C64 were:
- write a loop that reads from A000 to C000 and writes to the same address. This seemingly useless exercise makes a copy of the CBM BASIC from ROM to RAM (the C64 has addresses multiple times in parallel "banks"), in order to subsequently edit the appearance of the characters (screen font) or to rename BASIC keywords.
- jump to a subroutine ("SYS" in BASIC) or write code to jump ("JSR"/"JMP") to an arbitrary address, and then discover why the machine behaves as it does when you do so, by reading the RAM or ROM code located there with a disassembler or HEX monitor (try "SYS 64738" versus "SYS 4222").
reply