Tom7 is my favorite content creator. Each of his projects feels like a ~master’s thesis~ video dissertation. If you are not familiar with his work, please take some time to watch his other videos. They are all outstanding so I won’t recommend any specific one.
Tom7, if you’re out there (here), thank you for the free education and entertainment. You are an inspiration!
Every Tom7 video is a work of humbling genius that—just by virtue of knowing about them—makes me feel like I'm in some sort of secret club of people smarter than me.
I am a 54-year old undergraduate in computer science. I don’t know from Curry-Howard (or Hurry-Coward), but this paper made me giggle with delight and glee. (Knuth invokes this delight in me as well, although I don’t understand most of his writings, yet.)
If nothing else, it’s inspired me to implement half-ass easter-egg achievement systems in any future ‘serious’ software I write.
That also struck me as a great way to make software more whimsical. Imagine if you randomly got an "Achievement unlocked!" message if you churn through more than 10 GB of data in a single invocation of `grep` for the first time or something. So many possibilities!
For something user facing sure but trying to debug why _sometimes_ my grep job hangs with large data dumps because my popen3 didn't know to consume from stderr because of your whimsicle message would be pretty rage inducing
Pretty much your fault entirely for choosing to use my tool but not reading at least the README.md, which would explicitly state that there might be achievement texts on stderr. Anyway why output that stuff on the standard streams anyway when every modern OS has a perfectly fine window popup functionality with associated sound effects.
If you've got Python, you shouldn't be running grep within it, just open the file with Python and search through it in the usual ways. Far less flaky than a subprocess.
Shouldn't, sure. But people use software in all kinds of sub-optimal ways, and it would behoove an author to make sure that it doesn't fail dramatically when this happens.
I'm not even sure it's suboptimal to shell out to grep instead of writing a bespoke search in Python. It would depend on the amount of data I'm sifting through.
You misunderstand entirely how much the author of any software with "achievements" cares about whether it works well in shell scripts and/or from python.
Do I win anything for noting, in a video about hyper-detail orientation, that, when the text on screen says "Is this the most beautiful ____", the voice-over says "This is the most beautiful ____"?
(I'm not sure if it's also an error, or part of the joke, or if it just parses in a way that I can't accomplish on my own, that the text before the video reads "Way three (recommended) is to sit back and bathe in the 4k, 60Hz flashing lights that are Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version) is the newest installment in the Main Sequence:".)
There are quite a few errors in the presentation that seem intended to annoy detail-oriented people. One that stood out to me was the use of backslashes in his website URL.
In the paper, at citation [2] where he talks about mal-formatted URLs and fixing punctuation on Wikipedia, the footnote citation is a broken (and line-broken) link to the Wikipedia page.
Also, there is a [1] in the footnotes but not in the main body.
The pdf had absolutely horrible keming (long words were visibly broken into their component parts) on my mobile reader which I thought was a deliberate part of the joke until I opened it on desktop and it looked fine. I assume it was perhaps substituting a different font or something.
> There are quite a few errors in the presentation that seem intended to annoy detail-oriented people. One that stood out to me was the use of backslashes in his website URL.
Yeah, some of those (like the backslashes) were clearly intentional. It didn't look to me like the "Is this" / "This is" was, but I guess anything can be put down to being part of the joke.
After the opening on how he's bothered by minor errors, I thought it had to be part of a joke, and it was a setup for a punchline to be revealed later in the paper. But eventually I realized, no, the PDF must not being displayed the way it was intended. I was reading it in Evince at first, but muPDF gave much better output.
> Be warned that due to "BUG", these seem only to display properly in Chrome. I am working on fixing "BUG" once I get some sleep; I have some leads due to helpful people on the blog.
Never heard of this person, so watched the snes to nes video.
Wow!! Great to see there are original, actually genuinely funny (not racist/sexist lowest common denominator jokes) and obviously intelligent people out there.
Very inspiring person and videos. Going to enjoy this rabbit hole
You're getting a lot of glib answers, but in all seriousness, this is one of the amazing things about tom7 videos. It sometimes starts by appearing to be about nonsense or triviality, but as he weaves all these weird stories, they start to come together into observations that are absolutely brilliant and funny and he writes code to demonstrate what he's saying. I highly recommend "Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need" as an intro to his style, his humor, and the absurd lengths he will go to in order to prove a point. It's in three chapters and the middle chapter still blows my mind.
Tom7 is a somewhat well-known mad computer scientist who specializes in technically ambitious projects of limited utility.
In this latest escapade, he takes inspiration from Knuth's line-packing algorithm used in typesetting beautiful print documents using the TeX typesetting system and intensifies it by training a large language model to automatically rephrase the input text until it is worded to minimize the "badness" of the page layout. Thus, "Badness 0".
It's that but also much more ambitious, impressive, and stupid.
The "three ways" are that you can see his technical writeup in its original words with layout using Knuth's algorithm in TeX, a variant of that article using his own layout engine (and thus slight variations on the wording that, plausibly, maintain the meaning and semantics), and then a video version.
Why was I down voted for accurately summarizing the video? Sorry for not playing along with the joke I guess. HN is bringing more like reddit every day.
People can downvote you for any reason, don't worry about it. If I had to guess, someone may have mistaken your summary as a shallow dismissal of the work. On another note, your reply comment is addressed by two different HN guidelines which is impressive.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
I couldn't make it to the end of the "Badness 0 Knuth's version" paper because of the keming. Is it on purpose? I can't tell, it was too distracting to keep reading. Ironic.
> Hard Mode: Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses
As implemented, hard mode doesn't count gray letters (letters nowhere in the solution) as hints. You're allowed to reuse gray letters, but true hard mode should prevent that.
In his example he knows 3 of the colours as indicated by yellow but he also knows that those letters are not in those positions and hard mode let's him make bad guesses using those letters in the same positions again when it shouldnt
My understanding is in hard mode, you are not allowed to make a guess that you know is not the right answer. So you cannot use a letter in a spot where you know that letter does not belong.
Tom7, if you’re out there (here), thank you for the free education and entertainment. You are an inspiration!