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Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version)

suckerpinch · talk · Watch on YouTube

Satire & parodyProgramming language designGraphic design & typography

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2024, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “Tom7, who has many amazing videos about doing ridiculous things with programming on YouTube.”

    Tom7's talk on ridiculous programming work behind the license.

    josephg, 2024-06 · Recommendation · in “GNU Justified Public License”

  2. “this fun experiment in Typesetting which starts off with the amazing TeX origin story”

    Fun typesetting experiment opening with the TeX origin story

    jimmySixDOF, 2024-06 · Recommendation · in “LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer”

  3. “You can skip to 7:45 if the long intro bores you, but it's worth listening to it.”

    More of the same kind of content, with a long but worthwhile intro

    progval, 2025-10 · Recommendation · in “Mysterious Intrigue Around an x86 "Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD"”

  4. “You might enjoy this video”

    Contrasts Knuth with LLMs as a framing device

    asddubs, 2026-02 · Recommendation · in “The Tears of Donald Knuth”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: tom7, type systems, tex, gpl parody, typesetting

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