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Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version)

suckerpinch4 HN recommenders · 2024–2026
258K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2024-06-07

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.

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

Satire & parodyProgramming language designGraphic design & typography

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7 comments from Hacker News

@josephg2024 · in “GNU Justified Public License”

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]

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@LukeShu2024 · in “GNU Justified Public License”

This should not have "(2007)" in the title; 2007 is the date of the GPL v3, which this is a 2024 mimicry of (as explained in [VIDEO] ).

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@JadeNB2024 · in “Tom 7: Badness 0 (Three ways)”

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 ____"? [VIDEO] (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:".)

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@jimmySixDOF2024 · in “LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer”

and for anyone in the TeX User Group there is this fun experiment in Typesetting which starts off with the amazing TeX origin story [VIDEO]

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@btown2024 · in “Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2022) [video]”

That said, if Tom7 wasn’t meticulous about typesetting all his results, we would never have been blessed with [VIDEO]

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@progval2025 · in “Mysterious Intrigue Around an x86 "Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD"”

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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@asddubs2026 · in “The Tears of Donald Knuth”

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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