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“I just chose words carefully” (unsung.aresluna.org)

455 pointsby zdw6 hours ago115 comments

AgentOrange1234 an hour ago

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

CarVac 28 minutes ago

Row/col works but width/height doesn't, alas.

zxcvgm 6 minutes ago

I sometimes use abbreviations like wd/ht. Should be understood with surrounding context.

sho_hn 6 hours ago

There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files, saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence.

1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

xerox13ster 6 hours ago

I just realized I have nearly always avoided widows and orphans because it felt bad to write that way.

I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.

consumer451 5 hours ago

Here is the interview where she mentions it, with the correct timestamp, backed-up just enough to give it context.

https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162

cpeterso 2 hours ago

“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

rectang 2 hours ago

Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.

I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...

wombatpm an hour ago

Widows are when the final line of a paragraph starts the next page. Orphans are when the first line of a paragraph ends a page.

gucci-on-fleek 27 minutes ago

> I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:

> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.

But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)

diurnalist 5 hours ago

I also saw that interview, then out of curiosity I tried to find any evidence of this. There are some fan sites with ostensibly original X-Files scripts out there[1]. Looking through some written by Carter[2], I wonder if this is apocryphal, or if he was messing with her a bit.

[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...

consumer451 4 hours ago

Wow, thanks for doing this digging. In the interview Gillian recounts Chris Carter saying "Look, no widows."

Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?

tobr 11 minutes ago

Hey, I looked into this too! And I came to the conclusion that it's completely true.

The movie she mentioned in the anecdote was I Want To Believe. Here is the actual scanned screenplay, rather than re-typed:

https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Fil...

Just scroll through and look. In almost every paragraph or dialogue block, the last line ends very close to the right margin. Pretty much the only places that doesn't happen is when there's a single short line of dialogue by itself, meaning it doesn't wrap to a second line.

Looking through scripts on Boggsfiles, it's much more inconsistent, but it does happen, and perhaps more frequently in the later seasons. Here's one, from season 9; take a look at page 10 (page 13 in the PDF) for example, but it really happens throughout.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...

fasterik 4 hours ago

I'm also reminded of how David Milch supposedly wrote a lot of Deadwood in iambic pentameter. I only learned about this after seeing the show, but I did pick up the "Shakespearean" feel of some of the dialogue. Constraints often force creativity.

rectang 2 hours ago

"No widows" on its own isn't enough to create a distinctive dialog cadence.

"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.

I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.

I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.

ETA: I speculate that Carter was avoiding "widows" to be considerate to the actors by not splitting lines across page turns.

thinkafter an hour ago

Meanwhile Xfiles has a montage on YouTube of all the times the boom mic crept into the shot.

So I can’t super accept that these are geniuses - it was cheap TV.

In hindsight sure, whole cult following etc. but doesn’t mean it is well designed or even thought out.

bluefirebrand a minute ago

What does the writing quality, genius or otherwise, have to do with the boom mic though?

_jackdk_ 5 hours ago

I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide.

Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

mananaysiempre 5 hours ago

Judging by the lowercase “m” it’s the 8x16 variation[1] and not the 9x16 one you linked, but otherwise yes, looks like the plain old VGA font? (Incorrectly displayed, as the site points out: the VGA didn’t have square pixels in either of those modes.) The site uses (AVIF) images in place of text, but it’s like 15 minutes to write a program that typesets an ASCII file in a given monospace bitmap font and writes out the result as say a PPM (and I’m sure ImageMagick can do it if you’d rather dig through docs than program), so this doesn’t seem to require any further explanation?

[1] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

kibwen 5 hours ago

> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles"

I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.

somat 4 hours ago

Or Andrew Jackson approaching the problem from the other end.

“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”

As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.

jimmydddd 3 hours ago

I few years ago I saw a TV interview where some gen-z kid confidently stated: "the dictdionary is supposed to reflect how I talk, not the other was around."

eru 3 hours ago

That's actually how many of the dictionary people see themselves.

xboxnolifes 2 hours ago

The tricky part is that spoken language and written language are not the same. Even if you are a descriptionist that believes dictionaries should represent how people write, it doesn't necessarily mean that the spelling changes based on how people pronounce it.

saulpw 2 hours ago

A natural descriptivist.

tux3 2 hours ago

Also known as descriptivism. That's what it do.

eru 4 hours ago

Should be missels then?

rmunn 3 hours ago

Let's settle the argument by all agreeing on mussels instead, and enjoy a nice seafood dish with garlic and a white wine sauce. Delicious.

rkagerer 3 hours ago

They're where they keep the nuclear wessels.

saghm 4 hours ago

I'd argue that "le" is not really phonetic to how people pronounce words ending in that; "missils" would be more phonetic

cyphar 3 hours ago

And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i".

It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").

EGreg 4 hours ago

I think you meant "spelt" rather than spent. A but ironic, all things considered.

card_zero 4 hours ago

Muphry's law, innit

fwipsy 3 hours ago

oh ironny

Dban1 3 hours ago

I think you menat to spell "irony"

zdragnar 4 hours ago

Now I'm wondering if you meant to use but instead of bit intentionally or not... I'm not great with subtle humor in writing.

firecall 3 hours ago

And there I was wondering about used missiles!

Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.

_jackdk_ an hour ago

I did, yes. A but ironic indeed.

card_zero 4 hours ago

  This might potentially
  rejuvenate the writing
  by disrupting habitual
  patterns, which forces
  more original choices.

cottsak 4 hours ago

Could be a saving grace in the age where the robots come up with all the copy.

scott_weber 4 hours ago

And here I at first thought the direction the original post was going was "here's how I got a LLM to do this automatically". Seems like it would not be so difficult. Might still be be a win over their innate dispositions.

nvme0n1p1 3 hours ago

Tom 7 did something like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc

> BoVeX gives us a controlled tradeoff between these two states. By changing how much it costs for the text to be semantically wrong, we have a dial that allows us to smoothly interpolate between Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth.

someguyiguess 4 hours ago

Robots would excel at writing that sort of copy I’d assume. (I haven’t tested it but doubt an LLM couldn’t handle that)

DoctorOetker 3 hours ago

"perhaps it would be best to let the browsers do it on screens, and typesetting software for printed materials, since they have access to the font, size, text region boundaries, it comes at the small cost that users don't actually get to read what an author wrote, but increasingly this is an LLM anyways, if its a website or legal contract alike"

chrisfosterelli 2 hours ago

I suspect LLMs would actually struggle significantly with doing it consistently if given purely as a prompt instruction, but you could always constrict the sampling to force words that create a legitimate chain or fine tune / RL in some signal that would assist with it.

urams an hour ago

  You are right that this is hard from a prompt alone, but for a slightly stranger
  reason than the obvious one. The model never sees columns. It sees tokens, and a
  token can be one character or nine, so "make this line 80 wide" asks it to run a
  hidden tally over pieces it cannot count by looking at them. Any slip early in a
  line compounds, and there is no backspace key to reach for once it is committed.
  That said, the failure is not total. A model can lean on a learned feel for line
  length, pick shorter or longer synonyms to land close to the target, and rewrite
  a sentence when it overshoots. It will not be perfect every time, but it lands a
  lot more often than pure chance would suggest. The sampling trick you mention is
  the real fix: mask each token that would push a line past the limit, and force a
  newline the moment the count hits the mark. That converts a fuzzy instruction to
  a hard constraint with zero training. Fine tuning helps too, but mostly sharpens
  the same internal counter rather than replacing it. This reply is a small proof;
  if any line here is off by one, feel free to consider your point demonstrated...

crackalamoo an hour ago

An raw LLM no, but given code execution it can do a good job. I had my Claude Sonnet write a sonnet in this form after 14 rounds of iteration with Python:

The autumn wind moves slow across the field,

and every falling leaf now yields its fight.

The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,

and short days now give way to longer night.

I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,

and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.

I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,

and taste again that same old, bitter grief.

The silent stars come out to watch it still,

and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.

A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,

and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until

the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,

and I still recall the love I lost with you.

card_zero an hour ago

Monospace formatting: start each line with two spaces to get monospace (and then you won't need double linebreaks).

gyomu 5 hours ago

> At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?

I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')

See also: localizing your interface to German

crooked-v 4 hours ago

Yep, any concern about text widows and orphans in modern app layouts becomes irrelevant as soon as you have to localize.

Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.

xboxnolifes 2 hours ago

Or if you're really insane, localize the entire UI.

someguyiguess 4 hours ago

Anyone who ever worked as a front end developer definitely felt this.

t098i3 2 hours ago

Even as a backend dev who dabbles in frontend as a hobby - I get the view looking great on desktop, then a week later I open the site on mobile and am horrified

xamuel 6 minutes ago

I did something similar in my paper "Meno II: A self-referential Socratic dialogue about memory and computer programming" [1] (published in The Reasoner). Every length-200 block of text is carefully chosen so as to steganographically encode one character of a computer program, and Socrates and Meno decode the program in real time by examining the words they've said.

I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets.

The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be.

[1] http://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMIA-4.pdf

alsetmusic 21 minutes ago

That's the sort of attention to detail that makes me love an app. Apple used to have this. It's why I became one of their users. My hope is that John Ternus understands why this sort of "spinning of wheels" is essential when he takes over. I read that Steve Jobs picked the order of the icons in the Dock himself. Some people know that little things matter.

ivw 6 hours ago

suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically

https://tom7.org/bovex/

ivanjermakov 6 hours ago

No mention of Tom7's "Badness 0" by the author is the a crime!

uolmir 5 hours ago

He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.

hankbond 5 hours ago

towards the end of the knuth version

> This presents a problem for the typical way that academic papers are written, which is to do all the work in a coffee-fueled fugue in the last few days before the deadline, then stay up all night writing the paper and finding citations for the pro-forma “related work” section which you did last but you know that the reviewers will insist upon

I have zero exposure to academia but chuckled because thats often what I do for blog posts :P

eru 4 hours ago

AIs these days are pretty good for the 'find prior art and related work' part I find. Of course, you should treat their output like that of an over-eager but somewhat unreliable intern.

asddubs 4 hours ago

and in latex too, not just monospace

brooke2k 4 hours ago

this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting

cute_boi 4 hours ago

Same here, justified text feels difficult to read. And, I had academia where where students are forced to justify text....

JeremyMorgan 3 hours ago

I've never given this much thought, but I agree with you 100%.

After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".

For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.

Still super impressive that people do this though.

jolmg an hour ago

It's just neatness. Like ironing clothes or putting on a tie, it's not about it serving a functional purpose. It's just to show off straight lines.

fhub 5 hours ago

Two definitions that I had to look up.

* Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column.

* Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.

Leonard_of_Q 5 hours ago

Those who lived through the (text-mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features which was advertised for this program, i.e it could be set to either move that orphaned first line of a new paragraph to the next page or move a few extra lines or a whole paragraph to the next page to keep the widow company.

nosioptar 5 hours ago

Text mode WP is the reason I hate almost all word processors, everything else is tepid goat piss by comparison.

kkfkekfoked 4 hours ago

A bit over dramatic, but then again this HN.

schoen 4 hours ago

I remember using WordPerfect in that era and never understanding what that feature was. It seemed implausible to me that it was actually protecting human widows and orphans, but I couldn't imagine what it had to do with text layout!

jolmg an hour ago

Kinda cool when you learn the answer to something you were wondering about decades ago.

schoen 3 minutes ago

Absolutely! Unfortunately for me, I probably wondered about this 35 years ago and learned the answer 15 years ago. Otherwise, I could be one of today's lucky 10,000 in the xkcd 1053 sense.

a_bonobo 4 hours ago

The German is more crass: Hurenkind and Schusterjunge, translates to 'child of a whore' and 'shoemaker boy'. The child of a whore does not know where it comes from (who is their father), the short final line - the shoemaker boy is so poor, he does not know where he will end up (the short first line)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116

janci 5 minutes ago

There are also Rivers - when spaces between words on multiple lines align vertically. Harder to control for than widows and orphans.

GeertB 4 hours ago

I've definitely been guilty of wording my multi-line doc comments in a way that would ensure they'd flow without awkward right margins. I would have a macro in vim that would call the fmt program to reflow the comment to 79 (later 98) characters, and then would iterate on word choice until the comments looked good. Not exactly right-justified, but no very ragged edge either.

yetanotherjosh 3 hours ago

In a very real sense this is exactly what LLM watermarking does. It "chooss the words carefully" in order to get text to "line up," but not with a visible margin... instead with a verifiable word distribution that proves the author knew a secret key.

CarVac 5 hours ago

My dad told a story of a classmate in high school going through the effort of manually justifying text in a paper he wrote and being rewarded with a plagiarism accusation.

That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.

zellyn 5 hours ago

I remember reading Project Gutenberg email updates from Michael S. Hart in the mid to late 90s that were famously formatted like this.

It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)

BubbleRings 4 hours ago

I’ve been searching all over for a classic example of this that I first found around 1986, but I can’t locate it. It went on for a page or two, hand justified lines of maybe 40 characters, and then at the end of it he started making each line one character shorter, until the essay ended with these, the only words I remember from it:

dumb is

what I

think

this

end

is

!

If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.

ricardobeat 3 hours ago

Lewis Carrol was about 123 years ahead!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale

I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.

a_bonobo 3 hours ago

You may be thinking of one of the poems of Christian Morgenstern? He used many tricks of formatting for jokes, famous example that fits with yours is The Funnels

https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Morgenstern%2C_Christia...

epistasis 6 hours ago

I am filled with both a deep admiration and horror at this.

It's shockingly impressive.

cm2012 5 hours ago

And that it was done for an amateur game guide! This is like a legendary work of art.

lukeh 6 hours ago

Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)

boothby 5 hours ago

It's a guilty pleasure of mine, spending a few minutes to clean up the aesthetics of docstrings and comments. I justify (heh) it to myself by catching unclear wording on this last cleanup pass -- and not taking it too far, obstrusifying for the aesthetic.

rmunn 44 minutes ago

I must admit to occasionally rearranging words or choosing different synonyms to make a column of spaces line up in a monospaced paragraph, so that you could draw a straight line down one column the screen without passing through any letters or punctuation. Or making a diagonal line of spaces, top-left to bottom-right.

I usually only did that when the text already was close to lining up that way, though.

Boxxed 4 hours ago

I do this at work with the comments in my code. No one's ever noticed <thumbs-down-emoji>

RobRivera 5 hours ago

Man. I kinda want to stress test my memory of super metroid before reading this guide. I could do a sub 3hr run through at 100% when I was a child.

I know I couldn't today.

lanyard-textile 5 hours ago

I have never felt more seen. I do this with comments all the time, rewording things to look nice on that 80 or 100 column mark.

kkfkekfoked 4 hours ago

And it shows! Wait, no, it doesn’t.

underyx 5 hours ago

So maybe it is possible to use alternate words in writing without compromising on writing quality after all.

stevage 5 hours ago

The part that horrifies me about this is the disincentive to revise any part of the text due to the flow-on effects.

initramfs 5 hours ago

I used to go to my computer laboratory in high school and at my mom's work to print out GameFAQ walkthroughs in the late 90s. They were excellent. I wrote this to remind myself of simple fun that's been superseded by grander ambitions, and sometimes I think I am wrong for choosing the latter.

ChannelFence 4 hours ago

Before LLMs, there were Markov chain bots. We used SeeBorg on IRC and over time its dictionary would fill up with whatever everyone said. Most of it was nonsense, but every once in a while it would say something perfectly timed. Almost everything It said making sense or not was hilarious though.

(source: https://github.com/allanlw/seeborg)

techknight 5 hours ago

If I remember correctly, this is the tweet (and HN post) that brought it to the attention of the world back in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093