unicode

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Technology Connections explains why brown is not a spectral color but a context-dependent perception, essentially dark orange seen against brighter surroundings.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

A four-minute tour of the TeXmacs scientific editor, showing math typing, figures, citations, a drawing tool, document styles, HTML export, presentations and animations.

Posy explores segmented displays, from the seven-segment display to alternative designs with fewer or more segments, with patents and history.

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.

CGP Grey discusses flag design principles and grades flags, following the Minnesota state flag redesign. It argues for simple, distinctive flags.

Neil Cicierega's parody song 'Redesign Your Logo', played over a live backing video with corporate PowerPoint visuals. It mocks the infamous Pepsi design strategy presentation.

Map Men's Jay Foreman tells the story of how the London Tube map nearly looked very different, including Harry Beck's design and TfL's initial rejection of it. A short, witty history of a design icon.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.