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it's fascinating me that all of HSP's articles are manually justified monospace text. Pages and pages of it. That's quite hard to do? There's not a lot of double-spaces or unusual punctuation so it's mostly achieved by word choice. I did wonder if there was some subtle css justification going on but apparently not; and you can see in articles from other authors on the site that the style is ragged right, but HSP never writes like that.


This is a classic textfiles thing to do, yeah. It's one of the few ways to really be a virtuous with the typography.

In part, it's because it's a proof-of-work - there's no way to automatically do it. I've been musing about using word embeddings + dynamic programming to do just that, however: you take a list of all possible synonyms with their embeddings, and calculate every rewrite that results in lining up exactly, and then choose the ones with the minimum cumulative embedding distance between the original words & their replacement.


I always found it quite satisfying to do; many codebases I've worked on have mid-length block comments that are manually justified that way.


However I have noticed that when he is posting as USER, in the context of conversing with chatgpt, he does not make an attempt to do this. or perhaps more accurately there is no way to do it without going back and editing text that had already been fed to the bot and thereby misrepresenting the prompts it was responding to.



> That's quite hard to do?

Wouldn't that just be done by a text editor?

Eg in emacs C-u 70 M-x fill-region. (There's probably a better way)


There's no spaces

at the end of the

line. Every thing

lines up exactly.


  There's no spaces
  at the end of the
  line. Every thing
  lines up exactly.




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