Apple-sans-adjectives – A font that redacts Apple-esque superlatives from text | Hacker News Reader

Apple-sans-adjectives – A font that redacts Apple-esque superlatives from text

appleadjectiv.es

128 pointsslurpp56 comments

Ran across this recently:

> Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare puts storytelling in a narrative. Infinity Ward breaks ground by exploring weight and its responsibilities. In a time of adversity, the player, as Captain of their warship, must take command against an enemy. Soldiers are thrust into circumstances that will test their training and reveal their character as they learn to lead and make decisions necessary to achieve victory. The game also introduces environments, weaponry and abilities to Call of Duty. The campaign – from combat to fighters – occurs as an experience with loading times and delivers franchise moments that fans love.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/02/call-of-duty-inf...

I'd love to hear a 'honest trailers' style reading of things like this:

"Marketing Copy without the Marketing Wank"

- I think that example couple be better in a few places, but it is instructive how little actual content it contains, and how none of that content is at all informative.

A young author named Tao Lin uses this "transparent" style to write fiction. I haven't read any of his stuff because it seems like such a tedious, vapid way to write a story, but check out some of the reviews on his book Richard Yates on Amazon:

I read 'Richard Yates' on a work night in the beginning of the week alone in my room. I had heard that 'Richard Yates' was a true account by the author, which was primarily my motivation to read it. I had only ever read 'Shoplifting' prior to reading 'Richard Yates.'

The content made me feel, at first, shame and resentment for my own teenage mistakes. I also felt uneasy and inadequate that I didn't find it as humorous as other people did. So, at first, I felt negatively towards `Richard Yates,' as it made me feel poorly.

I didn't want my initial reaction and past experiences to shape my opinion of the book. After a week's worth of thought, I realized that I had received exactly what I wanted from `Richard Yates;' a literal retelling of events from a narrator unmotivated and unconcerned with my or anyone else's opinion of them. Behind the seemingly fake method of building a familiar brand is a product that is unusually authentic. It is likeable at times and unlikable other times. The book satisfied my curiosity about the author's life. This thought made me feel calm about the book. Things that I perceive to be authentic make me feel good about society and culture. I feel good. Thank you for `Richard Yates.'

https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Yates-Novel-Tao-Lin/dp/193555...

Fun idea but poorly executed. Even the first of the two examples they have on the website starts with 'every once in a while', redacting 'very' in 'every' for no reason, rendering the font unusable for most intents and purposes.

Fonts have a feature called ligatures, where you can take two or more letters and turn them into one glyph. You usually use them to improve readability but since there aren't any rules around what the 'combined' glyph looks like, people sometimes do things like change all instances of one word with another. In this case they're blacking out certain words.

It's really a job for natural language parsing, but the effort is commendable.

It reminds me of the clbuttic example of naive text substitution :-)

Indeed. They could have defined ligatures such that that only work when at the beginning/end of a word (many "cursive" fonts use this feature), so I think it's just an overlooked detail and not a technical limitation.

This is ingenious!

If anybody is curious at to how this works, they use a feature in OpenType (the most common format for modern fonts and the basis for WOFF and EOT) called glyph substitution. It's designed to combine adjacent characters for ligatures and the like. It lets you specify that some arrangement of characters should be replaced by an alternate glyph.

A more interesting usage of this feature is Hasklig: https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/

A monospaced fontface for Haskell, where the operators are presented as ligatures. If only it also included operators from other languages.

Fira Code Pro does: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

You might want to check out Monoid which is similar (and my personal favourite coding font): http://larsenwork.com/monoid/

Optionally, it also supports rendering fontawesome icon names (fa-...) as icons too, which is another hack along the same lines.

Pragmatic Pro does it as well and it works in intellij really well.

I'd like ligatures in coding fonts more if they also collapsed to a single (or double at most) character cell.

You must be too young to have used APL.

It is exactly how fonts like "Ligature Symbols" [1] and "Mono Social Icons Font" [2] works.

1 : http://kudakurage.com/ligature_symbols/ 2 : http://drinchev.github.io/monosocialiconsfont/

This is also done by Project Seen [0,1] and sans bullshit sans [2].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783275 [1]: http://projectseen.com/ [2]: https://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/

Cute. Especially with the clbuttic mistake apparent in the "famous speeches" section ("E••••thing", "b•••••ness" etc)

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clbuttic for those who missed that reference. And I agree, kind of a fail on the attention to detail front, which is suprising for a project like this.

By far my favorite example of this is the term "buttbuttination." If you dive deeply enough into the Google results, you'll start to find some actual accidental uses of the term rather than just discussion of the phenomenon of text substitution. There's something darkly hilarious about a web site seriously discussing something like "260 hours of recordings that JFK secretly made in the days before his buttbuttination in Dallas."

I would venture a guess that the font defines multi-letter ligatures for all the redacted words, therefore cannot detect any context.

The very first example shows "We think you're really going to love this" change into "We think you're going to this".

That's literally the first thing they wanted us to see. It took a sentence and broke it and rendered it meaningless. If it had only removed the "really", that would have been one thing.

The sentence was already meaningless. It didn't break the sentence but revealed that it was already broken.

How is the original sentence meaningless? "We think you will like this" (rephrasing) definitely has a meaning. You have probably said something similar when you are recommending something.

Whereas their version actually changes the meaning. It changes the verb from liking a lot to physically changing location. (And to be pedantic, "really" is an adverb, not an adjective, so it is outside the scope of the name of the font.)

It is a cool hack, although, I expect this idea could be put to all sorts of nefarious uses.

> How is the original sentence meaningless? "We think you will like this" (rephrasing) definitely has a meaning.

The original sentence is meaningless because it's marketing drivel. In a sales context, this is literally the only thing they can say.

Thus in an information theoretic sense the "We think you will love this" (the original phrasing) conveys exactly zero additional information besides what can be gleaned from the identity of the speaker.

And revealed intent. Only thing better would be if the algo could reveal truth. Then it would read:

"you're going to this".

It's not only "adjectives", also the word "revolution" was not masked too. "It's a revolution" are the first words that come to my mind when I think about Apple ;)

Came here to say the same thing. 'revolutionise' was the third word I typed.

previously - http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/

This is cute. How could you pick e.g. Google-esque adjectives?

Is there a corpus of press releases, etc. from lots of big (tech) companies? If so, has anyone done basic comparative word/n-gram frequency analysis of it?

Yes. This stuff is hard and subjective because you need to agree on a baseline...

It's described as "sans adjectives" but in the demo it removes only an adverb (really) and a verb (love).

This is the most exiting and innovative product we've ever created.

Very creative use of glyph substitution though. :)

On which planet is "to love" an adjective?

And why does the title talk about superlatives?

We think you're really going to love this. Love is redacted, and is not an adjective, it is a verb.

If the intent was to reduce hyperbole then love should be replaced with appreciate or like. Otherwise this makes text unreadable rather than stripped of superlative.

Doesn't handle "insanely"

Nor “insanely great”. Is this a font for the post-Jobs era?

For 'wonderfully', only the 'wonderful' part is redacted, so you get '---------ly'. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature :)

Here are some of the words it redacts:

beautiful right very love great exciting really

I'm curious what others there are. Also, interesting to see the Scunthorpe problem poke its head up here, with "e----" instead of "every" for example, as the font cannot detect context since it uses glyph substitution, which was designed for ligatures.

Does this mean that we can do cloud-to-butt as a font?

A whole new universe of possibilities has just opened up....

I made a replicate of the iPhone announcement poster they made, but without the black-censors and timestamps.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxdt7NWvLqR9Z1J3U1BIQkxfbG...

Please add 'blazing', 'light-speed', and 'turbo' to your dictionary ;)

Tragically, it doesn't redact the most of Jobsian of words 'Boom!'

I can't seem to get anything to redact. "amazing perfect outstanding beautiful gorgeous" all show fine. (Chrome 48, Win7, in corporate lock-down which might be causing it.)

If the author is reading this, I wish he'd do this for copy-pasted text too. I tried pasting some text from Apple's website, and it did nothing.

Ctrl+shift+v maybe?

That didn't work either. Apparently, it has something to do with Tor Browser, where it didn't work although I enabled JS. Pasting worked fine on another browser.

E[s]very[/s] place, even mid-word!

Nothing redacted on android chrome

I'm a little disappointed that "automagically" wasn't recognized.

this reminds me of an old idea I had: a TL;DR; for books. Initially humans would mark sentences / phrases as superfluous (later a bot / AI would do that). You'd be able to view the book in various levels of verbosity.

It should probably at least look at word boundaries.

Is this working for everyone else? I typed in, "Amazing new innovation that will revolutionize the way you work." And nothing happened.

Edit

On silk browser on kindle fire.

Works on my Kindle Fire 7 but I didn't like the fact I couldn't install Firefox on it - indeed, no Play Store - so I installed Cyanogenmod and everything's been great ever since!

Getting downloaded for asking a technical question? Hacker news... full of dicks.

This is brilliant :D

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