I had a old Macbook sitting on, but idle, for a few days. I just turned it off, and found the ethernet-to-USB-C dongle was really warm.
Not worryingly hot, but definitely "electronic device doing things"-hot.
Is that normal for such a simple device?
The external harddisk and the Macbook itself were cold to the touch.
Looks like the C64 keyboard font thing I shared the other day is, I don't know what to call it, "prompt driven drivel"?
By the looks of the commits and the approach, is seems to be "here's photos, make a font" instead of carefully analyzing all the C64 keyboard variations, and meticulously drawing the letters.
Every time I see the possibility of LLM in coding in a slightly positive way, something like this grounds me again. I somewhat resigned to fancy autocomplete in code, but offloading the part where your heart and soul should go, is kinda depressing.
One of my main fears when adding features to Wakamai Fondue is that I stray away from its core mission of "making fonts less of a black box".
I want folks to drop a font, show what it can do, and get out of the way.
But every new toggle, checkbox, button, "show more" or other way for people to tweak the way the fondue reports seems like a potential "pfff, this looks too complex, never mind".
So this Unsung posts really resonates: https://unsung.aresluna.org/they-take-one-look-at-the-ui-and-abandon-it/
(Also, would you look at the update frequency *and* quality output of that blog?!)
What I really appreciate from @jectives is his critical eye and calling out foundries who clearly use AI, especially when it seems haphazard and not even helping anyone, or have small print that totally un-sweetens an otherwise good looking deal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGhrWv8vQCw
Also, font news!
Going through my photo archive I found some images taken with/for "A World Of Photo".
I totally forgot this app.
You'd get pings at random times an exchanged photos with someone else on the planet.
Sweet memories when we were all still in the "wow, there's a computer in my pocket, and it has a camera"-phase!
"The people holding up the internet"
A good-looking but somewhat depressing exposé about the people holding up current digital infrastructure as a hobby.
I just want to be 107% clear: I don't quote-boost this as an attack or snear at @stevewetherill. It's also not an anti/pro AI post. I mean this as a "what a time to be alive" post, with whatever mixed emotions that you can attach to that.
RE: https://oldbytes.space/@stevewetherill/117403995523456372
I have *so* mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I have had SO MANY HOURS of frustration the get cycles correct, debugging timing and raster bugs, staring at (in my case, 6502) machine language trying to grok why my code was off. If you told my 15-year-old me that in the future you can just *wish* for your code to work, and the robot genie will Make It So, taking intro account the peculiarities of the CPU, the machine language, all the hardware specifics of your computer, I would've let out the most heartfelt HALLELUJA you'd ever heard.
But on the other hand, the last bastion of human cleverness in coding is now also taken over by LLM-assisted coding.
I want my demoscene productions to evoke "how did they DO THAT?!", not "did they let AI do that?"
Does anyone have information on why some fonts have a creation date of 1/1/1904 in their metadata?
Over the years I've seen various "what is that font on the Commodore 64 keyboard" threads and recreations, and I just stumbled upon a new one.
https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/ (via @hackaday)
Our site does not update a lot. But when it does you will be able to see it in your RSS. Currently tracking: books in the syllabus, research projects, and annual reports and galleries for the years. Subscribe to:
https://typemedia.org/feed.xml
(Thanks to @blag for suggesting and @pixelambacht for helping!)
#rss
⬅️⬅️⬅️⬅️ ➡️➡️➡️➡️
Tiny but handy update on #fontdrop
You can now use the arrow keys to go to next / previous character when you have the glyph modal opened!
Big thanks for the idea Manuel Viergutz!
https://typographicdesign.de
it's a new season for technology & for technologists, and our labor and its impact to the world are both more greater and more dangerous than ever.
how do we make sense of work in an industry many of us no longer recognize?
People be like "can everyone PLEASE stop just believing everything an LLM tells you, they litterally hallucinate, I beg you!!!"
As if I didn't stop trusting ANYTHING I READ on a screen ever since dialing into the Digital Dungeon BBS at 2400 baud on my Commodore 128 and getting scammed out of fresh AT&T cards in the chat room.
Fuck you, Psyc3L0rd, you still owe me a 0-day!!
BanjoCSS, or "Couple a banjo dorks".
@chriscoyier and @argyleink jamming in the woods!
RE: https://typo.social/@pixelambacht/117359047884215951
Dutch chain Hans Anders has immediately ceased sales of Meta creep glasses:
https://tweakers.net/nieuws/252882/hans-anders-stopt-per-direct-met-verkoop-van-meta-brillen.html (in 🇳🇱)
"We have this font, but it [does a buggy thing] in this browser, and we JUST CAN'T figure it out. Would you take a look?"
I just get unreasonably excited whenever I get one of these requests.
It's the *perfect* mix between nerdy, intellectual fun and being able to tap into my "step aside, everybody"-skillset. I FRiCKiNG love them! 🤓
I wish I got more of these!
On me dit que ce texte signé Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy a fort probablement été créé par IA.
Fabrice Bellard
A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.
He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.
His name is Fabrice Bellard.
Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.
Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.
In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.
Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.
He was not done.
In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.
He kept going.
In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.
In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.
Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.
Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org
He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.
A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.
He is still shipping.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy
CJ Type: The First Ten Years exhibition in Tokyo opened on Wednesday.
I just had an amazing conversation with an older lady who worked as a phototypesetter here in Japan decades ago, who just happened to walk by the gallery. These conversations are by far the most rewarding part of the exhibition. She knew about the foundry Shaken, used Ryobi and Morisawa machines, and described the arduous process of setting type one character at a time. And she bought my new type specimen for Louvette Pixel😊