Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races Before the Age of Linotype

(publicdomainreview.org)

48 points | by benbreen 3 days ago ago

5 comments

  • nemetroid 2 days ago ago

    From the last image:

    > No Type. No Distribution. No "Pie"-ing.

    > Self-spacing. Self-justifying.

    Looks machine-composed.

    • cryzinger 2 days ago ago

      If you mean machine-composed as in AI, I did a reverse image search and found the same image in a blog post from 2013:

      https://kenjeffery.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/on-linotype-the-...

      And to prove that the image wasn't tampered with recently, here's a Wayback Machine snapshot from 2019:

      https://web.archive.org/web/20190823231938/https://kenjeffer...

      I think it passes muster!

    • ripe 2 days ago ago

      Ha, ha! I thought the same thing: LLM slop. But soon I remembered having seen this Linotype ad before. It's a genuine image. Almost 140 years ago, some human writer came up with short, punchy copy.

      Look what these AI companies have done to us. We see the shadow of slop everywhere.

      • ahartmetz 2 days ago ago

        The poster didn't use "quietly", so I knew it wasn't slop! (Seriously, what's the deal with "quietly" in AI writing?)

  • hackeraccount 2 days ago ago

    Any mention of typesetting should work to include Mark Twain's quote about his relationship with the inventor James Paige, who worked on a never quite working as well as could be wished typesetting machine that Twain invested heavily in.

    "Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died."