> "Perhaps", he speculated, "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable ... weirdness."
I think, reading this today, it probably describes what people like about the place.
I love how you're opposed to the death penalty for provably societally damaging criminal activites, but violent imperialism on those that don't agree with you (which would almost certainly entail many deaths)? Completely OK.
This is not an original copy of the advertisement. This is typeset horribly from the original text of the ad, probably.
Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc.
Why not use an image of the original instead? [1]
Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :]
Thanks for pointing that out. The real ad appeared in the computer magazine Interface Age, September 1976 page 13, as can be seen in the Internet Archive. I think it's important for Hacker News to avoid fake/replica historical info so it doesn't end up like Reddit, where you can't trust anything.
The downfall of Reddit is so depressing to think about.
I trusted Reddit wholeheartedly in the 2010s. Redditors taught me the life advice I didn't learn growing up: how to shave, how to negotiate job offers, how to do things around the house, and so on. Huge subs aside, you could that every post you read had a human on the other side of it, and no-one wanted more than upvotes and Reddit Gold.
Once spez and crew decided to push the MAX GROWTH button, all of that flew out the window.
Now that LLMs make infinite content generation child's play and there are financial incentives for being a content provider, there's no going back. I'm doubtful that another service like that will exist ever again.
All that notwithstanding, I still search for stuff on Reddit because the rest of the Internet IS EVEN WORSE. SEO ruined websites, CPM ruined YouTube, and LLMs might not even tell you the truth! I wasn't expecting to start yelling at clouds in my late 30s, but I guess we're here now.
It descended into glitch-ass slop towards the end, which I found funny. Very telling of an LLM/VLM since OCR would print straight garbage if it can't map a glyph to text.
This is actually a great example of why domain knowledge is important.
The printed ad is much easier to read despite the text being more densely-packed. This is because the LLM extraction stripped formatting (including the bolded and italicized text that directs readers towards interesting factoids) and used a system font and size (which is inconsistent and, often times, harder to read in column form) while the ad used a print appropriate serif that is consistent and easy to read on paper.
I'd like to think that this is graphic design 101, but when LLMs are threatening creative jobs en masse...not great.
But not to worry! All of the LLMs will nail this tomorrow after the ad's been RLHF'ed appropriately. minitruth doesn't sleep!
> It added that three trains that had gone over the tracks at 17:21 on Sunday, 19:01 and then 19:09 had similar notches "with a compatible geometric pattern".
Then the crashed train passed at 19:45.
I don't see why an overnight inspection must have caught this, it could have happened just before the 17:21 train, or even have been caused by it.
We will need to wait for the investigation to continue, and I hope Japan's rail people will not be so arrogant as to assume they can't learn something from it.
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