Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races Before the Age of Linotype (opens in new tab)

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49 pointsbenbreen9d ago6 comments

6 comments

nemetroid9d ago

From the last image:

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

> Self-spacing. Self-justifying.

Looks machine-composed.

cryzinger8d 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!

nemetroid4d ago

Just poking fun - the ad is for a "composing machine", so the joke wrote itself.

ripe8d 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.

ahartmetz8d ago

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

hackeraccount8d 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."

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