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Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version)

11 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this talk3 months2024–2026 score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN readers point to it as an example of Tom7's ridiculous-but-brilliant programming projects, here tied to license parody and typesetting.

Tom 7's pilot episode of a series that plays with type systems and absurd programming, presented as a parody of the GPL v3 license. It mixes a typesetting experiment with a long, story-driven intro on the origin of TeX. Source code and papers are linked from the author's site.

“this fun experiment in Typesetting which starts off with the amazing TeX origin story” (HN, 2024)

4 recommendations · 3 citations · Talks · intermediate

7 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@josephg Jun 2024 Recommends
on HN thread GNU Justified Public License
This was made by Tom7, who has many amazing videos about doing ridiculous things with programming on YouTube. The talk on this work is here: [this video]
Tom7's talk on ridiculous programming work behind the license.
@asddubs Feb 2026 Recommends
on HN thread The Tears of Donald Knuth
You might enjoy this video: [this video] The connection to knuth is tangential to the actual video subject, but it does contrast knuth to LLMs as a framing device
Contrasts Knuth with LLMs as a framing device

Citations, criticism and jokes

@LukeShu Jun 2024 Cites it
on HN thread GNU Justified Public License
This should not have "(2007)" in the title; 2007 is the date of the GPL v3, which this is a 2024 mimicry of (as explained in [this video] ).
Explains the video is a 2024 parody of the GPL v3
@JadeNB Jun 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Tom 7: Badness 0 (Three ways)
Do I win anything for noting, in a video about hyper-detail orientation, that, when the text on screen says "Is this the most beautiful ____", the voice-over says "This is the most beautiful ____"? [this video] (I'm not sure if it's also an error, or part of the joke, or if it just parses in a way that I can't accomplish on my own, that the text before the video reads "Way three (recommended) is to sit back and bathe in the 4k, 60Hz flashing lights that are Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version) is the newest installment in the Main Sequence:".)

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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