Michael W. Moss | michaelwmoss.com

Writer, maker, and designer. Writer of fantasy, cyberpunk, science fiction, steampunk, horror, and hardboiled noir fiction. Typeface/font designer. Maker of 3D printed, laser cut, and microelectronics projects. Friend of cats and crows.

  • 102 Posts
  • 68 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2025

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  • But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.



  • But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.

    I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.

    The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.

    But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.


  • This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it’s so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don’t know any better.

    Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren’t up to the standards they claim.




  • Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

    Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”



















  • Definitely not the world’s first AI generated font. I imagine there are many out there already. Not everyone is likely advertising it though.

    It’s a relatively limited set of characters and the design is nothing new. Dripping fonts have been a thing for a while.

    Looking at the font closer shows where an LLM can’t replicate human effort well enough yet - the kerning is non-existent.

    The space character in the set is blank:

    The punctuation is disproportionate in size to the letters:

    Which brings us back to the fact that you need a human with expertise/experience to understand that the LLM isn’t performing as well as a human creator, just (potentially) faster and more recklessly, and to fix the issues with the output to make it actually usable/functional, which just feels like correcting someone else’s homework for them while they get the credit for the result.





  • My natural inclination would be to make the body in a single color filament and then use a stencil to paint on the logos. It would print a lot easier and look more natural and authentic. The logos were painted on the planes historically. And if you use stencils to paint them on, the logos could be customized for individual prints.


  • To do process of elimination, I’d recommend trying a different brand of filament and a different type of filament (i.e. PLA), preferably freshly opened rolls. I’d also generally be wary of AliExpress, but that’s just been my experience of seeing multiple people be disappointed with what they get. If you’re looking for discounts on filament, there are a bunch of Black Friday deals going on right now.

    That testing will at least tell you if it’s the brand or the type of filament that’s causing the issue. If you eliminate those by seeing no change, then you know it’s the printer itself and can start troubleshooting that next.