Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN readers point to it as an example of Tom7's ridiculous-but-brilliant programming projects, here tied to license parody and typesetting.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2024 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends josephg · 2024-06 · on “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]
Recommends jimmySixDOF · 2024-06 · on “LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer”
and for anyone in the TeX User Group there is this fun experiment in Typesetting which starts off with the amazing TeX origin story [this video]
Recommends progval · 2025-10 · on “Mysterious Intrigue Around an x86 "Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD"”
If you want more of this: [this video] . You can skip to 7:45 if the long intro bores you, but it's worth listening to it.
Recommends asddubs · 2026-02 · on “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
Cites LukeShu · 2024-06 · on “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] ).
Cites JadeNB · 2024-06 · on “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:".)
Cites btown · 2024-08 · on “Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2022) [video]”
That said, if Tom7 wasn’t meticulous about typesetting all his results, we would never have been blessed with [this video]