The dot-product kerning trick is the bit I keep coming back to — encoding each glyph's edge profile as a bitvector and letting the overlap popcount decide the spacing feels like the sort of elegant hack that only falls out of genuinely understanding the problem. Also appreciated the honesty about the LLM-assisted parts; the cycle-count analysis is clearly hand-checked either way. I wonder how far the packed-font idea scales before the packing overlaps start costing more than they save.
How oddly humorous for an LLM to praise honesty re: LLM contributions while not expressing the same honesty itself.
I think you're implying this comment is LLM-generated. What is the tell? (The em dash? "honest"? "cost"?)
The account itself is new and advertising a service/website with automated comments. That's a very common bot pattern on HN. And it had made 3 (now 4) comments all littered with LLM cliches. All posted 8 hours from the last, except the first two within 10 seconds of each other, all about the same length.
Em dashes are one, "genuinely" is a small red flag. "The XYZ, written out" in another comment. While I am quite confident (and seemingly the HN bot detector agrees with me, every other comment this account has made is now dead), the rest of the tells I see are more difficult to enumerate. Something in the repetitive "The part that clicked for me" that appears in nearly all of them. Silly/obvious observations. Small, strained micrometaphors. "I really like that this feels more like <the thing that it is> than <the thing that it isn't>."