I notice a comic.ttf in the repository with no indication it's under a license other than the MIT license of the repository. Does this mean that Comic Sans is now distributable under the terms of the MIT license also?
They did decide to remove the file now in this commit and removed it from the file dates.txt file in this one, both of which they apparently managed to use a LLM for.
The first paragraph of the post published by Microsoft emphasizes the font:
... helped introduce the world to a little font called Comic Sans. Yes, that Comic Sans. Originally designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare in 1994, Comic Sans found its first real home in Comic Chat ...
The file was in the repo at the time it was assigned a license. There was a future commit literally titled "Clarifying the project", where the file is still present, that emphasized the project "is available to read, build, and tinker with under the <b>MIT License</b>." followed by a call to action to "Study it, modernize it, play with it". Although there is a commit where the file was removed, it's still in the history and as of writing there hasn't been a clarification in the post or in the repo as to the font's exact status. If it wasn't under MIT, they've done a really bad job of making that clear.
It'd be nice if the FSF could help clarify its status for use in open source projects.
In 2006-2008 the small startup I was working at used IRC for internal chat and most people were running Comic Chat. I ran a Windows VM on my Mac purely to use it.
Hilarious stuff.
I have one screenshot preserved from that time, during the development of "alcheMo" j2me to native compiler. (initially for BREW, later ported to iPhone in time for the appstore launch allowing popular Java games such as "Virtual Villagers: A New Home" to be on iPhone)
I also did love it to mess around with. Reading this post also reminded me of a bot someone had running in a few channels I was in. It basically would keep a record of the last x amount of messages and when activated with a trigger command would generate a comic much like the chat client.
I am not sure what the policy is on bots in the lobster irc channel but I'd be tempted to set something like that up there.
Oh boy oh boy another historical codebase for Microslop to ruin!
The early web was filled with experimentation. “What if chat rooms looked like comics?” That question sounds wonderfully unreasonable. And yet it was built, shipped, localized into 24 languages, and bundled with Windows 98.
Is that 'AI-powered' as in 'we used an LLM to make the code worse' or 'AI-powered' as in 'we used a language model to do sentiment analysis of the prose and generate better pictures'? Because the latter might actually be interesting. One of my favourite machine-learning projects at MS was from the HoloLens team, where they trained a model on videos of people's faces and videos of the side of their heads and were able to produce something that convincingly mapped from the latter to the former. This meant that someone wearing an AR headset could still have a video that looked like their face without the headset appear to other people in meetings.
Under the hood, Comic Chat was more than a clever skin for IRC. It was able to interpret conversational cues in the text and choose appropriate poses, facial expressions, gestures, and panel layouts.
That's news to me! I had assumed it was more like IRC with user-controlled puppets.
I'm skimming a copy of the SIGGRAPH paper right now. Sounds like pretty basic stuff (e.g., the presence of the substring "IMHO" causes the character to point to themselves), but it's interesting to see all the different details they considered.
invlpg | 11 days ago
I notice a
comic.ttfin the repository with no indication it's under a license other than the MIT license of the repository. Does this mean that Comic Sans is now distributable under the terms of the MIT license also?brucehoult | 11 days ago
IANAL but that certainly sounds right, and no take-backs. If you plan to distribute it then keep a copy of the repo. The hashes prove it.
kreeft | 10 days ago
They did decide to remove the file now in this commit and removed it from the
file dates.txtfile in this one, both of which they apparently managed to use a LLM for.junot | 10 days ago
The first paragraph of the post published by Microsoft emphasizes the font:
The file was in the repo at the time it was assigned a license. There was a future commit literally titled "Clarifying the project", where the file is still present, that emphasized the project "is available to read, build, and tinker with under the <b>MIT License</b>." followed by a call to action to "Study it, modernize it, play with it". Although there is a commit where the file was removed, it's still in the history and as of writing there hasn't been a clarification in the post or in the repo as to the font's exact status. If it wasn't under MIT, they've done a really bad job of making that clear.
It'd be nice if the FSF could help clarify its status for use in open source projects.
david_chisnall | 11 days ago
This was the first IRC client I used! It spewed control, characters at the start of a line, so a kind person quickly introduced me to mIRC.
brucehoult | 11 days ago
I loved that program!
In 2006-2008 the small startup I was working at used IRC for internal chat and most people were running Comic Chat. I ran a Windows VM on my Mac purely to use it.
Hilarious stuff.
I have one screenshot preserved from that time, during the development of "alcheMo" j2me to native compiler. (initially for BREW, later ported to iPhone in time for the appstore launch allowing popular Java games such as "Virtual Villagers: A New Home" to be on iPhone)
https://hoult.org/comicChat.jpg
creesch | 11 days ago
I also did love it to mess around with. Reading this post also reminded me of a bot someone had running in a few channels I was in. It basically would keep a record of the last x amount of messages and when activated with a trigger command would generate a comic much like the chat client.
I am not sure what the policy is on bots in the lobster irc channel but I'd be tempted to set something like that up there.
FedericoSchonborn | 11 days ago
Oh boy oh boy another historical codebase for Microslop to ruin!
Wonder what model they used for that...
natkr | 11 days ago
I thought you were joking, but..
puffnfresh | 11 days ago
If you don't like slop, here's a fork: https://github.com/theAlexes/comic-chat-deslopped
If you do like slop, here's a fork which has started to port the app to Qt6: https://github.com/codegod100/comic-chat
SamRW | 11 days ago
Aww... What?! Incredible.
david_chisnall | 11 days ago
Is that 'AI-powered' as in 'we used an LLM to make the code worse' or 'AI-powered' as in 'we used a language model to do sentiment analysis of the prose and generate better pictures'? Because the latter might actually be interesting. One of my favourite machine-learning projects at MS was from the HoloLens team, where they trained a model on videos of people's faces and videos of the side of their heads and were able to produce something that convincingly mapped from the latter to the former. This meant that someone wearing an AR headset could still have a video that looked like their face without the headset appear to other people in meetings.
natkr | 11 days ago
As in used an LLM to 'modernize' the code.
bitshift | 11 days ago
That's news to me! I had assumed it was more like IRC with user-controlled puppets.
I'm skimming a copy of the SIGGRAPH paper right now. Sounds like pretty basic stuff (e.g., the presence of the substring "IMHO" causes the character to point to themselves), but it's interesting to see all the different details they considered.