Eli Heuer

Programming an AI font editor in Rust

Public Key

npub1gff4n5geujy3m9c9p4y43qyfrydhfmjmhrsqx6l9cgtkr46edh2sukxe0x

NIP-05 Address

elih@typo-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyy56e6yv7fzgajuzs6j2cszy3jxm5aedm3cqrd0juy9mp6avkm4gfnpuys

Author Public Key

npub1gff4n5geujy3m9c9p4y43qyfrydhfmjmhrsqx6l9cgtkr46edh2sukxe0x

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Last Notes

2025-04-06 21:25:07

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@nprofile…mjt5 not all AI is the same. There is closed AI and there is free and open-source AI. Richard Stallman himself got his start working at the MIT AI lab.
We have decentralized global post-nation-state blockchains that allow anyone to create and own digital assets, and there are lots of people using blockchain to capture value from AI.
You are also assuming every culture has a western bourgeois view of IP. Chinese culture for example has the concept of Shanzhai that works well with AI.

2025-04-06 07:48:39

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@nprofile…36n0 Some of us want to sell OFL related services and consulting. Which would almost always be a better allocation of capital vs Monotype or any other proprietary licensing deal.

2025-04-06 00:30:45

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@nprofile…mjt5 I'm an American without a college education, I'm doing my best.
The elitist over-socialized egomaniacs of the font industry will gatekeep, lie, and play parasocial manipulation games to the bitter end. I'm not trying to convince them.
Missimo Vignelli is a good example, he clearly critiqued the font industry, and people just refuse to listen to what he actually said. His point was never about a list of specific typefaces, it was that 99% of fonts are slop made by egomaniacs 4 $.

2025-04-05 23:00:52

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@nprofile…mjt5 Monotype is the inevitable endgame of the proprietary licensing business model.
If Monotype vanished, there would be an endless line of opportunists waiting to do the same playbook, it's baked into that particular form of IP and how it can be used as a financial asset.
Design education is an even bigger scam.
Students are lied to about the viability of proprietary IP models and are taught infantilizing software like Glyphs and Adobe that leave them helpless ignorant consumers.

2025-04-05 21:02:20

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@nprofile…qx50 @nprofile…jlpt this kind of behavior is the natural endgame of the proprietary font business model and the general world view around IP in the font industry. Many other organizations do this.
Teaching students this proprietary IP worldview and pretending it is still viable in today's technological/economic landscape is enabling and contributing to the scam.

2025-04-05 18:52:59

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@nprofile…jlpt Proprietary licensing is the problem, not specifically Monotype, if they didn't exist someone else would fill the void. The proprietary licensing model makes it the inevitable endgame.
We are 1 or 2 years away from automating 95% of font production with AI. It's time to rethink IP and authorship, and build new business models for crypto and AI.

2025-04-05 18:28:18

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@nprofile…36n0 I'm working on all of this with both of my startups. :-)
You can do a lot to automate font production/engineering with just Cursor today.

2025-04-05 18:10:32

The font industry is a bigger scam than crypto.
I'm working on AI tools to automate font production these days and I have zero qualms about disrupting the entire industry.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/286/696/202/872/724/original/5a29bab737349191.jpg

2025-04-04 21:40:06

“The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.”
—Donald Knuth
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/281/837/742/439/940/original/e133e09bc5186b50.jpeg

2025-03-28 20:25:17

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@nprofile…mjt5 I believe distributed authorship is a core new mode of creative production.
In the 21st century artists will make programs and systems more than drawings. Mark Zuckerberg is more of an artist than anyone posting images on his platforms.
The real Duchamp readymade moment we are living through right now is post-authorship network art, which Ghiblicore is an example of. It's completely illegible if you are stuck in the identity politics ideological bubble of the past decade though.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/241/926/617/329/968/original/aac7598891eab8bb.jpg

2025-03-28 19:49:31

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@nprofile…mjt5 technology is deflationary, but that is never factored into inflation.
Our time is being stolen by the fiat financial system and this is one of the many synergies between AI and Crypto. Hard money crypto diffusely captures gains from AI for everyone holding it, no bureaucracy and socialist tyrants required.
Also, personally AI saves me a massive amount of time in everything I do.
Save in Bitcoin, focus on your craft. It might just be that simple.

2025-03-28 06:56:29

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@nprofile…36n0 it's proprietary, expensive, and somehow worse and less iconic than Helvetica.
Yup, a perfect representation of the Obama era.

2025-03-28 03:10:22

people are not making Miyazaki art, they're doing Ghiblicore, it's algorithmic pastiche under a generalized, distributed authorship which is the new mode of creative production.
The auteur brand of industrial production was a market construct itself and the democraticization of art production and diffusion of the author into a collective is much closer to authenticity in expression.

2025-03-27 05:13:54

It’s kinda hilarious that Google dropped a huge upgrade and ghibli-core completely hijacked the zeitgeist. Peak example of how vibes and devrel now override tech merit in the attention economy.

2025-03-18 05:01:59

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@nprofile…mjt5 @nprofile…ep76 I I think value capture and coordination with crypto is the best way forward, and I hope Fontstand arrives at that conclusion. There is a long history of DAOs and co-ops using crypto infrastructure to out-compete big tech, Zora replacing Instagram being one example.
There is a reason every big tech manager hates crypto, and it's not the environmental and second-hand Molly White FUD they say in public.

2025-03-18 04:32:56

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@nprofile…mjt5 @nprofile…ep76 small independent publishers and designers have the advantage of taste and culture over big tech.
Big companies can throw money at taste and culture, but they are almost always exit liquidity and kill any cultural capital on contact.
Even a billion dollars of capital cannot compete with a project having a soul.

2025-02-28 17:30:38

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@nprofile…qx50 The systems that support fiat currency also require a lot of energy (military, taxation, etc). If you think in 2nd and 3rd order effects, fiat requires more energy. Ethereum requires almost nothing.
Global advanced economies produce a lot of ledgers, that is a good thing, this is high-fidelity information we can use to do things better, faster, cheaper.
A public immutable ledger is a terrible way to do money laundering, if you want to stop that, you should be against physical cash.

2025-02-27 18:38:22

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@nprofile…qx50 why boot the Bitcoin? It's federated and open-source, it has a lot in common with Fediverse values.

2025-02-14 10:59:10

🚧Work in progress on the Arabic UI font I am working on for my Rust/Bevy font editor.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/001/882/490/656/158/original/d8e339a4e7afaa23.png

2025-02-12 20:30:24

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@nprofile…t9gy I love the Fediverse, I have an old account from the early Mastodon days, but it turned into a depressing and abusive left wing echo chamber. I'm a Bahá'í and I believe left and right politics are obsolete and destructive on both sides.
I pay for X and still think it is the best micro blogging platform, but the most exciting new micro blogging platforms to me are Farcaster and Noster. I really believe open-source permissionless crypto is needed for healthy and productive social media.

2024-10-25 07:13:15

I now have a setup that works for doing Arabic type design on a Linux desktop using only simple software that I understand and can modify (Spoonbender and drawbot-skia).
I am using AI tools like Cursor/Claude to make Rust CLI/TUI tools that handle a lot of things people normally do in GUI font editors. My goal is that the editor itself needs to be simple and understandable, and as much work as possible is offloaded to CLI/TUI tools and LLMs/local custom neural networks.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/366/790/630/634/771/original/8cbe8a00125f024c.png

2024-08-17 05:42:53

I did some more work on Rena Arabic, just enough to cover the Baháʼí Short Obligatory Prayer in Arabic. It is still very rough, but I like where it could go.
Bābism and the Baháʼí Faith are sometimes thought of as an Islamic form of modernism born separate from and before European modernism, and I want to invoke that spirit in this design while paring it with a neo-grotesk.
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/975/761/981/011/077/original/e677d2b30cc952ec.png

2024-07-01 14:23:49

Very early work in progress on Rena Regular Arabic (opsz 144). Feedback welcome.
https://github.com/fontgarden/rena
https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/711/675/710/425/420/original/3b9dc53dc9d29639.png