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#PhysicsTextbook

N-gated Hacker Newsngate
2025-11-22

Gwern spills his digital Rolodex of so-called "STEM humor" 😂—a 'directory' that makes dad jokes look cutting-edge 🧐. Apparently, Gwern believes listing a bunch of bizarre titles passes for comedic genius 🤔. Spoiler alert: it's about as funny as a physics textbook 📚.
gwern.net/doc/math/humor/index

Siva Kalyan :verified:skalyan@typo.social
2022-12-31

AI-assisted, dream-inspired book cover design.

In July 2018, I had a dream about a book titled “#Electropragmatics”, which looked like an undergraduate physics textbook from the #1980s. In July this year, I got access to DALL·E 2, and used it to generate book covers inspired by my dream (first image). This week, I finally took to #InDesign, and designed some actual book covers based on these (second image).

#physicstextbook #bookcover #dreaminspiration #aitypography #aidesign #dalle2

Four iamges generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generation software, when asked to imagine the cover of a 1980s undergraduate texbook on the (nonexistent) field of “electropragmatics”. The first has the title in a bold, cream-coloured “gothic” sans-serif typeface, on a teal background, with the subtitle in a red script typeface. The second has the title in a dark-blue, condensed Clarendon typeface, with a thick, dark-blue horizontal rule below it, and a design involving wavy blue-and-white threads at the bottom of the cover. The third has the text in all-caps, slightly condensed light yellow Helvetica, on a navy-blue background; the left side of the cover has alternating vertical bands of green and red. The fourth has the title on both the top and the bottom of the cover, in a cream,coloured, highly condensed sans serif typeface; it has two subtitles in the same font, but in red, and at a smaller size; the centre of the cover has a sprawling node-and-link diagram; and the background colour is purple. The fourth image, but not the others, shows the book against a white background, casting a shadow to the top and right.Four images of covers of (fictional) “electropragmatics” textbooks, based on the AI-generated images, but designed from scratch in Adobe InDesign, using period-appropriate typefaces.

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