Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

My first name contains one of the fewest used letters of the alphabet and in first position nonetheless: Xavier

Let me tell you: the training data did not contain that many X to begin with :D

The Xs at best look like Ts, at worst like malformed Os.

Always funny to find the blind spots of some piece of tech.



Neat! Try "XxXxXxXxXx", max speed/legibility/width, style 2. The results are bonkers. It's just loops and scribbles. Interestingly, if you write your X's from top-right to bottom-left, top-left to bottom-right order, you can sort of see this in action. Grab a sheet of paper and try to write "xxxxxxxxx" really fast. You will see that loops are extremely common. I think this might be a coincidence, but it's possible it sees the kerning of two x's as a loop, then gets caught up in that false state of drawing loops.


Try "*****", style 3 or 9. I got it to write backwards at one point.


Cranking up the "legibility" I see plenty of perfectly respectable "x"s. Are you sure this is "not enough training data" rather than "actually, people writing quickly write pretty bad 'x's"?

[EDITED to add:] Ah, oops, I see. You were talking specifically about _capital_ X. You are right and I was wrong: the model produces disastrous capital Xs even at high legibility settings.


i recommend trying the phrase "sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!" on style 6, with legibility set to maximum. sometimes it looks roughly right, sometimes it opens with "sphnnneoooeoeoeoeoevorneroerof black quartz"


I like that phrase. On style 2 with high legibility (~75% to the right), max speed, and min width I ran it a couple times with good success then it looped off the screen for the next few runs.

The same settings but with min speed got caught at the z, creating what looked like repeating waves then a few letters that I couldn't place from the phrase.

Also amusing are the loops that get the tops cropped even though other letters extend higher.


wow! I was able to duplicate that!

as usual, the errors are at least as interesting as the successes on new tech!


I had it rewriting in style 6 several times "consider the lobster" without changing any settings, to see how random it was. After the fourth time it spat out "consider the lobsteoeororororo"


Such a good catch!


Doesn't handle accents either haha. My first name has an "é", it shows up somewhere between a straight up "t" (funny that it's the same letter as your "x") or some garbled mess.


The x's are bad across the board I think. Although on the whole I think this is pretty cool.


Common punctuation wasn't particularly common in the training set either: exclamations marks lack dots except style 6 where it is at the top (some Spanish in the training set? Or misclassified "i"s?), and [deity] knows what style 9 is doing with them. Didn't dare try an interrobang :)


Oh, a bunch of XXX, ZZZ, JJJ turned into this: https://imgur.com/a/BVN9MRz (ran off the screen to the right)

> My first name is: XXX ZZZ JJJ

(max speed, max legibility, default stroke)


I'm pretty sure you name is Tavier.


This is hilarious, its like its treating an X as a wonky t !


With a couple of tries I got a perfectly legible... T

https://imgur.com/a/PRl42rb

To be fair, I kind of remember handwriting X (and x) as totally counter-intuitive in school.


Try 'XXX'. Definitely too much variation with what should be the same glyph. It doesn't seem to know about ampersands either.


6ix9ine puts the 9 as a G and the x is all sortsa fun variations. Sometimes it’s a lowercase t, sometimes it’s a bunch of loops, and sometimes it’s two disconnected slashes.


I tried with a name starting with E, max legibility; except for styles 5 and 7 the rest of them looked like a t.


It does the same sort of thing for the @ symbol. They, too, look a bit like a lowercase letter 't'.


Words starting with Z come out looking like a T most of the time for me.


The training data didn't contain ñ, or characters with a tilde :)


Another great exception : 7z7z7z7z77zz


It's the same with capital Z.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: