It’s an interesting technical problem in a time before widespread internet. Something you can’t just put in a press release. Something you can’t describe.

> Since, obviously, the symbol did not exist on a computer keyboard, Warner Bros. sent floppy discs to media outlets containing a digital rendition of the image, although most gradually landed on referring to him as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” Television outlets were also provided with a brief video featuring the symbol, punctuated with an appropriately iconic-sounding digital clank, similar to the ones film companies used when their logos appeared in film credits.

It was a big deal at the time in 1993. Everybody in the music and multimedia and press industries received a copy of his floppy disk in the mail with his "Princely" font, with instructions on how and when to use it. And people on the cutting edge of digital technology could even download it from CompuServe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38964005

This is about an intellectual property dispute, which seems fairly on point.

With an added dash of the hacker ethos of sticking it to "the man". In this case, the record labels.

As a researcher of LLMs and a student of semiotics, I find this piece to be cultural-politically interesting, especially from a socio-cybernetic perspective

Look at the evidence.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Plenty of submissions and comments of this subject for several years.

HN hasn't changed, we do.

So, I ask an honest question and get downvoted (or stripped). Seems like HN people ARE getting worse, and way more petty. smh.

Not all of us live in this zone and some of us do want to understand people's thinking without getting hated on. Guess I'll move on to a safer place.

Prince's death was posted on HN and had basically the same criticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543668