Comment by roger_ 5 months ago
An aside: please use proper capitalization. With this article I found myself backtracking thinking I’d missed a word, which was very annoying. Not sure what the authors intention was with that decision but please reconsider.
Graham's Hierarchy, in "How to Disagree": https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
It's a fad associated with AI, popularised by Sam Altman especially.
It's the new black turtleneck that everyone is wearing, but will swear upon their mother's life isn't because they're copying Steve Jobs.
Twitter and all forms of instant messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, Discord, and the older ones like AIM/MSN/ICQ) have normalized it for many years. Sam is just one of the few large company CEOs to tweet in the style other Twitter users usually use. He's adopting the native culture rather than setting a trend.
Sam still uses capitalization in all of his essays, as do most people (including young people). In essays, like this one, it's distracting without it. I predict in 10 years the vast majority of people will all-lowercase on places like Twitter but almost no one will do it for essays.
>Sam is just one of the few large company CEOs to tweet in the style other Twitter users usually use.
Just looked at the algorithmic feed on Twitter to makes sure trends haven't shifted overnight, and zero people in that sample of hundreds of tweets used all lower case in the tweets. Not in science. Not in AI. Not in maths or politics or entertainment or media.
Sam is trying to bE dIFFERENT. He isn't adopting a norm but instead he's trying to make one. It looks ridiculous.
> Twitter and all forms of instant messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, Discord, and the older ones like AIM/MSN/ICQ) have normalized it for many years.
Half true. In SMS it was just easier, but in IM it mostly was a thing because the IM client's message boundaries acted as markers for beginning/end of sentence, making the formatting unnecessary. That's why using correct capitalization and periods for single sentences came to be associated with a more formal/serious tone, it was unnecessary so including it meant you wanted to emphasize it.
Even back then we'd use regular formatting outside of IM or when sending multiple sentences in a single message.
> He's adopting the native culture rather than setting a trend.
If this was the intent, it's really coming off as that "Hello, fellow kids" meme, rather than genuine.
the article has lots of caps it’s a branding and stylistic choice very e e cummings and so on not everyone likes it but clearly the author sees some utility in using caps since they name papers appropriately they also say “UPDATE” in all caps
> He's adopting the native culture rather than setting a trend.
Maybe he should consider there are different registers of language, and code-switching is a thing. This now increasingly applies to written language, not just spoken language.
Writing this way in structured, formal discourse would be equivalent to a CEO using internet memes and trendy slang in board meetings.
i don't want to press the shift-key everytime i need a capitalized letter on my phone and i disable auto-correct because it constantly messes with native languages etc.
wasn't aware that this makes me a steve jobs copier :(
EDIT: people are seriously so emotionally invested in capitalization that i get downvoted into minus, jeez.
When you consciously choose to save yourself effort in writing, at the expense of the readers who are trying to make sense of what you are saying, the people onto whom you've transferred the cognitive load are not likely to appreciate your laziness.
your comment contains one, single, capitalized letter. if the first W in your comment would have been small, would that have made your comment so much harder to read?
does it make my comment so hard to read just because i don't start my sentences with big letters and don't capitalize myself(i)? really don't get the fuzz.
of course i capitalize letters in "official" texts, but we're in a comment section.
i find it doubly funny because english doesn't capitalize lots of things, anyways.
Hey, sorry! I don't want you to feel bad, and I don't think you should.
I think there are legitimate reasons to struggle with things like capital letters, and you've named a few: non-native language and interface device limitations. There's other accessibility reasons too, like I have some dyslexic family members who use less capitalisation than most. Also, direct or casual communication with individuals, the impact of the extra cognitive load is minimal - 1 or 2 people - so again, no real issue.
The problem I have with this piece is that it's clearly meant to be an intellectual or academic-adjacent piece, and it's clearly meant to be public/read by many people - that's why we're reading it on Hackernews. The author is not putting in the extra few seconds required to fix the problem when writing, and as a result, many thousands of people lose a few seconds each when reading. I feel there must be a point where the cost of the extra reading time to humanity outweighs the benefits of the intellectual contribution - I can't really tell because even if I overlook the capitalisation, I'm not smart enough to understand it anyway.
> Hey, sorry! I don't want you to feel bad, and I don't think you should.
no worries, but apologies accepted, and sorry that i make you read my non-capitalized comments :)
> The problem I have with this piece is that it's clearly meant to be an intellectual or academic-adjacent piece
that's a good point i hadn't considered. i am of course for correct capitalization and grammar in "serious" documents etc., HN for me is more like a blog. but HN links to third-party, "serious" sites, where such things should matter.
> many thousands of people lose a few seconds each when reading.
i guess i can't really comprehend why some struggle with reading non-capitalized texts in english, because it doesn't matter to my brain. but valuable to know, that other people prefer it.
> I'm not smart enough to understand it anyway.
+1. at least we can discuss about language, so it's not that we're too dumb in general ;)
maybe because i use downvotes differently than others. downvote for me means, that someone either outright lies, is very disrespectful or adds nothing to the discussion.
i don't see it as a "i don't agree with this comment"-button. opinions differ, i guess :)
For completeness: I also disable all autocorrect/autocomplete on mobile because it's more trouble than it's worth, but I leave auto-capitalisation on. This is a thing, they're independent settings.
i absolutely HATE every automated keyboard-"helper", ever.
type in multiple languages constantly and all of these helpers constantly default to english usage. plus it would be weird to me if every sentence starts with a capital letter but the rest is left as it is. seems like such an arbitrary solution.
> It's a fad associated with AI, popularised by Sam Altman especially.
I know this is true but does anyone understand why they do it? It is actually cognitively disruptive when reading content because many of us are trained to simultaneously proof read while reading.
So I also consider it a type of cognitive attack vector and it annoys me extremely as well.
It's not true at all. It was very common, nearly norm in all online communication until phones started auto correcting with capitalization. You could always tell who was a mac/phone user by their use of capitalization. Sam is older than when that happened. He almost certainly spent the majority of his online life typing in lowercase, as I did. Go look at any old IRC chat log, forum, etc from his era.
The sibling comment to yours mentions that this is pretty common on Twitter, and I'd guess that it started as a way to making firing off tweets from a phone easier (since the extra effort to hit shift when typing on a phone keyboard is a bit higher, and the additional effort to go back and fix any typos that happen due to trying to capitalize things is also higher compared to using a traditional keyboard). Once enough people were doing it there, the style probably became recognizable and evoked a certain "vibe" that people wanted to replicate elsewhere, including in places where the original context of "hitting the shift key is more work than it's worth" doesn't hold as well.
I mean it seems very intentional and a passive aggressive technique to make the read feel disoriented while reading the content.
I can literally feel it assaulting my reading speed.
Capitalization and punctuation are to written language what pronunciation and stress are to spoken language. If someone was mispronouncing every word, using incorrect vowels, stressing the wrong syllables, etc., you'd have a really hard time understanding anything they're saying. Writing with incorrect punctuation and capitalization impedes comprehension in the same way.
This looks like a personal blog post, in a blog where the author have avoided capitalization fairly consistently. The blog post was likely not meant to be a research paper, and reading it as a research paper is probably setting the wrong expectations.
If people wanted to read formal-looking formatted text, the author has linked to one in the second paragraph:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07916 - Natural Language Understanding with Distributed Representation
The war is already over.
I 100% agree lowercase in longform essays is ridiculous, but I think for everything aside from essays, articles, papers, long emails, and some percentage of multi-paragraph site comments, lowercase is absolutely going to be the default online in 20 years.
So "everything that matters will continue to be written normally, but throwaway chatter will be written casually, where the specific features connoting casualness are a matter of ever-changing fashion"? Thinking back on '90s-era IRC chats, I suppose it was ever thus.
I think he knows he did something non-standard, as his previous post from seven weeks ago has correct capitalization.
This is the norm for Gen Z. We don’t see it because children don’t set social norms where adults are present too, but with the oldest of Gen Z about to turn 30, you and I should expect to see this more and more, and get used to it. If every kid can handle it, I think we can, too.
an opinion, and a falsifiable hypothesis:
call me old-fasahioned, but two spaces after a period will solve this problem if people insist on all-lower-case. this also helps distinguish between abbreviations such as st. martin's and the ends of sentences.
i'll bet that the linguistics experimentalists have metrics that quantify reading speed measurements as determined by eye tracking experiments, and can verify this.
> [I]'ll bet that the linguistics experimentalists have metrics that quantify reading speed measurements as determined by eye tracking experiments, and can verify this.
You appear to be trolling for the sake of trolling, but for reference: reading speed is determined by familiarity with the style of the text. Diverging from whatever people are used to will make them slower.
There is no such thing as "two spaces" in HTML, so good luck with that.
There's: U+3000, ideographic space. It's conceptually fitting, with sentence separation being a good fit for "idea separation".
edit: well I tried to give an example, but hn seems to replace it with regular space. Here's a copy paste version: https://unicode-explorer.com/c/3000
( do away with both capitalization and periods ( use tabs to separate sentences ( problem solved [( i'm only kind of joking here ( i actually think that would work pretty well ))] )))
( or alternatively use nested sexp to delineate paragraphs, square brackets for parentheticals [( this turned out to be an utterly cursed idea, for the record )] )
Yeah, things like these make me glad that humans don't live forever. By the time you are 30 you already hate the way so many things work around you. If you argue about it you are called a philistine luddite who can't stomach change. There's no right or wrong, but it's good you don't have to deal with stuff you find annoying indefinitely. You just... die eventually.
It's a better equilibrium this way and one of the main reasons I don't care much for transhumanism.
Language evolves. Capitalization is an artifact of a period where capitalizing the first letter made a lot of sense for the medium (parchment/paper). Modern culture is abandoning it for speed efficiency on keyboards or digital keyboards. A purist would say that we should still be using all capitals like they did in Greek/Latin which again was related to the medium.
I'll likely continue using Capitalization as a preference and that we use it to express conventions in programming, but I totally understand the movement to drop it and frankly its logical enough.
It's slower for sure, but capitalization does impart information: beginning of sentences, proper nouns, acronyms, and such. Sure, you could re-read the sentence until you figured all that out, but you are creating unnecessary hitches in the reading process. Capitalization is an optimization for the reader, and lack of capitalization is optimization for the writer.
As much as I dislike it sometimes, language absolutely does evolve. Proper capitalization does not fit into this, though. It can completely change the meaning of something if it is not capitalized. It's not just at the beginning of sentences, it's proper nouns within a sentence. Unfortunately I don't have an example of this handy but it's happened to me several times in my life where I've been completely confused by this (mostly on Slack).
This is a merely showing off your personal style which, when writing a technical article, I don't care about.
> As much as I dislike it sometimes, language absolutely does evolve.
Pointing out that language evolves helps to explain how the current established conventions came to be, but it is not an argument that there are (or should be) no established conventions.
If you are speaking in a way that diverges from what most people understand, then you are miscommunication and are making demonstrable errors precisely because the language has evolved into what it currently is, and not something else.
> we use it to express conventions in programming
Interestingly programming is the one place where I ditch it almost entirely (at least in my personal code bases).
I agree.
I'm all for Graham's pyramid of disagreement: we should focus on the core argument, rather than superfluous things like tone, or character, or capitalisation.
But this is too much for me personally. I just realised I consider the complete lack of capitalisation on a piece of public intellectual work to be obnoxious. Sorry, it's impractical, distracting and generates unnecessary cognitive load for everyone else.
You're the top comment right now, and it's not about the content of the article at all, which is a real shame. All the wasted thought cycles across so many people :(