4 ms·

I disagree. We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product. If a reference to a product is intended, we should clarify that associa

by lwhi 3y ago

I disagree. We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product. If a reference to a product is intended, we should clarify that association some other way; i.e. MS Teams.

tgv 3y ago
The reading process is automatic. It's quite likely that capitalized "Teams" is read by may as the product name. And it's reasonable, because in most daily contexts, "teams" refers to actual "teams" and "Teams" refers to the product. Nobody (including you) is going to teach them to stop doing that. Adapting a rather dumb capitalization rule is a lot easier. I do agree that editors should read their topics critically and add disambiguating text (if possible and permitted).
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Teams is a very generic product name. Microsoft can live with the consequences of that. When I read the headline, I was not thinking of MS Teams. Because I only use MS Teams a few rare times a year. Mainly I use Zoom. But even if OpenAI had an article that with the rules of headline capitalization of HN ended up reading “Dall-E adds Zoom Feature” I would have imagined that it was about being able to zoom into pictures. Not automatically assumed that it had anything to do with Zoom. Even though I use Zoom almost every day.
  - gbalduzzi 3y ago
    > Teams is a very generic product name. Microsoft can live with the consequences of that. Quite the contrary, Microsoft earns free advertisement from this. The problem is for the people that misunderstand the heading, not for Microsoft Ok, you would understand it correctly even the Zoom example. So? Heading should be optimized for the most possible amount of people, there is a clear possibility that a lot of people misunderstand the title, so why not simply edit it? In that case neither you nor anyone else would understand something wrong
    - F7F7F7 3y ago
      The vast majority of people aren’t going to make the association. Even in the HN demo. I think people are vastly over estimating Microsoft’s ownership over ‘Teams’. Even within a tech context. Plus, everything we’ve seen from Microsoft in their partnership with OpenAI has been Co-Pilot. Which is why I use MS Teams daily and did not make the connection.
      - jorvi 3y ago
        You are wrong and the vast majority of people are making the association. I showed the title to five colleagues and all of them assumed it referred to Teams the product. Not to mention the overwhelming majority of people in these threads.
        IlliOnato 3y ago
        Well, perhaps they meant "vast majority of people that count", which for them includes F7F7F7, F7F7F7, and of course F7F7F7! :-)
      - IlliOnato 3y ago
        How do you know about "vast majority of people"? Did you run a survey? I for one also thought it was Microsoft Teams in the heading. If a heading misleads even a fraction of readership, for no apparent reason (what is the benefit of having a title in Title Case?), maybe it's better that the heading is changed, no?
manojlds 3y ago
Should do the same for Apple?
jasode 3y ago
>We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product. What's happening is that lowercase "sentence case" titles have become more popular and normalized so repeated exposure to that style can cause a subconscious heuristic of "Capitalized letter signifies a Brand Name or Proper Noun". You can try to advise people not to assume that but it doesn't change the type of "sentence case" titles people are now repeatedly exposed to. The New York Times still uses "Title Case" but a lot of other newspapers switched to lowercase sentence case. Washington Post switched in 2009. And Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, etc all followed. Other popular websites with lowercase titles include Vox, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, etc.
- yamakadi 3y ago
  Given how Microsoft has been putting OpenAI models all over their products, I was 100% certain the title referred to including ChatGPT in Microsoft Teams and only surprised it wasn’t called Co-Pilot for Teams. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m the only one.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I've preferred it ever since I learned the APA reference format, which uses it.
KolenCh 3y ago
Why should the sentence be capitalized in the first place? A quick scan on other submissions seems to indicate it is not true, at least for longer sentence. Why should a shorter sentence be then? Claiming it is a title wouldn’t win the argument either. As it is not a rule that titles must have title casing. Both (title case vs first letter capital only) are valid typography of a title in English.
Frost1x 3y ago
>We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product. We shouldn’t but many of us do. As a title word, there’s ambiguity if it’s a proper noun or not given title styling. Given the context in this case (HN, OpenAI, ChatGPT) it was pretty difficult for my brain to not assume it was referring to Microsoft Teams so it baited me in, perhaps unintentionally. I’m not too upset about it because I knew that going in but none the less, a quick read of the title should make it obvious to call it “ChatGPT for Collaboration” or something of that nature.
- F7F7F7 3y ago
  When is the last time Microsoft released an AI product that wasn’t branded as Co-Pilot?
throwaway13623 3y ago
In this case the original title is "ChatGPT for teams", so the headline was actually editorialized when it was submitted, which is discouraged by HN guidelines. Normally it would be ok to capitallize words to match what many other US publications use, but this capitalization introduces confusion. I can only speak for myself, but I made the assumption that this was an integration with MS Teams. This would have been avoided if the original title was kept.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > I made the assumption that this was an integration with MS Teams. "ChatGPT for Microsoft Teams", marketed under the name Copilot, has been a Microsoft Teams feature for a while. What new thing did you expect when you read this?
  - throwaway13623 3y ago
    I don't follow the news closely, so I was not aware that Copilot is based on ChatGPT or that MS had already integrated Copilot with Teams.
- IlliOnato 3y ago
  Title case in unavoidably mentally taxing. It's trivial to convert sentence case to title case, but highly non-trivial in general to convert title case to sentence case (I know, I write code to do this :-)) To do it right, context, or even general intelligence is required. Basically, converting to Title Case looses information (capitalization) that can be important. Title case was invented when there were much limited typographical options than now, to emphasize, well, titles. On a web page, there are so many better ways to do it, there is no reason to preserve the archaic convention. To my eye it does not even look that nice...
bottled_poe 3y ago
We shouldn’t, but we do. Get over it and accept reality.
outside415 3y ago
I thought it was referring to MS teams initially too.
- sharken 3y ago
  Same here. Using the correct lowercase word "teams" would enable everyone to focus on the product. Anything else is just wasting time.
hammock 3y ago
We shouldn't. However a style guide that requires Title Case for a digital element that is very clearly a title (made clear by the various web design in which it appears) is outdated, and sentence case is more appropriate
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by lwhi 3y ago

I disagree. We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product. If a reference to a product is intended, we should clarify that association some other way; i.e. MS Teams.

tgv 3y ago

The reading process is automatic. It's quite likely that capitalized "Teams" is read by may as the product name. And it's reasonable, because in most daily contexts, "teams" refers to actual "teams" and "Teams" refers to the product. Nobody (including you) is going to teach them to stop doing that. Adapting a rather dumb capitalization rule is a lot easier. I do agree that editors should read their topics critically and add disambiguating text (if possible and permitted).

codetrotter 3y ago
Teams is a very generic product name. Microsoft can live with the consequences of that. When I read the headline, I was not thinking of MS Teams. Because I only use MS Teams a few rare times a year. Mainly I use Zoom. But even if OpenAI had an article that with the rules of headline capitalization of HN ended up reading “Dall-E adds Zoom Feature” I would have imagined that it was about being able to zoom into pictures. Not automatically assumed that it had anything to do with Zoom. Even though I use Zoom almost every day.
- gbalduzzi 3y ago
  > Teams is a very generic product name. Microsoft can live with the consequences of that. Quite the contrary, Microsoft earns free advertisement from this. The problem is for the people that misunderstand the heading, not for Microsoft Ok, you would understand it correctly even the Zoom example. So? Heading should be optimized for the most possible amount of people, there is a clear possibility that a lot of people misunderstand the title, so why not simply edit it? In that case neither you nor anyone else would understand something wrong
  - F7F7F7 3y ago
    The vast majority of people aren’t going to make the association. Even in the HN demo. I think people are vastly over estimating Microsoft’s ownership over ‘Teams’. Even within a tech context. Plus, everything we’ve seen from Microsoft in their partnership with OpenAI has been Co-Pilot. Which is why I use MS Teams daily and did not make the connection.
    - jorvi 3y ago
      You are wrong and the vast majority of people are making the association. I showed the title to five colleagues and all of them assumed it referred to Teams the product. Not to mention the overwhelming majority of people in these threads.
      - IlliOnato 3y ago
        Well, perhaps they meant "vast majority of people that count", which for them includes F7F7F7, F7F7F7, and of course F7F7F7! :-)
    - IlliOnato 3y ago
      How do you know about "vast majority of people"? Did you run a survey? I for one also thought it was Microsoft Teams in the heading. If a heading misleads even a fraction of readership, for no apparent reason (what is the benefit of having a title in Title Case?), maybe it's better that the heading is changed, no?

manojlds 3y ago

Should do the same for Apple?

jasode 3y ago

>We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product. What's happening is that lowercase "sentence case" titles have become more popular and normalized so repeated exposure to that style can cause a subconscious heuristic of "Capitalized letter signifies a Brand Name or Proper Noun". You can try to advise people not to assume that but it doesn't change the type of "sentence case" titles people are now repeatedly exposed to. The New York Times still uses "Title Case" but a lot of other newspapers switched to lowercase sentence case. Washington Post switched in 2009. And Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, etc all followed. Other popular websites with lowercase titles include Vox, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, etc.

yamakadi 3y ago
Given how Microsoft has been putting OpenAI models all over their products, I was 100% certain the title referred to including ChatGPT in Microsoft Teams and only surprised it wasn’t called Co-Pilot for Teams. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m the only one.
nerdponx 3y ago
I've preferred it ever since I learned the APA reference format, which uses it.

KolenCh 3y ago

Why should the sentence be capitalized in the first place? A quick scan on other submissions seems to indicate it is not true, at least for longer sentence. Why should a shorter sentence be then? Claiming it is a title wouldn’t win the argument either. As it is not a rule that titles must have title casing. Both (title case vs first letter capital only) are valid typography of a title in English.

Frost1x 3y ago

>We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product. We shouldn’t but many of us do. As a title word, there’s ambiguity if it’s a proper noun or not given title styling. Given the context in this case (HN, OpenAI, ChatGPT) it was pretty difficult for my brain to not assume it was referring to Microsoft Teams so it baited me in, perhaps unintentionally. I’m not too upset about it because I knew that going in but none the less, a quick read of the title should make it obvious to call it “ChatGPT for Collaboration” or something of that nature.

F7F7F7 3y ago
When is the last time Microsoft released an AI product that wasn’t branded as Co-Pilot?

throwaway13623 3y ago

In this case the original title is "ChatGPT for teams", so the headline was actually editorialized when it was submitted, which is discouraged by HN guidelines. Normally it would be ok to capitallize words to match what many other US publications use, but this capitalization introduces confusion. I can only speak for myself, but I made the assumption that this was an integration with MS Teams. This would have been avoided if the original title was kept.

randomdata 3y ago
> I made the assumption that this was an integration with MS Teams. "ChatGPT for Microsoft Teams", marketed under the name Copilot, has been a Microsoft Teams feature for a while. What new thing did you expect when you read this?
- throwaway13623 3y ago
  I don't follow the news closely, so I was not aware that Copilot is based on ChatGPT or that MS had already integrated Copilot with Teams.
IlliOnato 3y ago
Title case in unavoidably mentally taxing. It's trivial to convert sentence case to title case, but highly non-trivial in general to convert title case to sentence case (I know, I write code to do this :-)) To do it right, context, or even general intelligence is required. Basically, converting to Title Case looses information (capitalization) that can be important. Title case was invented when there were much limited typographical options than now, to emphasize, well, titles. On a web page, there are so many better ways to do it, there is no reason to preserve the archaic convention. To my eye it does not even look that nice...

bottled_poe 3y ago

We shouldn’t, but we do. Get over it and accept reality.

outside415 3y ago

I thought it was referring to MS teams initially too.

sharken 3y ago
Same here. Using the correct lowercase word "teams" would enable everyone to focus on the product. Anything else is just wasting time.

hammock 3y ago

We shouldn't. However a style guide that requires Title Case for a digital element that is very clearly a title (made clear by the various web design in which it appears) is outdated, and sentence case is more appropriate

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]