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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
by roger_ 2y 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.
- 1dom 2y agoI 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 :(
- jiggawatts 2y agoIt'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.
- bowsamic 2y agoWell at least it makes it easy to know who to avoid
- alchemist1e9 2y ago> 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.
- saghm 2y agoThe 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.
- bowsamic 2y ago> 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 I'm a bit confused about this. Do people turn off auto capitalisation on their phones? I very rarely have to press shift on my phone
- saghm 2y agoI hadn't considered that. My best guess is that it was originally an intentional decision based on consistency with nouns that people might have mid-sentence that they can't rely on autocorrect to capitalize properly.
- meowface 2y agoI and everyone I know turns it off. On many platforms and in many cultures, capitalization often implies Solemness or even rudeness in 1-on-1 conversations, and otherwise comes across as being out of touch in other kinds of communication.
- bowsamic 2y agoI’ve never encountered anyone turning it off. I avoid socialising with people who think it’s rude to use capitalisation.
- meowface 2y agoTwitter 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.
- llm_nerd 2y ago>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.
- meowface 2y agoMost people on my feed do. It's true that professionals, executives, and public intellectuals generally don't use lowercase and that Sam is trying to normalize that, but my main point was that the medium matters. Lowercase looks ridiculous for longform essays and normal for short messages and microblog posts.
- albedoa 2y ago> Not in science. Not in AI. Not in maths or politics or entertainment or media. That is the professional Twitter class and is not at all representative of the norm. Click through to the replies. Sentence case is probably in the vast minority. I promise you that it is neither a fad nor started with the AI bro.
- jiggawatts 2y agoBlack turtlenecks existed before Steve Jobs wore them.
- yapyap 2y ago[dead]
- 4ggr0 2y agoi 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.
- marssaxman 2y agoWhen 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.
- 4ggr0 2y agoyour 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.
- bowsamic 2y ago> EDIT: people are seriously so emotionally invested in capitalization that i get downvoted into minus, jeez. I find it weird that you would be surprised that people care about the quality of textual communication
- 4ggr0 2y agomaybe 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 :)
- tomsmeding 2y ago
- msikora 2y agoThat is so incredibly dumb. I can get it in a tweet, but please, please, please properly capitalize in anything longer than a few words!
- treetalker 2y agoGraham's Hierarchy, in "How to Disagree": https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- MrMcCall 2y agoYeah, people should wake up to what people are really saying.
- Gormo 2y agoCapitalization 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PhilippGille 2y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-capital-letters-why-gen-z-loves-lowercase https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
- bowsamic 2y agoWell I will fight this trend to the death. Thankfully I don't like to surround myself with philistines
- meowface 2y agoThe 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.
- marssaxman 2y agoSo "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.
- bowsamic 2y ago> for everything aside from essays, articles, papers, long emails, and some percentage of multi-paragraph site comment That’s already the only stuff worth reading and always has been. No loss then
- jppope 2y agoLanguage 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.
- bicx 2y agoIt'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.
- jppope 2y agoIts just a convention. You just get used to it. Whether we like it or not, written language is heading that way. Readers don't generally read letters in words anyway, they read the whole word after a certain literacy level has been achieved.
- meowface 2y agoI think capitalization will slowly go by the wayside in most media, but one hill I'll always die on is punctuation. "i'll go" vs. "ill go"... the latter is just too crude. Many gen Z/alpha do omit it, though.
- sodapopcan 2y agoAs 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.
- timdellinger 2y agoan 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.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> [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.
- recursive 2y ago> There is no such thing as "two spaces" in HTML, so good luck with that. Code point 160 followed by 32. In other words ` ` will do it.
- nomel 2y agoThere'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 https://unicode-explorer.com/c/3000
- agalunar 2y agoBelying the name somewhat, I believe U+3000 is specifically meant for use with Sinoform logographs, having the size of a (fullwidth character) cell, and so it makes little sense in other contexts.
- handsclean 2y agoThis 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.
- aidenn0 2y agoIt doesn't change the point of your comment necessarily, but as far as TFA goes, the author was teaching a University course in 2015, so is highly unlikely to be Gen Z.
- Gormo 2y agoKids also pee in their pants at a rate vastly exceeding that of adults, but they usually stop doing it before they hit 30.
- omoikane 2y agoThis 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07916 - Natural Language Understanding with Distributed Representation
- elevatedastalt 2y agoYeah, 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.
- mempko 2y agoAt least for now, maybe this is the best way to tell if a text is written by an LLM or a person. An LLM will capitalize!
- jgalt212 2y agoI think he knows he did something non-standard, as his previous post from seven weeks ago has correct capitalization. https://kyunghyuncho.me/bye-felix/ https://kyunghyuncho.me/bye-felix/