4 ms·

I concluded long ago that anyone who writes without capitalizing the first letter of their sentences is not worth paying attention to, due to some combination o

by nchmy 6d ago

I concluded long ago that anyone who writes without capitalizing the first letter of their sentences is not worth paying attention to, due to some combination of hubris, delusion, etc... Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight

hollerith 6d ago
I don't mind as long as the author follow the other rules, and this author does: he capitalizes the word "I" and proper nouns, e.g., "Sunil".
- swiftcoder 6d ago
  > proper nouns, e.g., "Sunil" it's kind of rude not to capitalise people's names, regardless of ones' stylistic preferences
  - layer8 6d ago
    I also consider it rude to not capitalize the start of sentences.
gradus_ad 6d ago
The only letter capitalized is "I"... Telling
- jolmg 6d ago
  No, they also capitalize abbreviations like COVID and PIP. I remember having a phase as a teen where I didn't capitalize the first letter of sentences because it just seemed redundant. Periods are there; why need another signal that another sentence has started? It was like a redundancy = bad phase.
  - spider-mario 6d ago
    Somehow, that reminds me: when I was younger and started learning programming, I had a phase where I seemed to hate most optional whitespace that wasn’t indentation. So each line would be indented to the proper level, but the rest of the line would look like this: SDL_BlitSurface((player1?smallcross:smallcircle),NULL,screen,&curpos);
    - nchmy 6d ago
      iTs aLl thE sAMe to ThE comPuTeR! /s This is a perfect analogy. Just as we have coding standards, we have grammar and punctuation rules so that people can effectively communicate with each other. Anyone who refuses to follow coding standards or punctuation rules is just an asshole. Obviously we relax them based on context - a comment here or text message are different from a blog post which is different from an academic paper. But surely publishing articles/essays on your blog, which you preusmably hope people will read, requires at least some minimal respect for language rules. Evidently this person doesn't feel that way, so they have to accept (whether they do it consciously or not) that some people are just going to lint themselves away from reading it. Not worth the hassle.
      - jolmg 6d ago
        It's their blog. They can write in 1337 if they want.
layer8 6d ago
Indeed, it’s generally not worth the annoyance.
analog8374 6d ago
i voice to text. in hopes of getting the thing to stop capitalizing every third word because it's somebody's trademark, i told it to stop autocapitalizing. So here i am. blame Google
- rpdillon 6d ago
  You probably need a better speech-to-text system then. I type 90% of my comments on HN with FUTO keyboard, which is a local speech to text engine, and it handles capitalization properly most of the time. https://keyboard.futo.tech/ https://keyboard.futo.tech/
rpdillon 6d ago
I kind of feel this way except I have a guy on my team that I actually really respect, that for some reason can't capitalize things. It's just one of those quirks I'm willing to work around because he's otherwise awesome.
- nchmy 6d ago
  What is he writing that doesn't get capitalized? Code comments or entire multi-hundred or thousand line issues, specs, etc? The context matters. Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.

by nchmy 6d ago

hollerith 6d ago

I don't mind as long as the author follow the other rules, and this author does: he capitalizes the word "I" and proper nouns, e.g., "Sunil".

swiftcoder 6d ago
> proper nouns, e.g., "Sunil" it's kind of rude not to capitalise people's names, regardless of ones' stylistic preferences
- layer8 6d ago
  I also consider it rude to not capitalize the start of sentences.

gradus_ad 6d ago

The only letter capitalized is "I"... Telling

jolmg 6d ago
No, they also capitalize abbreviations like COVID and PIP. I remember having a phase as a teen where I didn't capitalize the first letter of sentences because it just seemed redundant. Periods are there; why need another signal that another sentence has started? It was like a redundancy = bad phase.
- spider-mario 6d ago
  Somehow, that reminds me: when I was younger and started learning programming, I had a phase where I seemed to hate most optional whitespace that wasn’t indentation. So each line would be indented to the proper level, but the rest of the line would look like this: SDL_BlitSurface((player1?smallcross:smallcircle),NULL,screen,&curpos);
  - nchmy 6d ago
    iTs aLl thE sAMe to ThE comPuTeR! /s This is a perfect analogy. Just as we have coding standards, we have grammar and punctuation rules so that people can effectively communicate with each other. Anyone who refuses to follow coding standards or punctuation rules is just an asshole. Obviously we relax them based on context - a comment here or text message are different from a blog post which is different from an academic paper. But surely publishing articles/essays on your blog, which you preusmably hope people will read, requires at least some minimal respect for language rules. Evidently this person doesn't feel that way, so they have to accept (whether they do it consciously or not) that some people are just going to lint themselves away from reading it. Not worth the hassle.
    - jolmg 6d ago
      It's their blog. They can write in 1337 if they want.

layer8 6d ago

Indeed, it’s generally not worth the annoyance.

analog8374 6d ago

i voice to text. in hopes of getting the thing to stop capitalizing every third word because it's somebody's trademark, i told it to stop autocapitalizing. So here i am. blame Google

rpdillon 6d ago
You probably need a better speech-to-text system then. I type 90% of my comments on HN with FUTO keyboard, which is a local speech to text engine, and it handles capitalization properly most of the time. https://keyboard.futo.tech/ https://keyboard.futo.tech/

rpdillon 6d ago

I kind of feel this way except I have a guy on my team that I actually really respect, that for some reason can't capitalize things. It's just one of those quirks I'm willing to work around because he's otherwise awesome.

nchmy 6d ago
What is he writing that doesn't get capitalized? Code comments or entire multi-hundred or thousand line issues, specs, etc? The context matters. Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.