Comment by roger_
2 days 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.
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 :(
Graham's Hierarchy, in "How to Disagree": https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Yeah, people should wake up to what people are really saying.
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.
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.
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Well at least it makes it easy to know who to avoid
That is so incredibly dumb. I can get it in a tweet, but please, please, please properly capitalize in anything longer than a few words!
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.
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> 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.
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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
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
Well I will fight this trend to the death. Thankfully I don't like to surround myself with philistines
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.
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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.
Kids also pee in their pants at a rate vastly exceeding that of adults, but they usually stop doing it before they hit 30.
It 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.
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.
( 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 )] )
> [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 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.
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I think he knows he did something non-standard, as his previous post from seven weeks ago has correct capitalization.
https://kyunghyuncho.me/bye-felix/
At 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!
Please ChatGPT, decapitalize that comment above for me
Unless you tell it not to...
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.
Its 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.
I 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.
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).
Be thankful you haven't encountered the clusterfuck that is the Go Language :P