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.
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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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)