How I use my terminal

The entire blog post being in lowercase distracted me more than I thought it would.

It's also interesting to see that the author themselves are clearly fighting against their own instinct to use uppercase: the first 2 items in the "here's what happens in that video:" list use uppercase.

Huh interesting, I didn't even notice that

that's voice-to-text on iOS, i haven't found a way to turn off the auto-caps yet.

It's a stylistic choice you sometimes see people commit to. Porter Robinson (a DJ) does the same thing, and it's always struck me as a bit indulgent.

Kids these days. That's how many of us who grew up online in the 90s to early aughts have been doing things for 30+ years.

I think many of us abandoned it when we went professional. Or abandoned it in those contexts but still do it in others. I don't do it on HN, clearly - but I do it almost everywhere else. It's much more natural to me to skip capitals.

I believe there was also a period in the transition to ubiquitous smartphones where it wasn't an option to turn off auto-caps, or maybe there just wasn't the fine-grained control of which auto-correct you use on mobile devices that there is now. I suspect that killed some all-lowercase habits. I think that's why I ended up with a "normal" style on HN where I use caps and normal punctuation (I don't usually use periods for sentences that terminate a paragraph outside of HN.)

I'm 40, but the only place I have ever abandoned proper casing is in the specific case of single-sentence text/chatroom messages (and later, 4chan posts), where I also omit the period. And even then, I only abandon sentence-casing - e.g. "I", proper nouns, etc are still capitalized. I never adopted that style in other places though, like forums. And I'm definitely not used to seeing entire chunks of prose in this more extreme version of that format (no uppercases at all, rather than just no sentence-casing).

Well I certainly didn't say all of us! Most people our age didn't live their whole life on forums/IRC/etc and even those who did, didn't necessarily pick that up. But also many of us did! I don't recall any forums back then where everyone did it; but I don't recall any where nobody did either.

I am with you when it comes to texts for humans.

However, for speed, I have recently abandoned capitalization and punctuation when interacting with LLMs, unless they are critical for clarity. I wonder if this is why many folks in the AI crowd write everything in lowercase.

I was under the impression that LLMs do tokenize upper and lower case differently so prompting all in lowercase would yield different results. Is this incorrect?

All writing is about managing the "surprise" budget. Strictly following the rules of grammar (subject to the specific dialect and field) minimizes surprise, so the author can spend more budget on (and the reader still has the focus for) the interesting part. Deliberately using a non-default style draws the reader's attention to that particular point.

Yeah, it seems immature to me.

I used to write like that when I was a teenager. I guess it's a subtle way of rebelling against "the system". But seeing adults do that, especially in a professional setting, is cringey.

I never wrote full sentences or capitalised in my msn messenger convos. I'm not sure if I always did, but certainly at some point I started capitalising my IRC messages. Still don't always write in full sentences, though.

For me it wasn't about being professional, it was just about learning to type. As my typing speed improved it just became second nature to capitalise where appropriate. In other words, I capitalise everywhere out of laziness.

But why are you doing it in the first place? This is a genuine question, what do you gain by actively fighting against proper writing rules which aid in readability and comprehension? What’s the rationale for making it harder for users to follow your post?

I know I’m far from alone in having skipped your post entirely upon opening. Nothing personal, but I have yet to find a single post by anyone written in this style where the content was worth the effort of parsing non-existing capitalisation.

You go through the trouble of adding aids like syntax highlighting, lists, coloured titles, and even differentiated notes and timestamps. Presumably those are there to help the reader. But then you throw away a lot of readability by making everything lowercase.