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Comment by yunnpp | Hacker News Reader

Some of us capitalize the first letter of every sentence. Wild.

I feel like the AI backlash is creating a rise in "authenticity signaling", cheap public displays of not using AI. Much like virtue signaling, it's lacking in substance and presents as an annoying affectation to people outside of the target in-group.

Good quality well organised and accessible knowledve on a staggering array of topics is at everyones fingertips via wikipedia. Yet, still, I frequently find myself discussing things in depth with friends and collegues that we could easily just lookup and confirm. We dont do this though, because in the process of trying to establish truth using only what is known to us as a group, often creates far more interesting lines of inquery and insight. These are frequently far more potent and useful than anything we can lookup and sometimes are novel enough we cannot find anything like it online. This can only happen because we all applied ourselves and the cognitive varient we embody.

So, the problem with AI is that it is a regression to some mean of minds + corporate bias introduced. It contributes at best one person worth of input variance and is wholly incapable of contributing efficiently or effectively. AI does not contribute effectively and units of insight offered per word read is abysmal for AI text, and so carries enormoys cognitive burden to refine the slop into the simole coherent point actually made, if there even is one, which you often don't know until the effort in refining has been expended. So, we introduce a lot of labor to discussuons by including AI when best case it may offer about as much variance a single person who is not willfully ignorant can offer.

So, I imagine I am not alone in this, and when I talk with humans, what I want is their mental model of the world to contribute, not some corporate mouthpiece i could query directly if that's what I wanted. AI is not exactly inaccessible.

So, i think most are hypervigilant in pointing out AI in their communities for a variety of reasons , but a common theme will be that those who use AI to do their thinking are a single entity in terms of what they actually add to the discussion, and spread over many people it is the age old spam problem, a single mind having disproportionate signal strength in a discussion where all voices should carry equal energy.

Yes, you can also see an increasing number of typos, which I suspect would have been corrected pre-AI. What's interesting is that all these signals are really easy to fake with AI as well.

I don't think this has a lot to do with AI. People from certain circles wrote like this at least since tumblr, then it got trendy on Twitter, etc. There's probably no deep meaning here.

I guess it's a way to convey informality and rejection of "the norm" sacrificing legibility.

It's probably a way to express freedom, like the freedom of just refusing to consume unreadable walls of text that disrespect the reader. Freedom goes both ways.

not OP, but it's much simpler for me: when i edited/reordered a sentence, i hated when i had to fix the capitalization. and it's also faster to type without messing with the shift key.

eventually it became a habit and started to leak into more and more of my writing, including public writing. if i wrote something like a blog post, i would still capitalize it, though.

.and some are putting the dot at the beginning of sentences with all lower case, like in Lojban .it makes much more sense if you think about it

(but i'm half joking here. normally i just don't capitalize, only the names.)

Hmm, that does compensate somewhat.

Let's say the average sentence is 17.5 words, with the average word length being 4.5 characters. Not capitalizing the first word is only a 1.27% character error rate, on average. Not too bad. ;)

The journal is about a thing this person does privately for fun.

The writing style is clearly not meant for others to read either. They just did stream of consciousness out of their brain and didn't proofread. It's not meant for external consumption.

Capitalization is something you do out of respect for your reader, to make things easier for them. If you aren't intending others to read your writing, then there's no one to disrespect, so why bother?

> It's not meant for external consumption.

The blog author and HN user who posted are the same person. It was meant for external consumption.

Well, it was written without care for those who might read it at any rate.

I find that capitalization certainly appeals to me more, as someone who reads a lot, but a lack of capitalization doesn't make it any harder for me to read a text, so I'm confused what the issue is here.

it's an intentional display of informality by the writer, i imagine. i do the same a lot of the time.

It's grammatically incorrect and annoying.

prescriptivisT!

(said in the same tone as "splitter!" in Life of Brian)

Legitimate curiosity, what about capitalization selection annoys you? It feels like a stylistic choice that has no meaningful effect on readability.

Deliberately making sentences harder to parse (by, e.g., bad grammar, bad spelling, lack of capitalization, lack of vowels, leet speak) is annoying.

Non-capitalization may not seem like a huge decrease in readability, but every little bit counts.

It makes visually scanning the sentences harder, capital letter is bigger than period. I mean, sure, it is readable, but I do prefer regular text, you know, like in a book or newspaper.

Well, that's your problem. You're scanning.

something that does meaningfully affect readability is WRITING IN ALL CAPS. you're almost guaranteed to have encountered the visually distinct shapes of lowercased words thousands more times than you've encountered the shapes of their uppercased counterparts

It slows down my reading speed. I A/B tested my page reading speed on my kindle a few years ago

no it's not :)

at least, i don't think so heh

Believe it or not, some of us enjoy reading human-generated grammatically incorrect stuff more than correctly generated slop.

Slop content and grammatical presentation are separate concepts. Grammatical correctness and creative sentence structure are also separate. One can have an interesting structure whilst still being correct, therein lies the creativity.

I'm just too tired of reading ai generated grammatically correct content. The linked article did not annoy me at all, in fact I did not even pay attention to the capitalization until I saw comments about it on hacker news. YMM obviously V.

I guess we’re so used to autocorrect doing that, so that disabling it is a flex now?

You guys are using autocorrect?

more or less, but a lot of people have been doing this for decades. to do it sanely on a phone requires adding lowercased words to your dictionary like i'm, i'd, i'll, and i've. a lot of us also leave off the trailing period

that's model talk! get 'im boys!

What makes you think Erica is an 'im?

Who the fuck is Erica?

You should probably know?

No?

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