Am I the only one who finds the Sam Altman-esque 'all lowercase except for proper nouns like Linux but not including the pronoun i' writing style unbearable to read?

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Of course annoyances are annoying, but they're also distracting, and they tend to get stuck at the top of threads, choking out more interesting conversation.)

I definitely find it difficult, cognitively, for long-form writing. It's also the second time recently I've seen all-lowercase blog-post-length content, after previously having never seen it, so I wonder if something is happening culturally to pull text-message style formatting up into the rank of published content.

It's fine in tweets and even HN/Reddit comments, but it becomes a tacky affectation when used in longer form, deliberate content.

No. It's obnoxious signaling/tribal adherence. Relevant [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4ifVvgZU58&t=623s

I waste brain cycles correcting the author's formatting mistakes while simultaneously trying to understand the meaning. Thus I read slower, but not the productive kind of slow reading—I am not contemplating the concepts more deeply. I am slowed down by a lazy lack of editing, for no gain.

Not sure what it has to do with Sam Altman though.

it's pretentiousness thinly disguised as modesty.

trust me.

It's cool if you're on desktop Slack or Messenger or something between friends, but making a conscious choice to go into your phone's settings and turn capitalization off for everything you do is a bit weird and over the top.

Seems to be a trend though now to do it everywhere in public. I've seen the htmx author do that and the guy who wrote the second forked version of opencode.

You can use your ad blocker to lowercase the entire internet like this

  *##body:style(text-transform: lowercase !important;)

It's something I experimented with as an edgy teenager. It's not something I'd expect from an adult.

I do it a lot, do me a favor and don't attribute it to Sam Altman since some of us have been doing this for a long time. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it, but you also don't need to be patronizing and close-minded about how others choose to express themselves.

i tend to draft everything lowercase, and then go back and uppercase things depending on how much of a formal vibe i'm going for. capitalization rarely helps me formulate an idea, and so my writing often splits into phases: (1) formulation, (2) polish.

also, it's worth noting that proper capitalization does not automatically yield text worth reading. from that perspective, i like lower case text as a form of rebellion against the artifice of rules; any rebellion against particular aesthetics is fair game in my book. more generally, i'm skeptical of process advocacy in cases where the process seems to be done for its own sake.

on the flip side, good grammar helps me parse sentences, so i do sympathize with arguments in its favor.

I didn't know that was a thing. It's purpose seems to be different for the sake of being different.

i like it. maybe because i grew up with phones and texting but having perfect punctuation reads very formal to me, and if im reading a personal blog post i assume its casual reading. if i get a text that ends in a period mark, i assume the person typing it is MAD. i also just like lowercase glyphs more they look more pleasing to me

No.

Agreed. Honestly - life's too short to read a text the author couldn't even be bothered to capitalize correctly.

Weird. I actually never noticed that while reading the entire article. And I'm almost 50. No idea what that says about me.

"I" being capitalized is one of the most weird quirks of the English language.

for reasons I don't (want to) understand, lowercase i and psychopathic credit stealing prompting seem to yield best results for llms... e.g. "i want xyz how do i do it, ok please do so", not "I'm trying to do xyz. Could you guide me through?"

Tell me you didn't grow up on IRC and AIM without telling me you didn't grow up on IRC and AIM

I'd closed the tab by the end of the first sentence. If the author can't be bothered, then neither can I. I tend to find people who do this have a superiority complex, they think they're so much better than everyone else that they're justified in offloading their own tiny cognitive load on to everybody else.

i hate this writing style so much. i have to do extra work fighting autocorrect to make it seem like i just rolled out of bed and typed it out on my phone. i am so smart, see, i don't care about Big Establishment Grammar, my ideas are so good it will pierce through

your brain is only fighting it because it's expecting capitalization, the same way parens put new lisp users off and javascript has difficulty shedding its semicolons; it's all just struggling to let go of something that was drilled into you.