alt Hacker NewsAn 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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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
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.
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.
I think he knows he did something non-standard, as his previous post from seven weeks ago has correct capitalization.
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!
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.
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 :(