I think it might be adults ignoring established grammar rules to make a statement about how they identify a part of a group of AI evangelists.
Kind of like how teenagers do nonsensical things like where thick heavy clothing regardless of the weather to indicate how much of a badass them and their other badass coat wearing friends are.
To normal humans, they look ridiculous, but they think they're cool and they're not harming anyone so I just leave them to it.
That’s what it is. A shibboleth. They’re broadcasting group affiliation. The fact that it grates on the outgroup is intentional. If it wasn’t costly to adopt it wouldn’t be as honest of a signal.
it's meant to convey a casual, laid back tone - it's not that big of a deal.
Like look at the sentence "it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible." The casing actually conflicts with the tone of the sentence. It's not written like a casual text - if the sentence was "ppl talking about this are crazy" then sure, the casing would match the tone. But the stodgy sentence structure and use of more precise vocabulary like "veered" indicates that more effort has gone into this than the casing suggests.
Fair play if the author just wants to have a style like this. It's his prerogative to do so, just as anyone can choose to communicate exclusively in leetspeak, or use all caps everywhere, or write everything like script dialogue, whatever. Or if it's a tool to signal that he's part of an in-group with certain people who do the same, great. But he is sacrificing readability by ignoring conventions.
I agree with the sentiment too, or maybe I am getting old :P
Some people are being lazy, they will get less attention, ideally
The new generation of tiktok / podcast "independent journalists" is a serious issue / case of what you describe. They are many doing zero journalism and repeating propaganda, some paid by countries like Russia (i.e. Tim Pool and that whole crew that got caught and never face consequences)
fixed it for you! now it’s in a casual, laid back tone.
Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes, observations), while for older generations it was almost always associated with a modernist aesthetic and thus appeared primarily in functional or environmental text (restaurant menus, signage, your business card, bloomingdales, etc.). It may be interesting to note that the inverse ALL CAPS style conveyed modernity in the last tech revolution (the evolution of the Microsoft logo, for example).
I eventually ran into so much resistance and hate about it that I decided conforming to writing in a way that people aren't actively hostile to was a better approach to communicating my thoughts than getting hung up on an aesthetic choice.
Having started out as a counterculture type, that will always be in my blood, but I've relearned this lesson over and over again in many situations-- it's usually better to focus on clear communication and getting things done unless your non-standard format is a critical part of whatever message you're trying to send at the moment.
-- inspired by e.e. cummings!
Surprisingly, I have seen lower case AI slop - like anything else, can be prompted and made to happen!
I (a millenial) carried over the no-caps style from IRC (where IME it was and remains nearly universal) to ICQ to $CURRENT_IM_NETWORK, so for me TFA reads like a chat log (except I guess for the period at the end of each paragraph, that shouldn’t be there). Funnily enough, people older than me who started IMing later than me don’t usually follow this style—I suspect automatic capitalization on mobile phones is to blame.
Can make sense on twitter to convey personality, but an entire blog post written in lower case is a bit much.
At the same time, in my language (Latvian) you/yours should also get capitalized in polite text corespondence, like formal letters and such. Odd.
Ultimately, the author forces an unnecessary cognitive burden on the reader by removing a simple form of navigation; in that regard, it feels like a form of disrespect.
It does read as a little out of place in a serious post like the OP though.
It is on a human seeing level, harder to parse. If they don't want to use proper grammar and punctuation, it reflects on their seriousness and how serious I should take their writing (not at all because I'm not going to read difficult to parse text) The same goes for choosing bad fonts or colors that don't contrast enough
It was the norm on irc/icq/aim chats but also, later, as the house style for blogs like hackaday.
Now I read it as one would an hear an accent (such as a New England Maritime accent) that low-key signifies this person has been around the block.
Even more recently is a minor signifier that this text was less likely generated by llm.
Over the last 5 years or so I've been working on making my writing more direct. Less "five dollar words" and complex sentences. My natural voice is... prolix.
But great prose from great authors can compress a lot of meaning without any of that stuff. They can show restraint.
If I had to guess, no capitalization looks visually unassuming and off-the-cuff. Humble. Maybe it deflects some criticism, maybe it just helps with visual recognition that a piece of writing is more of a text message than an essay, so don't think too hard about it.
It’s okay to say ‘this was too long’. Prolix???
Ironically, it would take a lot of effort for me to type without capitalization and also undo capitalization auto-correct. It would not come quickly nor naturally.
Jerry: Yeah, like a farm boy.
That early sentence "i’ll be vulnerable here (screenshots or it didn't happen) and share exactly what i've actually set up:" reads pretty clawdbot to me.
that way I can continue the same sentence in the next message if necessary
And if I need to start a new sentence I start that message with a capital.
It's always useful to check oneself and know that languages are constantly evolving, and that's A Good Thing.
“It’s hard to learn how to spell. It takes practice, patience and a lot of dedication.”
^ In a proportional font the difference in width between ‘ll’ and ‘ ‘ is noticeable. In a monotypes font, two spaces after a period provide a visual cue that that space is different.
I think this is why this all lowercase style of writing pisses me off so much. Readability used to be important enough to create controversy - nobody cares anymore. But, I didn’t care enough to read the whole article so maybe I missed something.
It's not a new trend, I'm surprised you never noticed it. It dates back to at least a decade. It's mostly used to signal informal/hipster speak, i.e. you're writing as you would type in a chat window (or Twitter), without care for punctuation or syntax.
It already trends among a certain generation of people.
I hate it, needless to say. Anything that impedes my reading of mid/long form text is unwelcome.
Probably due to social circles/age.
> I hate it, needless to say.
It certainly invokes a innate sense of wrongness to me, but I encourage you (and myself) to accept the natural evolution of language and not become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today.
I think "accept everything new" is as closed-minded as staunchly fighting every change.
The genuinely open-minded thing to do is accept that some changes are for the worse, some for the better, think critically about the "why", and pick your battles.
It comes from people growing up on smartphone chats where the kids apparently don’t care to press Shift.
my reasoning is that i don’t want identifiable markers for what device im writing from. so all auto-* (capitalization, correct, etc.) features are disabled so that i have raw input
JUST IMAGINE A FACEBOOK POST THAT IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS AND THEN INVERT THAT IMAGINATION.
Later in the journal my writing "improved". Instead I might write, "Today I played in the sandpit with my friends."
I vaguely remember my teacher telling me I needed to write in full sentences, uses the correct punctuation, etc. That was the point of these journals – to learn how to write.
But looking back on it I started to question if I actually learnt how to write? Or did I just learn how to write how I was expected to?
If I understood what I was saying from the start and I was communicating that message in fewer words and with less complexity, was it wrong? And if so wrong in what sense?
You see this with kids generally when they learn to speak. Kids speak very directly. They first learn how to functionally communicate, then how to communicate in a socially acceptable way, using more more words.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think the fact you can drop capitals and communicate just as effectively is kinda interesting. If it wasn't for how we are taught to write, perhaps the better question to ask here is why there are even two types of every letter?
The general idea is deliberately doing something triggering some people and if the person you're interacting with is triggered by what you're doing, they are not worthy of your attention because of their ignorance to see what you're doing beyond the form of the thing you're doing.
While I respect the idea, I find it somewhat flawed, to be honest.
Edit: Found it!
Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028036
Blog post in question: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html
I've started using it professionally because it signals "I wrote this by hand, not AI, so you can safely pay attention to it."
Even though in the past I never would have done it.
In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out.
Do you mean like Teams AI autocomplete or people purposefully copying AI-generated messages into chats?
Every older generation says that about the next.
People who don't adhere to professional standards find fewer job opportunities and lower pay. The market will work things out
I viscerally remember starting my day with my inbox saying “cum c me”… I know what you’re trying to do, bro, but damn.
We are young and old all at the same time.
Normally I can ignore it, but the font on this blog makes it hard to distinguish where sentences start and end (the period is very small and faint).