We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest.
Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm.
How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).
Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".
Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.
But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.
Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.
In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
Hah. I think of it as a slime mold. There's the main body (bodies?), but it's always shooting out little bits of itself that try weird stuff - founding underwater communes, or climbing mountains in Crocs or something. Most of these offshoots don't have that much of an impact, but occasionally one lucks out and discovers America or peanut butter and the main body saunters off that way.
Yeah we find this type of optimization all over nature. Even radiation is important to create noise. We need it in machine learning. A noisy optimizer is critical for generalized learning. Too much noise and you learn nothing but no noise and you only memorize. So there's a balance
I get the "outliers are useful" thing you're trying to emphasis. But as someone from a mountainous country, please dont "climb[ing] mountains in Crocs", we regularily get media reports of hopelessly underequipped people having to be rescued with a whole team of people, in the middle of the night, with horrible weather, usually also endangering the people that do the rescue. I guess what I am trying to say is, there is a limit to how silly you can/should be.
I don't understand how this is a power law and not normal. The "long tail" is usually mentioned in a normal distribution being the right-most end of it.
I think you have a misunderstanding because a heavy tail is essentially one that is not exponentially bounded. A long tail being a subclass.
There's kinda a big difference in the characteristics of a normal distribution and power and I think explaining that will really help.
In a normal you have pressure from both ends so that's why you find it in things like height. There's evolutionary pressure to not be too small but also pressure to not be too large. Being tall is advantageous but costly. Technically the distribution never ends (and that's in either direction!). Though you're not going to see micro people nor 100' tall people because the physics gets in the way. Also mind you that normal can't be less than zero.
It is weird to talk about "long tail" with normal distributions and flags should go up when hearing this.
In a power distribution you don't have bounding pressure. So they are scale free. A classic example of this is wealth. It's easier to understand if you ignore the negative case at first, so let's do that (it still works with negative wealth). There's no upper bound to wealth, right? So while most people will be in the main "mode" there is a long tail. We might also say something like "heavy tail" when the variance is even moderate. So this tail is both long and the median value isn't really representative of the distribution. Funny enough, power laws are incredibly common in nature. I'm really not sure why they aren't discussed more.
I think Veritasium did a video on power distributions recently? Might be worth a check.
What is the expected value, of some dude at university spinning dinner plates in the cafeteria? What a silly pointless thing to do! Of course, if you're physics Professor Feynman, you get a Nobel out of it, so do the silly pointless things after all!
If the bongo man taught me anything it's that you should do something for the pursuit itself. The utility can always be found later. But chasing utility first only limits your imagination
> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
When did this writing with no capitalization start to become a thing? I'm seeing it too often now. It's pretentious crap and quickly leads to me thinking that the writer doesn't want to be taken seriously, so why read it?
If you purposely go into your phone settings and turn off auto-capitalization (which is what the kids do, since they're all typing on their phones), isn't it the very definition of pretentiousness? You're going into extra trouble to signify you're part of a clique, while feigning "laid-backness" and "i dont even care bro".
But you do care. You care so much to project your appearance of being cool and that you don't even care that you go through extra trouble to keep it up, even though paradoxically it would be LESS effort to not do it.
I think you are reading to much into kids trying to break norms and trying to be "part of a clique". It's not pretentiosness, it's part of finding yourself. They are also actively trying to get you to not read them because you are old and think they "are not serious" so mission accomplished I guess. And time will tell if these kids will invent something you have to respect. (Spoiler alert, we did and they will to)
I turn off autocapitalization on my phone so I can be consistent with my computers where it IS more effort to use capitalization. I also believe quite dogmatically that computers should not try to be smarter than me, I can press the buttons I intend to press, including the shift key on a phone keyboard.
This is not because I’m super cool, it’s because I’m an old man and I’m still typing in 2025 like I was typing on IRC in 1998 when nocapsing was absolutely dominant.
But if I type in a space where proper capitalization is expected, like HN, I do it (this was typed on my phone with no autocorrect, suggestions or autocapitalization — I know, I’m dumb and my opinions and settings are wrong). If it was my personal blog however I would do whatever I felt like doing.
> as is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either.
Of all fatuous nonsenses I've heard from design "geniuses" over the years, that might take the prize.
We don't look at spoken words, we listen to them. We add audible prosody (both pauses and intonation changes, in particular) to segment our speech. If we were to optimise our spoken language for lip-readers, we might very well choose to add some extra visible segmentation to compensate for the intonation being mostly undetectable.
You could validly claim that capital letters are superfluous given the presence of full stops (and I would disagree and we could debate that), but this argument that capital letters are bad because we don't speak "big sounds" is absurd.
> it is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either
We don't speak big sounds? We also don't speak commas and full stops, but those are still an important part of writing. Trying to get some of the suprasegmental features of speech into low bandwidth text.
I started typing in no caps in most conversation around 2013-2016, when I first started playing League of Legends and using Discord. Other people from this same age bracket as me have similar experiences (if they were "chronically" online) and similar behavior patterns. It's not pretentious imo.
This probably has to do with what kind of Internet milieu you grew up in because to me — grown up on IRC and certain late 90s/early 00s web forums — lowercase everything signals a sort of chill, easygoing humility while properly capsing in a casual setting like chat can feel overbearing, pretentious and self-important.
It probably starts with the habit of writing words without using the Shift key or diacritics. Just to be quick. At least, that’s how I’ve noticed this behavior in myself.
I think Sam Altman popularized it with his tweets during the height of OpenAI, GPT popularity ~2023. Or maybe it was already trending by then but at least for me he was the first among prominent people to be doing it.
Smartphones forced automated capitalization on us, just look at how chatlogs have changed over time. I'd suggest no-capitalization is on the downtrend, but sticks out more because everything is automatically capitalized now.
the lack of capitalization (and occasional omission of punctuation) was already a big thing on tumblr / twitter 10 years ago, especially in some anime and LGBT-adjacent spaces. I don't think jyn got it from Sam Altman, and I don't think he had that big a role in popularizing it.
Most people usually see common scammers writing emails with no capitalization to scam their victims, especially if it is not their first language.
More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.
So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.
I joined a compiler team out of college because it seemed like fun and I'd never worked on compilers before.
I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
I'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?
For me it made the text way more difficult to read. Periods and commas can be sometimes difficult to differentiate for people with poor sight or just on small screens, so having a capital letter next to the dot character is a very relevant visual cue to confirm it was indeed a period and not a comma.
My dev friends used to do this as a sort of inside joke around the office. If you were cool and hip, you wrote emails like this as a way to sort of thumb your nose at the establishment.
I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.
Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.
Everywhere I’ve worked, there’s a funny phenomenon where the people just under the real decision makers use formal language, start emails with salutations and sign them, etc. Whereas the actual decision makers send emails like “can u look in2 this? thx”
I wish non-conformity was more of a thing at points where it actually matters. Your product manager asks you to add invasive user tracking and surveillance? Push back and explain how this makes the world a worse place. Got a ticket to implement a "[yes][ask me later]" dialog [1]? Make a short survey that shows how user hate it. Nobody listens to you? Refuse to comply. The government requires you to take deeply unethical or unlawful actions? Sabotage the feature [2] (or quit/resign).
Performative non-conformance might be e.g. helpful to nurture a culture of critical thinking, but if it is just performative, then it is worthless.
(I write this with no intent to criticize you, burningChrome, or Jyn. You might very well do just that.)
(Also, I'm aware that the ability to push back is very unevenly distributed. I'm addressing those that can afford this agency. And also, non-conformance is spectrum: You can also push back a little without choosing the specific point to be the hill to die on. Every bit counts.)
Gen Z linguistic phenomenon. It's to signify a more authentic or calmer, more personable style rather than an overly literary one. It's kind of nice actually, like talking to a friend about their thoughts.
Yes however I doubt the author was an IRC user. For chats people generay do use lowercase cause it's easier but this article is also about using lowercase outside of chats.
bauhaus in 1925 has been linked in a peer comment.
i've got a 1926 print book is 5 by e e cummings who famously often used lowercase in his prose and poems ... going back earlier than the collection i have.
i do the same, at first naturally because this is how all the cool kids talked on the places of the internet i frequented when i came of age ca. 2000-2005
now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication
- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes
- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos
- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient
all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating
function f(n){n.childNodes.forEach(c=>{c.nodeType===3?c.textContent=c.textContent.replace(/(^|[.!?]\s+)([a-z])/g,(m,s,l)=>s+l.toUpperCase()):c.nodeType===1&&f(c)})}f(document.body)
Thank you, I just did the opposite in Microsoft teams PWA, "text-transform: uppercase;", now I feel like the whole company is mad, everyone using shouty caps at each other, and every message makes me laugh!
I have apparently been in a bubble based on the other commenter saying this was a gen z phenomenon.
Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.
I don't work in programming, but "you can do hard things" applies to my work as well. It drives me nuts when coworkers refer to me as really smart when in fact I'm merely curious. "I have no idea how you did that!" You should ask. That's how I learned it.
In my experience, curiosity and intelligence are very strongly correlated. There is a real gap between people with the curiosity and ability to explore and learn, and people without. This is often handwaved as "motivation" but it's more than just that.
In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
I think part of it is that geniuses gets (or at least feels) rewarded whenever they try learning, while other people might not. For the same amount of effort, the amount of new knowledge gained by other people is fewer than what geniuses can get. Overtime, leaning no longer feels worth it. Thus normal people no longer feels curious while geniuses still do.
People who cannot learn hard things don't have time, or they think they don't have time. Actually they try to fake their way through because they believe it is impossible or at least too late to sort things out properly.
The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.
This is true, you only grow when you have nothing to do. At least, nothing that other people are telling you to do. If there's something you want to learn really bad I highly recommend taking a sabbatical and just spending the whole year learning that topic deeply. You can get to the bleeding edge of most topics in one year of study, especially ones adjacent to what you already know. I did this in my 20s and can't wait for the stars to align to be able to do this again.
This all is good advice. Don't be intimidated, try new things, have fun.
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
I definitely worked with people who were limited by how much they were open to just dive one level deeper. You can wait for someone to explain things to you and tell you what to read, or just... go and do it. There's no speed limit in learning. This is even easier now with AI since you can ask "what's this concept called, what am I missing here, what stuff should I read about it" if you're actually blocked.
This is like “draw the rest of the owl” advice. Most people struggle with the earn enough money to afford house in metro with multiple employers step. And earn enough money per hour to have time for other stuff.
The Practice Guide of Computer is really a gem, and the bottom lines sentences are just golden (now I understand what they meant when people mentioned bottom lines) of part D: Rid yourself of the following reasons of being a practioner of computer.
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
A famous quote by Winston Churchill’s mother on meeting Gladstone and Disraeli is, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.” How people make us feel is so important — not only in Leadership but also in life.
> i really, sincerely, believe that art is one of the most important uses for a computer.
Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".
Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the
enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
I really resonate with it. When I was a teenager I was a burn out. I went to college and became enamoured with a field of study. Everyone thought I was very smart and people would drop the g word and it made me feel gross. I always just wanted to learn everything I could.
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting:
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
My take is that it stems from the way we chat with others online, where we might be freer with our formatting as we type out messages in IRC/Discord/wherever. It's meant to convey "down to earth"-ness or speaking plainly, which I find fitting given the content of the post.
i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone hastily formatted into a blog post, or something constructed to resemble that. the rushed construction slash abrasive rhetorical tool kinda matches the message it's trying to send, imo. it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little). the graphics feel like someone sending an image in between chat messages
Phones will automatically add the basic correct grammar for you. I would also argue that if you can touch type then writing in all lowercase is again more difficult than adding the correct (basic) grammar.
> it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little)
oh, this is a really good way of putting it! that’s exactly what happened :)
It's a signal they want to put out that they don't respect the rules of grammar.
They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.
It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).
hitting upper case on each word doesn't feel ergonomic but rather aesthetical. if we have periods, why do we need upper case? or why we don't have auto-capitalize globally activated in every text-box? as someone who type like this on my blog; i refuse to hit shift everytime i bring a period into any text, as well not using period at the end of any paragraph and not capitalizing "i", because otherwise, i want "YOU" and "WE" and "HE" and "THOU /j
I don't find it any harder or easier. Reading is not difficult and hasn't been since kindergarten for me. If anything, the British bastardizations of the Oxford spelling of words like "capitalization" with a z, because Pocket Fowler's Modern English thought the Americans were too crude and wished to emulate a more continental style, makes reading clumsier.
I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.
Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
eNGLISH is a lingua franca, so it's prone to morph much more than without the status. do you really think a blogger or 5 will change how upper case exist? maybe we'll signal something with exacerbation by some unicode somewhere at the phrase. maybe we'll type with the help of AI (fuck ai). maybe English will have augmentative and diminutive word forms like Portuguese. maybe grammar will be simpler, so more people can use it and even with a simpler language, like Chinese, you still can express deep stuff, with more words/characters but then, how often your typing or reading something serious? there's a big difference between a blog and a journal from a psychologist evaluating meaningless activities as the precursor/variable of hapiness or satisfaction (or whatever the correct scientific term is)
Hopefully this conversation plays out a million times whenever someone decides to make sentence boundaries harder to recognise for no reason, and together we can all make a difference.
I hate that people comment on this. It's a fascinating linguistic phenomenon that bothers some people but signals to others that it's for them, in a way. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, field. Humans have been speaking and writing in a myriad of ways for thousands of years that do not strictly correspond to the current du jour.
What a wonderful article. My stress has been drowning my joy in something I once found fulfilling. While reading this, I suddenly remembered it. Thank you.
It's nothing special. I'm an academic and usually I balance my desire to work / deadlines and family obligations. The last month I screwed up my management and got frustrated at both. I was holding that emotion even after crunch-time had passed.
Sometimes a lighthearted piece is all you need to remember to release. What's the saying? "The sea of bitterness is vast. Turn back, and you may yet see shore." I still love what I do, even if it got tougher than expected for a moment.
I feel like I can't have fun anymore because the AI can just do the thing instantly and you've got people on this website advocating to let the AI do everything while you merely read the code.
Ignore the AI people. In all probability, you were doing something similar before. The Internet is full of developers. Some may be faster at writing code than you are, or maybe they wrote better code, or perhaps they implemented your ideas before you even thought them up. Yet it sounds like you didn't let that inhibit you before.
I think it’s more complicated that. LLMs have allowed me to do things that I couldn’t do before which definitely made programming and hacking things together more fun, and massively increased what I could do in my limited free time. It also allowed me to manually do the things I enjoy while making the less fun parts go faster. On the other hand I recently tried doing a larger project in codex and it wasn’t fun anymore because codex quickly created a system that was way beyond my understanding, it didn’t work, and I had no idea how to fix it. So I guess it just depends how you use it.
AI is the latest line of trends. It will pass like everything else. Unless they are offering to buddy up with you for a project, why care about how other people would do it?
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
It can't possibly do everything; mind reading interfaces haven't been invented yet. Paul Graham goes on about how writing is thinking. Just the act of writing out instructions can be fun.
Who cares? Just disable or pay no heed to AI. Did you stop correcting your prose because spellcheck or grammarly could do it for you? Sometimes the human thing to do is to be the opposite of the zeitgeist.
I have been doing a lot of little projects using AI, and don't get this experience.
I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.
I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.
I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.
I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.
Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
I have fun, but I probably wouldn't if the AI was right all the time. Or if I was helpless when it was wrong. But for now I'm still in the centaur zone.
Mostly FUD from grifters and accelerationists. Coding AI isn't useful for producing things that you couldn't have produced yourself, which means you're still important. Fundamentally it's still "just" an autocomplete, whether it's snippets at your cursor or whole files inside your directory. I actually quite enjoy LLMs as a programmer. Contrast this with compilers, which produce machine code that you couldn't have possibly written yourself.
I've not used AI to write code, but everyone who I've spoken to who has says it actually takes a lot of work. It sounds like you get intern level work out of AI, but without the hope that your investment in time results in skills and personal development for the intern.
All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.
If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p
I like doing goofy things with code. I wrote an s-expression parser using TeraTerm (BASIC-like language). I came up with this generator only recursive descent thing in python. I never did anything with these except to fiddle around and see what was possible. Goofy stuff in code makes me happy.
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
Refreshing, after narration that usually goes along the lines that if you can’t make transistor from sand grains while also knowing all the http details, databases and of course all JS frameworks you are not “real programmer”.
It’s great advice and exactly how I live my life. Programming was a hobby and then a profession, I still use the phrase ‘working’ but really it’s play with outcomes.
The world was a much better place when engineering was done by men in dress shirts, who saw technical excellence as their professional obligation, but then returned home to their families and could leave their professional life behind.
People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression.
I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you.
And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
It fills me with joy to know that those are irreconcilable. It lifts the burden of having to reconcile these things and I know that my self expression can be directed elsewhere.
Whatever beauty exists in engineering comes from the purity of it. A fighter plane or a microchip looks beautiful, not because it was designed to be so, but because of the purity of the functionality, the harshness of the requirements.
If you turn a fighter plane into an art project, then it will be inherently ridiculous. It will make a mockery of its own purpose, looking at it will be like looking at a cripple.
I don't know what I expected from a blog written entirely in lowercase but I'm unsurprised it's something like this.
> if i can't feminize my compiler, what's the point?
I remember when people saying things like this would be considered strange, because it is strange, along with all the other bizarre and often fetishistic references in both the blog body and various screenshots. Same for the bizarre pull request screenshot referring to "the gay people in my phone", which is also devoid of grammar.
It's one thing to act stupidly, it's another thing to act stupidly write a self-important blog about it and how much you enjoy pissing people off (back in the day we called that trolling, believe it or not, and it was largely considered a negative thing). I eagerly await the paradigm shift when people stop condoning and supporting bizarre behaviour like this and I won't need to create proxies and extensions explicitly for filtering this kind of nonsense out.
I find the worst thing about this not the blog post itself, but the fact that the majority people on here see no problem with it and those who agree with me are being flagged to death.
People can be strange or bizarre if they want too but they have to understand it means some people won't like them, especially if their shtick is deliberately making people uncomfortable and being annoying.
> I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
I don't want people to act exactly like me. I greatly appreciate the existence of people different from me with differing points of view and differing nations with differing cultures. This doesn't mean I have to like one specific archetype that I feel acts obnoxiously.
The author quite literally mentions that part of their motivation to do things is to make people want them to stop, not to mention the deliberate and conscious choice to write the article in lowercase.
It's also natural to be uncomfortable because of the various references to sexual fetishes throughout the article.
"feminizing" doesn't refer to a sexual fetish, it just means making something more feminine. Do you assume that something being feminine is automatically sexualized and fetishistic?
"Feminizing" doesn't inherently refer to a sexual fetish but context matters. I invite you to examine the article more in depth, look at the chatroom conversations and then come to your own conclusion.
I like it. I've worked with the occasional programmer artist (at least one has an HN account). Not in the "elegant and austere like a suspension bridge" sense, but in the "what the fuck? no! stop reorienting my brain!" sense. They're rare and precious like a delicate orchid, and annoying as hell like a delicate orchid that gives you a rash.
Starting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
jyn’s advice here is spot on, however it misses an important point: jyn you are exceptional because you do these things. This is what excellence looks like.
If we are maximising our input I should only read things I wouldn't write.
That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view.
One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someone is a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.
Starting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
I see these blogs sometimes and they smell like Adderal. Have you considered that the thing you’re endlessly tinkering with may not be the thing actually providing the enjoyment you feel?
It's amazing how such a short comment manages to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of stimulants, tinkering, human nature and, implicitly, neurodivergence.
Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).
Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".
Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.
But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.
Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.
In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
I highly recommend it. I'm also just a huge Asimov fan
There's kinda a big difference in the characteristics of a normal distribution and power and I think explaining that will really help.
In a normal you have pressure from both ends so that's why you find it in things like height. There's evolutionary pressure to not be too small but also pressure to not be too large. Being tall is advantageous but costly. Technically the distribution never ends (and that's in either direction!). Though you're not going to see micro people nor 100' tall people because the physics gets in the way. Also mind you that normal can't be less than zero.
It is weird to talk about "long tail" with normal distributions and flags should go up when hearing this.
In a power distribution you don't have bounding pressure. So they are scale free. A classic example of this is wealth. It's easier to understand if you ignore the negative case at first, so let's do that (it still works with negative wealth). There's no upper bound to wealth, right? So while most people will be in the main "mode" there is a long tail. We might also say something like "heavy tail" when the variance is even moderate. So this tail is both long and the median value isn't really representative of the distribution. Funny enough, power laws are incredibly common in nature. I'm really not sure why they aren't discussed more.
I think Veritasium did a video on power distributions recently? Might be worth a check.
Heavy tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy-tailed_distribution
Long tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
But you do care. You care so much to project your appearance of being cool and that you don't even care that you go through extra trouble to keep it up, even though paradoxically it would be LESS effort to not do it.
This is not because I’m super cool, it’s because I’m an old man and I’m still typing in 2025 like I was typing on IRC in 1998 when nocapsing was absolutely dominant.
But if I type in a space where proper capitalization is expected, like HN, I do it (this was typed on my phone with no autocorrect, suggestions or autocapitalization — I know, I’m dumb and my opinions and settings are wrong). If it was my personal blog however I would do whatever I felt like doing.
https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_l...
Of all fatuous nonsenses I've heard from design "geniuses" over the years, that might take the prize.
We don't look at spoken words, we listen to them. We add audible prosody (both pauses and intonation changes, in particular) to segment our speech. If we were to optimise our spoken language for lip-readers, we might very well choose to add some extra visible segmentation to compensate for the intonation being mostly undetectable.
You could validly claim that capital letters are superfluous given the presence of full stops (and I would disagree and we could debate that), but this argument that capital letters are bad because we don't speak "big sounds" is absurd.
We don't speak big sounds? We also don't speak commas and full stops, but those are still an important part of writing. Trying to get some of the suprasegmental features of speech into low bandwidth text.
As I remember there was no singular reason; not having to pinky-press shift was definitely a factor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000015
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59004
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15 (from literally the first HN thread ever)
Also, it's perhaps somewhat hilarious to suggest that someone who has been chronically online for decades has to do anything to "fit in"
He writes as people who grew up on IRC and similar platforms tend to.
Prince song from the 1980s
Prince was pretentious AF
And I will be eternally thankful for his contribution to human culture
More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.
So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.
I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.
Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.
Performative non-conformance might be e.g. helpful to nurture a culture of critical thinking, but if it is just performative, then it is worthless.
(I write this with no intent to criticize you, burningChrome, or Jyn. You might very well do just that.)
(Also, I'm aware that the ability to push back is very unevenly distributed. I'm addressing those that can afford this agency. And also, non-conformance is spectrum: You can also push back a little without choosing the specific point to be the hill to die on. Every bit counts.)
[1] https://idiallo.com/blog/hostile-not-enshittification
[2] https://www.404media.co/heres-a-pdf-version-of-the-cia-guide...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
I grew up on some where you got flamed very quickly if you didn’t clean that up (e.g Espernet).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osNmf_zmSyE
i've got a 1926 print book is 5 by e e cummings who famously often used lowercase in his prose and poems ... going back earlier than the collection i have.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_5
* my sweet old etcetera - https://web.archive.org/web/19991008163420/http://www.geocit...
still, as you're a fan of that 1960's show ... here's a few samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dm_iq5OicM (1985)
now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication
- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes
- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos
- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient
all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating
I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.
Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.
In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".
Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
I don't know about Android but on the iPhone you have to go out of your way to remove the capitalisation.
oh, this is a really good way of putting it! that’s exactly what happened :)
I down vote it every time I see it.
They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.
It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).
Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
what have they done, other than essentially nothing, to reading comprehension?
My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
Sometimes a lighthearted piece is all you need to remember to release. What's the saying? "The sea of bitterness is vast. Turn back, and you may yet see shore." I still love what I do, even if it got tougher than expected for a moment.
Can AI do it faster? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is having fun.
The analogy I keep going to in my mind is chess. A computer can play chess on my behalf, or I can play chess myself, but only one is fun.
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.
I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.
I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.
I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.
Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.
If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p
Damn, that’s powerful.
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
https://lobste.rs/s/wilmno/i_m_just_having_fun#c_ziuqlv
Instead of obsessing with my rating on I just turned on Zen mode in lichees and hid all the numbers.
The game became fun again — Just "oh that was a cool tactic, let me try this weird opening, what happens if I sacrifice my knight for vibes?"
Turns out the rating was a distraction from the actual game.
Same energy as your point about "fucking around" being the point.
The elo was just making me miserable; removing it made me better anyway.
People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression. I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you.
And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
it makes me sad that you see these things as somehow in conflict with each other :(
Whatever beauty exists in engineering comes from the purity of it. A fighter plane or a microchip looks beautiful, not because it was designed to be so, but because of the purity of the functionality, the harshness of the requirements. If you turn a fighter plane into an art project, then it will be inherently ridiculous. It will make a mockery of its own purpose, looking at it will be like looking at a cripple.
Well, the people that code for fun (and profit) think you, the men in suits, ruined everything so at least the feeling is reciprocal.
>suits
shirts was what I said. Not suits.
> if i can't feminize my compiler, what's the point?
I remember when people saying things like this would be considered strange, because it is strange, along with all the other bizarre and often fetishistic references in both the blog body and various screenshots. Same for the bizarre pull request screenshot referring to "the gay people in my phone", which is also devoid of grammar.
It's one thing to act stupidly, it's another thing to act stupidly write a self-important blog about it and how much you enjoy pissing people off (back in the day we called that trolling, believe it or not, and it was largely considered a negative thing). I eagerly await the paradigm shift when people stop condoning and supporting bizarre behaviour like this and I won't need to create proxies and extensions explicitly for filtering this kind of nonsense out.
I find the worst thing about this not the blog post itself, but the fact that the majority people on here see no problem with it and those who agree with me are being flagged to death.
I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
> I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
I don't want people to act exactly like me. I greatly appreciate the existence of people different from me with differing points of view and differing nations with differing cultures. This doesn't mean I have to like one specific archetype that I feel acts obnoxiously.
It's also natural to be uncomfortable because of the various references to sexual fetishes throughout the article.
"Feminizing" doesn't inherently refer to a sexual fetish but context matters. I invite you to examine the article more in depth, look at the chatroom conversations and then come to your own conclusion.
That magenta PR? Fetch.
Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.
Maybe in more optimistic times. "Just have fun" is a top luxury nowadays in 2025.
That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view.
One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someone is a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.
It would be narcissism if the author didn't have talent or ability. That doesn't seem to be the case here.