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Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s only AI influencers that do this. I’ve noticed people use lowercase as some sort of power move. Like they’re so busy and important they don’t care about conventions.

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Ironically, if you just kept the default keyboard settings on your phone, it will capitalize words for you. So these people changes the default settings to create this impression?

I turn that stuff off because I don't like my keyboard automatically doing things for me.

They might be sending messages on a laptop which doesn’t have that turned on by default.

I disabled it for being annoying and frequently wrong. The idea that someone might interpret my laziness as a flex (or vise versa) is hilarious to me.

It's annoying that it insists on "proper" capitalization for github and so on ("GitHub"), I do revolt at this trademark injection into my autocompleter.

Haha, we're here arguing whether LLMs constitute AGI, and we can't even phone autocomplete right

Lowercase typing is broadly informal and (historically) faster (autocorrect especially on mobile devices was terrible for longer than it has been any good).

Anything else people read into it is very often just projection.

It's certainly a modern status symbol that can be seen as a power move.

So common in academia! The student writes a detailed, error-checked, well-edited long email only to receive an answer like

'yes plaese

Sent from my iPhone'

Definitely a 'I'm very busy look at me' powermove

Actually they probably are that busy and aren’t trying to impress students, they’re trying to grade a bunch of exams while reviewing a paper while writing up research while writing a grant and also having a personal life.

And if they treat them all with this degree of attention, then they're probably failing at all of them.

The grant writing and (supervising the work of the people performing and writing up) the research funded by the grants that will also be the basis on which they will secure future grants get more attention, obviously.

Many, perhaps most, successful academics are horrible mentors and parents/spouses. That isn’t pertinent to the fact that all faculty are, in fact, quite busy.

nah i dontt hnk so

Sent from my iPhone

I think you are correct. It's a status symbol at this point. It's the digital version of "inconspicuous consumption" [1].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/inconsp...

No, this is a status symbol because it's a signal that these people are above norms of conventional society.

What's worse is that there's a ready line of journalists talking about how capital letters promote inequality or shit like that providing coverfire for them.

I think it is because people are often typing onto a sheet of glass on a packed train..

The software on that sheet of glass actually automatically capitalizes the first letter of every sentence. You have to go out of your way to produce the sort of text you see in sama's tweets. That's what makes it so egregious.

Something similar I've noticed--there's a certain level people reach within a company where they're now too busy to type out "thank you" or even "thanks." Now "thx" is all they have time for.

> Something similar I've noticed--there's a certain level people reach within a company where they're now too busy to type out "thank you" or even "thanks." Now "thx" is all they have time for.

"thx" is way to verbose for anyone but a plebs, the real power brokers use "ty." Or they don't thank anyone at all, because they know just bothering to read the message they got is thanks enough.

It also appears softer and borderline condescending. I always thought it was feminine because I've only seen women do it before very recently.

It’s pretty common in chatrooms, forums, etc. Been commonplace for at least two decades.

Eh, I mean in a post-smart keyboard era that will do it for you, and you either have to disable it OR purposely backspace and re-write it.

For anything on a phone, agreed. I have mine disabled so I can switch easily depending on where or who I’m talking with.

…or capitalization is not really that important for conveying meaning.

it's because the stupidphone's stupid keyboard capitalizes for you in the wrong places, and you have to take extra effort to fix it when they get it wrong, or you turn it off, and then get lazy about fixing it when you do need the capitalization.

Does it? When I start a message, the keyboard automatically capitalizes. It also does it when a sentence starts after a period. I rarely ever have to fix capitalization.

(I typed this from my phone)

I get incorrectly capitalized one in every 250 times the keyboard is used, I'd imagine.

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