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Comment by knorker | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. Because if you want 100 people to read it, then every second you waste for the reader is worth you fixing up your message for over a minute.

It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type.

I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks.

I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.

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> This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster.

You can also teach those people about text expansion software. macOS and iOS have it natively, though if I’m not mistaken it doesn’t work properly in non-native apps such as Slack. Alternatives like Alfred should work anywhere. That way they can keep using their abbreviations to type faster, but others won’t have to deal with them.

> It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader

Can confirm. Not using proper punctuation and capital letters makes reading less fluid. I’ve stopped caring about posts and comments that do that—if you don’t care enough about what you wrote to do the most basic of courtesies (and sometimes even fighting the auto-capitalisation that’s done for you) then why should anyone else expend the effort?

That's a good use for AI. Type loosely and ask it to fix up the spelling, capitalization and punctuation.

Fixing spelling, capitalization, and punctuation...that's just a spell checker, no fancy LLM needed.

Tell that to ios’ autocorrect that seems to really suck at it lately. I’d like to have an llm that doesn’t screw up and replace actual words with what it probabilistically thought I was saying.

It is needed. Sometimes the semantics matter.

Except that it will get it wrong infrequently but often enough that you should really proof-read the result properly. All of which you end up taking more time than if you wrote proper if the first case.

No, it takes less time. This is the same kind of take as the teacher's "writing a cheat sheet is so much effort that you might as well spend it to learn the material". Lol, no it takes less time, that's why people do it.

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