Apologies if this comment is off-topic, but it really is quite egregious, and since the article was submitted by the author I presume they are open to the feedback.
Array.from(document.body.querySelectorAll('p,li')).filter(e=>e.innerText).map(e=>e.innerText = e.innerText.split('\. ').map(s=>s[0].toUpperCase() + s.slice(1)).join('. ') )
I read it as "I'll take literally any conscience for myself no matter how minor, at any cost for you no matter how big".
When you intend it as "inviting informality", you're implicitly doing this because "formality" is too much effort. The thing is you're not inviting, but rather demanding. You have decided the conversation is informal and low effort, and that's how you'll treat it, without considering the person you're communicating with.
This is of course all a lot of strong statements and these things don't matter as much as this sounds. I don't feel _that_ strongly about these things, but the lowercase thing always strikes me as just plain weird, and deconstructing why I feel that way this is where I get to.
So typing in all lowercase is a choice. I think it's a way to signal "I don't follow norms". It signals membership in a group.
Not my read on OP, but “tech bro” is not my first thought associated with the style
I will add that I'm not very happy with the readability of my site overall at the moment; if anyone has font or other recommendations for style tweaks to make I'd love to hear them!
To expand a bit: It's clear from the writing that the formatting is an intentional stylistic choice. My point wasn't about aesthetic preference. I meant precisely what I wrote. Language evolves and orthography evolves. We've been capitalizing less and less for centuries now. But (until very recently) it was a universal rule to capitalize the first letters of sentences. I believe this is partly because (again, until very recently) people read in large quantities and, to a fluent reader, sentence capitalization serves an important purpose: it helps the eye recognize where one sentence ends and the next begins. Periods alone can be easy to miss, or confuse for commas, when the eye is moving quickly.
Anyway, this is all a very minor point. You have a cool site and I enjoyed your article. I hope you keep writing.
I'll play!
My recommendation, in short: pick a new font, make the content pane narrower (around 75 characters per line), and increase line height by 15%.
The font you use, Montserrat, has nice details, but they're extremely subtle, and our eye doesn't pick them up at text size.The font uses very pure geometry [1], has really big counters [2], is light in weight, and has no visible stroke contrast [3]. The effect when you look at the screen is that you see big blocks of text, but struggle to register individual characters, and it's hard to find the beginning of the next line. Add the lack of capitalization, and it feels like a monologue, like you're playing rubber-duck for someone.
A challenge: everybody uses Google Fonts, and all the good fonts get used so heavily they end up losing their ability to make people feel something.
Pick a font that is good [4] and feels comfortable to you. Ideally, buy one. You get what you pay for. And you go from being one of the millions of people who use a certain font to being one of fifteen.
If you like the feel of Montserrat, Tiny Grotesk [5] and Decimal [6] would both be great choices and are from excellent type designers. Or browse Matthew Butterick's font recommendations [4]. They're good. You're out $50, but it's yours.
If you're absolutely allergic to paying for fonts, DM Sans and Work Sans are Google Fonts, have a similar feel to Montserrat, and solve the above problems. But then you're a robot.
A final note: Montserrat is actually a nice headline font. The details come into focus at larger sizes and weights. So I'm going to open a can of worms: you could pick a _contrasting_ body font. Remember PT Serif from the [3] footnote? Try it on for size.
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[1] By that, I mean things like: an "o" looks like a perfect circle rather than an oblique oval, and forms are strictly on 90º axes.
[2] Counters are the apertures of letters, the open center of an "o" being one.
[3] This is the contrast in "line" size. Think of it like the width of the line when you write with a chisel-tip marker: some lines end up thinner, some thicker. Look at the "e" on the font PT Serif - the vertical walls of the character are thicker, horizontal thinner. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif?categoryFilters=S...
[4] You can't go wrong with anything Matthew Butterick recommends (https://practicaltypography.com/font-recommendations.html), or from any of the "big" font foundries: Hoefler & Co., Linotype, Monotype, Berthold, URW. If it's a bestseller on myfonts, it's a sure choice: https://www.myfonts.com/collections/best-seller
[5] https://tinytype.co/type/tiny-grotesk
[6] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/decimal-font-hoefler-and...
If what you're trying to communicate is that, like Sam Altman, you're too cool the press the shift key, then why write some initialisms in upper case? After all, there is a style of acronyms that are always written in lower case: Latin ones ("i.e.", "e.g.")
Some concrete suggestions from me:
- Fira Sans [2] is a lovely, legible sans-serif font that's free and incredibly easy-to-read. This would make a fine body font.
- Source Sans [3] is another good sans-serif that might be closer to your current font. It's about as readable as Fira, but it's a little less warm imo.
- Make your line length a little narrower and your line spacing (i.e. leading) just a hair wider—that will do wonders for readability.
Definitely check out Practical Typography for more tips from a real professional.
Thanks for the blog post!
[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/
Since you are willing to consult LLMs for reviewing your post, why not ask them for feedback on improving the CSS, etc?
didn't realize people struggled to read text that way though, maybe i should change my writing style if this is a common pain point
If you do everything else right you can skip sentence cap without sacrificing readability. Not that you necessarily should but it's a vibe if you want it, it suits some voices & documents well.
(So does not adding a period at the end of a sentence)
Yeah, it does
It's definitely... unique?
LC;DR :P
Author's own style is certainly refreshing and welcome over LLM slop that dominates most HN posts now.
No it's not. It's common in chats where those people don't bother with punctuation at all, often writing a single sentence over multiple lines.
It's not common for blogs or long form content.
If it had proper caps etc, people here would accuse it of written using LLMs.
You just can't win...
That’s life )