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.

> 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?

Hard to have hobbies when you're spending your time doordashing and struggling to pay rent.

That still feels a bit off, as you are "having fun" because it ultimately is the road to success.

There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.

Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.

It’s all fun and games, until the funding runs out.

It wouldn't hurt if they could capitalise their sentences every now and then.

Josef Pieper wrote a book called "Leisure: the Basis of Culture"[0] - published in 1948 - in which he discusses the meaning of leisure, which is not what we mean by it today, and criticizes the "bourgeois world of total labor" as a spiritually, intellectually, and culturally destructive force.

Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.

What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.

This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.

So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?

Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?

[0] https://a.co/d/eCd0cJX

Yes, but that often breaks down once you have bills to pay and need steady income. Real life tends to complicate things. The risk-averse path is a valid choice too, and often the only sensible one.

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.

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.

it's also a burden when it's the team culture, because you're almost seen negatively for trying to design new things

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.

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.

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...

IME it is a common affectation in the queer / feminist internet. A sort of Tumblr Shibboleth.

I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.

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

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 use "text-transform: lowercase;". It's just a fun look. When I get tired of it I'll just remove the property.

Easy fix :)

  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)

Maybe they're anti-capitalist.

welcome to tumblr!!

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.

I read the whole thing without seeing it. But I also fail to see how you marry "pretentious" with not wanting to be taken seriously. So maybe it's me.

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.

in 1925

https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_l...

LOOKITCOULDBEWORSESOJUSTCHILLANDTRYNOTTOWORRYABOUTITTOOMUCHOK

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.

A lot of the comments here are bashing you, but I just wanted to say that I feel the same. I find it jarring and off putting.

It's like xml vs html, some people really like their markup to have explicit closing/self-closed tags, others don't really care and expect the user-agent (the reader) to parse them correctly. Same with semicolons in Javascript.

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.

In the 1990s, this was called "whispering" and had pockets in BBS/CompuServe/AOL/usenet discussions. Also why I still think of all caps as shouting and can't be convinced otherwise (looking at Microsoft and a few other companies and their designers that keep going through phases insisting all caps is a useful flavor in UI design and not shouting for attention that they don't need).

It is something people born 2000 and later do to try to sound cool and detached. It's really no more complicated than that.

i started typing no caps at least a decade ago (and i'm 50). the reason was mostly that when i edited a sentence i had to mess around with caps, plus speed and pinky strain.

learning about Lojban and its punctuation probably also swayed me (it marks the start of the sentences with punctuation, which makes a lot more sense).

My spider sense tells me it has to do with lesbian anarchism, as explained in Douglas Coupland's jPod.

capitalization has never been a requirement - it's not even part of grammar nor is punctuation

pretty sure i saw people doing it back in the eighties on local dialup bbs's

why do you think it's "pretentious" to be too exhausted to bother hitting the shift key

relax

He's just having fun.

bruh, we're never making it to space as a society if you can't stop getting hung up on pointless shit like this

who friggen cares? why can the president diddle kids, but a random internet user has to have perfect grammar to be taken seriously?

the poster of this article could probably not care less if you "take them seriously"

i actually interact with ideas, not grammar. Especially in a fun personal blog post like this

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.

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.

>On top of that, keep your day job.

I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once

[dead]

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.

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. ).

The other one that I find jarring is putting a zero in front of the year.

I down vote it every time I see it.

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

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.

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...

I hate it. It’s so much harder for me to read when they opt out of using some of the tools in their written language toolbox.

My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.

Most people probably assume that you're consuming rather than creating, consumption is what most people do on computers

I felt similar for most of 2025. Then at some point something clicked and now I work on side projects again without AI.

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.

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.

why do you have to do what people on this website tell you? Write the fun thing.

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.

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.

The rules to being good at something will never change. I like the (overused) Bruce Lee quote "Once you see the way you see it in all things". I always interpreted that as just looping over: Do something mindfully, reflect on your outcomes, do it again.

Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.

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.

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 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

The ability to be genuinely interested in what someone else has to say and what their opinions are is a real gift.

What has been causing you stress? (If you don’t mind me asking?)

I'd appreciate if you can give the LLM generated comments a rest (your entire profile is like this), given that this site is for humans to interact. Thank you.

It's a helpful indicator that the article isn't worth reading and that it was probably written by somebody who spends too much time in chatrooms.

> People like this make me hate everything to do with software

Well, the people that code for fun (and profit) think you, the men in suits, ruined everything so at least the feeling is reciprocal.

Are you seriously writing on ycombinator that the zenith of computer engineering was the early 70's when HP, Digital, and IBM ruled the world?

> If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful

why mandate compartmentalization to this extent? what is so harmful about software as art (or expression, etc.)? if i write a weird personal project, what "misfortune" would i bring to you as a coworker, lol

> Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression

it makes me sad that you see these things as somehow in conflict with each other :(

Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

this forum probably isn't the best place to make that statement, though I can see both of us didn't take that hint when we made our names

they clarify that point in the first sentence of that header,

> i mean, in some sense if you work as a professional programmer it is a competition, because the job market sucks right now.

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.

>Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this?

Maybe in more optimistic times. "Just have fun" is a top luxury nowadays in 2025.

There's a differences between narcissism and self-awareness.

It would be narcissism if the author didn't have talent or ability. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

What the actual fuck?

What does your comment mean? Is there some sort of substance to your statement or are you just being a hateful troll?

Did you even read the post? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from a person’s appearance?

I don’t know Jyn Nelson, but I have seen some of their talks. They seem to be a more than capable developer. Their blog is probably one of the least offensive, most down to earth, get shot done type of developer blog I have seen? So again, what the actual fuck.

(I’m not certain if the ‘seven words you can’t say on television’ are actually banned on HN or just frowned upon, but I think my usage is justified)

what a weird and mean comment, do better

You know you could simply pass by ignoring this article since you claim it doesn't apply to you.

But uhh, your need to put the author down is revealing.

It's ok to be strange. It's ok to be bizarre. Be free.

I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.

I am sorry that you consider queer hackers having fun to be strange.

It's amazing how such a short comment manages to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of stimulants, tinkering, human nature and, implicitly, neurodivergence.

Are you saying everyone who programs is on adderal? I don't understand.

Any merit in your comment was eroded by the unnecessary snark

Yes? No? Curiosity drives some to do unexplainable things.