I think it's become a bit of a cliche/clique'y thing amongst a certain population. I don't know its origins (tumblr emo crowd??) but I first encountered it in Silicon Valley. The Collison brothers used to love doing it, as did Altman. I feel it projects a kind of stream-of-thought with an aloofness, like "i dont care enough for correct form. language bends to my unique thoughts. read this if you like, i dont care lol".
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.
As I understand it the root was people using the iPhone with autocorrect turned off. That’s how someone from the tumblr emo crowd (where it was definitely prevalent!) explained it to me, and the reason was because there was a lot of culture specific terminology used (including deliberate misspellings of words) that was difficult if autocorrect was switched on.
By extension you can see how that could also apply to tech.
This is not really anything new, back in AIM and SMS messaging days, people would type "wuu2" or "whats up" to a friend, but to express the same idea in an email, you would probably be sending some variant of "What are you up to?"
There is massively different subtext between the two. Autocapitalization and autocorrect represents a limit on the subtextual bandwidth you can communicate along with a message. Restrictions on subtextual bandwith are not ideal when your generation relies on text-based communication for evermore intimate interactions - that "whats up" message might be the start of you asking someone out on a date, I don't want it formatted the same way as a message I would send my boss.
I've always wondered what the point of capital letters even is? It doesn't seem to add anything worthwhile to the language. You need to learn 26 extra shapes, and then some arbitrary rules for when to use the majuscule. But if you never heard of capital letters, nobody will be confused by what you wrote.
They make scanning and reading text easier since they make jumping to the end/start of sentences easier. When you read your eyes are constantly jumping ahead and even backwards. The capital letters help you land quickly back at significant positions in the text since they are associated with boundaries in logical clauses.
If that were the point, why does English capitalize proper nouns? That would seem to complicate finding the start of a sentence. Besides, you have periods, exclamation points, and question marks at the ends of sentences anyway.
In German even ordinary nouns are capitalized, making it even less easy to find the capital at the start of a sentence.
1. Dots are tiny and are hard to see. A capital letter is a more visible indicator of the start of the sentence.
2. English barely uses any punctuation (vs. Russian) therefore making adherence to readability rules even more important. Paragraphs are also nicer to read vs. trying to read a wall of text.
Underrated and unsung. Fei Fei Li first launched ImageNet way back in 2007, a hugely influential move sparking much of the computer vision deep learning that followed since. I remember in a lecture about 7 years ago jph00 saying "text is just waiting for its imagenet moment" -> then came the gpt explosion. Fei Fei was massively instrumental in where we are today.
Curating a dataset is vastly different than introducing a new architectural approach. ImageNet is a database. Its not like inventing the convolutions for CNNs or the LSTM or a Transformer.
It's true that these are very different activities, but I think most ML researchers would agree that it's actually the creation of ImageNet that sparked the deep learning revolution. CNNs were not a novel method in 2012; the novelty was having a dataset big and sophisticated enough that it was actually possible to learn a good vision model from without needing to hand-engineer all the parts. Fei-fei saw this years in advance and invested a lot of time and career capital setting up the conditions for the bitter lesson to kick in. Building the dataset was 'easy' in a technical sense, but knowing that a big dataset was what the field needed, and staking her career on it when no one else was doing or valuing this kind of work, was her unique contribution, and took quite a bit of both insight and courage.
Exactly right. Neatly said by the author in the linked article.
> I spent years building ImageNet, the first large-scale visual learning and benchmarking dataset and one of three key elements enabling the birth of modern AI, along with neural network algorithms and modern compute like graphics processing units (GPUs).
Datasets + NNs + GPUs. Three "vastly different" advances that came together. ImageNet was THE dataset.
"CNNs and Transformers are both really simple and intuitive" and labeling a bunch of images you downloaded is not simple and intuitive? It was a team effort and I would hardly call a single dataset what drove modern ML. Most of currently deployed modern ML wasn't trained on that dataset and didn't come from models trained on it.
Forbodingly, the article signs off with "Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups."
Sadly, it isn't strictly true. maybe the article should have said "applied" not "created".
Even the wikipedia page for "Usability" points to a 1982 BYTE article advocating "Usable" for software tools.
The existing word "usability" was being applied in human computer interface texts/papers around the time (1987, 1988) as computer UIs made advances.
The best summary of history I could find was in this article (section 5.1), claiming the first usage was in 1971, or 1979, or perhaps 1981, depending on interpretation.
If you want a single example it is untrue, a good example is "IBM makes usability as important as functionality" from 1986. I found a copy online but hate deeplinking to such things.
It's possible that Cachet was unaware of all that academia and independently "created" the term.
Of course the actual word is much, much older in the world of meatspace.
I was using xcopy at the time as a kid and still play with a physical Amiga. Nostalgia.
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