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.
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.
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.
> “The team did catch this ~month ago. The fact that it went this long before the catch is on me.”
I love this bullshit sentence formulation that claims to both have known this already--as in, don't worry we're ALREADY on the case--and they're simultaneously embarrassed that they "just" caught it--a.k.a. "wow, we JUST heard about this, how outRAGEOUS".
It's the correct counter-strategy to people who believe that you shouldn't attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity (and who don't update that prior for their history with a particular actor). And it works in part because things often are accidents - enough to give plausible deniability and room to interpret things favorably if you want to. I've seen this from the inside. Here are two HN threads abou…
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this seems straightforward: the first link goes to an email that went out announcing a change, which seems pretty deliberate; nobody writes an announcement that they're introducing a bug. The second change doesn't seem to have been announced, which leaves open the possibility that it's accidental. Although I suppose someone could claim the email was sent by mistake, and some deliberate…
The people in [2] got an email too. (It just turned out to be an automated one that hadn't been intended.)
Semi off-topic, but the trend of AI influencers adopting the all-lowercase communication style in professional conversation has been very annoying. It makes them appear completely unserious. I recently received an job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase and I was baffled how to interpret it.
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.
…or capitalization is not really that important for conveying meaning.
It's the correct counter-strategy to people who believe that you shouldn't attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity (and who don't update that prior for their history with a particular actor). And it works in part because things often are accidents - enough to give plausible deniability and room to interpret things favorably if you want to. I've seen this from the inside. Here are two HN threads abou…
Well, in this case, you have the CEO saying basically they didn’t know about it until about a month ago and then Vox brings receipts with docs signed by Altman and Friends showing he and others signed off on the policy originally (or at least as of the date of the doc, which is about a year ago for one of them). And we have several layers of evidence from several different directions accumulating and indicating that…
Yeah, but keep in mind he's been in the public eye now for 10-15 years (he started his first company in 2005, joined YC in '11, and became president in '14). If you're sufficiently high profile AND do it for long enough AND get brazen enough about it, it starts to stick, but the bar for that is really high (and by nature that only occurs after you've achieved massive success).
It’s got a term - “garden leave” and yeah it was prevalent in finance. I say “was” because I think some states are changing laws wrt/ non-competes and this calling this practice into question.
The federal government banned non competes last month: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/...
I think this still leaves garden leave on the table. The thing that can no longer happen is an employer ending it's relationship with an employee and preventing them from continuing their career after the fact. Garden leave was in fact one of the least bad outcomes of a non-compete as I understand it.
Semi off-topic, but the trend of AI influencers adopting the all-lowercase communication style in professional conversation has been very annoying. It makes them appear completely unserious. I recently received an job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase and I was baffled how to interpret it.
Writing in all lowercase is an aesthetic akin to an executive wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It is supposed to impart an air of self-confidence, that you don’t need to signal your seriousness in order to be taken seriously. However such signalling is harder to pull off than it seems, and most who try do it poorly because they don’t realise that the casual aesthetic isn't just a lack of care. Steve Jobs famously eschewe…
but sam said he was sorry in all lowercase so it must be okay
Semi off-topic, but the trend of AI influencers adopting the all-lowercase communication style in professional conversation has been very annoying. It makes them appear completely unserious. I recently received an job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase and I was baffled how to interpret it.
lowercase has been used by propeller heads and hackers since.. idk.. the 80s? some of us just liked it better that way.