Very interesting. Only thing that I see is that it's difficult to tell a difference between an 8 and a 9. Like I could see how it was different on the physical clock as it changes, but if I were to just look at it on its own, it would be hard to tell without literally trying to count the sides. I'd probably just make up some symbol for those. but otherwise very cool!

Grouping the dots would probably help.

Ignoring the orientation constraint, one easy way to tell is that one has a flat line on the bottom and the other doesn't.

I wonder if these items could be banned from college/lecture halls

Maybe we get AI to handle the lightwork while we go on to think about different things?

Trivial to get AI to write in all lowercase, though.

Yes, the strategy depends on lack of effort from other senders, even trivial effort

I've seen this before, I know Sam Altman does it (or used to do it). That was a couple years ago. Hope it doesn't become a trend.

It's already a trend. It's been for at least a decade. I'm surprised people here never noticed it...

Unfortunately it has become quite common on HN already.

It comes from people growing up on smartphone chats where the kids apparently don’t care to press Shift.

I've already written an extension that filters these comments intelligently. (E.g., quotes are ignored but if the rest of the body is all lowercase it is collapsed.)

have you shared it anywhere?

I plan to at some point, it's part of a bigger extension I created for myself to filter out minor annoyances and I'd have to strip out/modify things other people probably wouldn't want (such as filtering of "new age" TLDs like ".pizza" and whatnot).

What’s weird though is that modern OSes often auto-capitalize the first letter of a sentence, so it actually takes more effort to deliberately type in all-lowercase.

Only mobile does that in my experience - you can tell what platform people send discord messages on based on this usually

simple toggle to disable it permanently

my reasoning is that i don’t want identifiable markers for what device im writing from. so all auto-* (capitalization, correct, etc.) features are disabled so that i have raw input

Being part of the minority that disables those things (and then admitting to it in public) provides a lot more analytical signal than you’re aware of. That’s a remarkably poor reason to disrespect your readers.

i don't care about the 'analytical signal'. the purpose is people can't tell if im writing a (discord, slack, etc.) message from my phone or laptop or desktop, and it works for that