So this change has actually forced a reckoning of sorts. Maybe the best option is to outsource the thinking to another model, and then send it back to Opus to package up.

Ironically this is how the non-agent works too to an extent.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909827

Points: 320

# Comments: 139

Most of what makes people effective at large companies is neutral or negative value when applied to very early-stage companies.

The reality for better or worse is it's good enough for most companies and engineers.

I actually believe most writing is non-neutral in nature. Every word choice and sentence structure conveys meaning, intentional or not.

For example, why did Dante describe the sight of a lion as making "the air tremble" rather than cause "a stillness in the air"? Or a slightly more powerful variant, "a silence in the air"? My guess is that he wanted to call attention to how dominating the lion's presence was, that even the air was humbled/scared. That's how intimidating and commandeering the lion was. (Very intentional word choice here by me to pair with enraged!)

Maybe that's the wrong interpretation, but we also have people who study exactly this! The nuance of literary works and their meanings.

The article mentions a difference between 'lol' and 'haha' - if you boil it down, is that really so different from 'the air tremble' vs. 'a stillness in the air'? It's word choice again, ultimately.

> Also, as I've said before, improper grammar could also mean "I don't know the grammar of your language well enough", if I'm writing French, I make a lot of mistakes because I don't use it very often, so the tone is the last of my concerns and the people reading it could easily think it's from a 9 year old kid who hasn't finished primary school yet.

Maybe this is why we disagree - I believe that once relative fluency is assumed, tone becomes more important.

Mandarin is a great example here. Most people who are just starting to learn Mandarin focus on vocabulary, pronouns, etc. But once you get to a more advanced stage, it reveals a really unique twist.

Informal 'modal particles' [1] are optional in sentences but also can significantly change the mood. You'd never use them in formal writing (they're not exactly professional), but in practice people use them in everyday written communications. Interestingly enough, they're by default pronounced in a neutral tone but can also be inflected with more emotion even though Mandarin is already a tonal language.

English doesn't have modal particles, and the closest equivalent I've seen are these Gen Z Netiquettes (which aren't only for Gen Z as a few people have pointed out).

---

As an example:

1. 吃饭: eat food

2. 吃饭吧: eat food, we should (friendly but also commanding)

3. 吃饭吗: eat food, want to? (friendly but more suggestive)

---

In English, you could write it like this instead:

1. food

2. we should get food

3. want to get food?

---

But that's not exactly right, because Mandarin also has formal sentences for those forms:

1. 吃饭: eat food

2. 应该吃饭: should eat food

3. 要不要吃饭: want to eat food or not?

---

So closer parallels in English instead could be:

1. food

2. food :eyes_emoji: [2]

3. food? :drooling_face_emoji: [3]

---

And as the article mentions, you can even merge 2 modal particles into a new one that's equal to the combined mood of both. For extra nuance!

e.g. 吃饭了吗: eat food, have you already done it? (friendly)

I think there's some truth to the idea that emojis are a bit of madness (but are also here to stay), but I disagree that nuance doesn't exist in written communication. It's existed for hundreds of years already, as mentioned above in the Dante example. Emojis are just a modern-day version of nuance.

In your original post, you mention:

> Not doing it [capitalization] proves that people either don't care or don't know the basic rules of the language, which says a lot more than doing it properly.

The third (more charitable) possibility is that people are intentionally doing it for nuance. For example, I capitalize in formal emails with customers but use lowercase with friends. My guess is that most people I work with do the same, and more importantly know others are also aware of this.

So at work, I can either choose to treat my coworkers as closer to customers or closer to friends. You can likely guess what that means. (<-- another example of a short sentence where tone is lost - was I amused? condescending? factual? it was the first )

Lastly, while you may personally disagree with the existence of nuance, it's hard to deny that a large chunk of people do infer nuance from text - just looking at this HN thread alone! So the takeaway I'd lightly (and not firmly!) suggest again is that it's worth optimizing for others in certain situations even if it seems like madness.

[1] https://medium.com/@glossika/chinese-grammar-how-to-use-moda...

[2] https://emojipedia.org/eyes/

[3] https://emojipedia.org/drooling-face/

I didn't learn this lesson the hard way until I was past my mid-20s. When you write something for others, it's far better to optimize for them rather than for yourself. Let's say you spend twice as much time writing something in an 'odd' way, but it gets your 50% more reach or alignment or funding. That's probably actually a great use of your time.

> So, to me, your explanation of why you don't do it sounds like "look at me, I don't follow rules because we are all smart here, right guys? ... right?".

It's not about being contrarian, it's about the tradeoff. Tone is incredibly important in most situations.

When you write with perfect grammar and punctuation, most people don't know how to read into the nuance. Happy? Joyful? Pleased? Content? There's very little, if any, common understanding of the intensity or undertone in those adjectives. Imagine you're working with a new PM and he tells you the team's progress is 'acceptable.' What does that mean exactly? Is he happy with it? Is he mildly annoyed? Does he feel like things are off track and actually wants to talk more?

So how do we build this common understanding? It turns out most people have actually already built up a language with their friends! Through texts/DMs/etc. So when that language is ported over to a work context, most people immediately grasp it.

You can conform to the world or the world can conform to you. <-- A sentence where tone would be helpful.

On HN I’ll use correct punctuation, grammar, and a wider set of vocabulary because there’s a good chance my message will come across more clearly.

For general emails, I’ll write with simpler language because it’s very much a get-in-get-out activity especially with more senior stakeholders.

For work comms, what’s the value in typing HN-style? Everyone already knows everyone else is smart. I believe communicating tone is more valuable than perfect punctuation and grammar, which make it much harder to get that across.

Or as my grandma used to say - you don’t treat people you want to be treated, you treat them the way they want to be treated.

Reminds me a little generally of how some have an inner voice when they read and others don't.

We have an interesting setup where we do every other Friday off - the logic being that we combine 2 slow Friday afternoons into an entire day off. Everybody gets a 3 day weekend twice a month for longer breaks or road trips.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how it’s panned out in practice. Feels like a nice middle ground.

Unless you believe that Matt Tabibi is not a reputable journalist or that the Twitter Files lack credibility, this feels like a very defensive gut response.

Much like social media generally, disinformation is now one of the chief scapegoats across the aisle for all that’s wrong in the world.

Now that Facebook has decided to shoot itself in foot by going all in on the metaverse (the new narrative), a lot of Apple’s more self-interested decisions are starting to come to light. What started off as Apple’s commitment to privacy is now getting laid bare as pushing out and replacing their competition.

Or, more simply, ads have migrated out of the Facebook family of apps and into your OS. I can’t say this is an improvement.

Getting into a top 5 school would have definitely been a surprise, but I also doubt the top 20 or even top 50 schools have equal levels of talent.

> People have studied this and found that students that were accepted into elite colleges but ended up going to lower ranked schools had equivalent levels of achievement after graduation. So it turns out graduating from Harvard isn't as important as you think. Unless you want to go into IB or Big4 Consulting.

This tracks but as mentioned elsewhere it's probably a longer journey all around. There very much is an in-crowd of connection pooling when you're an alumni of an elite school, from my experience of going to some meetups with heavy membership from them.

At the same time - if I'd gotten 300-400 points less on the SAT, I likely still would have ended up at the same school. So in that vein my gut says the test scores were close to irrelevant. Or maybe not, I guess I wouldn't know.

Separately I think it's valuable to evaluate this through another lens. It sounds like you have some experience with the admissions process, and something I've been curious about for the longest time is this: if I had been in a slightly different segment, e.g. first-generation immigrant of non-East-Asian ethnicity, how would that have affected my chances?

Is it that test scores mattered less for me in this particular case, or is it that there's generally a higher bar because of competition from peers with similar East Asian backgrounds? In both cases it feels like test scores matter less overall (even if paradoxically the bar is generally higher!).

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> For reference, “top 50 state school” is something like University of Georgia or Ohio State University, both the type of school that will not slow down someone who would have fit in at Harvard or Stanford, imho.

This was the only piece I felt differently on. There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body for starters. Going to a state school didn't necessarily prevent me from finding success later in life, but I definitely took the long way around.

Ended up going to what I thought was my safety school and rejected/waitlisted at every reach school I applied to. I sometimes wish colleges mandated name/ethnicity-blind application reviews - not to sound ungrateful, but I’m still incredulous to this day that the best I could do was a public state school (still top 50 admittedly).

It ended up being a great experience in that it was a forcing function and made me realize most of these rules and expectations around admissions were meaningless. But I probably could have saved years in high school exploring things that mattered rather than optimizing for a college application process that didn’t ultimately end up feeling very fair.