Why are we still so afraid of using the grumpy old period?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/magazine/ending-sentences-period.html

16•samclemens•2w ago

Comments

Hasz•1w ago

bah humbug. In the age of LLM edited text, having a distinct style (be it written or spoken) is a breath of fresh air. AI has already ruined the em dash, no need to let it ruin your unique voice, style and cadence.

aquariusDue•1w ago

Hear, hear. I used to dislike low effort replies and comments that were written hastily and contained spelling/grammar mistakes, weird turns of phrase or even feeling incomplete like two different thoughts mashed together and presented as they happened to be. Now I just enjoy them, flawed as they are someone bothered to "hand-craft" them.

rdtsc•1w ago

> people appeal to the internet, terrified they’re hindering their careers by striking the wrong balance; they seek advice from job coaches ...

They do? It seems strange to me people are terrified about this and they need coaching about how many periods or commas to put around their "lol"s and "heh"s. If this is what terrifies and scares us, we are paradoxically both doomed, and at the same time doing pretty well, given what the top item on the agenda look like.

bigstrat2003•1w ago

What is this article talking about? Nobody is afraid of using periods.

satisfice•1w ago

Use exclamation marks sparingly. Use hyperbole sparingly. Use cussing rarely. Use emoji rarely. Use parallelism sparingly. Use antibiotics rarely. All for the same reason.

thrill•1w ago

Use any and all the rules of grammar and punctuation as needed for clarity, structure, (and the Oxford comma) and tone — but no more.

Hizonner•1w ago

> Use emoji rarely.

You misspelled "never".

satisfice•1w ago

The only time I do it is in replies to my wife, who thinks emoji are the funniest things she has ever encountered in her life.

Hizonner•1w ago

I'm not.

Show HN: Engineering Perception with Combinatorial Memetics

Show HN: Steam Daily – A Wordle-like daily puzzle game for Steam fans

The Anthropic Hive Mind

Just Started Using AmpCode

LLM as an Engineer vs. a Founder?

Crosstalk inside cells helps pathogens evade drugs, study finds

Show HN: Design system generator (mood to CSS in <1 second)

Show HN: 26/02/26 – 5 songs in a day

Toroidal Logit Bias – Reduce LLM hallucinations 40% with no fine-tuning

Top AI models fail at >96% of tasks

The Science of the Perfect Second (2023)

Bob Beck (OpenBSD) on why vi should stay vi (2006)

Show HN: a glimpse into the future of eye tracking for multi-agent use

The Optima-l Situation: A deep dive into the classic humanist sans-serif

Barn Owls Know When to Wait

Implementing TCP Echo Server in Rust [video]

LicGen – Offline License Generator (CLI and Web UI)

Service Degradation in West US Region

The Janitor on Mars

Bringing Polars to .NET

Adventures in Guix Packaging

Show HN: We had 20 Claude terminals open, so we built Orcha

Your Best Thinking Is Wasted on the Wrong Decisions

Warcraftcn/UI – UI component library inspired by classic Warcraft III aesthetics

Trump Vodka Becomes Available for Pre-Orders

Velocity of Money

Stop building automations. Start running your business

You can't QA your way to the frontier

Show HN: PalettePoint – AI color palette generator from text or images

Robust and Interactable World Models in Computer Vision [video]