Quote from: gmaxwell on Today at 02:10:12 AM

Quote from: l8orre on August 01, 2023, 05:32:18 PM

I would like to put this out here about the double whitespace riddle:

Most people of the age of 45 (today) or so or older would have been taught to type on a typewriter or using typewriter technique: You put two spaces after a period. Word processors made this practice antiquated because their automated typesetting does it for you (technically putting a space and a half after a full stop). Many people who originally learned to put in two spaces stopped if they've spent a lot of time using MSFT word, which nags you for doing it. It's also not always clear when people are doing it because because common typesetting (including in browsers) doesn't render it as two spaces.

But for those of us who learned the typewriter ways and haven't been heavy MS word users the practice continues.

Here are some random pre-2008 (to show that I didn't do it because of Satoshi) mailing list posts by me where you can see me using two spaces after periods:

https://lists.cypherpunks.ca/pipermail/otr-users/2007-November/001181.html
https://marc.info/?l=reiserfs-devel&m=110878382927801&w=2

My usage is a little less consistent than Satoshi's and has gone up and down over the years (I think mostly depending on which keyboards I was using, weirdly-- I think I most consistently an extra space when typing on a model M-- most similar to the keyboards I learned on, and do so less consistently on a laptop.) This is by no means unique to me-- scan around in other messages on those lists, mostly written by tech experts a little older than me and you'll see that many other people use two spaces after periods (even in some of the posts by others that I'm quoting). It's also possible that this was or wasn't Satoshi's native style, but he might have consistently used it in order to leave less of a stylometry signature. He was trying to conceal his identity after all (and it's not like stylometry was some unknown thing back then).

I think the fact that people keep talking about it like it's some kind of mystery shows the deep intellectual bankruptcy of the whole speculating-about-satoshi enterprise: the people doing it are too careless or too incompetent to sort out the simplest facts.

I would like to similarly point out that the occasional text editor *ahem* has to be explicitly told not to put two spaces after a period by enabling "French Spacing" for when you auto-reformat a paragraph.

This appears to me to be a generational disconnect between fashion and aesthetics, and typographic habit. I would fully expect that in the dark-ages of usenet as well, that the double-space after the period would have a histogram over time that just drops slowly as the old style fell out of .. fashion.

I find it irritating that anyone is focusing so much on this minor, completely arbitrary and capricious detail. To me, it is a very strong indicator of a weak mind who considers minor details in Satoshi's English output even relevant as a stylometric detail for fingerprinting in the first place.