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Devolution/devaluation seems very common now. I'm not sure if it's my perspective or if it's really worse that it used to be. Some examples: * ROM: something

by dwc 11y ago

Devolution/devaluation seems very common now. I'm not sure if it's my perspective or if it's really worse that it used to be. Some examples: * ROM: something you download and install on your Android phone (as opposed to socketing a new chip) * Machine Learning: any change in program behavior based on feedback input (we used to call this programming) * Disruptive: doing business at least slightly different than someone else (as opposed to a new paradigm that sends shockwaves through a whole industry) * Fork: make a copy of a project (as opposed to starting a rival project based on the codebase of another project)

oldmanjay 11y ago
Considering any of that "worse" is definitely your perspective. It's simple back-in-my-day-ism to apply a value judgment to language use.
- anon4 11y ago
  I used to be with "it". Then they redefined what "it" was and it wasn't what I was with. Now I can't be with what I used to be, because it's "it", but "it" is now different. In other words, embrace, extend, extinguish.
- UmDieWelt 11y ago
  The point is that the words don't really have a useful meaning anymore. It is especially important in technical topics to have terms with some specific meaning.
  - Retra 11y ago
    It's important to be able to construct specific meanings. You don't need terms to do that, and you run a major communication risk by relying on terms that you aren't willing to define. And if you define them first, then you can use them however you like.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      And that is why, a century ago, German was used frequently in science: A language where every word is a literal description of its meaning.
- dwc 11y ago
  It's less about prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics and more about people trying to make what they're doing sound more awesome than it is. The dilution of terms is an unfortunate side effect.
derefr 11y ago
"ROM" is, these days, short for "ROM image"—the type of binary you'd typically write to a ROM that gets memory-mapped and jumped into, e.g. firmware, a BIOS, or a previous-generation console game unikernel. "Fork", meanwhile, has simply transitioned from having a discrete to having a continuous meaning. All Github "code forks" of a project have the potential to become "organizational forks", and whether they do is mostly a question of to what degree the changes introduced in one "code fork" are incompatible with merging into the upstream. I would argue that this transition in meaning is necessary—when every piece of code is owned by some organization, "code forking" is "organizational forking"—but when there is no organization, it can happen that some random stranger's "code fork" becomes the de-facto accepted fork, just because it is being maintained while the upstream isn't.
branchless 11y ago
* Sharing economy - not sharing but it uses computers for part of it and some stuff is used more than one time
ketralnis 11y ago
Don't forget basically any word used by Javascript programmers * isomorphic * functional * reactive * responsive
deleted 11y ago
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by dwc 11y ago

oldmanjay 11y ago

Considering any of that "worse" is definitely your perspective. It's simple back-in-my-day-ism to apply a value judgment to language use.

anon4 11y ago
I used to be with "it". Then they redefined what "it" was and it wasn't what I was with. Now I can't be with what I used to be, because it's "it", but "it" is now different. In other words, embrace, extend, extinguish.
UmDieWelt 11y ago
The point is that the words don't really have a useful meaning anymore. It is especially important in technical topics to have terms with some specific meaning.
- Retra 11y ago
  It's important to be able to construct specific meanings. You don't need terms to do that, and you run a major communication risk by relying on terms that you aren't willing to define. And if you define them first, then you can use them however you like.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    And that is why, a century ago, German was used frequently in science: A language where every word is a literal description of its meaning.
dwc 11y ago
It's less about prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics and more about people trying to make what they're doing sound more awesome than it is. The dilution of terms is an unfortunate side effect.

derefr 11y ago

"ROM" is, these days, short for "ROM image"—the type of binary you'd typically write to a ROM that gets memory-mapped and jumped into, e.g. firmware, a BIOS, or a previous-generation console game unikernel. "Fork", meanwhile, has simply transitioned from having a discrete to having a continuous meaning. All Github "code forks" of a project have the potential to become "organizational forks", and whether they do is mostly a question of to what degree the changes introduced in one "code fork" are incompatible with merging into the upstream. I would argue that this transition in meaning is necessary—when every piece of code is owned by some organization, "code forking" is "organizational forking"—but when there is no organization, it can happen that some random stranger's "code fork" becomes the de-facto accepted fork, just because it is being maintained while the upstream isn't.

branchless 11y ago

* Sharing economy - not sharing but it uses computers for part of it and some stuff is used more than one time

ketralnis 11y ago

Don't forget basically any word used by Javascript programmers * isomorphic * functional * reactive * responsive

deleted 11y ago

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