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Yes, and this highlights something that bugs me about many tech articles - using acronyms without ever defining them.
by bodono 6y ago
Yes, and this highlights something that bugs me about many tech articles - using acronyms without ever defining them.
- waynecochran 6y agoI hate the overuse of acronyms (IHTOOA). One way to get back is just to start making up your own -- throw a few random TLA's out at your next meeting. It's fun. Also, I would like to push for an anti-acronym day. A full day where you have to use full and complete terminology. Ironic thing is, you don't add that many syllables when you say "Proof of Concept" vs POC and similar such absurd overused abbreviations.
- jcranmer 6y agoTo be fair, in the supercomputing community (or, more generally "high performance computing"--HPC), certain acronyms for libraries are very well-known: MPI, HDF5, FFTW, BLAS, MKL--no one is going to bat their eyes at seeing those names without an acronym expansion.
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoAnd I've only had a passing curiosity of supercomputing, a few years ago, and the only acronym you listed that I have no idea about is HDF5.
- Jarwain 6y agoThat's funny. I've never really touched supercomputing & the only one I c recognize is hdf5
- waynecochran 6y agoThink you could make it one day without using those acronyms? Use of acronyms is usually an audience dependent thing. I am frequently in the in the audience of talks/papers where I don't know all the acronyms. I think the general rule should be, for writing, if there is a reasonable percentage (say more than 10%) of readers who don't know the acronyms, define it on first use. When speaking, give some context or define the terms early in your talk, to help folks along. I say in a meeting the other day with marketing folks. They may be the worst offenders. Techies are pretty bad too.
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoDoing so would ruin many good names such as PoC||GTFO, a well-known infosec magazine.
- numpad0 6y agoIt’s a product name.
- rumanator 6y ago> using acronyms without ever defining them. I don't agree. The article quite clearly refers to Intel MKL, which is widely known at least in the number crunching world. Plus, it's just a blog post.
- Dylan16807 6y ago"MKL" is the name of it, and what it stands for doesn't really matter. Just like "AMD".
- marta_morena_25 6y agoYeah and Math Kernel Library is so much more illuminating than MKL, basically rolls off the tongue.