4 ms·

I have a particular antipathy for articles too lazy to spell out acronyms on first use. So: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation https:

I have a particular antipathy for articles too lazy to spell out acronyms on first use. So: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation

_joel 1mo ago
For those times you need to Red Amber Green your BM25
dotancohen 1mo ago
The audience for this piece is already very familiar with RAG. I don't want articles discussing e.g. OLED screens telling me what the acronym is - that would be a sign that the article is far below the level that I need.
- vaylian 1mo ago
  A hyperlink to Wikipedia would have solved that issue.
  - redsocksfan45 1mo ago
    [dead]
  - Lorean1 1mo ago
    Maybe if a person can't even google RAG they are not the intended audience of that article.
    - Zambyte 1mo ago
      Eh, a healthy web is a web. I enjoy my preferred search engine, but surfing the web is becoming a lost medium.
      - tux3 1mo ago
        Hypermedia? In my hypertext markup language? That is so not Web 5.0. Best I can offer is a support widget that pops up and keeps trying to talk to you until you interract with it.
    - ninkendo 1mo ago
      When I hear stuff like this I always imagine going to a restaurant and asking the waitress for a menu and them replying “lol just google it”. It’s not that I can’t or don’t know how, it’s rather that the expectation should be that a website should… link you to the information it believes to be relevant background. It’s why it’s called a “web”, linking is a core concept.
      - brazukadev 1mo ago
        > When I hear stuff like this I always imagine going to a restaurant and asking the waitress for a menu and them replying “lol just google it”. in this case there was a menu in the next empty table and you saw it but in place of getting it you want the waitress to get it for you. Which is a normal behavior but you could save your time by just getting the menu yourself.
        AshleyGrant 1mo ago
        No. It isn't. With acronyms, there's often plenty of potential things it can stand for, and if the person doesn't know enough to know which one is the correct acronym, Googling it isn't going to help them. As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK." The NWS knows this and automatically links to their glossary for both acronyms as well as jargon in their discussions. <-- See what I did there? What does NWS mean in this context? If only I had provided a link that would help you know. I very easily could have. I just didn't.
        serf 1mo ago
        >As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK." it also serves as a minimum barrier to entry for the masses, which isn't always a bad thing. if you're reading this stuff, and you can't figure out what kind of RAG that the search engine mentioned is being talked about through context clues, or you aren't clever enough to feed context into the search like 'hackers , computers, rag' as a query -- there is a very high probability that the person will have absolutely nothing constructive to add to the conversation that is about the topics they haven't even yet conceptualized or are aware of. in that case that slight barrier to entry for the conversation will serve as a tool to produce less work for the moderators and derail less threads into uselessness. (much like this stupid divergence.)
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      I thought this would be a useless search that brought up pictures of rags, but indeed, DDG delivers a full page of results about retrieval-augmented generation for the query "rag"
      - mdp2021 1mo ago
        We can confirm, RAG has been a very big thing in the past few years. It's actually bewildering that it be new to some now - but we are also getting the vibe that some are living an ""AI"-nausea" that may be shielding them from some trends.
- Angostura 1mo ago
  I found the piece interesting, once I worked out what it was about. I strongly disagree that taking time to spell out acronyms should be taken as a signal that an article is low level.
  - arjie 1mo ago
    For people familiar with the field, it would be like if you had every article about hardware read “Intel Central Processing Units (CPUs) with modern Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) Random Access Memory (RAM) can be coupled with Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to run Large Language Models (LLMs) that are stored on Solid State Disks (SSDs)”. Just rapidly becomes unreadable. The acronym constraint was valid in a pre-LLM world but now you are perhaps 3 clicks in a modern browser from learning. If I read an article that spelled out Random Access Memory I would definitely treat that as a lay article.
- triceratops 1mo ago
  There's a middle-ground where you write out ambiguous acronyms ("rag" is an English word) and not unambiguous ones ("oled" only has one commonly-used meaning).

_joel 1mo ago

For those times you need to Red Amber Green your BM25

dotancohen 1mo ago

The audience for this piece is already very familiar with RAG. I don't want articles discussing e.g. OLED screens telling me what the acronym is - that would be a sign that the article is far below the level that I need.

vaylian 1mo ago
A hyperlink to Wikipedia would have solved that issue.
- redsocksfan45 1mo ago
  [dead]
- Lorean1 1mo ago
  Maybe if a person can't even google RAG they are not the intended audience of that article.
  - Zambyte 1mo ago
    Eh, a healthy web is a web. I enjoy my preferred search engine, but surfing the web is becoming a lost medium.
    - tux3 1mo ago
      Hypermedia? In my hypertext markup language? That is so not Web 5.0. Best I can offer is a support widget that pops up and keeps trying to talk to you until you interract with it.
  - ninkendo 1mo ago
    When I hear stuff like this I always imagine going to a restaurant and asking the waitress for a menu and them replying “lol just google it”. It’s not that I can’t or don’t know how, it’s rather that the expectation should be that a website should… link you to the information it believes to be relevant background. It’s why it’s called a “web”, linking is a core concept.
    - brazukadev 1mo ago
      > When I hear stuff like this I always imagine going to a restaurant and asking the waitress for a menu and them replying “lol just google it”. in this case there was a menu in the next empty table and you saw it but in place of getting it you want the waitress to get it for you. Which is a normal behavior but you could save your time by just getting the menu yourself.
      - AshleyGrant 1mo ago
        No. It isn't. With acronyms, there's often plenty of potential things it can stand for, and if the person doesn't know enough to know which one is the correct acronym, Googling it isn't going to help them. As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK." The NWS knows this and automatically links to their glossary for both acronyms as well as jargon in their discussions. <-- See what I did there? What does NWS mean in this context? If only I had provided a link that would help you know. I very easily could have. I just didn't.
        serf 1mo ago
        >As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK." it also serves as a minimum barrier to entry for the masses, which isn't always a bad thing. if you're reading this stuff, and you can't figure out what kind of RAG that the search engine mentioned is being talked about through context clues, or you aren't clever enough to feed context into the search like 'hackers , computers, rag' as a query -- there is a very high probability that the person will have absolutely nothing constructive to add to the conversation that is about the topics they haven't even yet conceptualized or are aware of. in that case that slight barrier to entry for the conversation will serve as a tool to produce less work for the moderators and derail less threads into uselessness. (much like this stupid divergence.)
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    I thought this would be a useless search that brought up pictures of rags, but indeed, DDG delivers a full page of results about retrieval-augmented generation for the query "rag"
    - mdp2021 1mo ago
      We can confirm, RAG has been a very big thing in the past few years. It's actually bewildering that it be new to some now - but we are also getting the vibe that some are living an ""AI"-nausea" that may be shielding them from some trends.
Angostura 1mo ago
I found the piece interesting, once I worked out what it was about. I strongly disagree that taking time to spell out acronyms should be taken as a signal that an article is low level.
- arjie 1mo ago
  For people familiar with the field, it would be like if you had every article about hardware read “Intel Central Processing Units (CPUs) with modern Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) Random Access Memory (RAM) can be coupled with Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to run Large Language Models (LLMs) that are stored on Solid State Disks (SSDs)”. Just rapidly becomes unreadable. The acronym constraint was valid in a pre-LLM world but now you are perhaps 3 clicks in a modern browser from learning. If I read an article that spelled out Random Access Memory I would definitely treat that as a lay article.
triceratops 1mo ago
There's a middle-ground where you write out ambiguous acronyms ("rag" is an English word) and not unambiguous ones ("oled" only has one commonly-used meaning).