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| ▲ | halJordan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I disagree. I think you're saying that because this is your niche and finding the term isn't difficult for you. However, consider the Tolkien community. I enjoy lord of the rings and want to know more. But there's an absurd acronym for another book (home) that no one ever expands in that community. And it's not in the wiki's and it's not in Google (bc what do you get if you google "tolkien home"?) it was intentionally frustrating for me to figure out what that acronym was. The people in the tolkien community also adopted your pov and just wouldn't help, expecting new people to bootstrap themselves. It was not a fun experience. These styling conventions aren't for the 99% of the time they're for the 1% of the time. |
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| ▲ | mgiampapa 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not an intuitive leap to google "tolkien home acronym" of which both the AI summary and the first result give the answer. | |
| ▲ | Melatonic 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's also quite similar to CPU But yeah in general it's nice to at least explain the acronym once | |
| ▲ | zamadatix 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The experience can't have been that bad, you just used "bc" and "pov" without batting an eye. I'm also extremely cocksure, though feel free to prove me wrong, that you have no issue using generic HNisms or specialized technology jargon in the rest of your comments too. Reasonably so, because it'd be crazy to expand and explain what everything means all the time when it takes so little effort for anyone who wants to to familiarize themselves yet is so convenient for everyone who already knows. And what I'm saying here is different from "you should not ever care to expand acronyms/abbreviations/initialisms" but that does not necessarily mean your goal should be that it's "fun" for every possible person (you'll never achieve that goal, under or overexplaining is never fun). It's about what's reasonably efficient for everyone likely to read the article. If 50%, 10%, 1%, and 0.1% of your audience will understand an acronym, abbreviation, or piece of jargon then it has different implications for what the right balance of reasoning is. Not every piece need target a generic audience, not every acronym need assume the reader can't be bothered to learn anything not spelled out for them in the page, and not everything is equally hard to figure out when it's not spoon-fed to the reader. And, again, what is "Tensor Processing Unit" going to gain you if you don't already know that's what TPU stands for in the context of this article? I.e. who knows what a tensor is and why youd have a processor for them yet gains something by the acronym being expanded? People who don't know what a TPU is should start with a different article completely, probably several, and then read this one. Expecting every piece of writing should assume no knowledge blocks more knowledge than it helps share. |
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| ▲ | SecretDreams 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I see your point, but it's good practice to introduce abbreviations at least once before using them. I even still see GPU defined at least once in most professionally written articles. |
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| ▲ | titzer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is it going to kill them to spell it out once? Also, it doesn't just come out and say what the peak throughput of these chips are, just 2.7x the prior generation. This is one of those things that Apple does every Mac release--it's always some big dumb bar that is bigger or some line up and to the right that has absolutely no explanation. |
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| ▲ | foltik 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It also mentions GPU and CPU, should they spell those out too? | | |
| ▲ | _kst_ an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not necessarily. Those terms are, at least in my experience, much better known that "TPU". |
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| ▲ | mathisfun123 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Is it going to kill them to spell it out once? would it kill you to use an internet search engine (such as google)? | | |
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| ▲ | cco 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It is good writing practice, even in technical documents, to spell out an acronym the first time it is used in your document. > We first designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) more than a decade ago motivated by Google’s... Literally all it takes. Basically free and it helps both broaden your audience and avoid mistakes. Also, high key, it is a great opportunity for a back link to https://cloud.google.com/tpu, which you'd think Google would care about. |
