On 10/8/2020 2:17 PM, Michael Stone wrote:
On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 01:27:15PM -0500, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
Well, what, really, is wrong with pedantry?
It makes conversation with humans harder
Can you provide any data to back that up? I find it often to be quite
the opposite. Sloppy use of language very frequently leads to
miscommunication, sometimes of a very serious nature.
> with no corresponding benefit.
There are many benefits to accuracy in communication, and many risks to
poor accuracy in communication. Just ask NASA. Their $328 Million Mars
Climate Orbiter was lost due to miscommunication between engineering teams.
Not only that, but the discrepancy grows exponentially with the
order of magnitude. The difference between 1 KB and 1 KiB is only 24
bytes, or 2.4%. The difference between 1 TB and 1 TiB is 9.9%, which
is getting to be pretty significant. That, not to mention the fact 93
GiB is a pretty good chunk of storage.
And how, exactly, does that matter?
If you don't understand how 1,000,000,000,000 bytes is different from
1,099,511,627,776 bytes, then I don't know what to tell you. They are
not the same. They are different. Whether that difference is
significant or not depends upon the situation.
If you're on your own system and
looking at output from the same set of programs the units don't actually
matter at all--you could look and see that you need one foosbit of space
and have two foosbits and be fine. Units only really matter if you're
talking to someone else or otherwise taking information out of its
original context.
Is there some reason you feel the need to point out the obvious?
But I can't even think of a situation where I needed
to tell someone on a mailing list that I had n TsomethingBsomething of
space.
That is not a reasonable excuse for being sloppy.
Context is important. Within the context we're discussing, rough
order of magnitude is more than precise enough. For humans a 5.4TB drive
and a 4.9TiB drive both round to 5T. Relative values are generally much
more important in this context: what percentage of the drive is used?
Again, that depends upon the situation. I am certainly not going to
have a cow if someone accidentally says, "MB", when they mean "MiB", but
that does not mean it is unimportant everyone should have a solid
understanding of the difference.
At any rate here's the cold hard truth: even if you are exchanging
information and it needs to be precise, humans being what they are it
won't help you one bit if you're personally pedantic about MiB vs Mb
because *you can't assume the other side means the same thing*.
Again, you state the obvious. The point is, attending to one's
precision will never hurt. Failure to do so can. If one is precise in
one's speech, then one needn't worry about the situations when
imprecision can cause an issue.
You'll
have to establish a baseline in every situation where it matters.
Again you seem to be compelled to point out the obvious. No
communication can ever take place without at least implicitly agreed
upon definitions.
But in
a situation where it doesn't matter, doing so is just a waste of
time
How is it a waste of time? Imprecision takes no less time than
precision. Sometimes it takes more.
--it won't change the world or human nature.
Now that is just silly. Nothing any of us do has more than a minuscule
chance of changing the world, and less than that of changing human
nature. If we were to wait for an opportunity to do something of the
sort, then none of use would ever do anything.
