Earlier quoted context omitted.
== Call To Action
Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
There is absolutely no issue with using obscure abbreviations or acronyms as long as it is defined in the first use.
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
71–80 of 189 posts
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
They think it makes them sound knowledgable.
I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")
Without context ATM could be Asynchronous Transfer Mode or automated teller machine.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine "In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The sa…
I am sure it is against Terms of Service to use Starlink to bomb people! Last time starlink was used to sank tanker near Turkey. It was miracle tanker was empty, and there was no ecological catastrophe!
IIRC, that tanker was chosen preciselybecause it was empty and would not cause an ecological disaster. Not much of a miracle.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
[flagged]
They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate.
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
They think it makes them sound knowledgable.
I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")
> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate. Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
Who's going all the way to Google translate to copy and paste? You just select the text and right click/long press and select translate.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten? Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to…
I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?
By enforcing antitrust laws, like it has been done many times in history?
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#78If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power. Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
> Starlink-style connectivity Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Is that true? This comment suggests otherwise, with citations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46351511
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#79I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation to invest significant money and time once to replace them by something more robust.
Re: Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I don’t know why people use obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.
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