• InverseParallax@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    78
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Yeah, it’s an in-group exclusivity signifier.

    Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there’s 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.

    edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.

    • AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      40
      ·
      1 year ago

      IT guy here, we suffer from a similar problem where everything is an acronym so it sounds like alphabet soup that if said as a word means sometimes you can’t even quietly go look it up later. You either nod along knowing what it means or nod along not knowing what it means but having no chance to learn without outing yourself.

      • enkers@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        1 year ago

        And you can’t out yourself because, in many workplace cultures, the appearance of knowing is more important than actually knowing. :/

        • AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Had a ticket about sports sites being blocked, college talked about how the change was IOC related. International Olympic Committee or Indicator of Compromise, you decide!

    • gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.

      Yeah, this happens a lot. I studied math and I often got the impression that when you read other researcher’s work, they describe the exact same thing that you have already heard about, but in a vastly different language. I wonder how many re-inventions and re-namings there are of any concept simply because people can’t figure out that this thing has already been researched into. It really happens a lot, where 5 people discovered something, but gave them 5 different names.

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        It’s even worse, math uses arcane terms for things that in many other fields are basically just accepted.

        Galois fields? In hardware and software, those are just normal binary unsigned integers of a given bit length.

        I get that GFs came about first, but when they were later implemented for computers they weren’t usually (they are sometimes, mostly for carry less mul specifically, or when used for cryptography) called Galois fields, the behavior was just accepted as the default for digital logic.

    • uis@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.

      Programming is applied math. Mathematicians say “theory of mass service”, programmers say “schedulers”. Well, it’s “theory of mass service” in Russian, but in English it is “queue theory”.