I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.
Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...
I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
One thing that irks me quite a bit is when adjacent fields adopt the same acronym for different things
LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)
yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.
Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...
I enjoyed this article about AFSI.
I felt like it was just another WIWA rehash.
tl;dr