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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

> One of the samples Brianna decided to weave, was exploring what happens when you use differential sett with really slippery rayon, warp and weft, and then slippery rayon warp and a dragging kind of weft like Shetland wool. The sample with the slippery rayon warp, though challenging, was completely successful. She then wound a warp with the Shetland wool, and the idea was she would tie into the rayon warp and repeat the experiment with a rayon weft and a wool weft, producing an additional two samples.

The jargon! Is this what tech talk sounds like to outsiders?

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I am a developer, and I was once in a meeting full of scientists who work on gene sequencers. One of them, in what context I forget, referred to me as the "tech guy". I thought to myself, "I'm in a room full of scientists who work on gene sequencing, and I'm the tech guy? I thought I was the least technical person in this room."

I've had similar experiences with people who know the magazine industry, the custom steel door industry, the ad agency business, and several others. They all have their own language, and they all think that I'm the tech guy, and I know I'm the only one in the room who doesn't understand what we're talking about. :)

You were the tech guy. They were the biotech guys/gals.

I have known scientists to hold a view to the effect of Math > Science > Tech > ...

So, yea, you are the "tech" guy, but this is not necessarily an exultation

Not an "exultation", sure, but it did definitely feel (in every case) like they were more impressed by knowledge of programming as an esoteric art, whereas knowledge of whatever their specialty was seemed more common to them. The scientists I know have no self-esteem issues, or anything, but (like the advertising people and the steel door people and the ad people and the rest) they don't usually even hear the complexity in their own jargon anymore.

They are secure in their own expertise and can recognize expertise in others. Their jargon makes their conversations more concise, like ours does for us.

Ayup! Totally like that. And I'm sure they have their own sort of correction-reflex for "My computer has 1TB of memory!" - "Oh, you mean you have 1TB of storage." - "Same thing." - "No. It's not. eyeroll"

I think I spent more time watching video snippets and reading portions of other articles to give myself a lightning course on weaving jargon, just so I could understand what was being talked about in the OP. And suddenly, why looms look as complex as they do and are able to weave complex patterns makes sense. Why looms were automated makes sense, and I find myself with a new sense of respect for those who learn and master operation of a manual loom. It's not a trivial task.

Still haven't been able to figure out what a "differential sett" is. Searching with quotes on google finds a bunch of stuff talking about '"differential sett"lement'. Or stuff about Egypt. Best guess is that it has something to do with using a number of threads per inch that is different from what is set on the reed, or differs across the breadth of the warp.

Off-topic: one of my favorite dev environments had a half terrabyte of memory, and it was _fantastic_ for prototyping -- we rarely had to be bothered with disk spillover or any of the other time sucks that arise in low-RAM environments.

My workstation has 512GB of RAM. The cost of the memory (~$2.5k) is insignificant compared to the cost of GPUs.

How do you use that much RAM? Do you think most developers can benefit with this much RAM?

> How do you use that much RAM?

Typically you'd be operating on a lot of data of some kind and gain a lot in productivity by being able to keep all of it (ideal case) or large chunks of it (sampling, LRU cache, etc) in memory all at once.

Having more RAM also enables some workflow changes. You can aggressively point things like intermediate compilation steps or testing databases to a ramdrive. Any time you're doing anything moderately expensive you can cache the result in RAM to make it cheaper to use next time. When choosing algorithms you can bias heavily toward time in any time-space tradeoffs.

> Do you think most developers can benefit with this much RAM?

I'd wager they could use more than they have typically ;) But no, 512GB seems excessive to me for most developer use cases with today's software. In my current job I haven't had a single use case for that much, and there have only been a few instances where 128GB would have been much more productive than what I have.

In a computer engineering class (but nowhere else really), I heard storage can be called "secondary memory"[1] so they're technically correct, without knowing it.

[1] as mentioned here for instance https://techterms.com/definition/secondary_memory

I've not seen it that way, but I've seen memory called "primary storage." Historically storage and memory have been used fairly interchangeably, but when talking about a modern PC, "storage" usually implies disk (or disc, or nvme) and "memory" implies specifically the DRAM.

In french it can also all be called memory. Mémoire vive (lively/quick memory) is for RAM/DRAM etc. Mémoire morte (dead memory) for ROM/eeprom... and Mémoire de masse (mass memory) for storage/disc/tape.

Mémoire morte may be my favorite term ever for ROM/PROM. Would a CD-ROM be Mémoire morte or Mémoire de masse?

Mémoire morte is for PROM onboard chips in practice where you find bios, firmwares these kind of things. Mémoire de masse would include optical discs, storage in general. I'd say CDs are generally thought of as storage and are interchangeable and you need a CD drive/player to read them, not directly.

He he then some smartass says "No it really has 1TB of RAM"

I spent new year's eve 2019/2020 with a group of weavers. The jargon is strong in them and to make matters worse, IT borrowed a few terms (like "thread"), so their conversations were especially confusing to me.

"warp" also appears in various technical contexts. And I can only assume that that's where Rust's rayon comes from too.

I LOVE hearing jargon from a world I know nothing about, and trying to piece it all together from context.

Yep, and the fun thing is that every hobby and profession has its own jargon that binds and educates it members. It amazes me that DSLs are so prevalent in real life but hated by a lot of programmers when trying to describe the activities of people who already have one.

Isn't that to be expected? Jacquard's loom was afaik the first programmable machine?

So yeah .. weavers form a "discourse community" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_community

It's barely jargon. I think a lot of people know that rayon is a type of fibre, and warp and weft are the directions of weave. I don't know what sett is, but I think it's mostly hard to parse because it's not very clearly written.

It's barely jargon. I think a lot of people know that Haskell is a pure functional language, and arrays and hash maps are both examples of functors. I don't know what a monad is, but I think it's mostly hard to parse because it's not clearly written.

I would challenge you to share this with a non-developer friend and see what they think about that statement. You should consider what your personal experiences are with something before making such rather aloof statements towards others.

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

I can note a few differences here:

- People outside the field likely have enough concept of weaving (or fabrics) to know what the terminology might refer to.

- Weaving terminology is woven into our language(s). Before the industrial revolution, that was a huge labour industry - it was part of family/daily life.

- Words like 'sett' and 'weft' are clearly domain-specific and could be looked up. That's far less clear for 'language' and 'array' and 'map'; non-specialists are unlikely to recognise they are being used in a domain-specific way. Is a 'hash map' a type of map?

Hash maps are not functors similarly to how sets are not functors. That is because they do not preserve function composition.

You know what rayon is in the same sense a non-technical person knows what "an Intel CPU" is. You have likely no idea on which characteristics made the person choose a Shetland wool, or what exactly a differential sett is or why you'd hve one. (even when I tell you that sett is the spacing of your warp)

Understanding some of the words is far from understanding jargon. Even if you know all the words, you still don't know why this is an important topic to discuss. Which things there are carrying weight, and which things are more a throwaway to add color.

FWIW, it's quite clearly written for anybody who weaves. It seems unclear to you because you don't know the field. (Jargon extends to what kind of sentences and sentence structures you encounter)

Warp is the threads that go lengthwise, weft is the thread that goes side to side. Rayon is a chemical process that makes a satiny fiber (out of some cellulose source, lately bamboo is popular).

Sett is the spacing between the warp threads, and I had a hunch about what makes it 'differential' but that turns out to be wrong and so I have no clue what it means.

Shetland wool is [a] Scottish wool. At one point half of the UK's exports were wool, so that makes it kind of a big deal. That's all I've got from being in social circles with fiber folk.

> Warp is the threads that go lengthwise, weft is the thread that goes side to side.

That depends on the direction of the fabric through, it's probably clearer to the uninitiated to say that the warp is the fixed "structure", and the weft is the "filling" thread you draw over/under the warp.

The warp is connected to the machine, sure. But I think it’s a waste of time to set up a pattern to be as long as the loom is wide. You get no cloth at all until you’ve done all of the fiddly bits with getting the warp how you want it.

I believe that if you’re going to weave anything, professionally, you’ll pick the loom that’s the width of the shortest dimension of your design, for purely practical reasons. I briefly worked as a mechanic in college, and what separates the pros from dilettantes like me is speed. I’ve heard similar tales from other skilled laborers. “portrait vs landscape” I understood to be very much a speed issue with looms.

I'd say it's very clearly written. If you don't understand how the words are being used, you might struggle to grasp it.

That's exactly what people who don't know the jargon always say, given my experiences with tech jargon.

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