Article says at one point,
"We have reduced the time for the computation by ~119%!", which is impossible. If you reduce it by 100% it is taking zero time already.
It gets even better when people start switching between percentages and "percentage points" referring to a measure that's in percentages originally.
Unfortunately, most of those things are easier communicated and harder to get wrong if you try speaking in a more natural way. This is now "twice as fast" or "2.1x faster" is much clearer and can't go past zero :)
Similarly, I think it'd help to switch back from percentages to actual factors (119% = 1.19), and saying "we reduced the time for the computation by 1.19 of original time" would clearly show what's wrong (and saying "by 1.19x" would signal how it's a small reduction, so it's wrong as well).
Finally, I am 94.8% certain people will keep using percentages even where inappropriate, and with too much precision too!
It's about language use and what of are those per-cents (per-hundredths).
However, the original statement of "We have reduced the time for the computation by ~119%!" is still wrong-seeming, I agree. It should be "We have increased the speed for the computation by 119%" or "We have reduced the time for the computation by <WHATEVER>" :)
Yeah, when talking of speed, you can clearly go more than 100% faster.
But when talking of something taking a certain amount of time, like done in most benchmarks, it can't be made more than 100% faster.
You can say 100% faster when you are talking about speed. You can't say 100% faster when you are talking about duration. "Reduced the time" is talking about duration.
I love me some of those "discount -50%" signs though.
"What's cheaper? The price is." Now that just doesn't make any sense, since a price isn't cheap or expensive, it's high or low. The thing that is priced can be cheap or expensive, but that's not what's being said.
"What's faster? The speed is." Doesn't make sense either. Speed isn't fast, the speedy thing is. However, "What's faster? The acceleration is." is fine, because you can have slow or fast acceleration (I think?).
I'm an ESL speaker, so please do tell me if I'm wrong and how.
Of course multiply this by the sheer number of calculations and even that little misprediction results in huge differences. The reality is actually quite sobering: a computer mostly calculates the same thing over and over.
I think when I was younger, I thought of programming as very open ended. I.e. I wanted to build abstract, general solutions which would be able to handle any future case.
Over time I realized the problem space is mostly quite well defined, and when I started thinking about programming as defining an assembly line for computations my results and time to solution improved.