It is my futile mission in life to help people understand that initials, acronyms, and abbreviations are real barriers to communication.
Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First off, how many people would that be, compared to the number of people who love a good mystery and a good gadget, but have no idea what an ROV is?
As to bandwidth, you only have to spell it out once. Simple practice: I built a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and solved some cold missing person cases.
The author of this piece doesn't strike me as someone who relishes communicating in cryptic acronyms, so my guess is that it was just thoughtless. He hadn't yet seen my screed on the subject. :-)
I'm sure there are those who love communicating in cryptic code. They tend to congregate in like-minded cliques that don't much care about communicating outside their tightly-defined world. So be it. But if you want to be read and understood by a wide audience, spell it out.
The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.
And yes, effective communication within "like-minded cliques" is exactly what is facilitated by jargon. Personally I'd rather read concise technical descriptions from such direct communications (doing the work to learn what I don't know from context or external sources), rather than having to skim through watered-down general-audience "edutainment" articles and read between the lines to figure out the specific touchstones being referenced by canned general phrases.
This isn't a water hobbyists forum, nor one for all manner of remotely operated vehicles, so it's a bit optimistic to assume many people here will know "ROV" as a remote controlled submarine. Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested, nor from skimming the first six (!) pages of a long article. Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much, but saved me and most others on this forum some time figuring out if I want to figure it out.
And the article was not written to this forum?
> Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested
This is a situation where HN’s “no editorialising titles” rule falls flat. Simply with the context change the title would be also best changed. I also understand why we have the rule of course.
> Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much
Sure. There is a lot which could have been improved on the whole article with better editing.
EDIT: also https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...
For the latter, check this long list of acronyms used in Telsa vehicles (yes, A/C is obvious....keep scrolling down): https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/2024/en-...
What the fluff is a "Brick Monitor Board"? I'm a car nut and I know a lot about EVs, and my best guess: it's a submodule of the battery management system that monitors a group of cells, which I think the only reason I know to guess that is because I've watched youtube videos of tesla packs being repaired or torn down. IBST? Turns out that's the vacuum pump for the brake servo, and "I" means "electronic."
For the former, he was probably ranting about this because he's always struck me as a little insecure about being better than NASA (not really that hard) and thus is annoyed by NASA's fetish for backronyms...which I think it inherited from the military due to sleeping in the same bed for three quarters of a century, but also their convenience.
During all phases of a mission, there are often times where comms need to be fast (for example, when the flight director or whoever does it, asks each subsystem person if they're go for launch - there's a lot of those subsystem people and the "are you OK with us proceeding" happens multiple times just during the lead-up to launch. It's a lot faster to have the following conversation:
"ECS?" "Go." "TACNAZ?" "Go." "DONUT?" "Go."
If you're the astronaut, you don't want to be shouting "Electronic Cookie Stabilizer failure!" over the radio during an emergency, and anyone on the channel with you probably knows every acronym relating to the mission by heart..