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Comment by noibl | Hacker News Reader

> disclaimer: I write GPU drivers for living

Is that a reason for us not to take you seriously? Feel free to disclose any connection you have with the subject but please don't disclaim responsibility for your comments. :)

Unless, of course, you want to..

(Sorry for the no-content post but I see this word used in every second thread these days and it's one of the things that might be driving me nuts.)

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Disclosure, disclaimer. Both apply. I disclose that I work in the field but it can also be a disclaimer that I have extremely skewed views because of the frustrations that years of working too closely with OpenGL can bring. English is not my native language, sorry for any confusion.

Personally I think "disclaimer" is exactly right. If you work on the drivers (or some other low-level component that's part of the general plumbing), your concerns are not always aligned with those of people writing the actual software. Therefore, if you have a complaint about something, it may be that you should be the one who has to do the hard work rather than the application writers, because making your life easier might not maximize overall happiness.

So, "disclaimer" is spot on, I believe, because application writers might like to shed a tear, but not sympathize too hard...

All I think he's doing is alerting the reader that his perspective might be skewed because of his job. In this particular instance, I think that's useful because it balances out the extra authority his comment otherwise gets from the detail he provides (also presumably from the same job).

Whilst it is dangerous to guess at what people were meaning, I understood the 'disclaimer" to mean "I do this for a living so I know what I am talking about".

So, if that is the correct interpretation then is not a disclaimer, more a disclosure. Which is what noibl was trying to educate exDM69 about.

But it is really all idle speculation until exDM69 chimes in.

Dang, now you've made me look up the definition! Apparently, one should only disclaim when one wants to distance oneself from a previous claim.

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