Hacker News Reader

Comment by globnomulous | Hacker News Reader

> Jalapeño can reduce end-to-end latency (the time between prompt to last token) by up to 3.6 times

I'm never sure what on earth this kind of impressionistic math is supposed to tell me. Is the comparison between 4.6 and 1.0? 3.6 and 1.0? Clearly the comparison isn't supposed to be 1.0 and -2.6, even though that's what the words literally mean. I can't be the only person who finds this infuriating and distracting. These numbers shouldn't be impressionistic. They should be precise. That this is an article on spectrum.ieee.org makes the imprecision all the stranger. I'd expect their readershipt to care, for instance, about what's even being measured. Is this the geometric mean of something? The arithmetic mean? And what latency has improved?

View on HN

It's... written right there? Like what?

Suppose you send in your marvelous prompt and hit Enter.

Machine churns for 18 seconds, types out a "reply", then yields back control.

18 / 3.6 = 5

So now the machine will only churn for 5 seconds before yielding back control.

This is confusing how exactly?

Why would an "up to" figure be a mean, or a geometric mean? It's clearly a max, that's why it's called "up to"...

Am I missing something?

No the math is correct and that is how I understood it as well.

> Am I missing something?

If you’re sincerely asking…

Mathematically speaking, 18 / 3.6 isn’t “reducing” by 3.6X, it’s “dividing” by 3.6X. Reducing would be 18 - (18 * 3.6), which is obviously wrong. By your formula, “reducing by 50%” would be 18 / 0.5, also obviously wrong.

Yes, people do say things like “reduce by 3.6X” and are understood to mean what you said, but they also say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”. It doesn’t bother me but I can understand why math oriented people would be annoyed, and I personally would never say “reduced by 3.6X”, but instead “reduced by 72.2%”.

I was sincere, because as you point out, the phrasing is not actually ambiguous here. There is only one way to interpret this that is coherent and sensible. The usual % shenanigans weren't even on the table for me.

Not that I'd have ever seen "reduced by 0.5x" or any other value below 1x, probably for this very reason. What I do see is "reduced to 0.5x", in which case you're supposed to swap the division for multiplication.

Percentages on the other hand are a whole another can of worms, even if these forms are principally interchangeable, and I find them a lot more confusing a lot more often.

Not that this would explain the whole mean/geomean thing.

You're missing the part of your brain that wants to be pedantic more than it wants to understand someone.

Yea. That’s what happens when writers get sloppy.

That odor you are detecting is just good old fashioned bullshit, my friend. It’s just that nowadays everything and everyone is covered in it, and we are not supposed to notice. The emperor has no clothes… and is covered in shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com