Haha yes all words change meaning. You’re so smart for figuring that out.
There’s a difference between the two changes though.
Comment on Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 week agoAlgorithm means Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name was transliterated into Latin as Algoritmi and from there into English as Algorithm.
Using ‘algorithm’ to refer to anything other than the person is linguistic drift and therefore utterly unacceptable. Even if you’re “pulling an Algorithm” by relying on his mathematical work, then you’re pulling an Algorithm every time you use the number zero. Using “(pulling an) Algorithm” to refer only to a structured set of mathematically precise instructions is just so ignorant.
Anyway, what were you saying about people being dumb for using “algorithm” in a different sense than how it was used previously?
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 week ago
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
“Algorithm” is a term from computer science that doesn’t inherently have anything to do with social media or content recommendations. Those things are examples of algorithms, but far from the only ones.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
That is an example application of Algorithm’s work, but far from the only one. Algorithm doesn’t inherently have to do with information theory or programming languages.
Linguistic drift comes for us all. “Eventually everyone who hates this thing is going to be dead, and the ones that use it are going to be in control”.