What I hate even more, is that the morons who can't read more than two syllables decided to shorten "application" to "app", but now I only ever hear people reading that as "ay pee pee"! What was the fucking point?
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Chinese phonology doesn't allow for the pronunciation of "app", for example. I see a lot of Chinese people spelling it as "APP", and pronouncing it accordingly. It's kinda funny to me, since the Mandarin word "yingyong" is only two syllables. "APP" just seems more cumbersome by all account, yet it has become inexplicably popular.
The script is compiled to a program which is then executed by the OS.
->
The app is appified to an app which is then apped by the app.
Damnit.
Who has ever called a batch file an app
My end users
I hate that this meme never explains what application meant 'back then'
I get that it's a problem now, but if it had a clear enough definition back then, maybe this couldn't have occurred the way it did?
I always understood "application" like a gadget in the software world that just resolved one specific problem, and had that own definition till got distorted
I also hate the way "algorithm" has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying "I don't want any algorithm in my social media feed", which is a nonsensical statement.
I think it's the same concept as when people say that they don't want any chemicals in their food. You know what they mean, but in a technical sense the statement is nonsensical.
Yeah, I don't like that one, either.
People are onto something though - there's been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what's an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it's not that specific thing.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I'm not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn't involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.
Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.
One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you're doing that, though, you're probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there's been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?
It's a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.
Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.
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Let's not tell them that by definition both a shopping list and a recipe are algorithms.
Isn't a shopping list more like a data structure? A recipe would be an algorithm. I don't know, I could be wrong.
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So what should we call the thing that we don't want in our social media feeds that controls what we see?
Manipulation
Engagement based personalized recommendations.
Catchy. Can't imagine why "algorithm" caught on instead.
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In the Netherlands basically everyone uses whatsapp. In the beginning people would say send me a whatsapp or something like that. But pretty quickly people started to shorten it to just app. So people will say stuff like I just got an app (instead of message), it drives me nuts. Like my family chat group is called "app group".
In Italy people loves start up companies because they think they all make apps. And they write is as "Start apps"
Lmaoo, Italian here too, I never had the pleasure to see that slip up, where have you seen it on usually?
You don't talk to enough 40+ years old hahah
Guess not, not yet at least
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Web browser? "app". Web page? "app". Dialog box? "app". Phone app that's just a thin shell for the web site? "appapp".
I remember "killer app" being a phrase I regularly heard in the 90's.
On the flipside, "Bot" is the backend for almost everything that I've dealt with recently.
"We need the data moved from X to Y, can someone make a bot for that?"
Internal suffering
"... Yes. We can setup an API between X and Y."
"Great! We also want a bot to generate daily reports from Y"
Suffering intensifies
"... Ok."
I don't even try to fight it anymore.
Um excuse me the preferred term is "AI agent" if you want outside investment
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Then: Books, Movies, Videos, Blogs, Articles Now: C O N T E N T
Man, I hate the word content.
Product is a word I hate.
I have a warehouse full of product.
I mean unless you're a drug smuggler... Then that's fine. But using it for random lawn mower parts is dumb I think.
I’m content with it
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See also the client camera movement guide:
This is ridiculous. There's no way a client calls a dolly a "pan".
That's obviously zooming.
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The other day I realized they did that because its APPle. I have no evidence but I'm sticking with it
I think I heard "applet" being mentioned for embedded java or something in the early 2000s. I don't know if that's connected.
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I call everything a script. Makes the Java devs real mad. Makes the PM's super confused.
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I felt like I was alone in being frustrated at this trend. However I found a bit of relief to discover, through messing around in a Win98 virtual machine, that they were occasionally using the term "app" back then as well. Of course it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now, but whatever.
Also I thought I'd never see the Xbox kid meme again. What an unexpected throwback!
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