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by danpalmer 712 days ago
As a software engineer I'm very familiar with "OOM"s and "orders of magnitude", and have never once heard the former used to mean the latter.

Perhaps this is a term of art in harder science or maths. I can't help but think here it's likely to confuse the majority as they wonder why the author is conflating memory and compute.

Something that might help is for the link to be amended to link to the page as a whole (and the unconventional expansion of OOM at the top) rather than the #Compute anchor.

1 comments

As a physician I have the same expectations as you for those two words. Especially given that the link is to an anchor on the middle of the page, I was thinking in units of "OOM". Essentially I was thinking "OK an OOM is a unit for the doubling of RAM" (wrong).
As a physicist (physics dropout) I didn't realize till now OOM meant out of memory to most programmers