[hansvm]

It's not "lying" to use the words most likely to correctly get your point across to your target audience. Maybe they could have communicated better (for a seemingly dead project, IMO they put enough time in regardless), but it's not lying.

> Anyone making claims about performance should know the difference.

They probably do know the difference. Knowing the difference isn't the thing you're quibbling with.

> If someone asks what your cable bill is and you say it's only $2.50 a month because you have 32 TVs, no one is going to say that makes sense.

Sure...because when asking about your cable bill it's unambiguous that you want the total number of dollars. The whole reason there's any issue at all here is that some of their language is ambiguous if you don't consider the target audience and don't analyze their charts or read the descriptions of those charts. Picking an analogy which resonates precisely because of the lack of ambiguity doesn't say a whole lot about the actual problem at hand.

[CyberDildonics]

The whole point of overhead is that it is a base constant on top of whatever you do. The whole point of overhead is to eventually be amortized in some way. When someone asks what the overhead is, it is a lie to try to factor amortization in because it's implied that it will be done somewhere anyway.

[hansvm]

I think we're maybe talking past each other with definitions.

I think something is a lie when somebody intentionally tries to mislead (even when communicating "facts" if the intent is to maliciously shape the recipient mind). I think when they intentionally try to convey the "right" ideas (as I think this author is doing -- again, using words the way you think most of your peers use them is usually a good thing), that's not a lie. There are gray areas in between. I don't think this is a gray area, except insofar as I don't know all the facts perfectly.

You still seem to disagree with me though. I'd really like to understand why. I have a couple theories, which I'll list, but I'm interested in any insights you have:

1. You disagree with my description of what "lying" is.

2. You think the author is less deserving of trust than I do (since they seem to be profiting almost nothing other than a tiny bit of publicity, since they did outline in their README exactly what they meant, with photos, and since the title didn't stoop to clickbait, my default position is that they likely weren't too malicious, but you might have different priors and might also disagree with my opinions of those conflicts of interest).

> the whole point of overhead ...

That's perhaps the last pertinent thing we disagree about. I'll throw out my opinion, and I sincerely want to know your thoughts on the matter:

An extremely commonplace occurrence is that something is slow and you want to speed it up (measuring perceived latency). If you can magically do that by adding parallelism then it's a good day at work. Unfortunately, parallelism can easily add "overhead" -- parallelizing small or finely grained problems usually increases wall-clock timing, usually substantially.

In that mode of operation, the whole problem you're trying to solve is reducing a certain latency measurement, making it clear from context what "overhead" means. Other definitions don't even enter into the equation.

Zooming out a bit, I've heard that phrasing a ton of times in many different companies. Sure, it's better if people know to speak more precisely (and I think we're in agreement that a few more performance characteristics would be nice to know here), but it's hard for me to imagine a world were my default perception of somebody is that they're lying when they're using the exact same words and meanings as scores of other good engineers. _Maybe_ they are, but that's by no means my default assumption.

[CyberDildonics]

This seems like a lot of writing that has nothing to do with the topic. If someone wants to know the overhead of something and you tell them the overhead divided by an arbitrary number already, that's lying.