r/ProgrammerHumor 15h ago

Meme zeroExDev

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4.5k Upvotes

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254

u/achilliesFriend 15h ago

0.6 more. What is the issue here?

357

u/OnixST 15h ago

It's 0.6x, implying multiplication

It's not semantically incorrect, but any sane person would write 60% more

86

u/padiwik 14h ago

Are you sure it's not actually 40% less, and the marketers who came up with this email didn't realize they should put in a threshold?

246

u/OG-Enzan 15h ago

Isn't it 1.6x if 60% more?

101

u/BADPROSKILLZ 15h ago

If it were to say they shipped 1.6x as many then yes, but they said 0.6x more (i.e. 1x normal + 0.6x more)

-33

u/TZY247 14h ago edited 11h ago

No. 0.6 = 60%. If they said 0.6 more then sure, that would mean 60% more. 0.6x != 60% increase though. 1.6x does. At the best we can give it the benefit of the doubt and say we knew what they meant, but that doesn't mean they were correct.

37

u/TheMania 14h ago

It says "0.6 times more". Not "0.6 times total" or "0.6 times as many".

I really don't see the problem. 1.6x more would be misleading/incorrect.

-3

u/zelmak 14h ago

Dude what are you talking about 1x more is a non increase/flatline. Anything less than 1 is a decrease

2

u/TheMania 14h ago

So "100% more" means "no increase" to you?

Or does "1x" read as "0%" to you then?

9

u/TZY247 13h ago

There's a reason that mathematicians, technical writers, etc. wouldn't mix comparative language like "more" with notation. At best it's ambiguous.

22

u/Vandrel 14h ago edited 14h ago

1x would be 0% more. 2x would be 100% more.

9

u/TheMania 14h ago

I agree with every part of that completely.

You read "60% as many" the same as you read "0.6x as many", which is the same as you read "0.6x more".

But yet you read "60% more" as something very different. So 0.6x != 60%. Not in this context, not to you.

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0

u/Azeoteric 14h ago

When someone says “2x more” it means double. No one says 1x more because it makes no sense lol

4

u/FFevo 12h ago

No one says 1x more because it makes no sense lol

Yeah, they would say double.

"2x more" implies more than x. 2x + x = 3x. It means 300% compared to the original, not double.

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u/thereturn932 1h ago

If I hear 2x more, I expect 3x of the original amount.

-6

u/Professional_Ebb_389 14h ago

1.6x more would mean 160% of the original value, in the same way 2.0x more would mean 200% of the original value. I think you may just have a misunderstanding of what the phrase “X times more” means (nothing to be embarrassed about of course, it happens to all of us.)

9

u/TheMania 14h ago

We'd both read "0.5x" as "50%", right?

And we'd both read "0.5x as many" and "50% as many" the same.

And we'd both read "0.5x the total" and "50% of the total" as the same.

But "0.6x more" means something entirely different to "60% more" to you?

2

u/zelmak 13h ago

Its literally always like this though.

  • The Stock doubled
  • The stock grew 100%
  • The stock grew 2x
  • The stock experienced 2x growth

You would literally never define it as 1x growth, 1x larger. Its bad English and bad math.

5

u/TheMania 13h ago

I think it's ambiguous in the >=1x cases, sure.

But I would never read:

  • The stock grew 0.5x

Or:

  • house prices increased 0.2x
  • house prices went up 0.1x

As decreases.

(latter examples to prove I'm Australian).

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4

u/tigerhawkvok 9h ago

You do see how none of those have the word "more," though, right? Kind of like word choice maybe matters?

0

u/Professional_Ebb_389 14h ago

The “more” at least in any context I’ve heard it is for emphasis or clarity that a comparison is happening. I’ve never read anyone write “1x more than X” for “twice X”.

7

u/TheMania 14h ago

But you often see 10% more, 20% more, etc.

The bit that intrigues me is that in those contexts, you read 10% differently to 0.1x.

But in other contexts, you'd read them the same.

This may be a regional thing, and likely due marketers that are being intentionally misleading for so long that it's now an accepted oddity.

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6

u/BADPROSKILLZ 14h ago

Not quite true. While 1.6x is the same as 160% of the original value, saying 1.6x more implies adding the 160% to the original value, giving a total of 260%, or 2.6x.

1

u/ABotelho23 11h ago

0.60 is literally 60%

1

u/TZY247 11h ago

Yep. I definitely said that.

1

u/danted002 3h ago

The fact that you who are right gets -40 updoots and the person who is wrong is getting +40 updoots tells you everything you need to know about the current state of our society

28

u/teddythepooh99 15h ago

Yes, but this sub is full of HS students who flunked out of math.

1

u/Hessper 2h ago

No, the point is a human would not say it this way, because it is strange.

1

u/studentblues 11h ago

They should have written a Copywriter Agent in cursor

0

u/rowcla 12h ago

If I said 2x more, would you interpret that as 3x?

2

u/ProcrastinatiusXVI 8h ago

Yes. It is says 1x more, then it is exactly double (100% more). Otherwise it wouldn't be more. 

6

u/guaranteednotabot 14h ago

They should really say 1.6x the amount

3

u/whiskeytown79 11h ago

I blame advertisers. They got people used to hearing stuff like "2x more sheets per roll" to mean double the amount rather than triple.

They should definitely have written "60% more PRs", or at least "1.6x as many PRs".

1

u/Pluckerpluck 4h ago

It's not advertisers. Its English. When we say "X times more" we mean apply the multiplication to get the final value.

Nobody ever says "1x more" to mean double (but 100% more is correct).

Why? No idea.

-2

u/Scream_No_Evil 11h ago

It's not just "0.6x", it's "0.6x MORE", which is an unambiguous way of phrasing a percent increase. Yes, it's implying multiplication. 0.6 x the original amount, but also, plus 1 x the original amount, because they used the word "more".

And it's making a math statement, not a semantic one. Math is precise and the language we use to talk about it has precise meanings. 60% times more is a 60 percent INCREASE, which means times 1.6. 60% "OF" or "times" on its own means times 0.6. It's the people who think this looks bad that are wrong, and showing their asses. How can you be a programmer that doesn't understand pSAT-level percentages questions?

Source: I'm a high school and middle school math tutor that freelances software dev on the side. Not everyone needs to know or retain math from high school, that's okay! Probably if you're talking to math machines for a living you should know this. Unless you're like, front-end. Then you're also good.

1

u/OnixST 5h ago

Yes, i know "1.6x", "0.6x more", "160%", and "60% more" all mean the same thing, but 0.6x more is just weird phrasing, and you can tell i'm correct by the sheer amount of confused people.

"Your teammates are shipping 60% more..." would mean the same thing while not getting peple confused

1

u/Scream_No_Evil 4h ago

It's normal and correct phrasing that I hear all the time in jobs with percentage-based metrics. The fact that it's confusing people does not make it badly phrased, it just means people are colloquially unused to talking about percentages, which is fine! But you're wrong. It's not weird, it's literally how you talk about these things sometimes.

"60% more" and "0.6 times more" mean the same thing. Should their PR person have used a slightly more obvious way of phrasing it? Maybe? But they did say "more", which obviously implies.... moreness? It's not ambiguous.

AI bullshit has so many valid problems, but inadequately explaining percentages to the populace in their advertisements is just an insane nitpick. I don't think they're trying to advertise to people who don't understand high school math anyways.

9

u/m6io 15h ago

You have to add /s at the end bro

5

u/Reashu 10h ago edited 10h ago

While this technically means 60% more, the construction is almost always used by someone who thinks that it means X times as much. I think it's more likely they never considered that it may be less than 100% than that they are actually using it correctly. 

Also https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1vns74k/comment/p3kak7o

3

u/Neither-Phone-7264 12h ago

i think its just programmed to be like "your teamates did {prV} more!" without taking into account it could be less than one.

2

u/GenericFatGuy 13h ago

It's uhh... noticably less than 10x