What I mean is like for example, a person having “gravitational pull” or someone making a “quantum leap” makes no sense to anyone who knows about physics. Gravity is extremely weak and quantum leaps are tiny.

Or “David versus Goliath” to describe a huge underdoge makes no sense to anyone who knows about history, because nobody bringing a gun to a sword fight is going to be the underdog but that’s essentially what David did.

I’m looking for more examples like that.

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    5 days ago

    Not quite an idiom, but one of the senior managers at work keeps talking about Moore’s Law in the context of AI stuff like it’s some kind of fundamental law of the universe that any given technology will double in capability every 2 years

    1. Moore observed that transistor density in microprocessors had historically been doubling every 18 months, and this trend more or less continued for a decade or so after he noted it
    2. Density has nothing to do with the capability of technology that uses those microprocessors. The performance of the chips roughly doubled every couple of years, but there was a lot more going on with that than just transistor density
    3. Moore’s law hasn’t held for at least the last decade
    • JayleneSlide@lemmy.world
      38·
      5 days ago
      1. Even when Moore’s Law was still holding ground, it was countered by Wirth’s Law: software is getting slower at a more rapid pace than hardware is getting faster.
      • Artyom@lemm.ee
        4·
        3 days ago

        Kinda wild how a web pages still take several seconds to load. I remember first hearing about multi-megabyte per second internet and assumed pages will load instantly. Now a webpage is so large it takes compiled languages several seconds to parse them.

      • laurathepluralized@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 days ago

        Thank you for introducing me to Wirth’s Law. I’ll be citing that whenever I write code that takes forever to run even on powerful compute 🤣

        • JayleneSlide@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 days ago

          I’m totally guilty too. I’ll be right next to you in that circle of hell reserved for “SWEs who failed to optimize their code.”

    • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      3 days ago

      Yeah this is a common misunderstanding I’ve had to clarify to people as well, even people who work in tech. I support only using “Law” for things that are scientifically actually laws. I don’t even like to use it as a joke (Murphy’s Law) because, unbelievably, some people really do take that to be a law of the universe too.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      3 days ago

      Oh god, the cringe techno-optimist shit where you believe every kind of hype at once. The cream does not rise to the top.