Abbreviation confusability is relative to { in fact one might say measured by ;-) - number? entropy? etc. } the listener/reader's knowledge/exposure, much as sound levels need a reference distance.
I have heard "bare K" refer to a great many different things, not just kilobits (transmission) or kilobytes (storage) or kilograms (drug trade) or kilometers (foot races) and on & on, but pages or items or etc.
The fundamental problem is that some humans like to abbreviate while others get caught and annoyed by the necessary ambiguity of such abbreviation. Sometimes this can be the very same human in different contexts. ;-)
In fact, there even seems to be some effect where "in the know people" do this intentionally - like kids with their slang - as a token of in-group membership. And yes, this membership is at direct odds with broader communication, by definition/construction. To me this article seems to be just complaining about "how people are". So it goes!
This is the primary complaint. The secondary one about voltage and power and the ambiguity of the prefix itself was addressed in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44059611).
> I have heard "bare K" refer to a great many different things
The worst of the worst is when it refers to kilometres. Like, "I'm selling my car on the used market and its odometer is 150k", where they mean "150k km", but stacked prefixes are not allowed in metric, so the correct notation is "150 Mm" or "150 megametres".
I get immense pushback whenever I point this out - the response is usually along the lines of "but you know what I meant", and it inherently assumes that km is the universal unit for talking about distance traveled by car.
I point out that this is as ridiculous as saying "the hard drive is 4k GB" because they grew up with gigabytes; no, the correct notation is either "4000 GB" or "4 TB".
Also regarding bare k or kilo (especially キロ in Japanese), you can say something ridiculously ambiguous like "My scooter goes up to 30k for 90k and weighs 20k" (respectively km/h, km, and kg).
In 3D printing, I often catch people talking acceleration in kilo-milli-meter/second². Written and pronounced "16k accel". Instead of writing "16m/s²" and pronouncing "16 accel".
I have nightmares of 150km meaning kilo-miles instead of kilo-metre. And when I say that my car has 260 mega-meter on the odometer, even people born metric look at me funny.
And don't get me started on MB vs MiB. I have seen so many stupid production outages because of people miss-allocating resources by confusing SI and IEC bytes.
Oh dear. I haven't looked into 3D printer specifications, but I definitely understand how it is a problem now that you mentioned it.
Relatedly, most pocket-sized power banks have their charge capacity quoted in milliamp-hours, like 10,000 mAh. There is a high temptation for the layman to call it "10k mAh" instead of the proper and shorter "10 A⋅h". I'm disappointed that people don't think critically when applying the metric system, and just blindly follow certain patterns.
> I have nightmares of 150km meaning kilo-miles instead of kilo-metre.
Yeah, that would be bad. On the other hand, if you bought a used car in America with "150k" on the odometer, I don't have a problem with that meaning "150,000 miles" because rules don't apply to imperial, and "150k" isn't legal metric notation anyway.
> when I say that my car has 260 mega-meter on the odometer, even people born metric look at me funny
I understand your frustration, and I educate people on the existence of the megametre even to an ostensibly metric audience in Canada. (Our road distances are quoted in kilometres, speeds in kilometres per hour, car maintenance intervals in kilometres.)
I pitch megametres as a way to reduce words, imply less accuracy, and all around improve efficiency. For example, if your car calls for an oil change every 8000 km, I just say 8 Mm (megametres) because it's not like the engine will destroy itself if you wait until 9 Mm. And "eight thousand kilometres" is more syllables than "eight megametres".
Similarly, I talk about my yearly bicycling distance as 3 megametres, not 3000 kilometres or "3k k". I mention that chain waxing can support a chain lifetime of over 10 Mm rather than the more verbose 10,000 km.
> And don't get me started on MB vs MiB.
Agreed. And in online debates, I see way too many people who defend the abusive notation where 1 KB = 1024 bytes, and they think that HDD marketers screwed everyone over by using the smaller unit so that their capacities look bigger, and they think that RAM manufacturers have the true claim to prefixes. All of that is nonsense and doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44060099
I have heard "bare K" refer to a great many different things, not just kilobits (transmission) or kilobytes (storage) or kilograms (drug trade) or kilometers (foot races) and on & on, but pages or items or etc.
The fundamental problem is that some humans like to abbreviate while others get caught and annoyed by the necessary ambiguity of such abbreviation. Sometimes this can be the very same human in different contexts. ;-)
In fact, there even seems to be some effect where "in the know people" do this intentionally - like kids with their slang - as a token of in-group membership. And yes, this membership is at direct odds with broader communication, by definition/construction. To me this article seems to be just complaining about "how people are". So it goes!
This is the primary complaint. The secondary one about voltage and power and the ambiguity of the prefix itself was addressed in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44059611).