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Comment by jpc0

3 months ago

Border Gateway Protocol

But I don’t even think people in networking would say that, it is canonically BGP.

This is kind of like complaining about the abbreviation HTML, sure yes it is Hypertext Markup Language but everyone knows it as HTML to the point that there are probably people that don’t know it’s an abbreviation.

17 comments

jpc0

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federiconafria  3 months ago

Adding to this, both for BGP or HTML if you don't already know what they mean, the "full form" does not really help.

bryanlarsen  3 months ago

Agreed. There are almost certainly more people who know what "BGP" is than know what "Border Gateway Protocol" is.

But it still would have been a favor to the original commenter to write "BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)". If you write just "BGP" you annoy the reader who doesn't know what it is; they'll think it's your fault. But if you write "BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)", they still won't know what it is but they won't be irritated at you anymore.

  • jpc0  3 months ago

    Someone linked a document a few weeks ago that address the topic of abbreviations and when the abbreviation is the common form it is acceptable to just use the abbreviation.

    I don’t think anyone in their right mind would open every article with HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS( Cascading Style Sheets).

    For networking it would be the same with BGP/OSPF/RIP.

    • bryanlarsen  3 months ago

      But it is it a networking post? It's a networking blog in general, but this post is clearly targeted at people interested in a rust scripting language and should expect wider distribution.

  • jakkos  3 months ago

    Funnily enough, I had no idea what "BGP" meant until I saw "Border Gateway Protocol" and then remembered "oh yeah the router thing".

    I did a networking course in school, and haven't touched it since.

chrisweekly  3 months ago

This reminds me of a trivia night event last weekend; in a room of 12 6-person teams I was the only one who knew exactly what the acronym URL stands for. But I'm confident a majority would have been able to come up with a reasonable working definition.

k__  3 months ago

Fair.

I'm currently writing an article about Flowspec and had to comb a few RFCs to understand what's going on.

I opened the Roto announcement and felt very smart, lol

bluGill  3 months ago

A LLM response so don't trust it, but

    Biological and Genetic Programming: In biology, BGP can refer to methods or algorithms used in genetic programming or bioinformatics.
    BGP (Bureau of Governmental Personnel): In some governmental contexts, BGP may refer to a specific bureau or office related to personnel management.
    BGP (Bureau of Geographical Planning): In urban planning or geography, it might refer to a bureau that focuses on geographical data and planning.
    BGP (Big Green Potato): In agriculture or gardening, it could refer to a specific type of potato or a gardening initiative.
    BGP (Bilateral Grant Program): In finance or international relations, it may refer to programs that provide grants between two countries.

Elsewhere someone posted a link to the wikipedia disambiguation page. It is very insightful to compare the two lists - you should do this.

  • NitpickLawyer  3 months ago

    This is what people mean when they say "prompting an LLM is like the old google-fu; some people have it, some don't".

    Try this prompt instead:

    "Please explain the meaning of BGP in the following snippet: The need for Roto comes from Rotonda, our BGP engine written in Rust. Mature BGP applications usually feature some way to filter incoming route announcements. The complexity of these filters often exceed the capabilities of configuration languages. With Rotonda, we want to allow our users to write more complex filters with ease. So we decided to give them the power of a full scripting language."

    • bluGill  3 months ago

      When I searched for what does BGP mean, and DDG's LLM said "border gateway protocol". Even though I gave zero context and there are other possible meanings. The correct answer is probably something like "BGP can have multiple meanings depending on the context. The most common use of BGP is in networking where it means Border Gateway Protocol. If you provide more information on the context a better answer can be given." Or possibly it could link to the Wikipedia page.

  • ElectronCharge  3 months ago

    That was a pretty bad response, so I tried Grok 3, using the prompt "What's the likely meaning of BGP in a Hacker News article?"

    Its entire response:

    "In a Hacker News article, BGP most likely refers to Border Gateway Protocol, a key internet protocol used for routing data between different networks (autonomous systems) on the internet. It’s often discussed in contexts like network security, internet infrastructure, or outages caused by misconfigurations, as BGP is critical for directing traffic across the global internet. For example, a Hacker News article might cover BGP-related incidents like route leaks or hijacks, which can disrupt connectivity or enable cyberattacks.

    If the context suggests something else (e.g., a specific acronym in a niche domain), could you provide more details about the article? I can also search for the specific post if you have a link or title."

    Pretty good, eh?

    • bluGill  3 months ago

      I specifically ask the LLM about non-networking contexts because I was interested in what else BGP could mean.

      I believe that every possible combination of 3 letters has at least 5 different meanings - most of them only used in some tiny niche (often just one department of a company)

      3 replies →

  • diggan  3 months ago

    Is that the response from google/gemma-3-1b-it or something? Almost funny how off it is.

    • bluGill  3 months ago

      Whatever DuckDuckGo uses. First answer was board gateway protocol then I asked what is outside the context of networking.