Comment by hamandcheese
13 hours ago
If we were talking about speed instead of size, i think it would be perfectly reasonable to say 9x faster. I'm not sure I agree that 9x smaller is unintuitive. It makes sense to me.
13 hours ago
If we were talking about speed instead of size, i think it would be perfectly reasonable to say 9x faster. I'm not sure I agree that 9x smaller is unintuitive. It makes sense to me.
"Nine times" literally means multiplied by nine, but here we're dividing by nine. It's not unintelligible (because the corrupted verbiage is so commonplace) but it is needlessly awkward. Like saying "resulted in a size reduction increase of 10 megabytes."
> "Nine times" literally means multiplied by nine
Rather, "nine times larger" means multiplied by nine, and "nine times smaller" means divided by nine. This is basic and not particularly awkward, certainly not more so than e.g. positive/negative correlation, or many much more awkward and more common linguistic constructions, IMO.
If you have to edit out words (i.e. context) to argue a phrase doesn't make sense... I am not sure what mental model you have for natural language, exactly, but it certainly isn't a very robust one.
Saying something is 9 times bigger is also a shorthand because “times” is a shorthand for repeated addition. You are adding a number “9 times” to make it “9 times larger”. But we don’t say the “adding” part.
Likewise if I repeatedly subtract a number 9 times to make it “9 times smaller” I can omit the subtracted bit.
"faster" relates to speed. Speed is related to time and speed of a thing is usually defined by time. 9x faster speed translates to time/9. There is an extra step of related conversion there.
Conversely, 9x [filesize/natural number] is bigger. Every time. At least in the basic maths used by most people. There is no conversion into other units.
Therefore "9x smaller" when talking about a natural number like filesize is a nonsense statement in logic terms. If you strive for unambiguous phrasing - which is a significant part of the programming experience - this logical nonsense might well perturb you.
But english language is a flexible thing and if the phrase communicates your intent to your audience then that's fine by me.
I think more intuitively for speed - you are multiplying the things per period. If I’m making widgets 9x faster I have 9 x the previous number of units per period of time. To get the amount of time, you invert the ratio to period over units.
Multiplying some scale by units per period makes sense and is both linguistically and mathematically sound.