Comment by perching_aix

4 hours ago

It's... written right there? Like what?

Suppose you send in your marvelous prompt and hit Enter.

Machine churns for 18 seconds, types out a "reply", then yields back control.

18 / 3.6 = 5

So now the machine will only churn for 5 seconds before yielding back control.

This is confusing how exactly?

Why would an "up to" figure be a mean, or a geometric mean? It's clearly a max, that's why it's called "up to"...

Am I missing something?

> Am I missing something?

If you’re sincerely asking…

Mathematically speaking, 18 / 3.6 isn’t “reducing” by 3.6X, it’s “dividing” by 3.6X. Reducing would be 18 - (18 * 3.6), which is obviously wrong. By your formula, “reducing by 50%” would be 18 / 0.5, also obviously wrong.

Yes, people do say things like “reduce by 3.6X” and are understood to mean what you said, but they also say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”. It doesn’t bother me but I can understand why math oriented people would be annoyed, and I personally would never say “reduced by 3.6X”, but instead “reduced by 72.2%”.