I've got mixed feelings about your comment. It comes down to language; that is, the ability for people to communicate with each other.
As far as I can tell, for each and every specialty in human endeavor there appears to be a specialized language. Lawyers have their own, to the point where, in a bog-standard contract, the first couple of paragraphs are given over to
definitions of what
some of the words to follow mean. And that's just the words that aren't already in standard use by lawyers; from time to time, there are court decisions (usually by appeals courts and sometimes by SCOTUS) where they literally start hunting up word definitions in $RANDOM dictionaries.
Beyond that, take sailors: the language used for sailing ships has its own grammar and word definitions dating back centuries. Sheets, lines, ropes, left and right
and port and starboard (both used, with specific grammar). For that matter, the people who run railroads also have their specialized language, to the point of not being understandable at all by mere mortals not involved in the business.
Why does this happen? Because people invent linguistic short-cuts so they
don't have to try and explain which rope/lever/concept in excruciating detail every time they mention a topic. Once one has done that, then that short-cut gets used to explain other short-cuts, and the whole process snowballs. It can and does get to the point where word definitions are completely made up out of previous short-cuts. It may look (and be) ugly, but it means that quite complex ideas can be batted around faster than a shuttlecock in badminton.
I'm a EE; at one time I was part of a group that was building a honking big communications system, there were roughly a hundred of us, hardware and software, and we had to discuss the ins and outs of the system as we designed it. I joked at the time that, "If you're not inventing an acronym a day you're not working!" And, yeah, our conversations in the middle of all this got pretty obtuse. But the definitions of the words we were inventing, or the words that were in vaguely common use whose definitions we were changing on the fly, were pretty blamed exact, as grammar terms tend to be, and what was a noun, verb, adverb, and so on were pretty much set in stone. (By the by: Physicists and mathematicians are famous for this. The entire Greek alphabet, full of innocent little letters minding their own business, has been hijacked for quite complex ideas. Chi-analysis, anyone?)
The problem crops up when one tries to unroll all these complex terms and lingo into the common language. A single sentence unrolled into simple, non-jargon words, might take up a whole page; a page full of these terms couple easily take up a chapter, and so on.
I swear, at least a third of undergraduate EE is
learning concepts,
learning the lingo,
and figuring out how to manipulate those concepts with the lingo so learned. People who think that engineers have lousy grammar and writing skills had better think again: It's not a nicety, it's a
requirement.
It's pretty clear by now that the AI guys sweating the details of FSDb walked into the project with their own lingo, a lot of it probably learned in college, and probably a lot more learned on the job. And, to my eye at least, a lot of what they're doing over there appears to have a flavor of pure research: They're inventing concepts left, right, and center, with the lingo to manipulate those concepts as they go.
There's a quote I read, once, from some professor or other, who said, "If you can't explain your ideas in single or double-syllable words, then you don't understand what you're talking about." Ayup; good point. But that comes from somebody whose
job is explaining concepts and ideas to the ignorant. (Note: Not stupid, just ignorant.) It takes a certain mindset and practice to take complicated ideas and distill them down to levels where the hoi polloi can follow. My father, who was actually a college professor and dean, was death on making durn sure that people who were researchers had to teach undergraduate courses for sure, and graduate courses as a maybe: His opinion that if you didn't teach and lecture, then you got
worse at researching, because you got worse at the fundamentals and lost contact. But, again, he was riding herd on people paid to teach, not necessarily on those who had to invent at high speed.
Which brings us back to the people writing those release notes. There is a species of STEM called, "Tech writers" who are trained in that ability to break complex ideas down to simple ones. Dunno if Tesla employs those; probably, just so they can bring new people up to speed. But the in-house audience are people fresh out of college with their new-found lingo built in. Given the newness of the AI and tech built into FSDb, they're probably not writing for the public, especially as concepts and ideas
change over time.
And that's probably the point. It would probably take serious time and effort to break what they're talking about in the release notes to the point where a person with a high-school vocabulary could follow what they're talking about. And what would you rather have? Understandable release notes, or FSDb as fast as possible?
Me, I'd rather have the FSDb. And the release notes are, well, an education in process. I've already been corrected by forum members a couple of times when I spoke about what looked like Standard English words, but had been redefined as FSDb AI Lingo.
Hang on for the ride
.
my daily software update button....
?
