Things we shouldn't say in polite company - Sherif's blog

Hello, this post is about how we talk about ATproto stuff for a general audience / users - the words we use, the terms we explain things with.

The post is a work in progress, so atm just has some initial thoughts. Why am I publishing even if it's not ready? Because of this exchange:

Challenge accepted pckt.blog!!

Here we go. Things we should not say in polite company:

Appview

What do you mean? An app view is an app right? Who's viewing what? Is the app looking at you or you're looking at the app. Why is my app spying on me. An appview sounds like an app you view, which is... an app. But no it isn't because appview means something if you work with certain kinds of databases I've been told. Why don't we do a google search like most people do - here is what I found from searching for appview definitino (typo included).

So yeah that clears things up.

Please please pretty please let's use something else for ANYTHING meant to be read by a general audience - I don't know, app backend, data engine, anything that is not Appview.

Handle

In my former career as a spy* I had a pretty cool handle, now that I am a civilian I just have a name. Sadness. What's a handle one wonders. More importantly: we can just say username. Because it means what it says.

*j/k I was never a spy **
**but if I was I would say that wouldn't I

The AT Protocol / ATProto

Okay hear me out - I know some of you have a license to use it now and want to put it to good use and all - but for the love of every timeline where Argentina loses the final because they certainly didn't deserve to win the world cup and had fifa on their side throughout and don't event get me started on the Egypt game - maybe we can please please please only use ATproto/protocol when absolutely necessary for anything that a human being not working on said protocol is meant to read.

We will need to use it sometimes to introduce things, but this is not a term for general public consumption. We need to market "Atmosphere" much more, but it's got legs and doesn't sound like... protocol.

more things not to say in polite company will be added in time

In the meantime, I have a funny story.

A few years ago I wanted to build a small house extension and there were a few decisions I had to make, including the materials to use. Decisions to make:

for cement I was between CEM-I, CEM-II and Pozzolanic cement (CIVB-V). Needless to say, CEM1 and CEM2 have high early strength so it means construction can proceed faster, but pozzolanic cement has a much lower clinker ratio than CEM1 and CEM2 that gives it a substantially lower emissions footprint. So I was tempted. Could I live with its low early strength though?
the key question was whether I used the same mix everywhere. And that pointed to the best path. I could use a mix. Obviously for beams and columns, I wanted fast setting so I went with RC30 concrete because that was straightforward and easy to get. I then mixed my own concrete with CEM-IV for the non-load bearing elements.
Here's the funny bit, when I came to choosing my aggregate mix...