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Aurornisyesterday at 11:05 PM1 replyview on HN

For a general audience this is good advice.

This article was written for a specific audience who follows this blog because they know the term. If you start spelling out fundamental acronyms it makes the content look more basic and general.

This always upsets the general audience who stumble upon the article (like this) but it wasn’t meant for a general audience. CTF is extremely well known and the people who would be interested in this topic would wonder what’s happening if it was spelled out. It would be so odd that it would probably attract accusations of ChatGPT writing.


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jltsirentoday at 7:35 AM

It's the common practice in technical writing. Even when you are writing for other experts in the same field, your target audience never shares as much context as you would prefer. The world is much weirder and more varied than you would think.

Informal writing about technical topics is another story. There you can assume a lot more shared context, as you are only writing for a specific subculture within the field. It doesn't matter much if other people in the field fail to understand you.

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