I'm not the OP you're responding to, but to be fair, in a sentence about big-O perf characteristics, which includes the word "algorithms", using "exponentially" in a colloquial non-technical sense is an absolutely terrible word choice.

Exponentially bad word choice even... since we're using that word however we want now?

I don't think this is meaningless or non-constructive pedantry - we're a technical community and those are technical words.

I disagree. Misuse of the word "exponential" is a major pet peeve of mine. It's a particular case of the much more common "use mathematically precise phrasing to sound careful/precise" that you often find in less than honest writing.

Here they are actually using it to refer to growth functions (which is rare for this error) and being honest (which is also rare IMO) but it's still wrong. They should have written about quadratic or quadratic vs linear.

Regardless sloppy language leads to sloppy thought.

Sloppy writing is up orders of magnitude lately.

It will decimate readership.

My personal pet peeve is when the term “exponentially” is used to refer to a change between precisely two data points.

It’s a very specific subset of the one you’re describing.

“Tell me you don’t know what you’re talking about without telling me you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

>My personal pet peeve

Just be glad you have only one.

>pedantry

I wasted 2 minutes of my life looking for the exponential reduction. So did many others.

Now I'm wasting more of my life shit posting about it, but at least that's a conscious choice.

No, you spent 2 minutes improving your reading comprehension.

You're insulting people on the internet AND you're wrong, which puts you one Hitler comparison away from the trifecta.