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How GitLab decreased repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes with a fix to Git
(about.gitlab.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Programming
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I feel like there is something wrong with this sentence.
Seem ok to me, both in grammar and what it's saying about the change. O(N²) to O(N) would be an exponential drop (2 down to 1, in fact).
It's at least misleading 😛
But I have to agree that for any non-math people this would convey the right idea, whereas "quadratic improvement" would probably not mean anything 🤷
An "exponential drop" would be a drop that follow an exponential curve, but this doesn't. What you mean is a "drop in the exponent", which however doesn't sound as nice.
I'm not a native speaker, but would agree that it sounds imprecise. To my understanding, that's a polynomial reduction of the time (O(n^2) to O(n): quadratic to linear) and not an exponential speed-up (O(2^n) to O(n): exponential to linear). 🤷 Colloquially, "exponentially" seems to be used synonymously to "tremendously" or similar.
Note that you can also have an exponential speed-up when going from O(n) (or O(n^2) or other polynomial complexities) to O(log n). Of course that didn't happen in this case.
They make the same mistake further down the article:
This article writer really loves bullet point lists, too. 🤨
There isn't. This is the colloquial use of "exponentially" which is very obvious from the context.
On a technical blog post by a software company about the details of solving an algorithmic complexity problem?
Careless, and showing that the author does not understand technical communication, where precision is of great importance.
This is fine precisely because it is a blog post. If it was a scientific paper... sure maybe they shouldn't say that. But the meaning is abundantly clear from the context. There is no ambiguity.
Enjoy being mediocre.
Because I can read? Lol ok.