TL;DR: guess I'm just upset that there is no objective way of measuring how much knowledge is required, and trying to read everything from sources list would take forever.

Yeah, the last point is sort of a strawman, although I meant it not to highlight that explanations should be given in terms that the reader is used to, but rather that the reader may have quite arbitrary amount of prior knowledge.

I agree that there probably should be some shared context, what bugs me is that people tend to vary a lot in what amount of context is considered to be required. And more than once have I met papers that require deciphering even if you have some context and kind of come from the field they are written for. I used to think that this is our of malice to make reproducing their work harder for others, but maybe it was just an assumption of much larger shared context.

Tables markdown work in some clients, afaik, but I don't remember which, and even if I saw it or imagined it

[–] MisterFrog@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

No worries friend, no hard feelings and appreciate the engagement!

Yeah, agree it is a bit wishy washy in terms of gauging how much explanation to include ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I suppose (in my opinion) the mindset should be: include as much explanation as possible, without it being cumbersome.

I personally err on the side of over-explanation and have had some senior engineers give me feedback that it's too much. Still learning for myself how much is too much.

Totally agree though, that there are many cases where people leave things out as assumed, when it's not really reasonable to do so.

A side-thought on specificity: one of my biggest pet peeves is when people list pressure with the units of kPa, when they really mean kPag. In industry, you are rarely talking in absolute pressure (other than for pressure differences) and people then get lazy/don't know/assume it's fine to do something like: set point 100 kPa (when they mean 100 kPag). It isn't fine though, because at lower pressures atmosphere counts for a pretty large percentage of the absolute value.