Comment by philberto
How do you drop something by 33x? That is literally impossible unless they make money by purchasing energy.
How do you drop something by 33x? That is literally impossible unless they make money by purchasing energy.
33,000 multiples - (33 * 33,000 multiples) = -1056000 multiples
"Reduce by 97%" is simple, clear, and accurate.
"Reduce 33x" and "make 33x smaller" are ambiguous, unclear, and inaccurate. Is something that's "33x smaller" or "reduced 33x" 1/33 of the original total or is it 1/34? The question can't be answered in the absence of more information.
These are common expressions, sure. They're also awful, belonging to the same category of error as:
* The price is expensive
* It's a good-quality piece
* All but one of my friends speaks like this.
* Here's an author whom we know cares about language.
* As well, this is how some people write.
That is, they're the errors of a normal native speaker.
No it isn't
Suppose you were running a computation that requires doing 33,000 multiplies. Later you find a way to do the same computation using only 1,000 multiples
That's basically what happened here