I’m not debating. It is not a matter of opinion. I’m doing you the courtesy of informing you how the entire rest of the world uses the term.

If action A looks for thing X, and it finds thing X, then the test is positive. If action A fails to find thing X, then the test is negative.

If action A claims to find thing X, but later confirmation determines that thing X is not really there, then this situation is called “false positive”.

If action A claims fails to find thing X, but later confirmation determines that thing X is actually there, then this situation is called “false negative”.

That thing X may subjectively be considered an unwanted outcome has **nothing ** to do with the terms used.

Just so you know, if your doctor calls and tells you that your HIV test is positive, you probably shouldn’t run out and celebrate.

Maybe I’m tripping here but this kinda also explains why the human genome contains lots of noncoding DNA.

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After all these years I still don’t know how to look at what I’ve coded and tell you a big O math formula for its efficiency.

I don’t even know the words. Like is quadratic worse than polynomial? Or are those two words not legit?

However, I have seen janky performance, used performance tools to examine the problem and then improved things.

I would like to be able to glance at some code and truthfully and accurately and correctly say, “Oh that’s in factorial time,” but it’s just never come up in the blue-collar coding I do, and I can’t afford to spend time on stuff that isn’t necessary.

Long before the duck gained popularity – and I still can’t talk to a toy – I walk around and explain things to a phantom off in the corner of my mind, and I use bold hand gestures.

It’s also a movie too with Daniel Day-Lewis. He’s kinda hard to forget.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Left_Foot_(book)

Yes. I have worked in a financial company and a lot of teams in that particular company were structured with 2 or 3 Americans with no skills other than exposure to internal company info, the kind of stuff that should just be written down in a wiki somewhere. And when real work needs to be done they (metaphorically of course) drag an Indian contractor out of a cage who actually knows what’s going on and how to do anything. And they do it with disdain as if being a contributing member of society is a bad thing.

Just being in a meeting with some of these teams made me feel like I was a Harkonnen from Dune.

No. It’s a joke. Proper computer science is not about this level of computer programming. Computer science is more a field of mathematics that studies the computability of things. Like making the traveling salesman problem more efficient. Or how to most efficiently determine if a giant number is prime. Or how to scramble a message such that it is unduly difficult to unscramble without a key factor.

Computer programming is to computer science as telescope operation is to astronomy.