I’m not an extreme Harry Potter fan or anything. It just bothers me when people ride the coattails of some popular term/phrase but then get it wrong. Another one is “isomorphic” as in “isomorphic JavaScript” which abuses the term from mathematics to mean something completely unrelated.
I had a coworker try to use "isomorphic" to mean "when given the same inputs and environment, always produces the same outputs", then accused me of pedantry for pointing out that misusing a word with a very clear definition was likely to cause confusion.
Whoops, you're right, I brain farted the wrong word.
To be clear, though, they were still wrong. `f(x)=2x` has the property they described of consistently giving the same input for a given input (if you pass in 1, it will always output 2), but it is not idempotent because f(f(x)) does not, in general, equal f(x).
Microsoft co-opted “DNS” as “Digital Nervous System” to try to exploit business decision makers’ dim acquaintance with the term. They had a pattern of doing this with other internet acronyms back in the day. Annoying af.
