However, consider the Tolkien community. I enjoy lord of the rings and want to know more. But there's an absurd acronym for another book (home) that no one ever expands in that community. And it's not in the wiki's and it's not in Google (bc what do you get if you google "tolkien home"?) it was intentionally frustrating for me to figure out what that acronym was. The people in the tolkien community also adopted your pov and just wouldn't help, expecting new people to bootstrap themselves. It was not a fun experience. These styling conventions aren't for the 99% of the time they're for the 1% of the time.
But yeah in general it's nice to at least explain the acronym once
And what I'm saying here is different from "you should not ever care to expand acronyms/abbreviations/initialisms", but that does not necessarily mean your goal should be that it's "fun" for every possible person (you'll never achieve that goal, under or overexplaining is never fun). It's about what's reasonably efficient for everyone likely to read the article. If 50%, 10%, 1%, and 0.1% of your audience will understand an acronym, abbreviation, or piece of jargon then it has different implications for what the right balance of reasoning is. Not every piece need target a generic audience, not every acronym need assume the reader can't be bothered to learn anything not spelled out for them in the page, and not everything is equally hard to figure out when it's not spoon-fed to the reader.
And, again, what is "Tensor Processing Unit" going to gain you if you don't already know that's what TPU stands for in the context of this article? I.e. who knows what a tensor is and why youd have a processor for them yet gains something by the acronym being expanded? People who don't know what a TPU is should start with a different article completely, probably several, and then read this one. Expecting every piece of writing should assume no knowledge blocks more knowledge than it helps share.
One thing I think the "lucky 10,000" XKCD gets bang on is that it doesn't frame sharing something with the 9,999 in mind as error any more than it blames the 1 for not knowing - instead the problem is dogging people for saying they've never heard of something. That's truly a golden rule, regardless the audience and so on, and doesn't require changing the way humans write to avoid problems like the one you ran into.
Also, it doesn't just come out and say what the peak throughput of these chips are, just 2.7x the prior generation. This is one of those things that Apple does every Mac release--it's always some big dumb bar that is bigger or some line up and to the right that has absolutely no explanation.
would it kill you to use an internet search engine (such as google)?
> We first designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) more than a decade ago motivated by Google’s...
Literally all it takes. Basically free and it helps both broaden your audience and avoid mistakes. Also, high key, it is a great opportunity for a back link to https://cloud.google.com/tpu, which you'd think Google would care about.