Writing about containers and jails today for #openzfsmastery.
Language management is a big part of writing a tech book. Techies are both notoriously bad at language, and notoriously picky about it. Containers and jails are types of lightweight virtual machines. I don't want to keep repeating "lightweight virtual machines" multiple times in a paragraph, so I need a good short punchy word.
I could abbreviate and call them LVMs, but Linux folks have different associations for that abbreviation.
The current attempt is to call them "lightweight virtual machine instances" 2-3 times to build an association in the reader's brain, then call them "instances" for the remainder of the chapter. It wouldn't work for a longer piece, but I think I can get away with it for half a chapter.
Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire:
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2026-09-30 14:22:57 UTC
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