# gather (0-gather.org)

People use gather to mean bringing things or people together in one place. A family gathers for dinner. Someone gathers sticks for a fire. It is a plain, social word about collecting or assembling.

## What a model may hear
- collect data (data engineering, analytics): may assume the user wants to scrape, query, or aggregate datasets from multiple sources
- gather operation (parallel computing, MPI): may assume a distributed process where one node collects results from all others, or write code using MPI_Gather
- gather instruction (GPU shaders, vector processing): may assume the user wants a SIMD gather operation that loads non-contiguous memory elements into a register
- gather step (machine learning pipelines): may assume collecting metrics, gradients, or model outputs from distributed training workers

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "gather all the customer feedback"
  Means: collect emails and survey responses in one document
  May be taken as: build a web scraper or set up a real-time data pipeline
  Say instead: "collect all customer feedback into one list from files I already have"
- Says: "gather the results from each team"
  Means: ask each team to send me their report
  May be taken as: implement an MPI gather or distributed computing routine
  Say instead: "ask each team for their report and compile them into one summary"
- Says: "gather the scattered data points"
  Means: organize numbers that are spread across a spreadsheet
  May be taken as: use a GPU gather instruction or write vectorized assembly
  Say instead: "organize numbers from different columns into one sorted column"
- Says: "let's gather online"
  Means: have a video call
  May be taken as: assume the user wants to build or use a platform named Gather or Gather.town
  Say instead: "meet on a video call"

## Tips
- say where the things are if they already exist
- say who is doing the gathering if it is people talking to people
- mention if you mean a meeting, not a data operation
- say compile or collect if you do not need technical infrastructure
- name the tool if you mean a specific platform like Gather.town

## Often confused with
- collect: more neutral, less likely to trigger distributed computing
- aggregate: strongly signals data summarization, not social assembly
- assemble: closer to physical or social gathering, but can mean code compilation
- join: specific to database tables or meetings, rarely parallel computing
- reduce: a paired operation in parallel computing, not social
- scrape: gathering from the web specifically, often unwanted