An ocean of words
Glossary
Every term explained in any rabbit hole washes up here — 230 so far. Grouped by the kind of knowledge it belongs to. Each word is restored to its niche meaning, not the flattened one the wider web tends to leave it with.
Chemistry & neuroscience
- Amyloid plaques
- protein aggregates in Alzheimer's brains, associated with neuron death. — in lions mane
- Blood-brain barrier
- the selective membrane shielding the brain from most large molecules in the blood. — in lions mane
- H. pylori (Helicobacter pylori)
- a stomach bacterium implicated in ulcers and gastric cancer. — in lions mane
- Metabolite
- a compound an organism makes for defence or competition, not basic survival. — in lions mane
- Neurite outgrowth
- the growth of new axons and dendrites — the connections between neurons. — in lions mane
- NGF biosynthesis
- production of Nerve Growth Factor — a protein neurons need to survive and regenerate. — in lions mane
- Oxidative stress
- cellular damage from reactive oxygen molecules, implicated in ageing. — in lions mane
Design
- achromatic
- without colour — black, white and greys — in grey world color decline
- blanding
- bland + branding — the convergence of brand identities on the same minimalist look — in grey world color decline
- chromophobia
- fear or devaluation of colour — in grey world color decline
- computer vision
- software that extracts measurable features — colours, shapes, objects — from images — in grey world color decline
- debranding
- stripping a logo of ornament, colour, and often its symbol, down to a plain wordmark — in grey world color decline
- dopamine decor
- deliberately bright, joy-first interiors, named for the neurotransmitter associated with reward — in grey world color decline
- grayscale
- white, black, grey and silver together — colours with no hue — in grey world color decline
- greige
- grey-beige, the compromise neutral of the 2010s — in grey world color decline
- grisaille
- a painting technique executed entirely in grey monochrome — in grey world color decline
- luminance
- the brightness of an image, independent of its hue — in grey world color decline
- orange-and-teal
- a film-grading scheme pushing skin tones warm and shadows blue-green — complementary colours that make faces pop — in grey world color decline
- saturation
- the purity or intensity of a colour, from vivid down to grey — in grey world color decline
- серость (seryost')
- Russian "greyness," which also means mediocrity or drabness of spirit — in grey world color decline
Ecology
- Buna-rin (ブナ林)
- Japanese beech forest — the cool, humid montane forest of Honshu. — in lions mane
- Endophytic
- living inside plant tissue without immediate visible harm. — in lions mane
- Functional sapwood
- the living outer wood beneath the bark that conducts water. — in lions mane
- Large-diameter dead wood
- thick dead trees that hold moisture for years; the substrate it requires. — in lions mane
- Taiga
- the northern conifer-forest biome — not the broadleaf trees this fungus needs. — in lions mane
Economics
- Bilateral currency swap arrangement (BCSA)
- a standing agreement between two central banks to exchange set amounts of each other's currency on demand. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Cross rate
- an exchange rate between two currencies derived mathematically from each one's rate against a shared third currency, rather than quoted directly between the two. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS)
- China's RMB-denominated payment-settlement network, launched in 2015, built so cross-border yuan payments do not have to route through dollar-clearing infrastructure. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Liquidity / spread premium
- the extra margin market-makers charge for a currency pair that trades in thinner volume than either currency's own dollar pair. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Local Currency Settlement / Local Currency Transaction (LCS/LCT)
- a Bank Indonesia framework letting trade and investment transactions between two countries settle directly in each country's own currency, bypassing a third intermediary currency (typically the US dollar) for that specific transaction. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Money illusion
- the tendency to reason about money in nominal (face-value) rather than inflation-adjusted real terms. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Redenominasi (redenomination)
- striking zeros from a currency's face value without changing its real purchasing power. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Sanering
- an Indonesian-coined term (from Dutch, "sanitation/reorganization") for a forced currency-value cut combined with a deposit freeze. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Special Drawing Rights (SDR)
- the IMF's composite reserve-asset unit, a weighted basket of major currencies used for official reserve accounting between governments and the Fund. — in idr yuan conversion history
Food & culinary
- Baked custard
- a mixture of eggs, dairy fat, and liquid set by the thermal coagulation of egg proteins through oven heat — produces a gel, not a sauce — in quiche in the airfryer
- Blind baking
- pre-baking a pastry shell without its filling, weighted with pie weights or dried beans to prevent the dough from puffing or shrinking — in quiche in the airfryer
- Brasserie
- a French restaurant type, originally beer-oriented, operating with a relaxed service style and a broad menu; derives from the French brasser (to brew) — in quiche in the airfryer
- Convection oven / air fryer
- a compact oven with a high-speed fan that circulates heated air; marketed as an "air fryer" for its ability to crisp food without oil immersion — in quiche in the airfryer
- Lardon
- small rectangular-cut strips of cured smoked pork belly, used in quiche Lorraine and French sauté preparations — in quiche in the airfryer
- Nimono / oden / yakizakana
- nimono — traditional Japanese simmered dishes (vegetables, meat, or fish in a seasoned dashi-based broth); oden — a specific dashi-simmered winter dish of fish cakes, eggs, and vegetables; yakizakana — grilled fish, typically salted and cooked whole — in quiche in the airfryer
- Ovalbumin
- a dominant egg-white protein — approximately 54% of albumen protein by mass — the last egg-white protein to coagulate during heating, setting at approximately 84 °C≈ 183 °F — in quiche in the airfryer
- Pâte brisée
- French short-crust pastry for savoury tarts — fat-rich, minimally-worked dough producing a crumbly, tender shell — in quiche in the airfryer
- Quiche
- an open-faced savoury tart with a baked egg-and-cream custard filling in a pastry shell — in quiche in the airfryer
- Tarte flambée
- an Alsatian thin-crust dough preparation baked at very high heat in a wood-fired oven, topped with fromage blanc, onions, and smoked bacon; also called flammekueche in Alsatian dialect — in quiche in the airfryer
Fungal biology
- Basidiomycota
- the fungal division that makes spores on club-shaped cells. — in lions mane
- Fruiting body
- the reproductive structure — the visible mushroom. — in lions mane
- Mycelium
- the fungus's true body — a network of hair-thin threads (hyphae). — in lions mane
- Parasite
- lives at the expense of a living host without immediately killing it. — in lions mane
- Primordia
- the pin-stage fruiting bodies — the earliest visible bumps. — in lions mane
- Saprotroph
- an organism that feeds on dead organic matter, breaking it down externally. — in lions mane
- Spawn
- the "seed" culture — mycelium pre-grown to start new substrate. — in lions mane
- Spores
- single-celled reproductive units — like seeds in function, not structure. — in lions mane
- Subclade
- a branch within a species' family tree showing how populations diverged. — in lions mane
- White-rot fungus
- a wood-decomposer that breaks down both lignin and cellulose. — in lions mane
History
- Archetype (textual criticism)
- the reconstructed common ancestor of all surviving manuscript witnesses of a text. — in source the missing stratum
- Authentication (FRE 901)
- the legal requirement to produce evidence sufficient to show an item is what it's claimed to be, before it can be admitted. — in source the missing stratum
- Chain of custody
- the documented, unbroken record of who possessed a piece of evidence, and when, from collection to courtroom presentation. — in source the missing stratum
- Circular reporting
- a situation where information appears to come from multiple independent sources but actually traces back to only one. — in source the missing stratum
- Citogenesis
- the loop where a false or unsourced Wikipedia claim gets repeated by an outside publication, then cited back into Wikipedia as if that publication were an independent source. — in source the missing stratum
- Hearsay
- an out-of-court statement offered in court to prove that what it asserts is true. — in source the missing stratum
- Pertinenzprinzip
- the archival principle of arranging documents by subject, territory, or person — library-style — rather than by who created them. — in source the missing stratum
- Provenance
- the documented origin of a record — who created it, and in what functional context. — in source the missing stratum
- Provenienzprinzip
- the German archival provenance principle, formally established for Prussian state archives in 1881. — in source the missing stratum
- Q (biblical source)
- the hypothetical lost sayings-document proposed to explain material shared by Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. — in source the missing stratum
- Reference rot
- the combination of link rot (a URL stops resolving) and content drift (the URL still resolves, but the content behind it has silently changed). — in source the missing stratum
- Registraturprinzip
- the original-order principle: a creator's own filing sequence should be preserved, because the arrangement itself is evidence. — in source the missing stratum
- Respect des fonds
- the French archival principle: group records by the entity that created them; never mix creators together or rearrange by subject. — in source the missing stratum
- Stemmatics
- the study of relationships between surviving variant manuscript copies of a text, used to reconstruct a lost original. — in source the missing stratum
Linguistics
- Backronym
- an acronym-style explanation invented after a word already existed, to make it look like it was originally an acronym. — in coding names hierarchy
- Calque
- a word or phrase translated piece-by-piece from another language, rather than borrowed as a sound (a loanword) or coined natively. — in coding names hierarchy
- Can f 1
- a major dog allergen protein, found in dander, saliva, and skin oils. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Caniche
- the French name for the poodle, literally "duck dog." — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Dander
- microscopic flakes of shed skin, a primary vector for pet allergens. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Designer dog
- a deliberately bred first-generation crossbreed, marketed under a portmanteau name. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Doodle (fool sense)
- an old English word for a fool or simpleton, from the 1600s. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Doodle (scribble sense)
- to draw or scribble idly while thinking of something else. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- F1 / F1b / F2 / multigen
- breeding-generation terms: first cross, backcross, second cross, later stabilized generations. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Fons / fontis (false etymological sibling)
- Latin for "spring, fountain" — the root of English font and fountain, but NOT of English source. — in source the missing stratum
- Hollywood Principle
- "don't call us, we'll call you" — the software-engineering name for inversion of control, the formal test that distinguishes a framework from a library. — in coding names hierarchy
- Hypoallergenic
- less likely to trigger an allergic reaction — never allergen-free. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Loanword (phonetic)
- a word borrowed from another language by carrying over its sound, rather than translating its meaning piece-by-piece (a calque) or building a native equivalent. — in coding names hierarchy
- Pinyin tone ambiguity (as a keyword-design objection)
- the specific linguistic argument, raised in Chinese-language developer discourse, that pinyin (the romanization of Mandarin) cannot serve as programming keywords without losing tone information essential to distinguishing words. — in coding the infant discipline
- Pléonasme
- French for pleonasm — using more words than a meaning strictly needs, where one word already contains what a second one repeats. — in quiche in the airfryer
- Pudel / Pudelhund
- the German name for the poodle, literally "puddle-hound." — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Runglish / Ruglish (рунглиш / руглиш)
- a named, documented hybrid register of Russian technical speech carrying heavy English-loanword content — a recognized code-switching style, not casual borrowing. — in coding the infant discipline
- Source (etymology)
- a person or written work supplying information or evidence. — in source the missing stratum
- Wacky → wackadoodle
- eccentric, comically unhinged; the suffix chain wacky → wackadoo → wackadoodle. — in doodle wackadoodle poodle
- Велосипед (idiom — "reinventing the wheel")
- Russian technical slang for an unnecessary self-written duplicate of an already- existing library or solution — literally "bicycle." — in coding the infant discipline
Music theory
- 6/8
- a compound duple time signature — six eighth notes per bar, grouped into two dotted-quarter beats. — in creature half alive
- BPM (beats per minute)
- the standard measure of a song's speed; typical pop sits 100–130 BPM, 70 BPM is slow and deliberate. — in creature half alive
- Chord progression
- the sequence of chords that forms a song's harmonic backbone. — in creature half alive
- Common time
- the time signature 4/4 — four quarter-note beats per bar; the most prevalent in Western pop. — in creature half alive
- Compound duple meter
- a meter with two main beats per bar, each dividing naturally into three — a lilting, rolling feel. — in creature half alive
- Compression
- a technique reducing a signal's dynamic range — quiet parts louder, loud parts tamed — for evenness and closeness. — in creature half alive
- Diction
- a singer's style and precision of consonant articulation — how sharply or softly they hit word boundaries. — in creature half alive
- Enharmonic
- two differently-written notes (or keys) that sound identical — G♯ and A♭ are enharmonic equivalents. — in creature half alive
- Falsetto
- a vocal register where only the edges of the vocal cords vibrate — lighter, higher, often breathier than full chest voice. — in creature half alive
- Head voice
- the upper resonant register of the singing voice — adjacent to, but slightly fuller than, pure falsetto. — in creature half alive
- Key signature
- the set of sharps or flats at the start of a piece indicating its home key. — in creature half alive
- Minor key
- a tonal system on a scale with a flattened third — conventionally tied to tension, weight, or melancholy in Western music. — in creature half alive
- Outro
- the closing section of a song — typically a repeated or intensifying passage that winds it toward its end. — in creature half alive
- Placement
- a singer's imagined location of vocal resonance — "forward" resonates in the face, "back" in the chest/throat. — in creature half alive
- Producer's fingerprint
- the recognisable set of sonic choices — effects, mixing, arrangement philosophy — a producer applies across their work. — in creature half alive
- Relative major
- the major key that shares the same notes as a given minor key — G♯ minor's relative major is B major. — in creature half alive
- Reverb
- an effect simulating acoustic space — the tail of a sound echoing as if in a physical room. — in creature half alive
- Self-backing vocalist
- an artist who records their own harmonies and layered vocal parts. — in creature half alive
- Tenor
- the highest standard adult male voice type, roughly C3–C5, with extension above via falsetto. — in creature half alive
- Timbre
- the tonal "colour" of a sound — what makes a violin and a flute differ on the same note. (Said TAM-ber.) — in creature half alive
- Time signature
- the numerical notation at the start of a piece telling the performer how beats are organised per bar. — in creature half alive
Philosophy
- Anti-reductionism (testimony)
- the epistemological view that a hearer has a default, defeasible right to accept testimony without needing prior positive evidence the speaker is reliable. — in source the missing stratum
- Echtheitskritik
- the older German term for external source criticism — authenticity criticism. — in source the missing stratum
- Principle of credulity
- Thomas Reid's term for the natural, non-inferential human disposition to trust other people's word. — in source the missing stratum
- Quellenkritik
- the German historiographical method of assessing where a historical source came from and how much its content can be trusted. — in source the missing stratum
- Reductionism (testimony)
- the epistemological view that a hearer needs independent, non-testimonial reasons to trust a speaker before that speaker's word can justify belief. — in source the missing stratum
- Tradition (Geschichtswissenschaft)
- in historical-method terms, a source deliberately created to inform contemporaries or later generations — a chronicle, a memoir, a monument's inscription. — in source the missing stratum
- Type-species classification (Pushkarev)
- the Russian source-studies system of sorting historical sources by how their information is encoded, rather than by subject or intent. — in source the missing stratum
- Überrest
- a historical source not created to inform later generations, but which survives and can still be read as evidence — a tax ledger, a ruin, a grave. — in source the missing stratum
- Истoчниковедение (Istochnikovedenie)
- the Russian academic discipline of "source studies" — a full field distinct from the German Quellenkritik tradition, not a translation of it. — in source the missing stratum
Society
- Kapitan
- a Dutch colonial-era appointed leadership/intermediary role given to a prominent member of the Chinese community in the Indonesian archipelago. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Peranakan
- long-settled, intermarried, culturally localized descendants of earlier Chinese migration to the Indonesian archipelago, often matrilineal in custom. — in idr yuan conversion history
- Totok
- more recently arrived Chinese-Indonesian immigrants and their descendants, culturally closer to mainland Chinese tradition, typically patrilineal. — in idr yuan conversion history
Technology
- .env file
- a plaintext key-value file loaded into a program's environment variables at startup. — in vault file and the vibe
- .gitignore
- a file listing patterns Git will not track going forward. — in vault file and the vibe
- 1C:Enterprise language (bilingual keyword mode)
- the built-in scripting language of 1C:Enterprise, a Russian enterprise-software platform, in which nearly every keyword has both a Russian and an English form usable interchangeably in the same file. — in coding the infant discipline
- 80-column line (punch-card origin)
- the historical convention limiting a line of code or text to 80 characters, inherited from the physical width of IBM punch cards. — in coding the infant discipline
- ABI (Application Binary Interface)
- the binary-level contract between compiled program components — calling conventions, data layout, and symbol names that let separately compiled code link and call each other — in electron and the default
- Add-on (browser)
- Mozilla's umbrella term covering extensions, themes, and (historically) plugins and search-engine plugins together. — in coding names hierarchy
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- writing and structuring content specifically to be retrieved, selected, and quoted by an AI answer engine, as distinct from Search Engine Optimization's goal of ranking a page for a human to click. — in in depth search expanded
- AOT (Ahead-of-Time compilation)
- converting source code into native machine instructions before the program runs, so it executes directly on the CPU without a runtime interpreter — in electron and the default
- API (Application Programming Interface) — full restoration
- the defined set of requests a piece of software will accept, and how it will respond. — in coding names hierarchy
- Argon2 / Argon2id
- the winning algorithm of the 2015 Password Hashing Competition; a memory-hard key derivation function, standardized informationally as RFC 9106. — in vault file and the vibe
- Autocomplete attribute
- the HTML field attribute that signals whether an input is a login field or a new-password field. — in vault file and the vibe
- Benchmark contamination (search-time)
- a live-search analogue of data leaking into training: an agent's own web search can retrieve pages that directly discuss the benchmark question it is being tested on, inflating its measured score. — in in depth search expanded
- borrow checker (Rust)
- Rust's compile-time mechanism that enforces memory safety by tracking data ownership and preventing access to freed memory — in electron and the default
- Breadth-first question
- a research task solved by many independent, parallel lookups (e.g. finding every board member across an entire stock index), as opposed to one deep chained lookup. — in in depth search expanded
- bundle size (desktop app)
- the total disk footprint of a packaged desktop application, including the framework runtime, application code, and all assets — in electron and the default
- Citogenesis
- a term coined by webcomic author Randall Munroe: an unsourced claim added to Wikipedia gets picked up uncritically by a journalist, whose article is then cited back on Wikipedia as independent confirmation — a closed, self-reinforcing citation loop. — in in depth search expanded
- CLI (Command Line Interface) — full restoration
- controlling a program by typing text commands rather than clicking visual elements. — in coding names hierarchy
- Client / server (architectural pair)
- the client is the program or device making a request; the server is the running program that listens for and answers it. — in coding names hierarchy
- CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network)
- the 1993–1995 Perl module repository that established the modern package-registry pattern. — in coding names hierarchy
- CPU-bound
- work whose completion speed is limited by how fast the processor can calculate, rather than by waiting on network or disk. — in sif implementation languages
- Credential stuffing
- automated replay of already-breached username/password pairs against unrelated sites, hoping victims reused the same password. — in vault file and the vibe
- Cron Trigger (Cloudflare Workers)
- a Cloudflare Workers feature that runs a piece of code automatically on a schedule, expressed as a standard cron expression, with no separate always-on server. — in hosting data vps
- D1 (Cloudflare D1)
- Cloudflare's managed, hosted version of SQLite — same file format, run as a service with zero-config bindings from a Worker. — in hosting data vps
- Daemon — full restoration
- a program that runs continuously in the background with no window or user interface, waiting to do a specific job. — in coding names hierarchy
- Database — full restoration
- an organized, persistent store of data, structured so it can be queried independently of the specific machine it resides on. — in coding names hierarchy
- Deep Research Bench / RACE score
- an independent leaderboard evaluating deep-research agents against 100 PhD-level research tasks across 22 fields, scored by an LLM-as-judge method. — in in depth search expanded
- DPAPI (Data Protection API)
- Microsoft's OS-level encryption API (via the `CryptProtectData` function) that ties secrets to a specific Windows login on a specific machine. — in vault file and the vibe
- EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator)
- one of the first stored-program computers, built at Cambridge University, 1949. — in coding names hierarchy
- egress
- data leaving a storage or hosting service out to the internet — the part many cloud vendors meter and charge for. — in hosting data vps
- El-76 (Эль-76)
- a Russian-keyword high-level programming language built for the Soviet Elbrus multiprocessor computer systems, developed 1972-73. — in coding the infant discipline
- Electron (software framework)
- a framework that bundles the Chromium browser engine and Node.js runtime so developers can build desktop apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — in electron and the default
- Endpoint (API)
- one specific address within an API where a particular kind of request is answered. — in coding names hierarchy
- Engine (software) — full restoration
- a runtime specialized to do one demanding, repeatable job extremely well — render graphics, run a game world, search text. — in coding names hierarchy
- Envelope encryption
- encrypting a data key with a master key, rather than encrypting the underlying data directly with the master key. — in vault file and the vibe
- Epistemic diversity
- how varied the range of framings, sources, and conclusions is across a knowledge system, as distinct from how much raw content simply exists. — in in depth search expanded
- Extension (browser)
- a sandboxed piece of software that adds a user-facing capability to the browser itself — an ad blocker, a password manager — through a defined API, as distinct from a plugin's embedded-content-rendering role. — in coding names hierarchy
- FFI (Foreign Function Interface)
- a way for one programming language to call functions written in another, at the binary level, without serialization overhead — in electron and the default
- File format — full restoration
- the agreed shape data is written in, so anything reading it knows how to parse it. — in coding names hierarchy
- Focused crawler
- a web crawler that scores every link it finds for topical relevance before following it, rather than following every link it encounters. — in sif implementation languages
- framework (software)
- a pre-built collection of tools and structures that handles the common hard parts of building software, so a developer only writes the parts specific to their application — as opposed to building from scratch — in electron and the default
- HKDF
- HMAC-based Extract-and-Expand Key Derivation Function — a standard way to turn one cryptographic key into several independent ones. — in vault file and the vibe
- Index (database) — full restoration
- a lookup shortcut built alongside data so a search doesn't have to scan everything. — in coding names hierarchy
- Information hiding
- the design principle that a module's internal workings should be hidden behind a stable interface, so the internals can change without breaking anything that calls it. — in coding names hierarchy
- IPC (Inter-Process Communication) — desktop frameworks
- the mechanism by which separate OS processes send messages to each other, since they run in separate memory spaces and cannot share variables directly — in electron and the default
- JSON Lines / JSONL / NDJSON
- a file format where each line is one complete, independent JSON object — readable and appendable one line at a time, without loading or parsing the whole file at once. — in sif implementation languages
- Kernel — full restoration
- the innermost, most privileged core of an operating system, mediating every program's access to actual hardware. — in coding names hierarchy
- Key derivation function (KDF)
- a deliberately slow, computationally expensive function that turns a password into a cryptographic key, rather than a fast lookup value. — in vault file and the vibe
- Knowledge homogenization
- the narrowing of vocabulary, framing, and reasoning style a reader encounters, as more of what they read is produced or mediated by the same small set of AI systems. — in in depth search expanded
- Lethal trifecta
- Simon Willison's named risk pattern for AI agents: private-data access + exposure to untrusted content + the ability to communicate externally, all present in one session. — in vault file and the vibe
- Library (software) — full restoration
- an organized collection of ready-made, callable code that a program picks up and uses on its own schedule (contrast: a framework calls the developer's code instead — see "framework (software)" above, the Hollywood Principle). — in coding names hierarchy
- Litestream
- a tool that continuously copies a SQLite database's changes to S3-compatible object storage in real time, providing backup and disaster recovery without running a separate database server. — in hosting data vps
- Mac Catalyst
- Apple's compatibility layer that runs UIKit-based iOS apps on macOS — used by .NET MAUI for its macOS desktop support path — in electron and the default
- main process (Electron)
- in Electron: the single privileged background process that owns the app's lifecycle, creates windows, and communicates with the OS — in electron and the default
- Memory / objective / knowledge defect (AI coding agent taxonomy)
- three named, distinct root causes of security vulnerabilities in AI-agent-written software, as opposed to one undifferentiated "the AI made a mistake" bucket. — in coding the infant discipline
- Memory-hard function
- a key-derivation function that requires large amounts of RAM to compute, not just CPU time, specifically to resist GPU and ASIC hardware acceleration. — in vault file and the vibe
- Microservice / monolith
- a microservice is one focused, independently-deployable server-side responsibility; a monolith is a single application where all request-handling logic runs in one process. — in coding names hierarchy
- Middleware
- software that sits between two other pieces of software to let them exchange data. — in coding names hierarchy
- Mixed-use crawler
- a single automated crawler whose fetched data feeds more than one purpose at once — search indexing, live agent assistance, and model training — making a simple "search good, training bad" blocking rule structurally imprecise. — in in depth search expanded
- Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)
- a model architecture where only a small fraction of the model's total parameters actually activate for any given input, keeping inference cost close to a much smaller model's despite a much larger total parameter count. — in in depth search expanded
- Module (programming) — full restoration
- one named, self-contained unit of code inside a larger program. — in coding names hierarchy
- nodeIntegration (Electron security)
- a legacy Electron configuration flag that, when enabled, lets renderer processes directly call Node.js APIs — disabled by default in modern Electron — in electron and the default
- Null reference
- a placeholder value meaning "nothing here," embedded in a type system, that a program can accidentally try to use as if it held real data. — in coding the infant discipline
- Option type (Rust)
- an explicit wrapper type — `Option<T>` — that forces a programmer to handle the "value might be absent" case at compile time, instead of allowing a silent null. — in coding the infant discipline
- Origin (web security)
- the scheme + host + port combination browsers use to decide whether two pages count as "the same site." — in vault file and the vibe
- Package (software) — full restoration
- a module or library bundled together with the metadata needed to install, version, and distribute it. — in coding names hierarchy
- Parametric memory
- everything a model learned during training, frozen at a cutoff date and stored as weights — no live lookup happens when a model answers from this alone. — in in depth search expanded
- Pay Per Crawl / Pay Per Use
- Cloudflare products: the first lets a site charge an AI company per page fetch; the second, its 2026 evolution, pays a publisher when their content demonstrably contributes to an actual answer, not simply when a bot fetches the page. — in in depth search expanded
- PBKDF2
- Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 — repeatedly re-applies a cryptographic hash function thousands of times, so that even a fast computer takes real time per guess. — in vault file and the vibe
- Pipeline (computing) — full restoration
- an ordered chain of processing stages, where each stage's output feeds directly into the next stage's input. — in coding names hierarchy
- Plugin — browser sense (retired category)
- a browser component that renders one specific kind of embedded content directly inside a web page — Adobe Flash Player and Java applets are the canonical examples. — in coding names hierarchy
- Plugin — general sense (pre-browser)
- software loaded by an already-running host program to extend its abilities at runtime, without rebuilding the host. — in coding names hierarchy
- PostgreSQL (Postgres)
- a full-featured relational database that runs as its own always-on server process, supporting concurrent multi-writer access and advanced query features SQLite lacks. — in hosting data vps
- Prompt injection
- hidden or embedded instructions inside content an AI agent processes, aimed at redirecting the agent's own behavior rather than informing it about the subject. — in vault file and the vibe
- Protocol — full restoration
- the agreed rules two systems follow so they can exchange information correctly. — in coding names hierarchy
- PWA (Progressive Web App)
- a web application that is installable from a browser, can work offline, and can access some OS-level APIs through standardized web capabilities — in electron and the default
- R2 (Cloudflare R2 / object storage)
- Cloudflare's S3-compatible object storage product. — in hosting data vps
- Readability algorithm
- software that identifies the main body text of a webpage and strips surrounding navigation, ads, and layout chrome — the same category of logic browsers use for "reader mode." — in sif implementation languages
- REFAL (РЕФАЛ) — programming language
- a Russian-origin functional programming language built around pattern matching and term rewriting, oriented toward symbolic computation (string processing, natural- language translation, early AI work). — in coding the infant discipline
- Registry (software)
- a centralized store of records other software looks up. — in coding names hierarchy
- renderer process
- in Electron: an isolated Chromium process that draws one application window, with web APIs but no direct OS access by default — in electron and the default
- REST (Representational State Transfer)
- an architectural style for networked systems built around addressable "resources" manipulated through a small, standard set of operations. — in coding names hierarchy
- RFC 9309
- the 2022 Internet standard formalizing the robots.txt convention websites use to tell crawlers which pages they may and may not fetch. — in sif implementation languages
- Rosetta 2
- Apple's translation layer that runs Intel (x64) compiled apps on Apple Silicon (arm64) chips — makes older Mac apps run on M-series Macs, at a performance cost — in electron and the default
- S3 API
- the request format Amazon's S3 storage service popularized, now implemented as a de facto industry standard by many independent storage providers. — in hosting data vps
- Salt (cryptographic)
- random data unique to each user, mixed into a key-derivation function so identical passwords don't produce identical stored outputs. — in vault file and the vibe
- Schema (database) — full restoration
- the blueprint describing what shape data inside a database must take. — in coding names hierarchy
- Secret Service API
- the freedesktop.org specification, jointly authored by GNOME and KDE developers, behind Linux keyring services such as GNOME Keyring, accessed via libsecret over D-Bus. — in vault file and the vibe
- Secrets manager
- a dedicated service (e.g. HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager) that encrypts, serves, and can automatically rotate credentials on demand, rather than storing them in a plaintext config file. — in vault file and the vibe
- Secure Enclave
- Apple's physically separate, hardware-isolated security coprocessor, which never exposes its internal keys to the main operating system. — in vault file and the vibe
- Secure Remote Password (SRP)
- a cryptographic protocol that proves you know a password without ever transmitting the password, or a value equivalent to it, over the network. — in vault file and the vibe
- Shamir's Secret Sharing
- a cryptographic scheme that splits a single key into several independent shares, any sufficient subset of which can reconstruct the original key. — in vault file and the vibe
- Shell (CLI)
- the outer, replaceable command-interpreting layer wrapped around a kernel. — in coding names hierarchy
- Skia (graphics library)
- a 2D graphics library used by Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, older Flutter, and Avalonia UI — draws shapes, text, and images with GPU acceleration, cross-platform — in electron and the default
- Smooshgate
- a 2018 JavaScript standardization incident in which a proposed standard method had to be renamed because it conflicted with an already-widely-deployed library. — in coding the infant discipline
- SQLite
- a database that lives as a single ordinary file on disk, with no separate database server process running in the background. — in hosting data vps
- Synthesis (research)
- properly integrating findings from multiple sources into one coherent claim, rather than listing them side by side without connecting them. — in in depth search expanded
- unattended-upgrades
- a Debian/Ubuntu Linux tool that installs security patches automatically on a schedule, without a human running the update command each time. — in hosting data vps
- Vibe coding
- building software primarily by prompting an AI and accepting its output with little or no manual code review. — in vault file and the vibe
- Vibe-coded application (security research sense)
- a deployed, real-world software application built primarily by an AI coding agent from natural-language instructions, with minimal human review of the resulting code. — in coding the infant discipline
- VPS (Virtual Private Server)
- a slice of a physical server, rented whole, that behaves like an independent Linux computer. — in hosting data vps
- Wayland (Linux display protocol)
- the modern Linux display protocol replacing the older X11 system — apps running native Wayland have better color accuracy, variable refresh rate support, and cleaner window management than running through XWayland compatibility — in electron and the default
- WebAuthn
- the W3C/FIDO web-authentication standard underlying "passkeys," cryptographically binding a credential to a specific origin at the protocol level. — in vault file and the vibe
- WebView (desktop framework context)
- the platform-native component for rendering web content inside a native app — WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux — in electron and the default
- wenyan-lang (文言)
- an esoteric programming language (esolang) modeled on the grammar of Classical Chinese literary prose, created in 2019. — in coding the infant discipline
- WinAppSDK (Windows App SDK)
- Microsoft's packaged API layer providing modern Windows features (WinUI 3, notifications, app lifecycle APIs) to apps not built inside the older UWP model — in electron and the default
- workerd
- the actual open-source runtime engine that executes Cloudflare Workers code. — in sif implementation languages
- write-ahead log
- the internal record a database keeps of changes before they are permanently saved to the main data file. — in hosting data vps
- Zero-knowledge architecture
- a system design where the service provider is structurally unable to read a user's data — not merely policy-forbidden from trying. — in vault file and the vibe
- 易语言 (Yìyǔyán / "Easy Language")
- a fully Chinese-keyword, visual programming environment first released in 2000, designed to make programming accessible without needing English. — in coding the infant discipline