Glossary

Art

Concretismo / concrete poetry

a mid-20th-century Brazilian avant-garde movement treating the visual arrangement of words on the page as inseparable from their meaning — in what makes a music scene society

Business

A&R

Artists & Repertoire — the function inside a record label responsible for finding and developing new artists and songs. — in music money moves

addressable market

the total realistic revenue a company could capture given its actual product and customer base, as distinct from the whole industry it operates in. — in music data doors

Brooks's Law

adding more people to a late software project makes it later, not sooner — in pricing custom software builds ai era

catalog (music rights)

the bundle of rights to a songwriter's or artist's recordings and/or compositions, bought and sold as a package that generates ongoing royalty income. — in music money moves

cold-start problem

a recommendation algorithm's difficulty confidently suggesting an item — here, a song — that has too little existing engagement data to evaluate. — in music data doors

continuation vote

a shareholder vote, common in UK-listed investment trusts, on whether the fund should keep operating in its current form or wind down and return capital. — in music money moves

dashboard (business software)

a screen that pulls a company's own data into one place for its staff to read and act on — in pricing custom software builds ai era

foreclosure (antitrust)

the anticompetitive risk that a merged company can deny or degrade a rival's access to something it needs to compete (a customer channel, a technology, a dataset). — in shazam the machine

GMV

Gross Merchandise Value — the total dollar value of goods sold through a marketplace platform, before the platform's own commission is subtracted. — in music data doors

indemnification

a contractual clause requiring one party to cover the other's legal costs and damages arising from specified circumstances. — in shazam the machine

liquidation preference

a contractual right, usually held by preferred/early-round investors, to be paid back before common shareholders in a sale — regardless of the final price. — in music money moves

man-month

the amount of work one person can do in one month — the unit software projects were traditionally priced against — in pricing custom software builds ai era

net asset value (NAV)

the calculated total value of a fund's underlying assets, used as the benchmark a fund's share price is compared against. — in music money moves

non-horizontal merger effects

EU competition-law term for the risk that a merger between companies in related but different markets lets the combined company block or disadvantage rivals in one of those markets. — in shazam the machine

non-recoupable (payment)

a payment made to an artist that is not first deducted from other royalty balances owed — a direct payment, not an accounting credit against future earnings. — in music money moves

Phase II investigation (EU merger control)

the deeper, formal stage of a regulator's review of a proposed corporate acquisition, triggered when an initial review can't rule out competitive harm. — in music money moves

post-money valuation

a startup's implied total value immediately after a funding round, including the new money raised. — in music money moves

runway

how many months a company can keep operating on its current cash before it runs out, absent new revenue or funding. — in music data doors

software crisis

the gap between how large and unreliable software projects had become and how poorly anyone could estimate, budget or schedule them — in pricing custom software builds ai era

take-private

a public company's shares are bought out entirely by a private buyer — usually a private-equity firm — and delisted from public stock exchanges. — in music data doors

value-based pricing

charging for the outcome or business impact delivered, not the hours spent producing it — in pricing custom software builds ai era

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

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

Antropofagia

cultural cannibalism — the deliberate absorption and re-digestion of foreign cultural material into something new. — in what makes a music scene

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

Hearsay

an out-of-court statement offered in court to prove that what it asserts is true. — in source the missing stratum

Magnitizdat

tape-publishing — the Soviet-era underground practice of copying and circulating reel-to-reel tape recordings of music the state would not officially release. — in what makes a music scene

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

Samizdat

the underground, hand-copied circulation of banned printed material in the Soviet Union — magnitizdat's textual counterpart. — in what makes a music scene

Stemmatics

the study of relationships between surviving variant manuscript copies of a text, used to reconstruct a lost original. — in source the missing stratum

History indonesia politics rhetoric

"Up and Down" (code-switch)

the one moment Sukarno's Utara Kuru speech switches fully into shouted English, naming the one thing the paradise of Uttarakuru cannot produce: struggle, variation. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Dialektik

"dialectic" — a direct Indonesian loanword for a process that advances through opposed forces meeting and resolving. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

History mythology

Bharunda

the sharp-beaked birds of the Mahabharata's Northern Kurus that carry the dead into mountain caves. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

bhogabhumi

Jain 'enjoyment-realm' — a land where accumulated merit is spent rather than earned. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Jambudvipa

the 'rose-apple island' — the southern continent of ordinary, struggling humans in Indian cosmology; our world. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Uttarakuru

'north of the Kurus' — the blissful northern land of Indian cosmology, later the northern continent of Buddhist world-maps. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

History mythology southeast asia

Batara Guru

the supreme deity of Javanese wayang cosmology, syncretised with the Hindu god Shiva. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Gatotkaca / Ghatotkacha

a Mahabharata warrior, son of the Pandava Bhima and the rakshasi Hidimba (Javanese: Arimbi); commands an army for the Pandavas and dies at Kurukshetra. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Kawah Candradimuka

"the Candradimuka crater" — the mythic forging-pit of Javanese wayang geography, on Mount Jamurdipa. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Kurawa

the Indonesian/Javanese name for the Kauravas — the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, the losing royal house of the Mahabharata's civil war. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Otot kawat, balung wesi

"sinews of wire, bones of iron" — a Javanese wayang epithet for the hero Gatotkaca. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

History south asia

janapada

an early Indian settled tribal territory — a proto-state. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

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

ellipsis (linguistic)

a shortening where a phrase collapses onto one of its words, which silently keeps the dropped word's meaning. — in the word lexicon

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

GPT words

researchers' own term for words a model reliably adds when asked to edit or "polish" text, later found spreading into human speech. — in the word lexicon

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

lexicon

the total stock of words belonging to a language, a person, or a field — or, in its oldest sense, a book that lists and explains them. — in the word lexicon

linguistic homogenization

the risk that a small number of AI providers exert outsized, largely invisible influence over everyday language at population scale. — in the word lexicon

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

mental lexicon

the specific store of words one speaker holds in memory — sound, meaning, and grammar together. — in the word lexicon

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

Proto-Indo-European

the unattested reconstructed common ancestor behind Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and most European and many South Asian languages. — in the word lexicon

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

seeded word

a word an LLM brought into a project and turned load-bearing by unexamined repetition. — in the word lexicon

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

σκηνή (skēnē)

the Greek root of "scene" — originally a tent or wooden platform for actors. — in what makes a music scene society

σκηνή / skēnē

a light tent or cloth-and-branch shelter; in ancient Greek theatre, the structure behind the stage where actors changed masks and costumes — the root of "scene" — in what makes a music scene society

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

Тусовка (tusovka)

an informal, habitual gathering of a social circle; narrowed to "рок-тусовка" for the specifically rock-music underground. — in what makes a music scene

Linguistics indonesian

digembleng

hammer-forged, tempered — of steel; in Sukarno's rhetoric, of nations shaped by hardship. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Linguistics indonesian idiom

Hancur lebur

"utterly destroyed" — hancur ("shattered") doubled with lebur ("melted down, dissolved"), an intensifying pair meaning total ruin. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Linguistics indonesian oral form

Pantun

a traditional Malay/Indonesian four-line oral verse: an image-couplet followed by a point-couplet. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Linguistics javanese

Lor

Javanese for "north." — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Sewindu

"one windu" — an eight-year cycle in traditional Javanese/Balinese calendrical reckoning. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Music culture

Afrobeat

a genre fusing West African percussion and Yoruba musical patterns with American funk and jazz instrumentation, marked by long-form compositions and extended horn arrangements. — in what makes a music scene

aggregator

a company (DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, or a label's own pipeline) that packages an artist's release metadata and delivers it to streaming platforms on the artist's behalf. — in shazam the thin body

bedroom pop

music written, recorded, and released almost entirely from a home setting using inexpensive recording software, distributed directly through platforms rather than a label. — in what makes a music scene society

CMO

Collective Management Organisation — an organisation, such as a national performing-rights society, that collects and distributes royalties on behalf of rights holders. — in shazam the thin body

Cultural space

Will Straw's term for the local, informally agreed standards a scene uses to judge what counts as authentic or good within it. — in what makes a music scene

DDEX

Digital Data Exchange — the nonprofit standards body, founded 2006 by labels, publishers, distributors, DSPs, and collecting societies, that defines the shared message formats the industry delivers metadata through. — in shazam the thin body

deejay (sound-system sense)

the voice of a sound system, who "toasts" — talks or chants rhythmically — over the instrumental. — in what makes a music scene society

DIY ethic

do-it-yourself — recording, releasing and promoting music outside commercial label infrastructure, treated as a political stance, not just a budget limit. — in what makes a music scene

DSP

Digital Service Provider — industry shorthand for a streaming platform such as Spotify, Apple Music, or Shazam. — in shazam the thin body, music data doors

ERN

Electronic Release Notification — DDEX's core message format for delivering a release's metadata from a distributor to a streaming platform. — in shazam the thin body

expanded rights

a broader revenue category MIDiA Research has tracked since 2020: record labels' share of an artist's merchandise, live-show, and brand/sponsorship income, alongside core recorded-music revenue. — in music data doors

fanzine

a small, cheaply self-published, usually photocopied magazine, distributed hand-to-hand, by mail, or at shows rather than through commercial retail. — in what makes a music scene society

Genre-culture

a scene that has outgrown its originating city and become a style anyone, anywhere, can join. — in what makes a music scene

hibernation

as Vinyl Group uses it for Jaxsta: a service is taken offline and its technology/dataset preserved but not operated, with an open-ended stated possibility of restart. — in music data doors

IPI

Interested Parties Information — the identifier a collecting society assigns to a songwriter or publisher for royalty tracking. — in shazam the thin body

ISNI

International Standard Name Identifier — a cross-industry identifier meant to disambiguate a person's name across different databases. — in shazam the thin body

ISRC

International Standard Recording Code — a unique identifier for one specific recorded version of a song, assigned via a national agency such as the RIAA in the US. — in shazam the thin body

ISWC

International Standard Musical Work Code — a unique identifier for the underlying composition, distinct from any one recording of it, typically assigned by a collecting society or publisher. — in shazam the thin body

Local scene

a scene bounded to one place and time, sustained by face-to-face contact among its producers, musicians and fans. — in what makes a music scene

long tail

the very large number of individually low-play recordings that, in aggregate, make up most of a catalog by count but a small fraction of it by listening volume. — in shazam the thin body

metadata

data that describes other data — here, everything about a recording other than the audio itself: title, artist, credits, rights identifiers. — in shazam the thin body

non-major label

MIDiA Research's preferred term for what is often loosely called an "independent" label — any label not owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music, or Warner Music Group. — in music data doors

Scenius

creative intelligence distributed across a whole cluster of people in a scene, rather than concentrated in one "genius." — in what makes a music scene

scrobbling

Last.fm's term for automatically logging every track a user plays, the mechanism its listening-behavior data is built from. — in shazam the thin body

selector

the person who chooses and sequences the records on a sound system, reading the crowd's energy song to song. — in what makes a music scene society

sound system (Jamaican)

a mobile stack of speakers, amplifiers, and turntables assembled and moved by a crew, rather than fixed inside one club. — in what makes a music scene society

straight edge

a self-imposed abstention from alcohol, drugs, and casual sex, first articulated as a named ethic in Minor Threat's 1981 song of the same title — a discipline, not a rule imposed from outside — in what makes a music scene society

trade revenue

the money labels and distributors collect at wholesale for recorded music, before a streaming platform's or retailer's own margin is added on top. — in music data doors

trainee system / 연습생 (yeonseupsaeng)

"practice-student" — a K-pop recruit trained for years by an agency before a centrally designed debut. — in what makes a music scene society

Translocal scene

widely scattered local scenes in different cities, kept in regular contact around a shared sound and lifestyle even without everyone being in the same room. — in what makes a music scene

Venue (scene infrastructure)

a physical room — a club, a bar, a basement, a hall — where music happens live and repeatedly, not a one-off. — in what makes a music scene, what makes a music scene society

Virtual scene

a scene sustained mostly through print and the internet, where participants may rarely or never physically meet. — in what makes a music scene

기획사 (gihoeksa)

a Korean talent agency that develops an act from raw recruit through debut, rather than signing an already-formed artist. — in what makes a music scene society

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

anchoring bias

a person's judgment of what something should cost shifts based on whatever comparison figure is placed in front of them first, rather than an independent assessment of the thing itself — in pricing custom software builds ai era

Art world (Becker)

Howard Becker's term for the full cooperative network — performers, suppliers, critics, audiences — that collectively produces a work of art, not the artist alone. — in what makes a music scene society

blat

the informal, favor-based barter economy that moved goods and services around the Soviet Union's official shortages — in what makes a music scene society

Creative class

Richard Florida's contested urban-studies term for a class of technology, arts and knowledge workers whose presence he argues drives regional economic growth. — in what makes a music scene

Field of cultural production (Bourdieu)

Pierre Bourdieu's term for a structured social space where producers compete for legitimacy according to the field's own internal rules, largely independent of the wider commercial market. — in what makes a music scene society

gentrification

the process by which rising property values and new, wealthier residents displace the lower-income and cultural uses that made an area desirable in the first place. — in what makes a music scene society

Gentrification

the process by which rising property values and new, wealthier residents displace the lower-income and cultural uses that made an area desirable in the first place. — in what makes a music scene

Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5)

the Brazilian military government's 1968 decree instituting formal censorship of music, film, and media, and suspending habeas corpus for political offenses — in what makes a music scene society

intangible cultural heritage

a UNESCO designation category for living cultural practices — traditionally rites, crafts, or performance forms — rather than physical monuments. — in what makes a music scene 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

Milieu (sociology)

a social grouping still loosely tied to shared life-circumstances or position, as distinct from the purely elective Szene. — in what makes a music scene

Peranakan

long-settled, intermarried, culturally localized descendants of earlier Chinese migration to the Indonesian archipelago, often matrilineal in custom. — in idr yuan conversion history

posttraditionale Vergemeinschaftung

post-traditional community-formation — building community through chosen lifestyle and aesthetic affiliation rather than inherited social position. — in what makes a music scene

software house

the English loanword used directly in Indonesian for a small-to-mid custom-development studio — in pricing custom software builds ai era

subcultural capital

sociologist Sarah Thornton's term, adapted from Pierre Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital, for the specific knowledge, taste, and "in-the-know"-ness that marks someone as a real insider — knowing which club is currently the right one, dressing and dancing like it's natural — in what makes a music scene society

Subculture

in Dick Hebdige's Birmingham-school sense: a youth style read as a semi-coded form of resistance to the dominant culture. — in what makes a music scene

Szene

the German cognate of "scene," carrying its own distinct theoretical sense: a voluntary, part-time, elective community distinct from a Milieu. — in what makes a music scene

Totok

more recently arrived Chinese-Indonesian immigrants and their descendants, culturally closer to mainland Chinese tradition, typically patrilineal. — in idr yuan conversion history

UMKM

usaha mikro, kecil, dan menengah — Indonesia's official micro/small/medium-enterprise category — in pricing custom software builds ai era

Магнитиздат / magnitizdat

the Soviet practice of copying and self-distributing music on reel-to-reel and cassette tape outside official channels — in what makes a music scene society

Society performance indonesia

janturan

the dalang's sung scene-setting description in wayang, typically painting an ideal kingdom. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

Society religion indonesia

Maulid Nabi Muhammad

the commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. — in sukarno negeri utara kuru

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

accidentally load-bearing

a component that quietly acquires unplanned structural importance other things come to depend on. — in the word lexicon

acoustic fingerprint

a compact, lossy summary of a recording's audio content, matched against a database of stored fingerprints rather than the original audio. — in shazam the thin body

Add-on (browser)

Mozilla's umbrella term covering extensions, themes, and (historically) plugins and search-engine plugins together. — in coding names hierarchy

anchor point

in Shazam's algorithm, a chosen constellation-map point paired against nearby points within a defined 'target zone' to generate hashes. — in shazam the machine

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

audio fingerprinting

a technique for identifying a piece of audio by extracting a compact, distinctive numeric pattern from it, then matching that pattern against a database of known patterns. — in shazam the machine, music money moves

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

automatic content recognition (ACR)

the broader technical category audio fingerprinting belongs to — any system that identifies media by its content, not its file name or metadata. — in shazam the machine

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

byte-pair encoding

a method that builds a model's vocabulary by repeatedly merging the most frequent adjacent symbol pairs in training text. — in the word lexicon

Chesterton's Fence

the reasoning principle that you should understand why something was built before removing it. — in the word lexicon

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

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

combinatorial hashing

pairing points together, rather than hashing them individually, to pack far more identifying information into each fingerprint token. — in shazam the machine

constellation map

a sparse scatter of a recording's loudest spectrogram peaks, once volume and weaker signal are discarded — the actual thing that gets fingerprinted in Shazam's algorithm. — in shazam the machine

context contamination

in multi-agent AI systems, incorrect or unstructured information from one agent degrading another's shared context. — in the word lexicon

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

entitlement

in Apple's developer terms, a specific permission-and-access grant for a given API or capability, issued and revocable at Apple's discretion, separate from general Developer Program membership. — in shazam the machine

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

misalignment

a mismatch between what a training process optimises for and what end users actually want. — in the word lexicon

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

reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)

a training method where human raters compare model outputs and the model is adjusted toward the preferred ones. — in the word lexicon

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

SDK (software development kit)

a packaged set of programming tools and interfaces a developer installs to add a specific capability to their own app. — in shazam the machine

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

seed word

in topic modelling, a word a human researcher deliberately supplies in advance to steer a model toward a known topic. — in the word lexicon

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

token

the smallest unit of text a language model processes — often a word-piece, not a whole word. — in the word lexicon

tokenizer

the tool that splits text into tokens according to a model's fixed vocabulary. — in the word lexicon

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

vocabulary (model)

the fixed, closed set of tokens a trained language model can read or produce. — in the word lexicon

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

Web technology

agentic coding

an AI system that plans and executes a multi-step coding task across several files with only periodic human check-ins, rather than suggesting one line at a time — in pricing custom software builds ai era