notable embodied cognitive sewage

• lavalier (n. and v.): Pendant necklace. Particularly one with your frat's three-letter name on. Central to an old saccharine ritual in American frats and sorors: you swap lavaliers with your partner as a sort of pre-engagement ritual with your bros and sisters watching.


• TINLA (init.): This Is Not Legal Advice. To go with my new fav initialisms of epistemic humility, IANAL and IANAD.


• WLOG (init.): Without Loss Of Generality


• Taleb's demon (init.): Probabilistic equivalent of Maxwell's demon: a demon fucks with the usual urn metaphor for statistical inference, making you realise that we are never really justified in thinking we understand the sample space, since you can only understand the sample space by sampling. Actually due to Peter Taylor.


• rate raiding (n. / adverbial gerund): To systematically hit an API to learn the company's ruleset or regression ("rates"). Elsewhere called a model extraction attack.


• to threadshit (v.): to take over someone's discussion with a series of disgusting images until everyone goes away. A risky word - prone to devolve as "fake news" has devolved into "I don't think that's important" rather than its more useful meaning, "made up bullshit".


• madaline (n.): Many Adaptive Linear Elements. An early neural net, physically wired up.


• dindu (n.): A new racial slur, short for dindu nuffin. (That is, 'didn't do' in pseudo-ebonics.) Apparently a dogwhistle from Reddit.


• Evropa (n.): Europe. A shibboleth for white supremacists.


• grigri (n.): One brand of brake thingy used in climbing. Produces that cool-looking regular, slow descent. A genericised trademark, which I am usually against.


• bama (black East Coast n. and adj.): uncool person; a hick. From Alabama. Applied to other black people.


• aegrotat (UK n.): Degree awarded to a student too ill to sit examinations. By extension, a sick note or a student invalid. Latin for "he is ill", present tense.


• 5:01er (pej. n.): Person (especially a developer) who leaves work at a fixed time every day. Connotations are laziness and nonseriousness. In reality, of course, leaving work at the contractual time just means you have other things going on in there. 5:01er is sometimes retconned to mean "someone who doesn't actually care about coding and doesn't want to improve". But the etymology gives their intention away.


• Woodley effect (n.): A putative multi-generational fall in intelligence levels. Has to face up to the empirically confirmed multi-generational rise in intelligence, but people I respect think both are real. (e.g. "Flynn is due to nutrition and unleaded fumes, Woodley is due to genetics, Flynn is larger for now".)