notable nae naes

• reversal (medical n.): the eventual withdrawal of a treatment used without sufficient evidence, when it is found to be null or harmful. There must soon be a reversal on heart stents to relieve pain following a shocking null result; millions of invasive surgeries, presumably hundreds of deaths.


• booter (retrocomputing n.): 1) software executed at boot, from a bootable disk, not through an OS. Some early games did this, remarkably.
  2) Web service that will thoroughly DDoS your target for a few bucks. The record-breaking attack on Krebs was through one of these.


• assurance contract (economics n.): Legal instrument for decentralised funding of public goods. Think Kickstarter for climate change, roads, and schools.


• pilpul (Hebrew n.): pepper; sharp analysis. The method used by scholars to resolve contradictions in the Talmud or different halakhic judgments. See also retconning, logic-chopping, splitting hairs, red herring.


• arruginated (nonword adj.): Bit of inspired nonsense in Joyce: various people have found plausible etymologies in it for "rusty", "worn", "corrugated", and "wrinkled".


• chaos engineering (software n.): practice of testing distributed systems by stress-testing the production system(!)


• retry storm (internet n.): Cascading series of iterated failures which threatens to deny service to a system. One of the things that chaos eng tries to catch. So also thundering herd.


• smoke testing (dev n.): Preliminary test of basic functions, to see if it is ready to be properly tested. Solution to the modern problem of 100,000-line test suites which take 4 hours to run.


• KYC (regulatory n.): : Know Your Customer; requirement for e.g. banks to positively identify new customers, i.e. to surveil them. The next logical step of this is a full-face photo every time you sign up for things.


• PEP (international finance n.): Politically Exposed Person; person with enough state power that they need to be frisked for corruption. See also senior foreign political figure.


• manlet (internet pej. n.): short man.


• IAWTC (internet n.): I agree with this comment.


• iron butterfly (biz n.): Heavily hedged portfolio; what Taleb calls a barbell.
• killer bee: (biz n.): Anti-takeover consultant. Proposes defences against hostile takeovers. See also porcupine provision or shark repellent, what killer bees come up with.


• dragon bonds (international finance n.): Bonds issued by Asian nations in dollars, to attract foreign investment.


• parametric insurance (n.): policy with automatic claim payout, based on e.g. blockchain or smart contract conditions being met.


• geographical fix (US alcoholic n.): fleeing a region in an attempt to flee personal problems, e.g. debts, broken relationships, addiction. Doomed.


• hamshop (obsolete n.): butcher; lecher. Preserved in a loan word in Cantonese of all place, 鹹濕.


• Sinoxenic (): Extra-Chinese, non-Chinese Chinese; refers to the pronounciation of loanwords from Chinese in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese.



• trich (internet n.): trichotillomania; condition that makes you pull out your own hair.


• concrete steppes (econ n.): Mythical place where anti-monetarists live. After the "concrete steps" they always demand that monetarists offer the central bankers.