notable poland problems

• Cassandrafreude (n): twisted pleasure in things going wrong exactly the way you predicted, when no one believed you.


• forensicist (med n.): criminal psychiatrist, involved in e.g. verifying insanity defences. Real lie detectors.


• egregore (occult n.): thought-form; Volksgeist; manipulative hivemind; some sort of supernatural meme.


• Poland problem (social n.): having a polarised and unmanageable political culture despite good economic performance. (This is an exception to a very general socioeconomic rule.) Peculiar to Barkley Rosser but he makes up for the usage gap on his own.


• packed assembly (politics n.): an artificially-skewed parliament / voter base. Ballot stuffing via selection bias.


• cattle-cake (husbandry n.): animal feed block; mostly straw and yeast and other run-off.


• talcosis (med n.): inflammation of lungs from constant exposure to talc powder.


• BID (Latin): bis in die; twice a day.


• culture add (HR n.): New buzzword for what a diversity hire is intended to bring. Antagonist of cultural fit.


• fatbike (n.): cross-country bike; massive soft tyres. Very new but obvious and great.


• barcamp (n.): open workshop with content provided by participants in a relatively improv way.


• epoch (ML n.) : one full training cycle on the training set. Once every sample in the current set is seen, the epoch is over.


• data gravity (meta-IT n.): simple model of modern IT where increasing dataset size attracts software to exploit it, analogously to relativity mechanics.


• polyalgorithm (n.): program which can select between programs to run.


• preconditioner (numerics n.): algorithm for making a problem more amenable to approximation.


• to retire (CS v.): when the results of an instruction (register writes, memory writes) are committed and made visible to the system. Instructions must retire in order.


• speculative execution (CS n.): When your processor runs code that will actually not be used; helpful when you have spare capacity and a heavy task up ahead. If the speculation was incorrect, the CPU can discard the result and continue executing the correct execution path. Instructions don't retire before knowing they're on the correct execution path.


• mis-speculation window (CS n.): time in which the CPU speculatively executes the wrong code and hasn't detected the mistake.


• APU (IT n.): Accelerated Processing Unit. Meaningless marketing?


• Switchzilla (IT n.): the Register's diminutive nickname for Cisco.


• Introdus (futurology n.): a mass upload of a civilization onto computer hardware, particularly when uploaded to a solid-state drive hidden from astronomical view.


• milly rock (US n.): million-dollar diamond; a wavy-hand intro dance which looks like the Robot.