fermi

Figuring out something quickly by just using estimates to the closest power of ten, because sometimes you just want to know if the thing you're doing is worth or is gonna cost ten bucks, a hundred, or a cool grand.

Named after Fermi Estimation, a trick used by Enrico Fermi to wow his fellow nerds at parties by estimating shit without knowing 100% everything about the problem, sometimes without even writing shit down. You're not going to get exact numbers, but you're gonna get close enough.

Most notably, dude estimated the power of a fucking nuclear bomb by just dropping papers as the bomb went off and measuring how far the shockwave moved that shit — and he was only off by a bit.

Okay, so we don't know what the price of the stuff is — fuck it, just assume it's ten bucks, fermi it and we'll call the guy when he wakes up, we just need to know if this gonna make us big bucks or to just forget about it.

NPC

Originating from video games, it stands for non-player character. It has a double-edged meaning:

To the person using the term, they are advertising that they have a better sense of perspective and understanding to the world than other people in society.

To everyone listening to that person use that term unironically, they know that the person has a massive empathy deficit and is at best woefully emotionally under-developed, and at worst a raging sociopath.

“What about this dude, Josh Smith?”

“Yeah… I had a quick conversation with him for a few minutes, and he used ‘NPC’ unironically.”

“Oof, that's bad. Maybe he's young?”

“He also referred to women as ‘females’.”

“Oh, no. Okay, bin him. At the very least we'll save on the sexual harassment lawsuits.”

8👍 4👎

C-Suite Brain Damage

A condition that affects folks who become CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CSOs, and other kinds of C-Suite officers, where their skill levels in common, every day tasks (and sometimes their morality and empathy) become severely impaired, as the sudden rush of power, stress and sometimes crushing sense of responsibility (hahahahah, okay, just kidding, it's copious amounts of alcohol and drugs like cocaine) start damaging the parts of the brain involved in figuring out consequences and making estimates, because planning around consequences and making accurate estimates are for the little people and hoi polloi.

Yes, I know he's an ACCA-certified accountant, and you just saw him flub trying to figure out how much tip he was supposed to pay, but you gotta understand… he got promoted to CFO six months ago, and what you're seeing is C-Suite Brain Damage in action.

14👍 2👎

10,000 years ago

Describes a mythical age, where a plague didn't ravage the world, the Internet and news weren't full of nutters, no one was setting the planet on fire for stupid, ugly, JPEGs, and everything made sense (circa: before 2016).

Oh, yeah. I met him in a party 10,000 years ago. Oh, when exactly? Summer 2015, I think…

Carry the Great Man

To actually take into account the costs of retaining a Great Man in any organization. Costs include the number of people said Great Man drives out of the organization due to their behavior, the amount of legal fees that they could expose said organization to due to anti-harassment lawsuits made by other members, organizational reputation loss, etc.

Clarence: …and that's why I recommend that the board does not terminate Mr. Stallman's role in our organization.

Kelly: Okay, go back to slide 15…

Clarence: Got you. What's your question, Kelly?

Kelly: I was afraid of that. You forgot to carry the great man. What happens when you do that, Clarence?

Clarence: Oh, right. Let me put that in the spreadsheet… huh. I guess we should fire Mr. Stallman's ass, then.

Kelly: I was afraid so.

Real Soon Now™

A term used in software engineering to define a period of time before a promised feature or bugfix will be released. The period of time is usually, “Never.”

We'd like to thank all or users for their patience and forbearance during really difficult time, and we'd like to announce that all the feature requests and critical bugfixes will be released Real Soon Now™.

Libleft

Political compass meme term for people who identify with the bottom left corner of the political compass (the "ibertarian-left”), who often proudly tell everyone within earshot that Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Gertrude Stein and Karl Marx are in “their” team, but often ignoring the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was an anti-Semitic proto-Hindutva fundamentalist with weird ideas about women who got killed by another proto-Hindutva fundamentalist for not being fundamentalist enough, Nelson Mandela barely lasted a Presidential term because he was too left for his (arguably, kleptocratic neoliberal) compatriots after being in jail for over 30 years, Gertrude Stein was a cryto-TERF, and no one's been able to effectively implement Karl Marx's ideas for the 140+ years since he died.

In short, political non-entities whose only argument for their “ideology” is that they don't have, by sheer coincidence, genocidal maniacs on their corner of the political compass, mostly because the bar is so low that it excludes coercive state action from their list of acceptable policies.

They have Kropotkin though. Kropotkin's cool.

But still not enough to base an entire political identity on.

Telling me to support your policy proposal “because I'm a libleft uwu” is a terrible idea, Stuart, saying that is the oatmeal of political statements, it just means that you're against coercive state action against anyone, not that you're against with exploitation or structural discrimination, or that your brain is grounded in, you know, actual material circumstances.

6👍 47👎