The language of silicon dreams and stack overflows.
A software development methodology that replaced long, painful development cycles with short, painful development cycles called sprints. The only thing that actually moves fast is the deadline. Comes with its own priesthood of certified Scrum Masters.
Application Programming Interface: the digital equivalent of a restaurant menu -- it tells you what you can order without making you watch the kitchen catch fire. When an API breaks, every developer suddenly becomes a detective and a therapist simultaneously.
Pure 100% ethanol alcohol produced through industrial distillation with drying agents—technically illegal for consumption and designed to burn throats if consumed neat, but legendarily effective as a flavorless punch spike in laboratory settings.
The gradual loss of signal strength, wave amplitude, or general oomph as something travels through space or time. In tech, it's why your Wi-Fi sucks in the bathroom; in biology, it's why scientists deliberately weaken pathogens to make vaccines. Think of it as nature's (or physics') way of enforcing the "things get worse over distance" rule.
A step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or performing a calculation, now blamed for everything from bad recommendations to societal inequality. In computer science, it's the recipe your code follows to turn input into output. These days, 'the algorithm' is invoked mystically to explain why your social media shows you cat videos instead of news, like it's some inscrutable digital deity rather than just math someone wrote.
The industry, science, and practice of designing, manufacturing, and operating aircraft—the sector that keeps billion-dollar businesses flying through the air and occasionally on schedule.
The therapeutic spa treatment for metals and glass, involving heating them up and then cooling them down in a controlled manner to relieve internal stresses. This heat treatment makes materials less brittle and more workable, essentially giving them anger management therapy at the molecular level. Blacksmiths and glassblowers have been doing this for centuries, though they probably didn't call it stress relief.
The maximum height or intensity a wave or oscillating signal reaches from its center point—the vertical swagger of your sine curve. In physics and engineering, this tells you how much energy or power you're actually dealing with.
The direction and movement of air currents, especially around aircraft or HVAC systems—basically the invisible force keeping planes aloft and offices from smelling like old coffee.
Short for ampere, amplifier, or ampoule, because why use complete words when you can confuse three different professions at once? Electricians measure current with it, musicians crank it up to eleven with it, and medical professionals fill syringes from it. Context is everything, or you'll end up asking a sound engineer to inject you with 120 volts.
Images generated by machine learning models trained on vast datasets to understand composition patterns, then reverse-engineered via text prompts to create new works. Basically: computers making art from plagiarized data, which courts are still fighting about.
A software development approach that promised to free us from rigid planning but instead gave us daily standups and infinite meetings about sprints. It's chaos with a framework and motivational posters.
The digital equivalent of showing your ID at a bar, proving you are who you claim to be before the system lets you in. It's the bouncer checkpoint where your username and password get verified, hopefully through something more secure than "password123." Once authenticated, you're granted access to do whatever damage—er, work—you're authorized to do.
The act of replacing humans with machines, usually sold as 'efficiency gains' while simultaneously creating an entire industry of people who maintain the machines that replaced people. Originally meant to free humans from tedious tasks, it now mostly means replacing checkout clerks with self-service kiosks that require three employees to supervise. The ultimate corporate dream: a workforce that doesn't need bathroom breaks or complain about the office temperature.
Software plug-ins that extend the functionality of a larger application, like giving your Excel spreadsheet superpowers it never asked for. These little code parasites attach themselves to host programs to add features, automate tasks, or generally make your life easier—or introduce delightful new bugs. Think of them as the remora fish of the software world, hanging onto bigger programs for mutual benefit.
A demographic term for Macintosh computer users, used as a preferred alternative to the somewhat pejorative 'Mac People.' It's tech culture's way of being polite.
The person with elevated privileges and system access who can fix things when they break and break things when they're fixing them. In IT, administrators are responsible for keeping networks, servers, and databases running, which means they're perpetually blamed when anything goes wrong. They possess the sacred power to reset your password and the burden of being everyone's first call during outages.
Software that's technically free but spiritually expensive, serving you ads like an overeager waiter pushing the daily special. It's the business model equivalent of "I'll work for exposure," except the exposure is literally advertisements plastered across your screen. Some variants moonlight as spyware, because why stop at annoying when you can be creepy too?
A budget mobile phone brand that serves as a nostalgic reminder of pre-smartphone days or the current choice of extremely frugal shoppers. Owning one means you either lost a bet or have admirably transcended materialism.
The magical process of teaching machines to do your job so you can focus on explaining to management why you're still necessary. It's the art of replacing human error with systematic, scalable, computerized error. Essentially, it's converting manual tasks into automatic ones using technology, theoretically freeing humans for "higher-level thinking" (read: more meetings).
Short for applications—software programs designed for mobile devices or specific tasks, now so ubiquitous that we've forgotten they're just computer programs with better marketing. From ordering food to tracking your sleep, there's literally an app for everything, whether you need it or not. The modern solution to problems you didn't know you had.
The rod or spindle on which a wheel or pair of wheels revolves—basically the unsung hero keeping your vehicle from becoming a very expensive sled.
Advanced Encryption Standard, the government-approved way to scramble your data so thoroughly that even the NSA needs a warrant (theoretically). It's the cryptographic algorithm that protects everything from your credit card transactions to your embarrassing Google searches. Built to replace DES when computers got too fast, it comes in flavors of 128, 192, and 256-bit keys for varying levels of paranoia.
Software designed to detect, prevent, and remove malicious programs from your computer, essentially a digital immune system that's perpetually fighting the latest cyber diseases. It's the software you install, immediately forget about, then wonder why it's slowing down your computer during important presentations. The security industry's most successful ongoing subscription model, selling protection from threats they help make scary.