Honest tech definitions for dummies

AI Agent: a cheap junior employee who has root access to your system and production and will fake competency and waste your money. Have fun.

All-in-one calendar/messenger/file sharing app: oh, look, they generously manage your most sensitive data with good intent and cheap costs: your security and privacy is not a problem it seems. Run away even if it's free.

Anti-AI: someone using AI but bitter about it officially.

Application logs: something you stare at while thinking about the sense of your life.

Backups: something everyone is supposed to do but never does. Tip: you can have world-class data backups for free, feed them to some LLM prompt or share them in private LinkedIn messages or in private GitHub repo, they will likely leak later in some hack or some LLM output.

Bugs: something that occurs to you because you didn't RTFM.

CDN: a disaster waiting to happen.

CI/CD pipeline: a glorified shell script that compiles your code, usually wrapped in YAML or in Groovy or a messy mix of both. Nobody cares it until it breaks. If you are a developer, blame any pipeline failure onto the CI/CD tooling pretend your code works on your machine.

Coding: some ancien art you go back to after wasting 4 days debugging AI-generated code.

Contabo: cheap plastic VPS.

Cloud: a big garage with computers, related to random outages and expensive certifications.

CloudFlare: a tool to protect robots from humans trying to use internet.

DevOps person: someone debugging your code and your production environment.

Docker: a packager for your bloated app and your dependency hell.

DuckDuckGo: a private search engine hosted by big tech and using big tech search results and funded by big tech. Yeah very private.

Ecosia: a green washing search engine.

Git: a simple version control tool to make your life miserable.

Google search: a search engine for ads.

Hetzner: cheap VPS for your piracy stuff self hosted business applications.

Home hosted: piracy stuff or very sensitive stuff running on a Raspberry with zero backup. Do not mixup with Self hosted.

JavaScript: sugar for the web.

Kubernetes: because Docker wasn't complicated enough, this is a glorified infinite loop that restarts your bloated apps when they crash, and they will. It's also good to have on a resume.

LLM: a tool for text generation you can use to save you from developing skills. Some people call it general AGI. Ok, AGI, go win the lottery for me.

Newsletter: legal spam nobody reads.

Passkeys: a tool to prevent humans from using a tool on multiple devices.

QR Codes: links that force you to be glued to your phone and run a crappy app to avoid talking to human beings. It's the modern way to ordering anything. If you want I can generate infinite QR Codes for only 10$ per month.

Quantum: a marketing term to make any bullshit sound more legit. Oh, there is it, a quantum LLM.

Reboot: something you do when you are too lazy to RTFM.

RTFM: reading the manual is something you never do unless to prove someone else wrong or when it's time to understand the programming language you are using for ten years.

Self hosted: some barely secured docker containerized app running in some cloud like Hetzner. What is "self" about it? You decide. Maybe the fact it's installed by some human following a recipe. Impressive.

Spotify: a scam acting like a glorified Winamp clone that randomly removes content from your favorite playlists, rob you and artists.

Substack / Bearblog / Dev.to and other blog platforms: a recycle bin for your ideas.

Seedboxes: A place for exchanging free Linux distributions,.NOTHING ELSE of course.

the Onion, Le Gorafi: satire websites that compete with D. Trump for the most stupid headlines.

URL shorteners: a good legal way to ease phishing attempts. It's also a tool used to hide mostly useless sometimes good links behind magic ephemeral links. You remember that good site? Was it blb.lb/8378hdkf? Or goo.gl/hdk792? Who knew it would be such a terrible idea. Oh, did you see this new quantum URL shortener?

VPN: a glorified proxy.

Web scraping: a way to fix the lack of APIs. Also a lazy yet professional way to CTRL+C / CTRL+V content from websites.

YouTube: ads streaming service.