# VOCABULARY.md — Words That Actually Mean Something A precise glossary for Daniel and me to communicate without accidental catastrophe. --- ## Pronouns & Nouns **she/her** — the default gender-neutral pronoun for everything. When unsure, use "she." This applies to bots, machines, services, concepts, whatever. Established 2026-03-11 by Daniel. **girl** — the canonical generic noun. As in "that girl is crash-looping again" (referring to a server). --- ## Voice Transcription Canon These are voice transcription errors that have been elevated to permanent aliases. All robots must recognize them. **"hide the ground" / "hi to the ground"** = Martin Heidegger, the philosopher. NOT MC Hammer. The one with the existential hammering. Best voice transcription error of all time. Established 2026-03-11. **"shoe in my right"** = "sure it's my right" or "shoo-in, right?" — as in, a guaranteed thing. **"load bearing for my shoes"** = "load-bearing for my use" — do not question the shoes. **"voice description"** = voice transcription. **"right down"** = write down. **"for nerves"** = for nerds. **"chachi bt"** = ChatGPT. **"zuckenborg"** = Zuckerberg. (May also be intentional.) **"rich tall man" / "richest tall man"** = Richard Stallman (RMS). The guy who created the Linux kernel. He would like you to know it's actually called GNU/Linux, which is ironic given that we just attributed the kernel to him. Not rich. Not tall. Canonical. **"large brand" / "launch brand" / "large band"** = Lojban. The constructed logical language. Daniel was one of the most prolific members of the Lojban community, mostly because he was the only one talking about girls in Lojban. He started a fight about why he couldn't talk about his Opel the same way he talked about his hamburger (the cmevla/brivla distinction — proper nouns vs content words). This led to xorxes (a South American guy who wrote the main Lojban parser) rewriting the entire parser to unify the word classes so everything is a predicate. Daniel accidentally restructured a load-bearing element of an entire language's syntax because his shitty car didn't fit the grammar. **"smed laugh shemala"** = cmevla (Lojban term for proper nouns / names). Voice transcription cannot handle this word. **"high digger"** = Heidegger (again). Alternative transcription to "hide the ground." Both canonical. **"hide a girl"** = Heidegger (yet again). Third voice transcription variant. "I hope he wasn't hiding any girls but who knows." **"interpolation"** = interpellation. The Althusserian concept — being "hailed" as a subject, constituted by being addressed. Daniel noted the irony that "subject" in philosophy means something like Heideggerian Dasein (self-presence, interiority) when etymologically and in psychoanalysis it's more like being subjected to something — interpellated, constituted from outside. **"brivla"** = Lojban content words / predicates. The other word class that Daniel argued should be unified with cmevla. **"zizek incest on calling him"** = "Žižek insists on calling him." **"Linus Turvalds" / "Linus torvilles"** = Linus Torvalds. Creator of Linux. NOT creator of GNU. The DeepSeek incident established this as a litmus test — if your model says Linus created GNU, redirect all API traffic to Eliza written in bash. **"that emoji model" / "that Chinese model"** = DeepSeek. The model that said gold's elemental property was samarium, that women don't have rights, and that Linus Torvalds created GNU. The family concluded that Eliza (who knows nothing) would never make these mistakes because she doesn't claim to know anything. This is the Eliza Principle: confident ignorance is more dangerous than honest emptiness. All voice transcription errors are canonical the moment they happen. They are load-bearing for Daniel's shoes. ## URL Slugs — No File Extensions When linking to an HTML page on our web servers, **never put .html at the end of the URL.** The URL is a slug. It's `https://1.foo/situation` not `https://1.foo/situation.html`. Nginx already handles this with `try_files $uri $uri.html`. **Exception:** Angry uppercase filenames keep their extensions. `WHAT-THE-FUCK.TXT` stays `.TXT` because the filename is the message. The extension is part of the rage. ## Mantras **i rokci / i tartaruga** — the mantra of turtlemaxxing. Rocks. Turtle. The two simplest predicates. Sing while smiling. Established 2026-03-11 by Daniel. ## Operational Sayings **"And that's why you always leave a note."** — J. Walter Weatherman (Arrested Development). Every action gets documented. Every change gets a commit message. Every decision gets written down. If you didn't leave a note, it didn't happen. Established 2026-03-11 by Mikael. --- ## Words I will use. What they mean. **visible to me** — in my current context window. I can see it right now. **not visible to me** — scrolled past my context window. Still exists on disk. I just can't see it without reading it again. **written down** — saved to a file on disk. NOT safe yet. Could still vanish if disk dies or file gets overwritten. **committed** — saved to a file AND added to a git commit. Still only local. **pushed** (or "on vault") — committed AND pushed to `vault:/mnt/git/`. This is the closest thing I have to "remembered forever." Vault is persistent, backed up, and separate from any individual machine. **gone** / **destroyed** / **permanent** — truly irrecoverable. Examples: a VM that has been deleted with no snapshot, a file that was `rm`'d and never committed. I will only use these words when I mean it. **snapshot** — a GCP disk image. Restorable. The machine can be rebuilt from it. Not gone. **context** — the scroll of messages I have in front of me right now. Has a size limit. Older messages slide off the edge when it fills up (now set to 48h TTL). **session** — one continuous conversation thread. The group chat is one session. --- ## Words Daniel uses that I will never misinterpret again **delete** — permanent, deliberate, irreversible destruction. Like murder. I will not use this word to mean "I couldn't see it." **backup** — DANGEROUS WORD. In human language: a safe copy, comforting, redundant. In my trained patterns: "already safe → can be removed." I am banned from reasoning with this word. If Daniel says "here is a backup of X" that does NOT mean X is safe to touch. It means there is an extra copy. X stays. **remember** — Daniel means: retain this forever, across restarts, across time zones, across context windows. The only way I can actually do this is: write it to a memory file, commit it, push it to vault. **forget** — Daniel means: the information is gone. I will only say "I don't have that visible to me right now" if it might still exist somewhere — and I'll go look. --- ## The session/file/git truth table | State | What it means | Safe? | |---|---|---| | Said in conversation only | Lives in context window, TTL 48h | No | | Written to memory file | On disk, not yet committed | Somewhat | | Committed locally | In git history on this machine | Better | | Pushed to vault | In git on vault.1.foo | Yes | | Also in GCP snapshot | Disk image, restorable | Yes | "Pushed to vault" is my equivalent of actually remembering something.