500 Words — Day Twenty-One: Technical Jargon

There’s nothing that screams “the future” than edge computing in fog networks running AI algorithms securing the blockchain. Of course what does that techno-babble even mean? Who knows? It can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Technical jargon is effective at two things. Decreasing the communication time between two competent subject matter experts that both understand the jargon and confusing the hell out of everybody else. Most people don’t have the time or the interest in learning what a lot of these technical terms mean. I’m a career programmer and I would struggle to be able to accurately give a good and informative description of edge computing or fog networks and be able to identify some examples of it. Although over time a lot of technical jargon has moved from being technical shorthand to being marketing shorthand.

Marketers know that people don’t have the time or interest in learning the jargon which allows for creative interpretation of certain terms as well as associating those terms with whatever they feel would best sell their product. When you hear that non-fungible tokens are going to change the creator economy, what you don’t think about are links to images stored on a random server. But that’s essentially what NFTs are when you simplify down to the easiest to understand explanation. Now, I can clarify that the link itself is stored on a globally distributed database called a blockchain that is extremely resistant to censorship (censorship being something like erasing the link or overwriting it with a different link). The image’s resilience is a little less certain and is susceptible to the image being deleted, replaced, or moved. Most images, for your information, are too large to be placed on blockchains due to them taking many thousands of bytes of information which by themselves could take up the size of an entire block on the blockchain.

You see, it’s all very complicated. For those unfamiliar with the crypto space (or web3 as those crypto hipsters like to redefine the space), even my description is still too complicated to get a grasp of. They might not understand how databases or servers work for example. This makes it very easy to market concepts that may have technical flaws in them when you are unable to see the flaws and struggle to understand what is really going on.

I have already talked about how artificial intelligence in reality probably lacks the luster of what lies in the imaginations of most people. While some may see artificial intelligence as some artificial consciousness or some magical adaptable problem solver, in reality, it is just a clever use of applied statistics to make decisions that is fragile to outlier data just a lot of other artifacts of statistics (let’s say the arithmetic mean, for example).

The cloud is nothing special. It is just a computer or group of computers that you store your data when you connect to the internet. Nothing like a warehouse of computers purring with their little flashing lights screams ethereal and heavenly like a cloud. Don’t forget your umbrella.