Personal Glossary
Sometimes words need to be defined and you just can’t wait for Webster’s.
- Party Monday—A mutual aid tradition that started in my friend group sometime around 2017. One of our good friends broke her foot real bad (like, real bad), and was basically stuck on the couch for months because she wasn't even allowed to go up the stairs to where her bed was. At some point someone had the great idea to start working-from-home-from-her-home, both as an excuse to see her/allow her to spend time with anyone besides her own family and to help out with dishes or anything else that might need taking care of. Then, of course, after the workday was done it would just turn into a regular 'ol hangout. Her foot has long since healed, but Party Monday stuck with us. I really appreciate that it's an explicitly low commitment hosting event, since half the point is that you're inviting people over because you want help.
- Public Scram—More commonly known as a QR code. A genius five-year old we know saw one, leaned over and quietly informed his mother that he called these "public scrams." Now we do too.
- Potemkin Comprehension—I first came across the term in a 2025 paper (paper, poster) that establishes a couple of approaches for quantifying and testing them. A failure mode of LLMs that reveals the illusion of comprehension. While many LLMs can score high on tests designed for humans, doing so doesn't indicate that an LLM "understands" the concepts being tested in the same way that it might for the actual humans the test was designed for. This gap between the high scores on tests and LLMs inability to comprehend is called Potemkin Comprehensin (or sometimes Potemkin Understanding). This is an allusion to Potemkin Villages, a phrase whose history I didn't fully appreciate until I read the wikipedia page while making this entry.
- Scrib—A writing utensil. Pen, pencil, doesn't matter. Coined around 2001 in a fit of frustration. Why wasn't there a single syllable word that just meant "writing implement?"
- The Weekly Week—A weekly meeting where my wife and I sit down together and look at the week ahead. Calendar management, food for the week, chores, etc. This helps us both be on the same page, let's us get a bit of a leg up on the week before it starts, and is a stable-enough part of our routines that we can use it as a launching pad for experiments or to chain other habits off of. Naming credit goes to my brilliant wife. I got the idea from a very talented project manager I once worked with who very generously shared her process with me, though we have molded it and made it our own over the years.
Last updated: Jan 6th, 2026 🕐