Language moves fast in tech, and mastery of new terms is usually the gateway to mastery of a given technology (or at least of being able to convince others you are a master of the tech), since grokking and competence are equivalent these days. Here are two terms I came across in the past month; I’m fascinated by them because they are cultural markers of where our tech is at a given moment in time.
The new slang term I learned for the AR/VR headset space is “Rectangle-pilling”. Can you guess what it means to be rectangle pilled?
The new slang term in AI / Vibe coding is “slopsquatting”. “Slopsquatting”, besides just being fun to say out loud, describes an exploit for a phenomenon in vibe coding where the LLM writes a code library for you that depends on another library you can download from github — except, said github repo does not actually exist. It is a hallucinatory repo. “Slopsqatting” is the practice of identifying these dream-repos (apparently the same ones come up a lot?) and creating an actual library to squat at the dream repo’s address. Then additional code, possibly malicious code, can be placed in the library. Or maybe just an unusual license. Or an IP pinger. At some point, an unsuspecting dev who has been told by his company to learn to vibe code will download the slopsquat code and push it out in an internal product. And then the trap snaps shut, whatever it is.