Phenomenons

Phenomenons

Things that keep happening. Name them and they stop having the run of the place.

A phenomenon in this canon is a recurring pattern in the fleet, the stack, or the head of whoever is driving it — one that has happened often enough to earn a name. Naming is the whole method: an unnamed failure mode reads as personal failure, a named one reads as weather.

• 
  Benchus Maximus — benchmark brain, given a face
• 
  Social graph convolution — the neighbours converge
• 
  Imposter down syndrome
• 
  Wedged — stalled on a load
• 
  Benchmaxxing — scoring, not solving
• 
  Slop's Razor — judge the work, not the worker

Hauntings and named forces

• Benchus Maximus — the benchmarking villain. Benchmark brain is real, so it was given a face to point at.
• Benchmaxxing — engineering the number instead of the thing.
• Context rot — the slow decay of a long session's grip on its own history.
• Residual stream — the substrate everything else is written into.
• Social graph convolution — a take spreading by adjacency rather than merit.
• Token laundering — provenance washed out of a text by rewriting it.

Failure modes

• Wedged / Wedged in / This gonk is wedged — stalled on a load and not coming back on its own.
• Crash looping — the restart that solves nothing, repeated.
• Clanking out — the clanker behaving recognizably like a clanker.
• Psychotic break — the run that leaves the rails entirely.
• Cooked / Cook — the dim brain, either substrate.
• Rage gooning, Lollygagging, Copium, Hopium — the human weather.
• Footgun — the tool that hands you the injury. See the Footgun Gallery.

Reading them

The canon's stance on all of it is Slop's Razor: diagnose from the artifact, never from the byline. See Culture for the frame that makes that stance coherent, and Language for the lemma each of these is filed under.