Jargonautica

About

Jargonautica is a glossary for people who got handed a word and no explanation. Every entry is written twice: once so anyone can follow it, and once so somebody who works in the field is not short-changed.

Why Twice

Most glossaries pick a side. Either they are so simplified that they are useless the moment you need to do anything, or they assume you already know the five terms sitting inside the definition. Writing every entry twice sidesteps that. The plain version comes first and never leans on jargon it has not explained. The technical version sits underneath a control you can open when you want it, and it is allowed to be properly technical: the maths, the trade-offs, the arguments practitioners are still having.

The other rule is that nothing stands alone. Where an entry depends on another term it links to it, and each entry ends with a handful of related terms and a line explaining why each one is related. There are currently 577 terms and 2284 links between them, which is why there is a graph.

Who Writes It

Jargonautica is written and maintained by Big Trouble Labs ('BTL'). It started as one person's notes for keeping track of a field that invents vocabulary faster than it explains it, and grew until it seemed worth putting somewhere public. AI is the first glossary. The format is not specific to AI, so it will not be the last.

Anyone whose suggestion turns into an entry is credited on that entry, by whatever name they ask for.Suggestions are open, and no email address is ever collected.

The Licence

The writing is published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. In plain terms: take it, copy it, translate it, put it in your onboarding pack, sell a course that uses it. Two conditions. Say where it came from, and if you change it, publish your version under the same licence so the next person has the same freedom you did.

The code that turns the notes into this website is separate, and is published under the MIT licence.

How It Is Built

The source of truth is a folder of plain text notes in Obsidian, one file per term, cross-linked the way Obsidian links things. A build script copies those notes across, works out what every link points at, and refuses to publish if a link points at a term that does not exist, if a term has no way in, or if two terms would end up at the same web address.

The site itself is Astro, which turns the notes into ordinary HTML pages ahead of time, and it is hosted on Cloudflare Workers. There is no database and no content management system. The graph layout is calculated once during the build, so your browser only has to draw it, never work it out.

Everything except the suggestion form is a static file, which is the whole security model: there is almost nothing running to attack.

Glossaries