I guess it sounds really cool. Apparently this term came about referring to building a “stack” of appropriate technology to support something or other. Maybe.
Then the vitamin/supplement woo crowd glommed onto it. Ohh, I’m building my stack of herbs and minerals as though somehow this means something. Lots of advice about growing your stack slowly and evaluating each step.
My wife loves supplements. Hair, nails, memory, skin, arthritis, she’s got it. She keeps hers in a plastic box. Maybe that is her stack. She’s deep into it. I think she eats them in a specific order, because. She buys local pollen because “among those thousands of plants some have got to be good for you”. She thinks the black pollen is the best and will seek out jars that have a lot. No reason whatsoever except it tastes bitter. I told here it might be poison ivy.
The precious metal crowd is also real big on stacking. A poster will post a picture of his random silver coins and little bars and ask if his “stack” is growing properly. It’s just so funny. As though there is this one simple trick to hoarding coins. Some of the people do build stacks of coins. I guess a stack of silver dollars is better then a bag of them.
I’ve collected a lot of stuff over the years but I never thought I was stacking anything. I guess I could convert my shelves of vintage phone directories to stacks. That’s the ticket!
I have tendencies. I have them under control(I promise)
Seeing lots of one kinda item organized, stacked, lined up does something to my inner stacking gene. It pings my heart.
In IT, the thing that makes it a “stack” is that each gizmo acts as a support for the next. There’s an intrinsic ordering to the parts and, like flunking jenga, if you remove any piece, then every piece above comes tumbling down in a crash while the stuff below is unaffected.
I agree many other uses of the term are just trying to steal some geek cred.
OTOH … in casinos players have referred to thier collection of chips on the table as “my stack” since long before IT lingo went mainstream, and probably from before computers were invented
If you have enough chips there is a logic to how to arrange your chips for ease of counting and use. Likewise if you’re betting, say $30, it’s polite to put the $25 chip under the $5, not on top. Order matters at least some.
This has been my guiding principle in designing software architecture since forever. The basic principle is that the layers are completely independent, and communicate only through well-defined interfaces. It’s the fundamental principle behind the ISO-OSI network architecture which unfortunately never took off, and to a lesser extent of the TCP/IP architecture which adheres to the general idea but less rigorously.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams came up with the concept of the talent stack -“I am a famous syndicated cartoonist who doesn’t have much artistic talent, and I’ve never taken a college-level writing class. But few people are good at both drawing and writing. When you add in my ordinary business skills, my strong work ethic, my risk tolerance, and my reasonably good sense of humor, I’m fairly unique."
In the 70’s and 80’s I remember steroids were stacked. A bodybuilder took several different steroids at a time and they were his stack. They would do a cycle of them then take a break before starting the next cycle with possibly a different stack.
A phrase I’ve heard from woo-sters is that by trying an apparently endless sequence of herbs and supplements, they are “guinea-pigging” themselves. Something is bound to work sooner or later, and nothing natural can really harm you.
I wonder if that came before or after that Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank startup that creates ‘custom’ vitamin gummies; you answer a few lifestyle questions on their website and they sell you 3D printed layered ‘vitamin stack’ gummies that are supposedly tailored to your exact needs (like you can get that from a questionnaire). They are stupidly expensive.
