Embedded, Then Embedding

One word that followed me for decades — embedded system, then embedded Linux, then ML embeddings — each time a different creature.

A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.

For a few semesters in college I held a work-study job. Maybe it was because I was an out-of-town student who didn’t live in the dorms; either way, the main task was carrying the mail that landed at the engineering office over to the department office, then sorting it out lab by lab. Half an hour, an hour a day of small errands — and warm memories of the office staff, the grad-student seniors, and the professors who were kind to a kid running deliveries.

One small perk: I got first look at the odd jobs that came into the department. One of them was translating an article from some journal into Korean. It was the kind of thing I could do from my boarding-room desk, so I picked it up out of curiosity — and that was my first meeting with “embedded system.”

Embedded System

The article was about how you could now do real, high-level programming in C down in the world of sensors and controllers — small things, made to do more complicated work. My biggest problem wasn’t the content. It was how on earth to say “embedded” in Korean. For context: this was before Naver, before the internet was something you reached for, and the English-Korean dictionary on my desk had probably been printed sometime in the 1980s.

After a long stretch of trips to the library, I settled on a Korean rendering that came out as roughly “built-in system.” What gnawed at me most was the mirror image: if I called its opposite an “external system,” what English word did I imagine sitting behind that? Embedded has no clean antonym, it turns out. My better memory is the happy ending — the senior who checked my work looked pleased, and the finished translation held together on its own terms. Translating one article doesn’t exactly broaden your horizons. But it was a new experience, and years later, when “embedded systems” swept through an entire era, I felt strangely well-prepared for it.

Embedded Linux, and After

Around 2000, embedded systems and embedded Linux took off — people bolting on a CPU and some RAM and coaxing Linux to run on it, and on from there. For a while it felt a little like the AI wave does now (maybe not quite that big), to the point where labs renamed themselves just to get the word “embedded” into the title. My own lab spent a stretch as something other than “Computer Architecture and Networks,” with “embedded” worked into the name — though I’ll admit the lab names that kept changing after I graduated are hard to keep up with.

The Korean “built-in” reading, meanwhile, quietly faded out. I remember grumbling about it at work, handling something like an ARM7 with full Linux running on top: in what sense is this built-in? Then smartphones arrived, the whole thing shifted into another era and another class of product, and it slipped into memory.

Embedding — A Different Animal Entirely

For a while I forgot the word in both languages. Then, doing AI/ML work at the company, I ran into “embedding.” Same root — just a present participle where the other was past — so you’d expect them to be cousins. They weren’t. This one was a creature of pure math and vectors, asking no questions about hardware at all. Even when you reached it through NLP, it resolved into an exercise in reducing dimensions; there was surely a reason for the name, but this one was genuinely hard to put into Korean, and not really worth the trouble.

Lately, in the LLM era after ChatGPT, it has surfaced yet again. Seeing it written as embed_model still gives me a brief flinch, but mercifully people keep spelling it out as “embedding,” and I get used to it. I’d half-assumed it was something you’d only touch if you were pretraining a model — but with fine-tuning and RAG, it turned into one of the hottest issues going, and picking a good one became a competitive edge of its own.

P.S. Three lives for one word — embedded system, embedded Linux, embedding — and across all of them I never did land on a Korean word I was happy with. Some terms you end up just saying in English, and meaning it.

Part of 90s Computer Science Stories — first-person notes on growing up with computers and studying CS in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/40