Glossary

Last updated: 2026-08-08

We use real technical terms where the field expects them — and explain them in plain English right next to where they appear (hover a dotted term on any page). This page is the full reference: 41 terms, grouped by area.

Mind & neurodiversity

cognitive scaffolding: Support that helps a mind do more than it could alone — like scaffolding on a building. Software that gives structure so a person can think, learn, or work in their own way.
neurodivergent: Having a mind that works differently from the typical — e.g. autistic, ADHD, dyslexic. A descriptive word, not a deficit label.
identity-first language: Saying 'autistic person' rather than 'person with autism'. Many autistic people prefer it: autism is part of who they are, not something separate attached to them.
masking: Hiding your natural way of thinking or behaving to fit in. Common among neurodivergent people; it's exhausting and linked to burnout.
sensory profile: How a person's nervous system responds to sound, light, touch, and other input. Differs a lot between people, especially neurodivergent ones.
interoception: The sense of what is happening inside your own body — heartbeat, breath, hunger, temperature, the early signs of stress. Interoception differences can mean the warning arrives late or not at all, which is why several tools here externalize the noticing.
monotropism: A account of attention where it flows deep into few channels rather than shallowly across many — interests that pull you all the way in are the mechanism, not a symptom.
unmasking: Letting the performed, social version of yourself shrink back toward the version that takes less effort to run. Usually gradual, safest in small steps, and not the same thing as refusing all adaptation.
camouflaging: The work of hiding autistic traits and performing neurotypical ones — closely related to masking. A real skill with real costs; the most commonly reported cost is exhaustion.
meltdown: A nervous-system overload response: the point where load exceeds what the system can carry and control is no longer available. It is not a behavior choice and not a discipline problem.
shutdown: The inward version of an overload response — going quiet, still, and unreachable when load exceeds capacity. The same mechanism as a meltdown, expressed inward instead of outward.
alexithymia: Difficulty naming your own emotions — knowing a feeling is there without being able to say which one it is. Common alongside autism, and not the same thing as indifference.
allostatic load: The accumulated wear of staying responsive under sustained stress — the budgeting a body does to keep protecting you, and what that protection costs over time.
autistic burnout: The state that arrives when masking, sensory load, and unmet support needs keep drawing on the same depleted budget — chronic exhaustion, a real loss of skills or language access, and a shrinking tolerance for input. Distinct from occupational burnout: rest alone doesn't reverse it, the load has to drop.
double empathy: Damian Milton's account of cross-neurotype misunderstanding: autistic and non-autistic people each misread the other's intent, so comprehension breaks down in both directions rather than one side lacking empathy. The friction sits between people, not inside the autistic person.
AAC: Augmentative and alternative communication: any way of communicating that supplements or replaces speech — boards, pictures, text, devices. For people whose speech is unreliable sometimes or always.

Play & spatial

spatial computing: Using computers to work with 3D space — rendering, simulating, and interacting with 3D environments, often right in the browser.
WebGPU: A modern browser API for high-performance graphics and compute, letting a web page use the graphics card (GPU) directly.
Babylon.js: An open-source JavaScript engine for rendering 3D scenes in a web browser.
Gaussian splatting: A fast way to reconstruct a realistic 3D scene from a set of photos, so it can be viewed from any angle.
3D reconstruction: Building a 3D model from flat images or scans — turning photos into something you can rotate and inspect.

Core & AI

multi-agent harness: A system that coordinates several AI agents working together on a task, each with a specialized job.
agent: An AI program that can take actions — call tools, run steps, make decisions — toward a goal, not just answer one question.
RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation — grounding an AI's answers in your own documents so it draws on real sources instead of guessing.
generative asset pipeline: An automated workflow that creates art, audio, or 3D assets from prompts, at scale.
local-first: Software that keeps your data on your own machine by default, rather than on a company's servers.
self-hostable: Software you run on your own server or computer, so you control it — instead of logging into a vendor's hosted version.
source-available: Code you can read and inspect (and usually extend for your own use), even if it isn't fully open-source.
ELv2: Elastic License 2.0 — lets you use, modify, and self-host the software, but not resell it as a competing hosted service.

Identity & credentials

did:web: A way to anchor a digital identity to your own web domain — anyone can verify it by reading a file on your site, like checking a public key.
verifiable credential: A digital claim (e.g. 'holds this qualification') that anyone can check is genuine and really came from the issuer — without calling the issuer.
Open Badges 3.0: An open standard for digital credentials (like badges) that carry evidence and can be verified by anyone.
SD-JWT: Selective-Disclosure JWT — a format that lets a holder reveal only the fields needed (e.g. prove you're over 18 without showing your birthdate).
Ed25519: A fast, secure digital-signature method used to prove a credential was really issued by its claimed source and hasn't been altered.
sealed-key provider: A hardware-backed or encrypted store for signing keys — so the secret key can't be read in plain text.
stateless verification: Checking a credential against public information (the issuer's published key) with no call back to the issuer — so it scales and can't be tracked.
phone-home: When a verifier has to contact the issuer to check a credential. Mneurix's approach avoids this.

Tools

WASM: WebAssembly — a fast, safe format for running near-native-speed code inside a browser (used for in-browser SQL, image processing, etc.).
VRAM: Video RAM — the memory on your graphics card, used by games and AI models; a scarce resource when running local AI.
GGUF: A file format for running large AI models locally on your own hardware, often compressed (quantized) to fit in less memory.
ChatML: Chat Markup Language — a text format for structuring multi-turn prompts sent to chat models.