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: 31 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.
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.
- grand-strategy
- A game genre where you manage a whole nation or civilization over a long arc — economy, diplomacy, war — not just one battle.
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.