Dictionary

Computer vision is a field of AI that trains machines to interpret and understand visual information from images and videos. Applications include object detection, facial recognition, autonomous driving, and medical image analysis. Modern computer vision leverages deep learning models like CNNs and vision transformers (ViT), and increasingly integrates with language models in multimodal AI systems.

Container Queries allow CSS styles to respond to the size of a parent container rather than the browser viewport, solving a long-standing limitation of media queries. By marking an element as a containment context with `container-type`, its children can use `@container` rules to adapt their layout based on the container's dimensions. This makes truly reusable components possible — a card component can rearrange itself whether it's in a sidebar or a full-width section.

React's Context API provides a way to pass data through the component tree without manually threading props through every intermediate level. You create a context with `createContext`, wrap a subtree with a `Provider`, and consume the value anywhere below with `useContext`. It's ideal for global concerns like themes, authentication state, or locale, but should be used judiciously since any change to context value re-renders all consuming components.

A context window is the maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) that an LLM can process in a single interaction, encompassing both the input prompt and the generated output. Larger context windows allow models to handle longer documents, maintain extended conversations, and reason over more information at once. Context window sizes have grown rapidly — from 4K tokens in early GPT models to over 1M tokens in current models like Claude.

A controlled component is a form element in React whose value is driven by React state rather than the DOM's own internal state. The component's value is set through a `value` prop and updated via an `onChange` handler, giving React full control over the form data. This pattern enables validation on every keystroke, conditional disabling of submit buttons, and enforcing input formats, making it the recommended approach for most form handling in React applications.

A cron job is a time-based task scheduler originating from Unix systems that runs commands or scripts at specified intervals. The schedule is defined using a cron expression with five fields representing minute, hour, day, month, and weekday. Cron jobs are fundamental for automations like database backups, log rotation, report generation, and periodic data synchronization.

Cross-platform development is the practice of building applications that run on multiple operating systems (iOS, Android, web, desktop) from a single codebase. Frameworks like React Native, Flutter, and Kotlin Multiplatform each take different approaches — from shared UI rendering to shared business logic with native UI. The key trade-off is between code reuse efficiency and the ability to deliver platform-native experiences that feel right on each device.