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How Pointers Work and the Weird Math Behind Them
Pointers are a frequently confusing topic for intermediate computer science students. A misunderstanding about the arithmetic surrounding pointers or even the very nature of what a pointer is, is a significant barrier to students that need to code in C or C++, or do tasks with large data that needs to be efficient. By the…
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GPT-4 Technical Report: A blog post masquerading as scientific literature
Due to a lack of a Methods section, hand-wavy explanations and metrics, and unfounded claims about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) the GPT-4 Technical Report and System Cards would have been more appropriate as blog posts.
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How to Treat an Image as a Vector for Machine Learning
Computers don’t perceive the world in the same way we do. So, a common point of confusion for students just starting out with machine learning is how to bridge the gap between fully colored images and the sequence of numbers that a computer uses. We will focus on explaining this gap in this article.
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Turning Electricity Into Numbers
Today, we are going to explain how a computer converts electricity into numbers. We’re also going to briefly touch on the basics of how a computer can combine these different electrical signals to do operations involving boolean logic and even addition.
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Killing a Minecraft Slime with Recursion
The goal of this post is to explain the, often confusing, topic of recursion using a modified example of the process of killing a Minecraft slime. Typically, teachers will use examples like the Fibonacci sequence and the Towers of Hanoi to explain recursion. However, students often find these examples confusing because the underlying concepts are…
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Why is my computer so slow?
The short version Your computer probably feels like it is running slow for one of the following three reasons. The first reason is that your computer might be trying to do too much at the same time. Even though you may not think you have asked it to do many things, this may still be…