Published:
2023 was one of those years that refuses to become a simple summary. There were achievements I had worked toward for a long time. I became an Assistant Professor, an academic step that meant a great deal to me. There were also difficult periods. Health problems and surgery interrupted normal routines and reminded me how quickly plans become unimportant when the body demands attention. Read more
Published:
Google introduced Gemini in December 2023 as a new multimodal model family with Nano, Pro, and Ultra variants. Rather than treating images, text, and other modalities only as separate systems connected afterward, Google emphasized multimodal training and reasoning as a core design goal. Read more
Published:
Java has a large community, and some contributors become influential far beyond one company or project. The Java Champions program recognizes people who make sustained contributions to the Java ecosystem. They may write books, maintain open-source projects, teach, speak at conferences, organize communities, or help improve the platform itself. What I like about this idea is that technical communities are built by more than language designers. Read more
Published:
OpenAI’s board removed CEO Sam Altman on November 17, 2023, triggering five days of extraordinary organizational turmoil. President Greg Brockman left, employees threatened to resign, Microsoft offered positions to Altman and others, and the board eventually reinstated Altman with a changed membership. Read more
Published:
November 10, 2023 carries special meaning because this year marks the centenary of the Republic of Türkiye. Read more
Published:
Computer science classes can become difficult for a simple reason: the subject often moves from concrete to abstract very quickly. A student sees code on the screen, then suddenly hears about memory models, graph complexity, process scheduling, or mathematical proofs. It is easy to lose the thread. The first thing I recommend is active participation. Do not only copy what is on the board. Read more
Published:
Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” was released in October 2023 with a newer Flutter-based desktop installer and GNOME 45. The installer represented Canonical’s effort to share more installation technology across desktop variants while modernizing a component that had changed slowly for years. Read more
Published:
There is a sentence attributed to Anatole France: “If the path is beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.” I like the idea, although I would not follow it literally in every part of life. Destinations matter. A road can be beautiful and still take us somewhere we do not want to go. But the sentence contains an important warning. Read more
Published:
Starting Computer Engineering in 2023 feels especially interesting because artificial intelligence has suddenly become part of everyday conversation. Read more
Published:
Apple introduced the A17 Pro processor with the iPhone 15 Pro in September 2023. It was manufactured on TSMC’s first-generation 3 nm process and included a redesigned GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Read more
Published:
In 2023, generative artificial intelligence has changed the public conversation about computing. Tools that can produce text, images, and code have made many people ask what software work will look like in the future. Read more
Published:
Claims about a material called LK-99 spread rapidly in July and August 2023 after researchers suggested it might be a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Laboratories and computational researchers around the world rushed to test the claim. Read more
Published:
Meta released Llama 2 in July 2023 with 7, 13, and 70 billion parameter versions and a license that permitted many commercial uses. That was a major change from the research-only distribution of the first LLaMA. Read more
Published:
Success looks much cleaner after it happens. We see the finished degree, the published book, the company, the promotion, or the project that finally works. The road before it is usually less attractive. It contains repetition. Doubt. Read more
Published:
Apple introduced Vision Pro at WWDC in June 2023 as a “spatial computer” rather than a conventional VR headset. The device combined high-resolution micro-OLED displays, multiple cameras, eye tracking, hand tracking, spatial audio, and Apple’s M2 processor with a new R1 chip dedicated to sensor processing. Read more
Published:
Google announced PaLM 2 at I/O in May 2023 as the language-model family behind products such as Bard and new generative-AI features across Google Workspace. Read more
Published:
SpaceX launched Starship and its Super Heavy booster together for the first integrated flight test in April 2023. The vehicle cleared the launch tower but several engines failed, control was lost, and the flight-termination system eventually destroyed the vehicle. Read more
Published:
Gordon Moore died on March 24, 2023, at the age of 94. His name will remain closely connected with one of the most famous observations in computing: Moore’s Law. In 1965, Moore observed that the number of components that could be placed economically on an integrated circuit was increasing rapidly. The exact formulation changed over time, and it was never a physical law. It was an observation and later an industry target. Read more
Published:
There is an old saying in several cultures: a donkey does not become a horse because it wears a golden saddle. The language is harsh, but the idea is simple. Appearance cannot create substance. A title can make a person sound important. Money can make a person look successful. Read more
Published:
OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023. It improved substantially over earlier GPT models on complex instructions and many academic-style tests, and OpenAI demonstrated that it could accept images as well as text as input. Read more
Published:
When someone leaves without saying goodbye, the silence can hurt more than the departure. We naturally want an explanation. Was I the problem? Were they angry? Did the relationship mean less to them than it meant to me? Read more
Published:
Meta released LLaMA in February 2023 as a family of research language models with 7, 13, 33, and 65 billion parameters. The work challenged the idea that competitive language models always had to grow toward hundreds of billions of parameters. Read more
Published:
When people hear Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa usually appears first. That is understandable. But the painting is only one part of a much larger life. Read more
Published:
Computers do not make decisions in the human sense. They follow logical rules. At the hardware level, these rules are built with logic gates. An AND gate produces a true output only when its required inputs are true. An OR gate produces true when at least one input is true. Read more
Published:
Computers use 1s and 0s because electronic circuits need reliable ways to represent information. A transistor can behave like a tiny switch. At a simplified level, one voltage range can represent 0 and another can represent 1. Two clear states are easier to distinguish reliably than many very close states. This gives us binary. Read more
Published:
A computer without an operating system would still be a computer. It would also be much harder to use. Read more
Published:
Microsoft announced a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI in January 2023. The partnership tied frontier AI models closely to Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure and product strategy. Read more
Published:
Getting older is strange because it happens slowly until one day it feels sudden. A photograph, a birthday, a small physical change, or seeing someone younger can make time visible in a way the calendar cannot. When we are young, age often looks like something happening to other people. Later, we understand that there is no separate road. We are already on it. Read more