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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
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Starting Computer Engineering in 2023 feels especially interesting because artificial intelligence has suddenly become part of everyday conversation. Read more
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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A computer without an operating system would still be a computer. It would also be much harder to use. Read more
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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
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LastPass disclosed in December 2022 that attackers had obtained backups containing customer vault data after an earlier breach of its development environment. Read more
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Being a student and being a graduate require different habits. As a student, many problems arrive already prepared. The course has a syllabus. The assignment has a deadline. The exam tells you which questions matter. Read more
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A student can sit quietly through an entire lesson and still learn very little. This is one weakness of passive education. Listening is useful, but understanding becomes stronger when students have to do something with the information. Ask a question. Explain an idea. Read more