311–320 of 327 posts
OP, don't excuse your work by prefixing it with your age. Your write-up is better than most people will ever do. Nice work!
Very unlikely anyone would care about this ChatGPT-level summary of how a CPU works if the author didn't mention they were 17.
Never went to college or high school. When I was 17 in 1981 and had been already been deep diving into several different types of computer systems over 3 years, I would have died to read what you have written, just the way it is written. It would have answered so many questions directly, fortunately I sometimes had other peoples' code to look at (and Vector Graphic actually included commented Z80 assembler for their entire BIOS in the manual, many pages!) but when you are short on examples to look at, that's when the real disillusionment sets in. I love today's world, one is only a few keywords away from great examples. The challenge is to present them in a way that someone reading puts it all together and becomes excited about understanding.
Great work!
Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…
Before Web 3.7+ us self-taught hackers often had to learn out of books, in the dark ages these were basically compilations of actual printed paper and not even a single TikTok video in sight.
No likes or subscribes to the authors either, you had to go to a place that freely stored all these books and find the authors using a catalog of paper index cards. Check this one out sometime:
https://www.amazon.com/But-How-Know-Principles-Computers/dp/...
Exceptionally well done though, keep up the great work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When many people read an article on the web, they keep their eyes in one small vertical area on the page and scroll to shift the text (rather than reading the whole visible area and then scrolling to the next "page"). However, when you reach the end of the scroll area, you're suddenly forced to move your eyeline down the page. Adding a bunch of space adds means you can keep scrolling the text to be underneath your ey…
You've put in some good, hard work there, congrats. I'm thinking I'd have to have some very fine scrolling skills, and sit exactly still to keep my eyes constantly on one small vertical area of the page. And I'd rather dart and exercise my eyeballs than my scrolling finger :)
You are a very skilled technical writer. One way to discern this is asking at a given point, "What question just likely popped into their mind after what they have read?" (you don't have to be right, just close) ... and importantly, "Do they need a little break from the main outline?" Your brief tangents in light blue are a perfect answer to both questions. Your terminal examples show what things really look like, or…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a teens react to LP video on YT. It's refreshing. It's how previous generations discovered older music. Also the one on Blink 182...is like, "my Mom loves that song"...so a lot of times that's how.
I have 10,610 songs in my music library, I listen to a lot of different music! Linkin Park, however, is quite popular — of course, "In the End" itself was widely shared as a meme when I was younger, but I've also just heard it playing out loud in the world.
Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…
Having read the first couple of pages, my only feedback is a strong suggestion to drop the cutesy language. >The central processing unit (CPU) of a computer is in charge of all computation. It’s the big cheese. The shazam alakablam. It starts chugging as soon as you start your computer, executing instruction after instruction after instruction. Given the context, that would read much better as: >The central processin…
PS for archmaster: here is an excellent Operating Systems textbook & resource (that also has fun references throughout): https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
Keep it up :)
Great effort, but really still needs a bunch of work. In some places the sentences just don't make sense. I think in terms of CPU, a good starting point is the Von Neumann architecture which most computers are designed around. The current description of CPUs mix things up with OS concepts. You may want to look into things like memory management units ( MMU ) that builds on the basic Von Neumann architecture to provid…
Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…
Having read the first couple of pages, my only feedback is a strong suggestion to drop the cutesy language. >The central processing unit (CPU) of a computer is in charge of all computation. It’s the big cheese. The shazam alakablam. It starts chugging as soon as you start your computer, executing instruction after instruction after instruction. Given the context, that would read much better as: >The central processin…
Everyone has their own opinion on style and if it's not yours that's fine. Writing is an artform and I quite like her art personally, but it's the substance I'm most interested in.
"After executing an instruction, the pointer moves forward to immediately after the instruction in RAM so that it now points to the next instruction.' What is a pointer? How does it "move" inside the computer? This is low level stuff, but still probably somewhat mysterious to the layman. Never mind the obscurity of the word "syntax".
That's true - some level of technical knowledge is assumed, but I'm fine with that. Every article needs an audience. I can't write something that's perfect for everyone.