Archived
「 19 」
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June 2025
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June 20, 2025Welcome to My Notebook
Welcome to My NotebookHi, I’m Zack. I’m a Master’s student trying to navigate the fascinating and often confusing world of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. This blog is my p...
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June 11, 2025Seeing My Coursework Everywhere: An AI Student's Look at Web Development
Seeing My Coursework Everywhere: An AI Student’s Look at Web DevelopmentI have a friend who’s a frontend developer, and our conversations lately have been fascinating. I’ll be explaining a concept ...
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April 2025
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April 30, 2025From 'Does It Work?' to 'Will It Break?': My Evolution in Software Testing
From “Does It Work?” to “Will It Break?”: My Evolution in Software TestingIf I’m being honest, for the first couple of years of my computer science degree, “testing” meant running my code, seeing i...
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March 2025
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March 28, 2025Grappling with LLM Evaluation: A Student's Field Notes
Grappling with LLM Evaluation: A Student’s Field NotesOne of the biggest shifts for me moving from traditional NLP tasks to working with large language models has been evaluation. In my earlier cou...
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March 25, 2025From Monolith to Microservices: A Student's Journey with Node.js
From Monolith to Microservices: A Student’s Journey with Node.jsFor my final software architecture course, we had to build a small e-commerce application. Like most students, I started by building ...
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February 2025
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February 22, 2025Trying to Understand MoE: How LLMs Get Both Bigger and Smarter
Trying to Understand MoE: How LLMs Get Both Bigger and SmarterEvery few months, a new paper or model release sends a shockwave through the NLP community. Recently, it was all about models with “tri...
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February 20, 2025Leveling Up in React: My Journey with Advanced Hooks
Leveling Up in React: My Journey with Advanced HooksFor the first few months of learning React, I lived in a comfortable world defined by two hooks: useState and useEffect. They were my hammer and ...
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January 2025
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January 18, 2025Building My First RAG System: Grounding LLMs in Reality
Building My First RAG System: Grounding LLMs in RealityOne of the first things you learn about large language models is their “knowledge cutoff.” Ask a model about an event that happened yesterday,...
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January 15, 2025My TypeScript 'Aha!' Moments: Best Practices I Learned on a Real Project
My TypeScript ‘Aha!’ Moments: Best Practices I Learned on a Real ProjectI just spent a semester wrestling with a pretty complex web application for my software engineering course. We chose TypeScri...
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December 2024
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December 30, 2024My App Was Working, But It Was Slow: A Student's Guide to Web Performance
My App Was Working, But It Was Slow: A Student’s Guide to Web PerformanceI finally deployed the first version of my portfolio project. All the features worked, the code was (mostly) clean, and I wa...
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December 20, 2024How I Shrank My LLM: A Student's Dive into Model Quantization
How I Shrank My LLM: A Student’s Dive into Model QuantizationOne of the most exciting and frustrating moments in my Master’s program was when I finally got my hands on a powerful, pre-trained langu...
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November 2024
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November 28, 2024A Grad Student's Guide to Fine-Tuning LLMs: From Brute Force to Finesse
A Grad Student’s Guide to Fine-Tuning LLMs: From Brute Force to FinesseWhen I was assigned my first big research project, the goal was to adapt a general-purpose large language model for a very spe...
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November 25, 2024How I Finally Conquered CSS Layout: A Student's Guide to Flexbox & Grid
How I Finally Conquered CSS Layout: A Student’s Guide to Flexbox & GridFor the longest time, CSS layout felt like a dark art to me. My early attempts at building websites involved a chaotic mix...
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October 2024
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October 25, 2024On Data Contamination in LLMs: A Grad Student's Perspective
On Data Contamination in LLMs: A Grad Student’s PerspectiveIn my NLP seminar last semester, a recurring theme was the integrity of our evaluation benchmarks. We spent weeks discussing how to measur...
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October 20, 2024Navigating the Framework Maze: A Student's Take on React, Vue, and Angular
Navigating the Framework Maze: A Student’s Take on React, Vue, and AngularFor one of my CS courses this semester, we have to build a dynamic web application to showcase our final project. That mean...
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October 15, 2024Finding My Footing in Heidelberg: How Hiking Saved My Sanity
Finding My Footing in Heidelberg: How Hiking Saved My SanityWhen I first arrived in Heidelberg for my Master’s program, I was completely overwhelmed. The classes were demanding, the language was a ...
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September 2024
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September 30, 2024Making Sense of Multimodality: How Models See and Read
Making Sense of Multimodality: How Models See and ReadFor the longest time in my NLP studies, the world was made of text. Then came the rise of multimodal AI, and suddenly models could see, hear, a...
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September 20, 2024Packing Up Heidelberg: More Than Just a Year Abroad
Packing Up Heidelberg: More Than Just a Year AbroadMy apartment is full of boxes, and my flight home is in a few days. As I try to fit a year of my life into two suitcases, I keep getting distracte...
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September 15, 2024Choosing a Look and Feel: My Dive into Material, Fluent, and UI5
Choosing a Look and Feel: My Dive into Material, Fluent, and UI5For a course on Human-Computer Interaction, we were tasked with building a prototype for a new application. A big part of our grade w...