As a teacher I understand how difficult it is to explain complex topics in a simple step by step way.
The site has some really impressive technical aspects, but the educational angle is the most rare and special! The simplicity of the language and explanations disguise how difficult this is to do.
This is the original use of the internet- giving away free knowledge to people, perfectly suited for the medium of a website.
The combination of straightforward explanations and clear diagrams reminds me of David Macaulay's The Way Things Work which is one of my favorite books.
While I do agree, if the author is reading the comments one piece of feedback I have is the overuse of the phrase "In this article I will...". It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and they use a version of the phrase three times in the first four paragraphs.
I find the convention whereby authors 'explicitly tell readers what they're going to do' a hallmark of good explanatory writing, so long as the writing is supposed to be explanatory and the author follows through.
So your comment got me to take a closer look, and yeah, the author could certainly cut "in this article" and "in this blog post" from the third and fourth paragraphs.
Otherwise, yeah, this is an excellent piece of work. Reminds of that ancient, short, black and white film from General Motors that artfully demonstrates how differentials work.
If the HN commentariat knows of similarly excellent educational work that uses intuitive visual to explain software concepts, please do share.
I learned this as "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them."
If the HN commentariat knows of similarly excellent educational work that uses intuitive visual to explain software concepts, please do share.
I have not gone through it yet, but this explanation of how transformers work is in the same class as Ciechanowski's work IMO: https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/
After looking at this enormous labor of love, is this really what you chose to comment about?
I'd rather read imperfect human writing than modern day AI slop. Seeing human writing "mistakes" like this is a breath of fresh air.