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A prion is just a misfolded protine that has some adverse behavior that your body can’t detect (there’s a mechanism that if your body identifies a malformed protine, it will terminate the cell making it). Anyway, prions live in this small region in a Venn diagram whereits can’t be detected, but can still replicate and cause harm.
We mostly think of prion diseases (like mad cow) affecting the brain, but I dont think prions are isolated to the brain… Prion deseases happen to involve the brain a lot because a misbehaving protine in your brain will have a lot more apparent effects
Can you give more context to where the phrasing is used? Coming from a computer science angle, there are different data types for different things. For instance, you would use a “float” (floating point) data type to store a number like 7.12. Likewise, you use an “int” to store a whole number (such as 7). Because computers use a certain number of bits to store information, this means there’s a max size to your data. int data types specifically have a “signed int” option as well as an “unsigned int” (the latter being a non negative integer). The benefit there is that by not storing a sign, the int can store numbers about 2x as large as a signed int.
If I dont need to ever store a negative value, I might explicitly call out that when writing out an algorithm