Approximating Hyperbolic Tangent
Survey of fast tanh approximations using Taylor series, Padé approximants, splines, and bitwise manipulation techniques like K-TanH and Schraudolph The hyperbolic tangent function, ( tanh ), maps any real number to the range (-1, 1) with a smooth S-shaped curve. This property is useful as an activation function in neural networks, where it introduces non-linearity […]
How to Stop a Data Center in Your Backyard
When the people of Monterey Park found that their local government was going to approve a 250,000-square-foot data center just 500 feet from their homes, they organized. And within a few months, the developer withdrew their application. Andrew Yip, an organizer with SGV Progressive Action, tells L.A. TACO that the organization’s success started with their […]
The Neon King of New Orleans
If New Orleans has a siren song, it’s neon. The Hotel Monteleone’s signature rooftop sign smolders red against the skyline. Tropical Isle’s sinister green beckons revelers to brave its Hand Grenade cocktail. Retro pink script scrawls above the columns of the Uptown diner Camellia Grill, and the Joy Theater’s marquee electrifies Canal Street with nostalgic […]
Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones
Apple released a software update on Wednesday for iPhones and iPads fixing a bug that allowed law enforcement to extract messages that had been deleted or disappeared automatically from messaging apps. This was because notifications that displayed the messages’ content were also cached on the device for up to a month. In a security notice […]
The Illuminated Man: an unconventional portrait of JG Ballard
The writer JG Ballard, who died in 2009, is a tantalising subject for a biographer. His extraordinary childhood in prewar Shanghai, his family’s subsequent internment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and the death of his wife, Mary, at the age of 34, were formative events in the creation of his unique vision. The vivid and […]
New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production. It’s no contest
Solar energy expansion is often viewed as a threat to US food security. And yet roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel. In a new PNAS study, researchers ask a provocative question: why not […]
Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics
Scores decline for many student groups in reading, and for nearly all student groups in mathematics The 2023 average scores in reading declined compared to 2020 for many student groups reported by NAEP; for example, scores were lower for both male and female 13-year-olds, for students eligible and not eligible for the National School Lunch […]
Coding Models Are Doing Too Much
Code for this post is available here. AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code. If you have used any of these tools in the past year, you have probably experienced something like this: you ask the model to […]
Parallel Agents in Zed
Zed now lets you orchestrate multiple agents, each running in parallel in the same window. The new Threads Sidebar lets you control exactly which folders and repositories agents can access, and lets you monitor threads as they run. All of this runs at Zed’s famously buttery-smooth 120 fps, with whichever agents you like, and it’s […]
We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
We recently discovered a privacy vulnerability affecting all Firefox-based browsers. The issue allows websites to derive a unique, deterministic, and stable process-lifetime identifier from the order of entries returned by IndexedDB, even in contexts where users expect stronger isolation. This means a website can create a set of IndexedDB databases, inspect the returned ordering, and […]