The Nightly Build.
Friday, July 24, 202663 min read
Daily Reading · Paper of the Day

Batch normalization's own paper never measured internal covariate shift

The paper credited its speedup to a change in activation statistics it never actually measured, and the team that finally measured it found batch-normalized networks carry just as much of that change as ordinary ones.

18 min read9 sources
policy-debate

The Supreme Court Lets Lisa Cook Keep Her Fed Seat Without Deciding Whether Trump Can Fire Her

The 5-4 order came hours after a 6-3 majority overruled Humphrey's Executor for the Federal Trade Commission and carved out the Federal Reserve by name, on historical grounds that two independent legal scholars, arguing from opposite sides of the underlying debate, agree the Court has never actually defended.

13 min read15 sources
Technical Practice · Expert Tools

ast-grep matched and rewrote 9 nullable-call sites across 5 files in the TypeScript compiler's source

The pattern binds to the parse tree, not the text, so it skips every look-alike sitting inside a comment, a string, or a call with the wrong number of arguments.

10 min read15 sources
daily-news

New forced-labor tariffs replace the expired global levy on 99% of US imports

The tariffs took effect hours after the House voted, for a second time, to end the war with Iran.

9 min read38 sources
investing-course

Costco owed more within a year than it owned in fiscal 2024

Costco's balance sheet lists $35.5 billion of liabilities due within a year against $34.2 billion of assets that turn to cash that fast, a gap that flips to a surplus a year later on the accounts Lesson 1's cash reconciliation used.

9 min read9 sources
Daily Reading · Word of the Day

Bear and Thomas named the odour rain draws from rock

Isabel Bear and Richard Thomas, CSIRO mineral chemists, built the 1964 word from Greek stone and ichor for the whole scent of a storm meeting dry ground.

4 min read5 sources