Ars Technica: Our newsroom AI policy
When we attribute a statement, a position, or a quote to a named source, that material comes from direct engagement with interviews, transcripts, published statements, or documents reviewed by the reporter. AI tools must not be used to generate, extract, or summarize material that is then attributed to a named source, whether as a direct […]
I am building a cloud
2026-04-22 Today is fundraising announcement day. As is the nature of writing for a larger audience, it is a formal, safe announcement. As it should be. Writing must necessarily become impersonal at scale. But I would like to write something personal about why I am doing this. What is the goal of building exe.dev? I […]
Borrow-checking without type-checking
This is a demo of a toy language with dynamic typing, inline values, stack allocation, interior pointers, single ownership, and a limited form of borrowing – less expressive than rust, but much more expressive than second-class references (eg we can express external iterators). Since there is no static typing the borrows must be checked dynamically. […]
Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari’s Iconic Video Game
TEMPEST vs TEMPEST is a book-length attempt to explore and understand the code and craft of Dave Theurer’s ’Tempest’ (1981) and Jeff Minter’s ’Tempest 2000’ (1994). The idea is to explain how lots of different little things in each of the games actually work, down to the level of how they are implemented in the […]
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 […]