December 2025

This article is divided into five parts; they are: • Introduction to Fully Sharded Data Parallel • Preparing Model for FSDP Training • Training Loop with FSDP • Fine-Tuning FSDP Behavior • Checkpointing FSDP Models Sharding is a term originally used in database management systems, where it refers to dividing a database into smaller units, called shards, to improve performance.

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Freedom of speech is a foundational principle of healthy democracies and hence a primary target for aspiring authoritarians, who typically try to squash dissent. There is a point where the threat from authorities is sufficiently severe that a population will self-censor rather than risk punishment. Social media has complicated matters, blurring traditional boundaries between public and private speech, while new technologies such as facial recognition and moderation algorithms give authoritarians powerful new tools. Researchers explored the nuanced dynamics […]

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On Monday, the ACLU announced that it and other organizations representing medical researchers had reached a settlement in their suit against the federal government over grant applications that had been rejected under a policy that has since been voided by the court. The agreement, which still has to be approved by the judge overseeing the case, would see the National Institutes of Health restart reviews of grants that had been blocked on ideological grounds. It doesn’t guarantee those […]

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Determining how “successful” Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) truly was depends on who you ask, but it’s increasingly hard to claim that DOGE made any sizable dent in federal spending, which was its primary goal. Just two weeks ago, Musk himself notably downplayed DOGE as only being “a little bit successful” on a podcast, marking one of the first times that Musk admitted DOGE didn’t live up to its promise. Then, more recently, on Monday, Musk […]

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MANVILLE, N.J.—Richard Onderko said he will never forget the terrifying Saturday morning back in 1971 when the water rose so swiftly at his childhood home here that he and his brother had to be rescued by boat as the torrential rain from the remnants of Hurricane Doria swept through the neighborhood. It wasn’t the first time—or the last—that the town endured horrific downpours. In fact, the working-class town of 11,000, about 25 miles southwest of Newark, has long […]

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Stranger Things fans are hyped for the premiere of the hotly anticipated series finale on New Year’s Eve: they’ll either be glued to their TVs or heading out to watch it in a bona fide theater. Netflix has dropped one last trailer for the finale—not that it really needs to do anything more to boost anticipation. (Some spoilers for Vols. 1 and 2 below but no major Vol. 2 reveals.) As previously reported, in Vol. 1, we found […]

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Earlier this month, a hacker named Lovely claimed to have breached a Condé Nast user database and released a list of more than 2.3 million user records from our sister publication WIRED. The released materials contain demographic information (name, email, address, phone, etc.) but no passwords. The hacker also says that they will release an additional 40 million records for other Condé Nast properties, including our other sister publications Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and more. Of […]

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Lobsters are generally notable for their large claws, which can serve as a deterrent to any predators. But there’s a whole family of spiny lobsters that lack these claws. They tend to ward off predators by forming large groups that collectively can present a lot of pointy bits towards anything attempting to eat them. In fact, studies found that the lobsters can sense the presence of other species-members using molecules emitted into the water, and use that to […]

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