In Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, becoming a "ghost" means running afoul of the state. In this excerpt, a secret agent discovers it doesn't take much. True diligence is I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after. For a long time I wrote in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn't secretly wish to be a spy? We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear--when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in--but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

Trending Now Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag All Series The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. TL;DR: iScanner turns your iPhone, iPad, or Android device into a portable document scanner with OCR, PDF editing, signatures, and file-management tools. Lifetime access is $29.97 (reg.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Desktop scanners are expensive and pretty limited in what they can do. Even scanning the pages of a book is almost impossible to do cleanly on most scanners. If you want a simpler alternative, SwiftScan is a new scanner app that works for iOS and Android, and it's only $47.97 (reg. SwiftScan is a whole lot easier to use than most desktop scanners.

Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School Furtastic All Series AI companies keep destroying old books. There's a backlash against book destruction -- and a better way to scan them. Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine.

Midjourney announces a full-body ultrasound scanner that uses water and sound waves to create body composition maps in about 60 seconds with no radiation or MRI magnets.

Recently, Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) methods have demonstrated stunning sample efficiency in various RL domains.

Most scanning apps try to get you to buy a cloud storage subscription or pay for extras. Not FairScan, which is free and open-source, and has some powerful features. If you're interested in going paperless, you probably think you need a scanner. It's true that hardware scanners make turning multipage documents into PDFs very simple. But most of us don't have easy access to a scanner.

The significant heterogeneity poses higher requirements foralgorithm robustness.

AI coding is now everywhere. But not everyone is convinced. Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem is right now, it's not easy to know which is true. As tech giants pour billions into large language models (LLMs), coding has been touted as the technology's killer app. Executives enamored with the potential are pushing engineers to lean into an AI-powered future.