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1 articles
01
2026-08-25
·
Deep Learning Basics
·
FREE
·
PAPER
·
13 min read
Activation Functions from Scratch — Why Nonlinearity Is Non-Negotiable
Without an activation function, a hundred stacked layers can do exactly what one layer does. Starting from that one-line proof, this article traces why sigmoid was abandoned, why ReLU won, and why today's LLMs settled on SiLU and SwiGLU — with an interactive plot where you can drag the input and watch the slope.