Guides & How-tos · Worked examples · Real numbers

Do it right, with real numbers

Step-by-step how-tos, head-to-head comparisons and honest roundups — every guide worked through with current figures, then backed by a RECATOOLS calculator or AI-directory entry so you can act on it.

299 guides published 17 topic areas Latest guide Sep 2026

Tagged LLM · 33 guides

All 299 AI & ML 60 Developer Tools 48 Finance 33 Chinese Culture 29 Cybersecurity 26 Science 16

Lines of code on a dark screen in blue and purple, blurred outward from the centre

AI & ML 5 min

One embedding model, four different maximum lengths

The most downloaded sentence-embedding model ships four config files declaring 128, 256, 512 and 512 as its maximum inpu...

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 5 Sep

A sheer cliff face dropping straight to the sea, the land above ending in a clean vertical edge.

AI & ML 6 min

One token can double your bill

OpenAI charges 2x input and 1.5x output on the full request once a prompt passes 272,000 tokens, so the 272,001st token...

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 4 Sep

The exposed mechanism of an old mechanical meter on a black background, showing a numbered counter wheel, a graduated dial and brass gears.

AI & ML 6 min

Two providers charge a toll for your prompt cache. One charges rent.

All three major providers price a cache read at a tenth of normal input, so caching looks like the same deal everywhere....

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 3 Sep

A wall-mounted year planner photographed in shallow focus, columns of printed date numbers running down the sheet with several rows blocked out in yellow highlighter.

AI & ML 9 min

One cloud answers with a different model instead of failing

Every hosted model has a date after which it stops answering. Almost everywhere that is an error you can see in your log...

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 2 Sep

A weathered blue parking meter against a yellow wall, its dial reading SIXTY MIN. TIME LIMIT above a red TIME EXPIRED flag.

AI & ML 8 min

Your AI Coding Agent Charges You for Coffee Breaks

A long session is cheap. An interrupted one is not. Every AI coding agent re-reads your whole conversation at a tenth of...

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 29 Aug

Vintage postage stamps from many different countries scattered across a single white envelope on a wooden desk

ASEAN Tech 6 min

What the Same Sentence Costs in Eleven Languages

Write a prompt in Thai and it costs more than the same prompt in English — not because the model charges you differently...

Sarah Chew

Pub. 21 Aug

Two rows of painted wooden nesting dolls on a shelf outdoors, larger ones behind and smaller ones in front, each hand-painted with flowers and headscarves in red, blue and gold against a green blurred background.

AI & ML 6 min

How Big a "Small" Model Really Is

A parameter count is not a size. Mistral 7B is 14.5 GB of weights before the KV cache exists, and most model repositorie...

Maya Lin

Pub. 20 Aug

A straight dirt road running away from the camera between two bamboo fences, toward a large forested hill on the horizon. A few tin-roofed houses sit at the far end, and limestone peaks fade into haze behind.

Developer Tools 6 min

Your AI API Call Leaves the Country

From a server in Singapore, OpenAI's API accepts a connection in 6.2ms and takes 237ms to say anything. Anthropic's: 2.3...

Maya Lin

Pub. 19 Aug

A worker in a frost-covered jacket and heavy gloves aims a handheld barcode scanner at a cardboard box in a cold-storage warehouse, the scanner's red beam falling across the box while breath fogs the freezing air. Racking recedes into the dark blue background.

AI & ML 6 min

What You Are Trusting When You Download a Model

We checked the 1,000 most-downloaded models on the Hugging Face Hub. 99% ship a model card, so documentation is not what...

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 19 Aug

An antique balance beam mounted on a wall beside a wooden measuring rod, its pan hanging empty — an instrument that only tells you anything when it is weighed against a known standard.

AI & ML 10 min

We Went Looking for What AI Is Bad At. We Found a Bill Instead.

Every business owner wants a map of where AI is reliable and where it is not. We built five task types — drafting to spe...

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 3 Aug

A researcher at a laboratory bench, back to the camera, surrounded by rows of identical glassware — the shape of a controlled comparison, where only one thing is allowed to differ.

AI & ML 12 min

We Tested the Prompting Folklore — 474 Answers Later, Nothing Had Changed

Tell the model it is an expert. Offer it a $200 tip. Threaten it. Say please. Add "let's think step by step". We ran all...

Nadia Rahim

Pub. 3 Aug

Close-up of vintage wooden letterpress blocks spelling 'pleasure' on paper.

AI & ML 14 min

Why AI Cannot Spell — What Image, Video and Voice Models Do Instead

A language model emits one symbol at a time, in order. An image model starts from noise and refines the whole canvas at...

Kenji Tanaka

Pub. 2 Aug

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