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AI & ML guides

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.

302 guides published 17 topic areas Latest guide Sep 2026

All 302 AI & ML 60 Developer Tools 48 Finance 33 Chinese Culture 29 Cybersecurity 26 Science 16

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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...

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How to Measure Whether Your RAG Is Retrieving the Right Documents

Twenty questions with known answers, run over 205 real documents. Prefixing titles to chunks raised hit@1 from 14 to 17...

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How to Give an Agent Search Over Your Own Documents

Seventy-eight lines with no dependencies join a local embedding model, a vector store and MCP. The interesting part is n...

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How to Generate Embeddings Locally

A 46 MB model, running on your laptop, turns text into positions in space. The demonstration: a query whose only content...

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How to Self-Host Qdrant in Docker

Every retrieval tutorial says "point it at your vector database" and none of them tells you how to run one. One containe...

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Making MiniMax H3 Videos Longer Than 15 Seconds

MiniMax H3 generates video with the sound already in it, and stops at fifteen seconds. Five ComfyUI nodes now exist to g...

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How to Run MiniMax Music 3 in ComfyUI

MiniMax Music 3 writes complete five-minute songs with sung vocals, and the weights are public. Here is what hardware yo...

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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...

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What Installing an Agent Toolkit Actually Grants

Giving an agent tools is one line of configuration, and that line does not say what any of them can do. We read all 77 t...

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Who Actually Blocks the AI Crawlers

robots.txt is the one place a publisher's position on AI training has to be written down in public. We read it for 19 ne...

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.

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...

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Can a Tool Directory Tell You Your AI Act Risk Tier?

We tried to tier all 1,370 entries in our own AI directory against the EU AI Act. A keyword scan gave 42 hits, 26 of the...

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What a Tool Listing Cannot Tell You About AI Risk

We set the ten OWASP LLM risk categories against what our directory of 1,366 AI tools actually records. Four have a fiel...

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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...

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.

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...

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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...

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How to Spend Fewer Tokens — and Why That Is the Fourth Thing to Try

Every guide to controlling an AI bill opens by telling you to trim your prompt. We ran the arithmetic over all 27 models...

A woman searching a wall of library card-catalogue drawers, pulling one open — a filing system is only useful when its drawers match what is being filed.

What Am I Actually Choosing Between? We Sorted 1,347 AI Tools by Shape

The usual answer is five neat categories — chat assistants, copilots, command-line agents, autonomous runtimes, model pr...

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Do You Need Fine-Tuning? Two of the Big Three Are Taking It Away

The usual case against fine-tuning is that it is expensive. That case is wrong — a small training run costs about four d...

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Using AI in Your Own Language — What the Machine Can Actually See

The same sentence costs seven tokens in English and fifteen in Malay. That gap is usually explained as a money problem;...

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