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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.

185 guides published 15 topic areas Latest guide Aug 2026

Tagged AI · 43 guides

All 185 AI & ML 47 Finance 27 Cybersecurity 24 Developer Tools 20 Science 10 Chinese Culture 9

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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...

A Hong Kong road sign giving the same directions twice, in English and in Traditional Chinese.

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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SEO When the Answer Is Written for You

Here is our own referrer log. In eight weeks and 214,712 page hits, every AI assistant combined sent 59 visits — against...

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How to Choose an AI Tool Without Believing the Marketing

Five checks worth running before you adopt anything, and where each answer actually lives — because none of them are on...

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If You Put Engineers Inside Your Customers, Do You Still Have a Software Company?

The question every product leader has about forward deployment is financial, and almost nobody selling the model will an...

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Before You Hire Anyone to Deploy AI, Read the Report They Are Quoting

Every pitch for embedded AI engineering rests on one statistic: 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail. I downloaded the paper...

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What a Forward Deployed Engineer Is, and Which Numbers to Believe

Every claim about this job travels faster than its source. The famous "729% growth" is arithmetically correct and almost...

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Nobody Is Training the People This Job Actually Needs

I read the entry requirements of every Forward Deployed Engineer programme I could find, then read what Singapore's publ...

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The Best Forward Deployed Engineers May Not Be Engineers

An AI practitioner in Beijing argues that the best Forward Deployed Engineers he has worked with were not computer scien...

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Where Does My Data Actually Go?

"Do you use my data?" is two questions wearing one coat. Training asks whether your text enters a future model and is us...

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Why It Confidently Makes Things Up

We asked two AI models for five peer-reviewed studies on an obscure topic, with DOIs. One produced five — authors, journ...

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MCP, RAG, Agents, Skills: The New AI Vocabulary in Plain English

Somebody says the agent will use MCP to hit the connector, then RAG over the docs, and the skill handles the rest. Every...

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Tokens and Context Windows, Explained From Zero

You are billed in a unit nobody explained. A token is a countable stand-in for a chunk of text — the word is borrowed fr...

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What an LLM Actually Costs You

The rate per million tokens is the one number you cannot change, and the smallest part of the bill. Measured on 102 para...

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The Chapter Everyone Skips: 孫子兵法 and the AI Capital War

Business writing quotes 知彼知己 and misquotes it — the received text reads 百戰不殆, not the 百戰百勝 that Sun Tzu expl...

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Serve an LLM with vLLM on CPU in Docker: Learn the Production Engine Without a GPU (2026)

We ran vLLM v0.25.1's official CPU image in Docker on Apple Silicon, dodged a 10 GB CUDA decoy, survived three traps, an...

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Run ComfyUI on CPU in Docker: Node-Graph Image Generation Without a GPU (2026)

We pinned ComfyUI v0.28.0 in a python:3.13-slim container, hit a torchaudio ABI trap and an 8 GB OOM kill, and still ren...

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Self-Host LiteLLM with Docker: One OpenAI-Compatible Endpoint for Every Model (2026)

We ran LiteLLM v1.93.0 against a local Ollama model in Docker: pinned tags, a 4-line config, token metering, and the wro...

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How to Transcribe Speech Offline with whisper.cpp in Docker (2026)

We ran whisper.cpp v1.9.1 in Docker: an amd64-only tag trap, a SIGILL crash, a gcc fp16 build fix — then 7.3 s of speech...

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