批评 Lucas Costa 用"背压(backpressure)"来比喻应对 AI 代码生成机器人是错的隐喻:背压是让上游减速(控制数量),而应对 AI 代码生成需要的是让上游改变产出方式(控制质量)。作者从精益制造中提取单件流、自动化(jidoka)和防错(poka-yoke)三种实践,指出当 AI 机器人出错时只能怪流程不能怪机器人,这个道理其实对人也适用,只是对机器人时痛得更明显。文章有鲜明的个人观点和讨论入口。
William Sealy Gosset was great. He improved beer at Guinness by using the statistics that existed at the time. Not happy with that, he invented new statistics to brew even better beer. The things he i...
People assume all sorts of wild stock market returns when they make their financial calculations. Here are some numbers that show up on web searches: These are all correctly computed under their resp...
TL;DR: Instead of labouriously computing (c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}), we can mentally calculate using the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm, by estimating [\hat{c} = \mathrm{max}\left(a, 0.9a + 0.5b \righ...
In the Henley Royal Regatta two teams at a time propel their boats up a river and compete to be first to go a distance. Teams get assigned to their starting stations – Berkshire or Buckinghamshire – a...
Since about three years past time immemorial, the RSS feed for this site has been very anaemic. It had article titles and dates, and that was it. Many readers have requested that I include the full ar...
Some decade ago I read a good implementation of fizzbuzz. What set it apart was its excellent modularity. The original article is no longer on the web, but this is my reconstruction: In[1]: The grea...
Some time ago I read an article on what makes a good tutor. It explicated many of the things I do when tutoring, so obviously I thought it was a great article. When I had a side gig as a private tutor...
Spaced repetition is best introduced in the words of Gwern: it is a mechanical golem that will never forget, and never let us forget whatever we chose to. If this was a medical treatment or lessons ...