A table states its values. A chart encodes them — as a length, an angle, a position along an axis, a colour — and reading it means inverting that encoding from pixels. Models are good at describing charts and much less good at inverting them, and the gap is predictable from which encoding the c...
How much ice is stored in the world's glaciers? And where exactly is it located? A new study led by Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISP), provides an updated global map of glacier ice volume.
A research agent is a loop with three tools and two things that must not live in the prompt: the budget that stops it, and the check that every citation points at a page it actually read. Put those in the prompt and they are suggestions. Put them in code and the agent is something you can leave...
Retrieval-augmented generation is five stages and none of them needs a framework: split the text, turn each piece into a vector, store the vectors, find the nearest ones to the question, and put those in the prompt. Written out in Python’s standard library with two HTTP calls it comes to a littl...
Every “chat with your PDF” tutorial works on the tutorial author’s PDF. Yours will include a scanned contract with no text layer, a two-column report whose lines interleave when extracted, a spreadsheet exported to PDF where the numbers arrive without their headers, and a four-hundred-page manua...
A moderation system is not a classifier. It is a pipeline with a cheap filter, an expensive opinion, a human queue, an appeals path and a log you can put in front of a regulator. The classifier is the part that takes an afternoon; the other four are what makes the thing operable and defensible.