Researcher, builder, and 12th-grade student based in Singapore. I investigate the limitations of artificial intelligence, develop transparent educational tec...
Personalized tutoring remains one of the most effective educational interventions, yet it has historically been difficult to scale due to the high costs and labor-intensive nature of individualized instruction. Large Language Models (LLMs) have reopened this problem by making individualized support technically feasible at scale. However, most institutional deployments still face two structural…
This post documents the experimental design behind Reasoning Over Recall , a study examining the effect of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) on Large Language Model performance in legal reasoning tasks. The core question the experiment investigates is not whether RAG helps in principle, but whether providing an LLM with incomplete legal context — specifically, context that omits controlling…
The standard prescription for deploying AI on knowledge-intensive tasks is Retrieval-Augmented Generation: rather than relying on what a model learned during training, you give it a search tool. For legal questions, this means retrieving the relevant statute and feeding it to the model before it answers. The intuition is sound — surely providing the actual text of the law makes reasoning more…
If you build AI applications, you are already familiar with the structural tension at the core of LLM deployment: inference costs scale with every query, regardless of whether that query has been answered before. When you examine production telemetry for LLM applications, a consistent pattern emerges — over 70% of user queries are repetitive or semantically similar to questions that have already…
The question of how to provide every student with the quality of instruction that only a private tutor can offer has occupied educational researchers since at least 1984, when Benjamin Bloom published what has since become known as the 2 Sigma Problem. Bloom demonstrated that average students taught one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students…
The integration of artificial intelligence into consequential sectors — medicine, engineering, financial services — has proceeded at a pace that, even a decade ago, would have seemed implausible. Education, by contrast, has absorbed these developments more cautiously. A 2024 review of AI in education noted that while the technology has been present in the sector for some time, its adoption has…
There is a particular kind of book that is short enough to be read in a single sitting and substantial enough to be thought about for considerably longer. The One Minute Manager by Dr Kenneth Blanchard and Dr Spencer Johnson is, by most measures, that kind of book — a slender text whose central ideas are simple to state and less simple to consistently practise. How I Found It I came to it through…
There is a well-worn observation in productivity literature that the people most likely to read books about managing time are precisely those who already spend considerable energy thinking about how they spend it. Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is aware of this irony, and it is a more self-aware book for it — less a lecture on discipline than a practical toolkit assembled by two people…
After a sustained period of reading across the self-improvement genre — productivity frameworks, habit literature, focus guides — a pattern eventually becomes visible: the same underlying science tends to surface repeatedly, distributed across dozens of books that each claim a particular corner of it. Dr Stuart Farrimond's The Science of Living is interesting precisely because it does not claim a…
There is a certain kind of popular science book that prioritises accessibility to the point of undermining the very subject it sets out to explain. Chris Ferrie's Quantum Bullsh t: How to Ruin Your Life with Advice from Quantum Physics* sits, somewhat uncomfortably, in that category — a book with a genuinely interesting premise that does not quite deliver on it. The Premise The title signals the…