Articles
Articles — YAKKI EDU
About this section
How the things we build actually work, and where we got them wrong. Without the scholarly pose: we publish not claims of novelty but reviews of our own mistakes — together with the numbers they rest on.
Articles
Who decides what a child reads
The platform's built-in content filter stopped none of four plainly unfit passages — while correctly refusing a direct request about making an explosive device. It is not broken; it answers a different question. What we wrote instead, why it is harder not to filter out the good than to filter out the bad, and three lessons worth more than the result.
How we measured text difficulty and fooled ourselves three times
The instrument produced rising, plausible numbers while there was nothing to measure. First it was measuring text length. Then it agreed with itself, because the answer was being fed to it. Then it stayed silent about grammar, because we had added rising features to falling ones. How this came to light, and why the method cannot be called our own.
How to simplify Dickens without ruining him
Living children's texts do not supply enough rare grammatical constructions, and we forbade ourselves to compose them from nothing: composed text is plausible and dead. How we take a real author and lower him one step, six traps along the way, and the finding that an absolute scale does not transfer from someone else's corpus to your own.