Adobe Flash Player was retired by Adobe and major browser vendors since the beginning of 2021. By the time of 2025, major browsers (Chrome, Edge that works on Chromium core, and Safari) all DON’T support Flash. Which makes some interactive operations inapplicable. But if you ever have the misfortune to still need the Flash function. Here’s how to do it (works on Mac, guess similarly you can make it work on Windows too). Key is to (i) download older version of Chrome that still supports Adobe Flash Player (ii) download Adobe Flash Player and (iii) manually run older version of Chrome with Adobe Flash Player. ...

The courier job in China has long been regarded as a tough, low-paying, and insecure occupation. With limited benefits and high risks, it’s a job that many take on for part-time hours or as a side hustle. In our previous posts, we’ve touched on the struggles of delivery riders before: Blowing in the wind—perhaps because I’m no stranger to ordering takeout and shopping online too often! However, JD.com, one of China’s largest e-commerce giants, has recently announced a groundbreaking decision: starting March 1, 2025, they will provide full social security benefits—the complete “five insurances and one fund”—for its full-time food delivery riders. ...

An interesting paper recommended by Professor Kimon Drakopoulos: Strategic Experimentation with Exponential Bandits Abstract This paper studies a game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits whose risky arm might yield a payoff only after some exponentially distributed random time. Because of free-riding, there is an inefficiently low level of experimentation in any equilibrium where the players use stationary Markovian strategies with posterior beliefs as the state variable. After characterizing the unique symmetric Markovian equilibrium of the game, which is in mixed strategies, we construct a variety of pure-strategy equilibria. There is no equilibrium where all players use simple cut-off strategies. Equilibria where players switch finitely often between the roles of experimenter and free-rider all lead to the same pattern of information acquisition; the efficiency of these equilibria depends on the way players share the burden of experimentation among them. In equilibria where players switch roles infinitely often, they can acquire an approximately efficient amount of information, but the rate at which it is acquired still remains inefficient; moreover, the expected payoff of an experimenter exhibits the novel feature that it rises as players become more pessimistic. Finally, over the range of beliefs where players use both arms a positive fraction of the time, the symmetric equilibrium is dominated by any asymmetric one in terms of aggregate payoffs. ...

The food rescue project has officially come to an end, so I’m now looking forward to a series of joyful months leading up til graduation. I have a mix of delightful tasks ahead—tidying up both the physical and digital clutter, organizing books and papers, and even enjoying a few indulgences: concerts, ballet classes, and some long-overdue shopping. Among the tasks on my list is a thorough clean-up of the RMAB project. Now formally titled “Contextual Budget Bandit in Food Rescue…”, it has many unpublished results that didn’t make into the paper, interesting mathematical methods, and heaps of code that need some serious reorganization. To make an end is to make a beginning, of which this one is filled with opportunities to learn, share, and refine. ...

As title suggested, here’s an excerpt from Eugene Onegin Chapter 3’s ending: But today, dear friends, I’m too exhausted to relate the sequel to this unlooked-for meeting After so long a narrative I must go for a stroll and have a rest I’ll finish of my story later somehow. See you tmrw!

When I took CS101, my professor shared a well-known truth: “For every hour you spend coding, expect to spend three hours debugging.” While I never officially timed it, I can confidently say that the ratio often feels closer to five… However, debugging doesn’t have to be an endless struggle. With a clear mind and a more organized approach, it can be surprisingly efficient. Today I faced a frustrating issue when checking my blog: the changes I pushed earlier never updated. I usually use my local server for demos before pushing updates to the cloud, so I rarely check the live site. Therefore, when I finally did check, I discovered the changes hadn’t been updated since January 30th. ...

A new paper is out: Contextual Budget Bandit for Food Rescue. The picture shows volunteers and donation regions in real food rescue database. Region color indicates the richness of volun teer resource. Connected lines indicates how volunteers and real-time donation tasks are matched by food-rescue platforms. ...

Really? The best way to make everyone read a book is to BAN IT… (Hermione, Harry Potter) DeepSeek AI ban: What’s going on and why it matters (Techcircle): Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek that has rocked the global AI landscape by recently launching R1 LLM model, is facing crackdowns from several governments, including India, the US, Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea, due to concerns over its security and data practices, particularly on government devices. ...

Told you so— Sabrina Carpenter won Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Pop Solo Performance of 67th Annual GRAMMY Awards. she didn’t prepare her acceptance speech obviously (here). Advice: always prepare for every possible public speeches you might anticipate. also, here’s the link to Grammy’s official page if you want to check out more winners. ...

Accepted to The Web Conference 2025, Sydney Australia💖💖💖 Ophir Friedler, Hu Fu, Anna Karlin, Ariana Tang abstract Platforms design the form of presentation by which sellers are shown to the buyers. This design not only shapes the buyers’ experience but also leads to different market equilibria or dynamics. One component in this design is through the platform’s mediation of the search frictions experienced by the buyers for different sellers. We take a model of monopolistic competition and show that, on one hand, when all sellers have the same inspection costs, the market sees no stable price since the sellers always have incentives to undercut each other, and, on the other hand, the platform may stabilize the price by giving prominence to one seller chosen by a carefully designed mechanism. This calls to mind Amazon’s Buy Box. We study natural mechanisms for choosing the prominent seller, characterize the range of equilibrium prices implementable by them, and find that in certain scenarios the buyers’ surplus improves as the search friction increases. ...