72 chunks · 55 episodes
...d "gremllms". When you access a method, the LLM generates code JIT. I think the mental model of gremlins fits well: small, not too powerful, but mischievous and a bunch of them together can make an impact.
...t enough doing. The doing is what ground truths and helps figure out where your mental model is incorrect. It's the same asymptotic curve of perfection that is a bad idea in building products. Overfitting to a simulation.
... if anything comes back from the subordinate that disagrees with their existing mental model it will be rejected. They'll critique the underling as not having understood the idea properly. It's a one way process, not a two-way process, as tru...
...l or nasty. Because we talk about things that are interesting: that updated our mental model and thus might update others', too.
Watching my daughter learn to read changes my mental model of what reading is. She's been playing a game called Teach Your Monster to Read for a few months that slowly introduces sounds and letter combination...
Mental models can't disconfirm themselves, by definition. In idea space everything works exactly as you expect. Because it's not real, it's your simulation of rea...
...tremely fragile. If even a single thing were different than the administrator's mental model, the system wouldn't work.
...ol offered by someone else for you. Software that says "my" at least allows the mental model that the tool is yours.
These vibe coding tools are all about making apps. Apps are the wrong mental model for little throwaway things that do useful things on your data. We should be moving beyond apps.[pm][pn]
Perfectionists have a harder time collaborating. Because they have a mental model of how a given thing should work and their collaborators don't, so unless they have the same very high fidelity mental image of what it will be, they...
... concerned the canonical take on the pitfalls of engineers using this incorrect mental model for LLMs.[vb]
...o do the sums. They didn't realize the superpower of computer spreadsheets. The mental model was "paper spreadsheets, but in the computer." But by being in the computer, the spreadsheet could be magical and interactive. A massively more power...
When you have the wrong or ineffective mental model for a situation, it creates the possibility for a nasty surprise. The wrong mental model that doesn't actually capture the relevant dynamics of the s...
...and criticism. (Apparently this is an idea from David Deutsch.) That is, form a mental model, a hypothesis. Then expose that hypothesis to disconfirming evidence, for example ground truthing it. Guess and check. The disconfirming evidence giv...
...box[wg]" frame for LLMs quickly leads to icky scenarios and also gives a flawed mental model for what they can do anyway.
To guess what someone means in an ambiguous situation, you need to overlap on mental models. If you don't share mental models, your guesses will not align with their assumptions. Your mental models are the frog DNA that fills in the implici...
...ions with humans.[yr] Another way that the "LLMs are basically a virtual human" mental model is wrong. LLMs have all of the background world knowledge that was statically baked into them during training, but their only "working knowledge" is ...
...ss quality that it can be compelling on its own. But they also cement the wrong mental model: "LLMs are just like a person, but virtual." That vastly misunderstands what LLMs are, what they can do, how they could be used. LLMs are an alien br...
... early adopters. The early adopters can pull you in weird, random directions. A mental model to get the underlying dynamic: Imagine an underlying distribution of points with 0.7 correlation. Imagine adding one point from the distribution at a...
A mental model for retconning your thing: what is a plausible story that is compatible with you being a master of the universe. If you were a master of the universe...