79 chunks · 60 episodes
...reet to give him their watch by doing this aborted routine carefully. Here's my mental model for what's happening. When you start a stored social routine, your brain expects to simply execute it. Presumably the prefrontal cortex goes to sleep...
...d can retrieve it and don't need to learn it. Where learn it means "update your mental model"
...opular product and usage increases discontinuously. On the team, the exec has a mental model that there must be a single driver of the increase. If they can't find it, they might erroneously conclude that the increase is illusory.
Surprise is the gradient of improvement. Surprise requires a mental model to be surprised in the first place. If you are incurious about the world around you you can't be surprised. Surprise is a precious gift, because it s...
...s not the individual execution, it's the coordination between people. Sharing a mental model with enough fidelity to be able to work on it in a way that can cohere into something that works. One of the curses of the human experience is that o...
... chat" and "create a chatbot" in an AI-native system. The former encourages the mental model that you're talking to the omniscient service in a new thread. The latter encourages the mental model of spinning up a specific chat thread with an e...
... there's apparently a saying of "don't be behind the plane." That is, keep your mental model of what's happening, where you're going, what you're going to do next, active. If you lose that mental model, if you have a failed prediction, you ge...
...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...