10.1Explainers
Each of these is a mechanism you meet every day but cannot see. Instead of reading about it, you turn a dial and watch it respond, and at some point your intuition turns out to be wrong. Every number on a page cites its source, and every model says where it is a simplification. Nothing leaves your browser.
- 1Pick
- The forgetting curvepage 10-2
Memory fades fast after you learn something, and each review given while it is fading slows the next decline. Place reviews on a timeline and watch the same five reviews give very different results depending only on when they happen.
- Tokenizationpage 10-3
A language model never reads letters or words, only numbered tokens from a learned vocabulary. Type anything to see how a real tokenizer splits it, and find out why the same sentence costs more in Nepali than in English.
- Base rates and riskpage 10-4
When a condition is rare, most positive results from even an accurate test are false alarms, and a risk that doubles can still be tiny. Set how common the condition is and how good the test is, and count the people.
- Why long agent chains failpage 10-5
An agent that gets each step right 95% of the time finishes a 20-step task only about a third of the time. Run a hundred agents, add a check between steps, and see why a model checking its own work barely helps.
- What 1% really costspage 10-6
Growth earns growth, so a small fee or a few years' delay become large sums decades later, and a card balance compounds the other way. Turn the return, the fee and the start age, and watch a 1% fee take about a quarter of the balance.
- Caffeine and sleeppage 10-7
Your body clears caffeine at a steady fraction per hour, so every drink leaves a fading trace and the traces stack. Build your day, set your bedtime and a half-life, and see how much is still in you when you lie down.
- Luck and skillpage 10-8
Every result is part skill and part luck, so last season's stars tend to land nearer the middle next season with nobody changing. Set the mix, run two seasons of 100 players, and watch a manager's scolding seem to work when it does nothing.
- Deep timepage 10-9
4,567 million years drawn to one scale, so the length of the page is the lesson. Scroll from the Earth's formation to now, watch the counter, and find out how late the dinosaurs and how thin the slice of human history are.
- The forgetting curvepage 10-2