#lesson | Anand S - Things I Learned

Tue, Aug 5, 2025. Slow, effortful practice (spaced recall, interleaving topics, self-testing) builds lasting knowledge but looks inefficient and doesn't help with exams. # #best-practices #future #very-hard #learning #lesson

Mon, Aug 4, 2025. What happens when LLMs play Chinese Whispers / the Telephone Game? Here are learnings. ChatGPT #llm-ops #voice-cloning #learning #lesson
- Drift increases faster than linear with hops.
- Bigger models do better, but constrained prompts (“Copy the text exactly; change nothing.”) have a bigger impact.
- Low temperature improves copying fidelity.
- But even after "forgetting", LLMs reproduce rare content if they're trained on it.

Wed, May 7, 2025. ⭐ When writing notes, summarize at the end of the day the learnings and next steps. #future #markdown #write #lesson

Wed, Feb 5, 2025. Lessons from discussions at IIT Madras: #best-practices #lesson
- Even in recorded video tutorials, asking students a question and pausing to give them time to think can be effective.
- When you put students in front of real clients, engagement increases dramatically.
- Most teaching assistants would like to help diligent students among the bottom half (more than the top decile of students).
- However, there is a fraction of poor performers who do not care, and are best ignored. Their engagement and effort is a good measure of their interest.
- Defining a minimal set of principles that we want to teach helps us measure if we've helped the bottom half at least meet those objectives.
- Teaching is hard. Even after explanations, students, even ENGAGED students, tend to make basic mistakes

Sun, Jan 26, 2025. Bring LLMs to the table. One mode of collaboration is using LLMs as ACTIVE participants, i.e. they CONTRIBUTE. For example, in a video call. A workshop. A classroom. A presentation. Have the LLM provide input DIRECTLY to a group of people. #llm-ops #learning #lesson

Fri, Jan 17, 2025. "The curriculum tells teachers what to teach. The exams tell students what to learn." - Ronald Harden #future #lesson

Fri, Sep 20, 2024. Instructor prompts by Ethan Mollick help teach better #future #lesson

Thu, May 30, 2024. Knowledge Project podcast. Morgan Housel #lesson
- Differences of opinion exist because of different stories arising from origins and experiences. We are not debating facts. We are debating life lessons!
- Solution: hear their anecdotes. The stories that taught them their lessons.

Sun, Apr 14, 2024. Due to in-context learning, giving 100s of examples in the prompt can teach LLMs to jailbreak. Ref #ai-coding #future #llm-ops #learning #lesson

Fri, Apr 12, 2024. Prashant Pandey: we need to prepare before every meeting. Something to teach #best-practices #future #lesson

Wed, Feb 28, 2024. Being in Control motivates . my cycle tires were flat. I thought it was someone pulling out the air and felt very demotivated. But once I carried my cycle pump, I felt so much more in control and power and felt a whole lot better #lesson

Sat, Jan 27, 2024. ⭐ OpenAI's prompt engineering strategies are an excellent start for prompt engineering. A few lessons: #automation #prompt-engineering #lesson
- Use detailed system prompts, often containing the entire instruction set, if it won't change over the course of a conversation.
- "... summary of the prior conversation could be included as part of the system message" is an interesting history compression tactic.

Wed, Jan 3, 2024. Teachers are using LLMs to plan lessons, write emails to parents, create tests, adjust reading level of materials, personalize content with tools like MagicSchool, Diffit, Eduaide. #future #llm-ops #learning #lesson