#lesson

• Sun, Jan 4, 2026. Familiarity and recency feel like learning but they're not. Instead: Take tests. Review (spaced repetition). Interleave learning. That's what helps. Claude #best-practices #learning #lesson
  • Make It Stick (Peter C. Brown, 2014)
  • A Mind for Numbers (Barbara Oakley, 2014)
  • Ultralearning (Scott Young, 2019)
  • How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens, 2017)

• Thu, Dec 11, 2025. "Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." -- John Holt #learning #lesson

• Mon, Nov 24, 2025. New skill unlocked: creating tutorials from talk proposals. I asked Claude to Write a Malcolm Gladwell article based on this talk description to teach me the topic and passed it this talk proposal: Your Causal Parrot might be lying to you. The story it wrote is very engaging and informative! #learning #lesson
  • LLMs "understand" causality because of training, but lack a world model to extrapolate to new situations.
  • Giving them tools to reason (e.g. causal models, sub-agents to explore root causes) will help.

• Sun, Aug 17, 2025. LLMs are faster than me. So me learning and doing what the LLM says is a bottleneck. Get out of the way. For example do not learn. Do not execute. Do not verify. Give LLMs the tools to deploy, verify and iterate to improve. #llm-ops #learning #lesson

• 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 #learning #lesson #beliefs

• 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 #lesson #write

• 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