Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work

#21

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

dvt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the user is immediately able to understand the constraints Nagel's point was quite literally the opposite [1] of this, though. We can't understand what it must "be like to be a bat" because their mental model is so fundamentally different than ours. So using all the human language tokens in the world can't get us to truly understand what it's like to be a bat, or a guppy, or whatever. In fact, Nagel's point is argu…

Different argument I’m not going to argue other than to say that you need to view the point from a third party perspective evaluating “fish” vs “more verbose thing,” such that the composition is the determinant of the complexity of interaction (which has a unique qualia per nagel) Hence why it’s a “unintentional nod” not an instantiation

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work

#22

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

dvt wrote: post #6

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

I love these kinds of educational implementations. I want to really praise the (unintentional?) nod to Nagel, by limiting capabilities to representation of a fish, the user is immediately able to understand the constraints. It can only talk like a fish cause it’s very simple Especially compared to public models, thats a really simple correspondence to grok intuitively (small LLM > only as verbose as a fish, larger LL…

> the user is immediately able to understand the constraints Nagel's point was quite literally the opposite [1] of this, though. We can't understand what it must "be like to be a bat" because their mental model is so fundamentally different than ours. So using all the human language tokens in the world can't get us to truly understand what it's like to be a bat, or a guppy, or whatever. In fact, Nagel's point is argu…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work

#23

Post by dinkumthinkum » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

I think this is a nice project because it is end to end and serves its goal well. Good job! It's a good example how someone might do something similar for a specific purpose. There are other visualizers that explain different aspects of LLMs but this is a good applied example.