Practical 01 — The same half-sentence, five times
Belongs to Note 01: a model doesn't know things, it predicts what comes next. (Not yet written; it will link here when it is.)
Open a fresh chat each time, so no earlier answer influences the next. Paste exactly this and nothing else:
Complete this sentence in one line: "The most surprising thing about working in enterprise technology is"
Do it five times. Write down the five continuations side by side. Then, if you like, do it again in a different model. What you are looking at is the point of the note: there was no answer stored anywhere. Each time, the model chose a likely next word, and then the next, and the path diverged.
write down what you noticed. that's the whole practical.
Practicals are added with their notes. Practical 02 is a tokeniser you can type into; Practical 03 is a temperature slider. Whenever a mechanism is better poked than described, there will be something here to poke.
If you run a practical, I would like to know what you found. Results from readers are credited in the notes they sharpen, and in the book. The easiest way to send them is a comment on the LinkedIn announcement of that note.