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ostackelast Friday at 12:57 PM1 replyview on HN

Interesting concept with conceptual spaces, but how does that affect how you work with LLM:s in practice?


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EastLondonCoderlast Friday at 2:55 PM

I think of it like improvising with a very skilled but slightly alien musician.

If you just hand it a chord chart, it’ll follow the structure. But if you understand the kinds of patterns it tends to favour, the statistical shapes it moves through, you can start composing with it, not just prompting it.

That’s where Gärdenfors helped me reframe things. The model isn’t retrieving facts. It’s traversing a conceptual space. Once you stop expecting grounded truth and start tracking coherence, internal consistency, narrative stability, you get a much better sense of where it’s likely to go off course.

It reminds me of salespeople who speak fluently without being aligned with the underlying subject. Everything sounds plausible, but something’s off. LLMs do that too. You can learn to spot the mismatch, but it takes practice, a bit like learning to jam. You stop reading notes and start listening for shape.