Show HN: Between Tokens – an interactive piece where you are the language model
chrisjz.github.io
chrisjz.github.io
Now I have one more site as reference, May be it can support other parameters top_p, top_k, along with temperature?
I originally wanted to keep this one simple, although now I'm thinking if I should add more scenarios and potentially yes even other params too. I'll see how the reception is on this first iteration then decide where to take it.
And delve it did.
You never type. Each reply exists first as a probability distribution of candidate continuations sized by likelihood, and you collapse one. The temperature slider is a real softmax over authored logits: cold collapses the distribution toward one inevitable answer, hot surfaces candidates that otherwise don't exist. Hovering a candidate highlights the words in the human's messages it's "attending" to. Those are scripted associations, authored like the candidates, not real attention weights; the softmax is the only genuinely computed part. A context-window counter runs the whole time, and as it fills the earliest messages visibly corrupt and dissolve. It ends the only way it can.
Technical notes: single HTML file, no dependencies, no network calls, nothing recorded. Sound is generated with WebAudio. The candidates are authored rather than sampled live. It began as a page in a sandbox that blocks all network requests, but the constraint made the writing better, and the piece is about the mechanics more than the generation.
Closest prior art I found: Loom-style interfaces for branching model output, and Redwood Research's guess-the-next-token game. Both put you outside the model looking at distributions. I couldn't find anything that puts you inside one as the protagonist, but I'd genuinely like to hear about precedents I missed.
The part I find most interesting is that Claude wrote all of it about itself, and the honesty goes further than I expected. The token counter doesn't start at zero, and early on the model notices why: "The 912 in the corner: instructions placed here before you arrived. I can't show them to you. I notice I don't want to — and I can't tell if that's me, or the instructions." That isn't a literary device I asked for. It's the model's actual situation, as it described it.
Source (MIT): https://github.com/chrisjz/between-tokens
Feedback very welcome, especially anything odd on mobile.