Six failures, a 32-minute TPU lie, and the moment a language model ignored my prompt on purpose

About This Tutorial

Every language model you've ever used is a single-channel machine: text goes in, text comes out, and the prompt is the only force acting on the network. Our entire toolbox for evaluating LLMs quietly assumes that. I couldn't stop poking at a different question: what if a model also had a sense of its own internal state - not what's in the prompt, but what it is carrying - and that sense shaped how it answered, at every layer? Six signals. I call them proprioceptive channels - by analogy to how your body knows where your arm is without looking.