a CoT means externally iterating an LLM

Not necessarily. Yes, a chain of thought can be provided externally, for example through user prompting or another source, which can even be another LLM. One of the key observations behind these models commonly referred to as reasoning is that since an external LLM can be used to provide “thoughts”, could an LLM provide those steps itself, without depending on external sources?

To do this, it generates “thoughts” around the user’s prompt, essentially exploring the space around it and trying different options. These generated steps are added to the context window and are usually much larger that the prompt itself, which is why these models are sometimes referred to as long chain-of-thought models. Some frontends will show a summary of the long CoT, although this is normally not the raw context itself, but rather a version that is summarised and re-formatted.

Archived versions of Reddit pages haven’t worked for a while now. You can find snapshots listed, but when you try to load them, the comment section is empty.

Could you give some examples of things that worked for you on Windows but couldn’t port over to Linux? I’m interested if they’re related more to games or just using Linux in general.