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Comment by jryb | Hacker News Reader

It's the first thing I go to when I have a "stupid" question. I also just use it to learn languages and math, and get clarification when something in my area of expertise is confusing. It's dramatically reduced my search engine use. It also enabled me to write an anki clone that I just wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.

That said, it is actively harmful when discussing components of Chinese characters - it hallucinates so much it's essentially unusable. I stick to traditional resources for that. I'm also reading as many scientific papers as before, there's really no substitute for that yet, and I haven't found it very good at literature searches.

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> It also enabled me to write an anki clone that I just wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.

Do you mean, it helped you write software that replaced Anki the program or something else? Intrigued

Yes, it's an anki replacement. I found adding/modifying cards programmatically was a nightmare. I also wanted to add new features, like having ephemeral cards that disappear after a few reviews (the use case was translation of chatgpt-generated sentences - knowing myself I'd just unconsciously memorize the answer and not actually go through the task of translation so I wanted to automatically get rid of those cards after they outlived their useful lifespan). And in general I didn't want to be constrained by someone else's software.

Yeah my current approach for programmatic Anki notes is genanki + using a stable ID as the first field of cards to allow for updates. Great point about ephemeral sentences -- something for me to think about creating an auto-suspension add-on for (I've seen the same issues about memorizing structure).

What did you use for scheduling? I've seen ebisu [0] used before but found it difficult to grok. I can say as I've used FSRS [1] within Anki I've started to like its decisions alot.

I think the main thing that keeps me from rolling my own Anki is mobile support. I had an Android app once and having to keep up-to-date with all the changing App Store requirements was annoying as hell. Eventually they took down the app for some compliance thing.

[0] https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu [1] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki

For scheduling, I just guessed at the weights - the interval to the next review just increases geometrically at a different rate for each difficulty rating. I'll probably run into ease hell issues but it hasn't happened yet. I tuned the weights by intuition over the course of a few days until I arrived at something similar to what I had in Anki.

Mobile support was a concern of mine as well but I just took the easy way out and make a simple SPA in javascript and futzed with the CSS until it looked good on my phone (also mostly ChatGPT). One explicit design principle was that I will never support anyone but myself, which simplified things greatly. The SPA interacts with a little CRUD app that uses a sqlite database to store my cards and activity.

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