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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

I'm on record saying that a system like this with some extra hardware (i.e. a way for the LLM to have live understanding of the student's paper notebook or handout which are being written in with a plain old pencil) combines the best of both worlds - individual tutoring with approximately zero screen time which scales linearly with the number of students. The role of the teacher or professor then becomes a manager of the student - agentic tutor pairs, a referee when the student and model disagree, etc. and most importantly still being the human teacher you can just talk to in the human education process.

I'm convinced this is the future of education - models are there, we need the classroom tech to catch up. The alternative is obvious and quantified in the paper - students just use models to do their work for them and learn nothing.

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I work in consulting and one of my projects is piloting an AI use case for a department within one of my clients. On a discovery call someone casually brought up that they bought a reMarkable notebook themselves and were wondering if it could be integrated into the use case. It really got me thinking.

Maybe reMarkable or something like it could help bridge a student's writing with an LLM without having to fall back to a laptop or ipad.

https://remarkable.com/

> Maybe reMarkable or something like it could help bridge a student's writing with an LLM without having to fall back to a laptop or ipad

What does “bridge a student’s writing” mean?? If this is a real argument it needs to be clearer.

What’s the functional difference between a Remarkable and an iPad? The former is less responsive, costs less, and has better battery life, right? I really don’t see how that’s significant to any kind of development of anything.

Are you talking about running a local model??

I assume that the reMarkable here would mainly just be used to capture the writing. It could then be examined by an LLM asynchronously.

I feel like an eink b/w device will work better because of the display and lack of distractions like on a full blown iPad. Seems like sink would be similar to a sheet of paper but digital so it could be sent to an LLM or some Other API. Just my two cents though, I don’t have a super strong opinion about it.

> costs less

I assumed that too, back when i thought that getting an e-ink pad would be cool.

Right now Amazon is quoting me $450 on a 10.3" reMarkable, but the price goes up for the 11.8" model and/or for bells and whistles. It looks like an 11" ipad is $450 and up (based on https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/), although you need to buy the $80-100 iPencil separately.

So yeah - I was hoping that e-ink things would cost less, but they're still pretty expensive and certainly competitive with the iPad.

I've written a bunch of tools around the remarkable, and it can be easily integrated here, although realtime integration is quite fussy. At this point, it's easiest to vibe code your own, if you're interested, start with https://github.com/ddvk/rmapi and look into pulling documents and optionally putting them back.

remarkable keeps inking data on a per-page basis in vector format, so there's a bit of work to be done to render the inking and then visually assessing it, but it's all pretty much "done" work.

Remarkable's cloud syncing tech is .. not great, and I'd speculate you'd get a better setup here with some sort of harness where you talk / text with an agent that has access to all the files, dates, OCRs, etc first before you consider trying to generate PDFs / pages and put them back onto the tablet.

I would add that somewhere in there should be a spaced repetition algorithm.

Spaced repetition is very effective, but it's really really clunky to use. My unpopular opinion is that we all have Stockholm syndrome when it comes to creating "cards", and people talk about how valuable creating cards is; but I think it stucks, it takes a lot of time.

If AI is already teaching me math (let's say), it would be nice to tell the AI/app "quiz me on this periodically", and then the AI makes up a fresh polynomial to factor (or whatever) and presents that to you according to a spaced repetition algorithm.

Behind the scenes, the AI should have access to what has happened the last several times a specific topic has been quized, so the AI can watch to see that certain mistakes are resolved, and the AI might also know better how to correct the user if it has context about previous quizzes of that topic.

But the very act of making and organizing your card deck is part of the SRS! It “sucks” because you get no dopamine hit from a fresh desk, as the reward system is not yet in place.

Again, I really think this is a viewpoint we've talked ourselves into to help us feel better about how cumbersome creating the cards are.

I'm willing to grant that there is some value in choosing what to put in the cards, but most of the awkwardness around making cards is UI related. Nobody creates cards on their phone, or while they're walking (AI could do both of these) - people create cards sitting at their computer (like cavemen!) usually clicking through a clunky UI and managing thousands of cards with thousands of clicks. That sucks, and people probably wont realize it sucks until something better comes along.

> Nobody creates cards on their phone, or while they're walking

Wait, when are you doing it then? No wonder you think it sucks! Adopt some modern tools, yo. Use Anki, or vibe code your own app.

> Use Anki

Anki is great for studying, but the card creation experience sucks. To be specific: I found creating any custom card type immediately dropped me into the bowels of CSS. It felt like writing HTML by hand.

Is there any facility for re-using shared pieces?

I felt like it needed a static site generator type tool to move up a layer of abstraction and reduce the copying of chunks into my card. Is there one? Please mention if so.

It's rather nerdy, but QuickTurtle9 released mdfc on GitHub, https://github.com/bttger/markdown-flashcards a couple of years ago

Using that as the input file format standard, AI can generate what you're looking for, Android app, Webapp, iOS app, pdf.

> I found creating any custom card type immediately dropped me into the bowels of CSS.

Ah, LaTeX syndrome.

Write a tool to reduce the friction.

I use an Emacs based SRS tool. I have a capture template to quickly make a card.

For anything tedious, it's critical to reduce the friction!

I really never thought it would come up in a HN thread but I’m actually working on a modified version of Anki as a personal project (not quite ready yet though, but will open source probably in a few weeks) where improving the editing/curating/creating experience is a big focus. I’m trying to make it markdown-based too.

Just to pick your brain real fast, when creating new cards (from scratch?) what would a better experience look like for you?

I rarely make cards by hand anymore. I would recommend forking something like https://github.com/jasperket/clanki and editing it (perhaps with an agent) so that it works exactly to your liking.

> Spaced repetition is very effective, but it's really really clunky to use

Spaced repetition is just reviewing the same material periodically. It doesn't have to be a complicated system.

We already know how to learn and educate: spaced repetition (periodic review), and retrieval practice (frequent testing). This is how school used to be fore centuries; it's not sexy but it's effective.

A 'smart pen' that records the student's writing in some way, maybe? My first thought was a tablet that boots straight into a writing software but students should not be subjected to any amount of latency in their writing.

Practically, I think if you want the AI system to have a live view of what the student's doing you're going to have to replace one of either the tablet or the writing instrument. A wearable camera could work as well but there are issues with that.

there was a pen that used special paper to directly record your notes (15-20years ago)... should be possible nowadays to directly transfer this to a connected device and have it feed it to an llm.

and after looking it up, it appears they are still available: https://www.livescribe.com/landingpage/ls3_onenote/

That was likely what I was thinking of - I have vague memories of seeing an ad for this in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science in the 2000s.

They still exist, along with a bunch of different ones. I don't think it's going to be all that different compared to just writing notes in an e-book or on an iPad though. And for many people who learn in other ways, the iPad or similar is superior because you can copy in pictures, make diagrams, and use other ways of learning all in one spot. For me, honestly, something like OneNote (or especially Obsidian) is awesome, because it's super easy to tie in AI into mark down text.

Today I saw a demo of Remarkable turned into Voldemort's diary from Harry Potter - you write to it, and it writes back, in handwriting.

This has been around for a bit, not sure it writes back in handwriting.

https://github.com/awwaiid/ghostwriter

Installation not for the average user.

Here's the new demo and repo: https://github.com/MaximeRivest/Riddle It writes back in a cursive font

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