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knubie

1,067 karma · joined July 19, 2011

Matthew Steedman, founder of Mochi.

https://mochi.cards

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knubie··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
The current Mayor of New York City and three candidates that just won congressional primaries in the city belong to a political party called Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They will be joining two more DSA members in congress. This is the DSA's platform on immigration:

> Allow workers to freely migrate between countries to seek employment without restrictive immigration controls. Demilitarize the border, end all immigrant detention and deportations, immediate amnesty for all immigrants regardless of current immigration status, and provide access to jobs, labor rights, and social services to all immigrants.

https://platform.dsausa.org/foreign-policy/

knubie··on US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos
You mean the one that says

> Infrared still image (black hot) captured of unidentified object *below helicopter* over western United States in September of 2025.

knubie··on BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets
You really think BYD would exist in a free market?
knubie··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
Most people in America don't live paycheck to paycheck or rack up massive debt because they're poor. They do it because they're financially illiterate, over-consume, or both. A few watch-through's of Caleb Hammer's financial audit show will disabuse you of this belief.
knubie··on Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
I stopped using tmux when I started using kitty terminal with native split windows. I prefer the native window management of kitty, but I do miss the session saving of tmux (e.g. if I accidentally close a tab).
knubie··on Hologram v0.7.0: Milestone release for Elixir-to-JavaScript porting initiative
This looks really cool. Congratulations on the milestone.

Does the elixir->js compiler exist as a separate project, or is it built into the framework? Is it based on an existing transpiler? How does it compare / contrast to something like gleam (which, AFAIU also let's you transpile elixir to JS)?

knubie··on Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
It's not FOSS but Mochi [0] is a pretty good alternative.

[0] https://mochi.cards/

knubie··on FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
Intimidation, or threat at the very least seems applicable here if you have any idea of what's going on in Minnesota and what these Signal chats are being used for.
knubie··on 'The old order is not coming back,' Carney says in speech at Davos
> They clearly don't want our friendship or value the treaties they've signed.

Let's be honest, Europeans haven't valued their "friendship" with America since the end of the cold war.

knubie··on Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
I'm a little late to the party here but since Mochi was mentioned I want to take some time to address some of the criticism of it in the article.

With regards to cloze deletions the author writes:

> cloze deletions in Mochi are very verbose. [...] This is a lot of typing.

First, the numbering (1::) is optional. Secondly there are keyboard shortcuts, cmd+L to wrap in {{}} and cmd+1,2,3 to add numbering.

The point about note types is fair, and I may a similar function eventually, but I recommend most people to create no more than 10 cards a day. Any more and you risk getting overwhelmed with reviews. In the article the author shows an example of creating 4 (or more) cards for a single atomic element. This excessive card creation probably contributed more to the 1700 overdue cards than the algorithm (more on that later). If you really do want to create multiple cards like this you can use cloze groups. E.g. {{1::Helium}} (symbol: {{2::He}}) has atomic number {{3::2}}

Finally, the "biggest problem with Mochi". This is kind of a moot point now that Mochi has an FSRS option, but there are a lot of misconceptions in the article about the algorithm. First being that Mochi's algorithm is inferior to SM-2 because it is simpler, and that the rational for it being simpler is because "the user can reason about the algorithm more easily." I'm not sure where the author got that idea, maybe I mentioned it before as an advantage, but it's not the main reason. The main reason is that the additional complexity in SM-2 is actually detrimental in some subtle ways. [0] The author just assumed the algorithm was worse and gave up.

With regards to the forgetting multiplier the author states:

> If I forgot something after sixty days, I surely won’t have better recall in thirty.

But what is the evidence for this? The assumption here is that the knowledge was "completely lost". For the card to have gotten to 60 days in the first place, you must have remembered it previously after 30 days. Evidence show that reviews strengthen memory, not degrade it. Even FSRS does not completely reset the interval after a forget. I get that the author doesn't want to configure things, but lowering the multiplier to 0.2 for example seems a lot easier than building a brand new SRS flashcards app.

Criticisms aside I really do like the idea of hashcards. Plain text, offline, open source. It checks a lot of boxes that I personally look for in software and I'm happy to see more options in this space.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200926103540/https://massimmer...

knubie··on Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux
The latency for drawing on the Boox Note Max is excellent. Best on the market or close to it.
knubie··on Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux
I've tried this setup (and a different setup using a capture card) with a BOOX Note Max but the input latency is just too high to be usable, even for simple cli work.

Are the dedicated eink monitors (like Dasung) better in this regard?

knubie··on Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
People interested in this subject might enjoy this interview with David Albert [1], as well as this interview with Tim Maudlin [2], who offers a different perspective from Albert. They are both philosophers of physics, or in other words physicists working on the foundations of physics.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR2sMeXLuLw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3riyyEmWwoY

knubie··on SwirlDB: Modular-first, CRDT-based embedded database
This looks really cool. I've actually been hacking on something very similar to this myself, although with clojure/script on the server / browser. The adapter architecture and equivalent nodes was something I first saw with PouchDB. ~830KB seems quite large for the browser library though.
knubie··on Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
> crappy, dumbed down web UI; phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source

What does any of this have to do with local first? Most online only apps have this stuff too.

knubie··on Obsidian Note Codes
I only had to read three sentences into to find your answer:

> Those codes let you quickly reference notes in your vault from other places such as hand-written notes.

knubie··on iPhone Air
I still have my SE 1st gen that I pull out from time to time because I use it as the 2FA for my other Apple account, and I am always struck by by how much better it feels to use than even the 12 mini. It is such an ergonomic size for single hand use, and it surprisingly still runs very smoothly.
knubie··on iPhone Air
If they just made the 12/13 mini ever so slightly thicker, it would obviate the camera bump and improve the battery life. /shrug I don't get.
knubie··on Starbucks in Korea asks customers to stop bringing in printers/desktop computers
I've been living in Seoul for a few months now and often work out of different Starbucks and have never seen anything like this here. I spent a similar amount of time in Seattle and saw much "worse" set ups at the coffee shops there.
knubie··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
Most people just use whatever the default browser is on their phone.
knubie··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
The other problem is that more and more content now is designed for (or only tolerable on) larger phone screens. Go to any website these days on a smaller phone like an iPhone mini and more than 50% (being charitable here) of the screen will be taken up by garbage like ads, cookie banners, popups, etc.

It's a vicious cycle. Phone manufactures make the screen bigger, app and website developers realize they can cram more junk on the page, consumers demand larger screens as a result, return to step 1.

knubie··on ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral
Please don't believe everything crazy leftists say online.
knubie··on The App Review Guidelines have been updated for compliance with courts
The current App Store Guidelines don't mention anything about the EU. They only have a carve out for the US storefront, so I assume you still need to apply for a "StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement" in the EU as well.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#lin...

knubie··on America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
I mean 20% of the population thinking they would be better off working at a factory is huge. So we need more than that?
knubie··on How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured
From the interview:

> So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.

So I guess the answer is that they're selling to the "government security market" so they can charge whatever the hell they want.

knubie··on The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)
> The counter to this thinking is that if you intertwine your economic wellbeing with your "enemy" to the point that neither side wants to sever the relationship

You mean like how Europe has made themselves completely dependent on Russia for energy? How's that working out?

knubie··on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button
Downloading 60kb of compressed javascript takes way longer than executing it.
knubie··on US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s
Yes I'm sure the Danes are wishing they had purchased their fifth generation fighters from China or Russia instead.
knubie··on Nobody Profits – George Hotz
> Except it isn’t and Joe Biden is a senile moron. Because when you smash the windows and grab the stuff, Tiffany’s no longer has the stuff. With piracy, everyone has the stuff. It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation.

Having a picture of jewelry is not even remotely close to having actual jewelry. When you pirate something you destroy its value, that's basic supply and demand. Sure, everyone has the stuff, but it's now worthless. Great for the consumer obviously but terrible for the producer.

knubie··on Apple Debuts iPhone 16e
I'm still using my iphone12 mini and still holding out that someone makes a similar sized phone. I would love to see a slightly thicker version to accommodate a larger batter and no camera bump, but at this point a small, thick phone seems almost unimaginable.
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