mvieira38

Also, why SM2 instead of FSRS?

The idea is great, although I'm a little against the spirit of releasing this as a paid product instead of an Anki plugin/front-end or something. Alas, my biggest feedback is marketing stuff: the english on the landing page is way too broken for a premium paid product; I shouldn't need an account to try a simple app; this is surely not the ONLY (in all caps) app to do "variations". Maybe be more detailed on what the variations are and how it's different from the bajillion free Anki plugins out there.

OP is not a native English speaker and thought "decorar", the Brazilian Portuguese verb for memorize (with a "mindless memorization" subtext) translated to "decorate".

5- I don't know if that's even an issue that needs solving with Anki. If that ever becomes an issue with your deck it's probably because you don't add enough cards per day (or preferred time period) and enough cards per subject. I wrote about this in a comment last week I think, but a simple vocab card should actually be like at least 6: vocab <-> image (2), vocab <-> native vocab (2), vocab <-> write out native vocab (2). The text-based answers should still contain an image, too, for better embedding of the knowledge.

People that complain that Anki ends up being just Q -> A memorization are often using it superficially. And even then, won't the algorithm just phase the useless cards out anyways when they become too easy?

Can't say I'm looking forward to migrating from lazy.nvim, tbh... Can anyone tell me what this does better than lazy? I can't really tell from the docs alone

> It moves RAG away from approximate "semantic vibes" and toward explicit reasoning about where information lives. That clarity can help teams trust outputs and debug workflows more effectively.

Wasn't this a feature of RAGs, though? That they could match semantics instead of structure, while us mere balls of flesh need to rely on indexes. I'd be interested in benchmarks of this versus traditional vector-based RAGs, is something to that effect planned?

You forget some characteristics of China's political economy that make their quality of life improvements way bigger and are not accounted for in this story. For example, the unprecedented investment in clean energy is seamlessly (compared to the west at least) followed by improvements to the grid. The central planner knows the plan, so he can account for the infrastructure necessary, which is not true for capitalist countries. The USA is laughably behind other powers in terms of basics like mass transportation and energy partly because of this coordination issue. No need to get started with how ahead China is with internet infrastructure, too, right?

(slightly off-topic)

Students shouldn't ever have become so laser-focused on a single career path anyway, and even worse than that is how colleges have become glorified trade schools in our minds. Students should focus on studying for their classes, getting their electives and extracurriculars in, getting into clubs... Then depending on which circles they end up in, they shape their career that way. The thought that getting a Computer Science major would guarantee students a spot in the tech industry was always ridiculous, because the industry was just never structured that way, it's always been hacker groups, study groups, open source, etc. bringing out the best minds

Doesn't he have an incentive to make it look like that, though? The way he phrased it, that they are losing money because people use it so much, makes it seem like Pro subscribers are some super power-users. As long as inference has a nonnegative, nonzero cost, then this case will lose money, so Sam isn't admitting that the business model is flawed or anything

Love this for the US. I hope many more companies follow the example

Appropriate use of Anki isn't so simple, it's a skill in itself. Here's my strategy specifically to learn vocabulary. TL = target language, NL = native language.

1- front: image+subtitle (in TL) back: word in TL.

2- fill-in-the-blank phrases for the word, fully in TL, translation shows up after completion (you HAVE to use the function where you actually type it out)

3- front: word in TL back: translation in NL with an image, also the inverse, but the image is always in the back. Making it a different picture as the one for 1 is essential

So each new word would generate me about 6 to 8 new cards. At a fast enough rate of card creation, you won't run into the problem of memorizing each card because you will be creating like 100 cards in a day. The "fatal mistake" (to quote the author) of this article is underestimating how much this process of card creation and organization aids in learning. Creating your own study material IS studying in itself.

That is, assuming the strategy being compared to LLMs here is the correct one of actually studying the language and creating your own Anki deck while you study the material, instead of the incorrect strategy of downloading a deck

This is a good point. If we are marching towards some sort of LLM-driven world, where every company wants to have automated AI agents for customer service, internal development, marketing and prospecting, the energy usage will compound. A simple RAG system can be expected to make 5 or more prompts per query, and multi-agent systems like Roo Code power through tens of prompts for any given task.

What matters most is training, post-training, fine-tuning and data scraping, not inference IMO. The "prompting destroys the environment" deal always seemed sensationalistic to me, I'm glad it's starting to be debunked, but at the same time we can see IRL the heavy toll the new data centers being built are taking on the energy grid. If the tech was lean at it's heart in terms of energy consumption, we wouldn't be seeing that or even the private nuclear reactor arms race by big tech.

At that point was Google already using deep learning for search? I'd guess the number fluctuated a bit during the rollout of this kind of feature

> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?

I don't think so. The stuff you mentioned is objectively better as there's no reason for Apple not to let you do it. It's more of a "I've been in the Apple walled garden for so long and so are all my friends" or the so-called network effects. Examples: you can't "Facetime" and "Airdrop" on Android, your text confirmation marks are green instead of blue, you don't have access to the same apps as your friends (sometimes), you don't have integration with iPad. If you grew up in certain circles you may be bullied for not having an iPhone, too.

Also there is a prevailing sentiment that Android doesn't "just work" as much as iOS, which is true tbh but not for Pixels which are basically the Android equivalent of an iPhone, where the device is pretty much tailor-made for the OS.

Is this meant to be a Windows 11 clone on Ubuntu?

It's Anduin as in the fictional river from LotR

Obsidian has all of that and more if you go for some of the advanced extensions. It's not about "graphing notes" as much as connecting a note to another. It's really not that different from inserting a page into the text of another page in Notion

GPT-5 released just a few weeks ago and it's drastically cheaper than similar models. I think efficiency might not be that big of an issue long-term

This is the kind of stuff that made me like HN initially. Great job

This analogy undersells the negative impact of social media. Smoking wasn't a propaganda machine at the hands of a few faceless corpos with no clear affiliation, for example, nor did it form a global spynet

I think most of the social media power users don't connect with friends and family at all through the platforms. Young Gen Zers just scroll Tiktok (or whatever clone they prefer) and share the ones they like through snapchat/discord/telegram/messenger/sms/whatsapp. Some will post stuff for their friends to see through "close friends" or whatever, but it's much less personal than it once was with Facebook groups and whatnot

Well put. Easy pollution-reducing policies are all under our noses but governments chicken out of implementing them for whatever reason. Office workers having at least one mandated day of remote work would be a godsend, and it's very noticeable post-pandemic how much nicer the cities where this is unofficially implemented are on fridays

Yes, transit costs a total X. In the car regime everyone puts in a small amount towards public transit and roads and richer folk put high amounts towards cars, totalling X. In the public transit regime everyone puts in a medium amount towards roads and public transit, and a negligible amount of tradespeople and construction companies buy their work vehicles, totalling X.

You can choose the car regime if you want, the US does, but: 1- public transit is lower quality due to higher income brackets choosing cars. 2- everyone is screwed by the cars' negative externalities (noise and air pollution mainly). 3- lower income brackets are screwed by the traffic generated by the higher guys (50 minimum wage workers occupying the same lane space as 3 SUV-driving middle managers). Also you have to remember how much the mortality increases in higher car traffic areas, so that X figure isn't really true

It's also false that transit prices are small, by the way, at least globally. Where I live (third world), taking the subway daily to and from work amounts to 14% of minimum wage

Wow, that first paragraph is a compelling political economy argument against this policy that I hadn't really thought of. Your model seems to take the assumptions that the trade industries can't reorganize to optimize car usage, and that transit operators have only one stream of income (the car tax).

Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.

I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".

Liberal media will say they "want automation to replace the tough jobs, not the creative ones" when talking about LLMs, but then support this garbage that is just artificially increasing demand for cheap labor, often covered by vulnerable, illegal immigrants with no way to defend their rights. In trying to protect the workers they end up increasing worker exploitation

We have dedicated bus lanes where I live, and they don't really work during heavy rush hour, unfortunately, due to merging and turns. For example, most of the time the bus lane needs to be on the right so it can pick people up, so cars turning right will have to cross the bus lane somewhere. The opposite happens if the bus needs to take a left turn, or if another bus is stopped for maintenance or something and overtaking is necessary.

Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.

Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff

[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)

Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities.

You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.