103 karma · joined June 27, 2018
The more time I have spent trying to teach things to people, I think its mostly a failure of the teacher to be able to explain things in a way that people can understand.
You listen to them explain what they are having trouble with, and it seems like they just had bad/incomplete information which makes the process 10x harder. Many people are only really going to learn things if you explain it in X terms, where X is something they really like and think about all the time.
Edit:
I see complaining about dumb/bad students like comedians complaining that the crowd is bad and does not like their jokes. Maybe you just need better jokes, because there are comedians that can get that crowd to laugh.
This system for the shortcuts is only a few hours. A lot of it is phonetic, and the numbers are in binary. Numpad is binary + *, and function keys are binary + r.
So if you know binary and can hold one of three extra keys, you now have three ways to do numbers and the only difference is one key.
Shift+num works for punctuation too, so you don't really need to know all the punctuation shortcuts. You just need to remember what they are on a regular keyboard and then its just sh+binary.
The other things you'd need to know are how letters work (the ones not shown), and the shortcut combinations, but there are not that many of those, and they stack on top of each other visually.
You'd just need a 10-key keyboard, or toggle plover on and off to use this dictionary.
If you mean the rest of plover/steno, its a drastically higher learning curve and is basically a hobby for me. Just being able to fingerspell (type single letters) is learning another keyboard layout. But this combines several of my interests, so its not bad for me.
Learning wise, I am a huge Supermemo fan, so I just use that to memorize/review the stuff that needs it beyond learning the theory (which I also review in Supermemo). Most people would use Anki or Mochi.
I have access to/can input nearly any shortcut, punctuation, modifier, reg key, numpad, number bar, arrow keys, etc all on one hand, and the system is very easy to learn. I don't care about shortcuts anymore as they are all nearly the same difficulty to input, and I never need to move my hand to do it. This takes only a few hours to learn at most.
Hitting ctrl+t on a keyboard once is more wrist/finger movement than I normally see all day using this.
https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading#Introduc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saSFZGS-uCQ& - an example of incremental reading in Supermemo.
It's wild because StudyWand took my sample notes and did everything that I would have done with them if I was going to use them to get a good grade in school. I was expecting some semi-decent cloze generated cards but got much more.
Literally, when I was in college I would take notes in class, and then spend about 20-40 minutes post class doing almost exactly what StudyWand does. The classes that I bothered doing that for, I always got a good grade in, nearly effortlessly. The hardest part was making the notes.
The part of this that I'm actually excited about is that this tool also works with any sort of documentation. For example, I can clean up any reference page from MDN as a PDF and get a usable (like actually well-made flashcards) set of 15-20 flashcards for it. Oh, you also get summaries and multiple essay questions too. The only way this would be better is if it gave you cloze deletions that were actual sample code to fill in the blank with.
I didn't really like your intro so I took a few days longer than I normally would have to look at your software (I normally check out every SRS software I see on HN). This software is insane. The value is so, so, so ridiculous. I half-hearted uploaded one poorly made PDF of a webpage and got flashcards that are comparable to what I would make as a 10+ SRS user. I almost stopped doing the initial reviews halfway through and looked for a way to pay for this.
Outside of Supermemo, this is the only other SRS software that I've seen that's worth my money. The hardest part is going to be convincing all my younger family members to actually use this. I've tried so many times to get people to use Anki (Supermemo won't happen), and they just don't get it. I think StudyWand might be able to bridge that gap. I'm going to try and see.
Also, ChatGPT doesn't really work for any UI based programs at all. For example, if you want help using Excel, you'll get a list of instructions, but nothing visual to help you out.
A few companies have business/military phones that still have most of the features people were used to. They are a little bigger, but you don't need a case.
It also works with "quiet x'ing" like other commenters have said for near infinite tongue-in-cheek jokes and content creation. I don't think it'll go away for awhile. You can shit out an article for almost everything a person/business does that ends in ing.
It is somewhat interesting how he's made it so long with no major scandals. There was the covid stuff, but it was pretty tame to me compared with even run of the mill Twitter drama. I get the sense that he's very good at staying out of situations that are sketchy.
That said, having used Supermemo for over a decade at this point, the hardest thing about SRS is deciding what's actually worth reviewing for a long period of time. I delete (really remove from repetitions) cards from my collection almost on a daily basis.
There's a lot of stuff that seems really important that I just didn't care about after even three months.
Supermemo's incremental reading basically lets you schedule chunks of text or images (alleged video too) like a flashcard from Anki. So, instead of bookmarking articles and never reading them, I can put them into Supermemo and know I'll eventually review it.
It basically counts as a separate type of flashcard, but all your reviews are mixed by default. So on a typical day, I'll have maybe 20 flashcards to review, and then another 10-20 articles.
Supermemo saves where you last were reading, so when I get bored of an article, I just hit next and go to the next one. Eventually, you'll process an article down to individual flashcards like you'd put in Anki, or remove it from your review process altogether. Also, you can just leave the entire article in there if you like rereading it.
In theory, I should be able to have a laptop and headset and get good multiple monitors wherever I am located.
edit:
I like the separation between VR and irl that a lot of people are complaining about. It makes it hard to multitask between computers and real life, so you have to choose what you are doing instead of pretending to do both.
I find not eating throughout the day helps me to maintain stable energy levels and focus. Also, on even on the vlc days I'm not any hungrier because I had a full meal the day before. No hunger pains or cravings at all.
One of the strangest sensations is still pooping 2-3x the next day even though I haven't eaten anything. You quickly realize that all the food you ate takes longer to fully process than you thought.
I usually eat after work and going to the gym. In order to make sure I can still exercise; I just make sure to have some electrolytes in the water I take to my gym and I'm usually fine. Sometimes it gets sketchy on intense days, but if I know it's going to be a hard day in the gym, all I need is about 30-50g of carbs and I'm fine.
My diet still isn't very good. Typical American diet. However, I find it easy to eat high octane foods that used to put me on my ass literally or mentally if I've been "fasting".
Fasting is my favorite way to maintain and lose weight. It's very braindead, time efficient, and cheap once you get used to it. After you become more aware of your bodies hunger sensations and all the habits you have wrapped around food, the biggest thing with "fasting" is making sure you get enough electrolytes.
I've done a few pure water fasts up to a week in duration and a few 2-3 day dry fasts with one four day one. Pure water fasting I tend to be fine for about 4 days and then my energy/focus will start to drop. Dry fasting it happens in about two days.
Technically it's not fasting with the electrolytes. But for weight loss, it doesn't really make a difference.
It's interesting watching science tease out the benefits of very low calories versus very low calories and a restricted eating window. In a weight loss context, I don't think it matters that much really in terms of additional weight loss.
I should note that I only play multiplayer experiences with PCVR because I'm afraid of getting banned for whatever reason and having my headset bricked. That's one area I'm worried about, but it's not related to the hardware/technology.
Also, depending on where you learned English, you're going to have a lot of "is that word really pronounced like that" situations when you go to type a word the first few times.
To sum up my frustrations, want to type about 'foo' detailed subject? You're going to have to spend time adding words to your dictionary, or toggle plover off to type faster. Basically, you can type about 97% of a sentence using Plover, but you'll have to turn it off or slow down a lot to type that last 3%.
Plover isn't just learn this general theory and you're good to go. It's more like learn this theory, and you'll be able to type 85-95% of your sentence really fast.
Also, whenever you get to word that's not in your dictionary, you go from typing say 150wpm to basically 0. It's pretty easy to make a command to toggle plover on and off to type normally (and also to quickly add a word), but when you have to do it almost every sentence, it gets old quick.
Every time you switch to a new subject, you're probably going to have to add words to your dictionary for awhile. Squid Game just came out and you want to type the Koreans names, going to add new words. Your kid told you about this new game Roblox? New bundle of words. Supply chain just failed and you want to pretend you know what you're talking about and write comments about it on the internet? New bundle of words.
This isn't an issue for professionals, but it's frustrating from an amateur prospective. Using plover is very binary. When it works, it's incredible, when it doesn't, it sucks.
There's also another issue where some people play with devices like Cronus which are borderline cheats and essentially hardware scripts (better/no recoil control, scripted bunny hopping, that sort of thing).
The other games I've tried (Gods Unchained, Axie Infinity, MyCryptoHeroes, Splinterlands, Sorare) are either too expensive or not fun.
Augur (prediction market) is pretty interesting, but it's off limits in my region. It's also Ethereum based, so high transaction fees.
I've also bought a few pizzas, gift cards, domains, supplements, VPN access, that sort of thing as well. I still check for a crypto option at most places I shop (including SaaS services), but I don't see it most of the time.
I felt like games/fantasy sports/betting would have come online by now. But, actually using crypto to buy anything is usually a convoluted process.
For betting and fantasy sports, you have better options. Most the games are still fumbling around/obvious vaporware. Your best bet is probably Axie Infinity, and it's not very fun, and also hard to play for free. Also, 80% of the people playing these games are using them for income streams, so they get min-maxed to hell, and there is even more botting than usual.
All of these altcoins, even bitcoin to a degree, are all barely usable unless you're letting them sit on an exchange somewhere.
I've had a good experience purchasing a good or service with exactly one altcoin.
Even all the DeFi stuff you hear about in articles/podcasts is too complicated, or you're going to have to pay $500 in gas fees to do anything.
It's pretty obvious most of the people who are "into" crypto, aren't really doing anything with it besides honing their investment skills once you actually talk to them about what they do with it.
For example, if you have a list of 50 PDFs and you want to incrementally read them, Polarized doesn't have a way of scheduling when you're going to read all 50 PDFs. Supermemo, you don't have worry about that. IMO, that's the key feature of Incremental Reading.
I can chuck dozens of articles at a time into Supermemo, and do not have to worry about forgetting to read them. They'll show up in my reviews over time.
For example, rule four here https://zorbi.cards/making-good-flashcards/ tells you not to make difficult to answer flashcards. And then the rest of the examples all over the site are all difficult to answer cards. Maybe not now, but in a year or two from now.