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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#341

Post by Alex-Programs »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #325
Alex-Programs wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal approach with A levels was to strictly learn content through classes, then organise things (which teaches you a lot on its own!) and make my own flashcards. Then I used the flashcards to keep it fresh till exam season. It was crazy, during revision lessons everyone else in the class would be going "uhhh I have no clue, that was two years ago" while I'd just know it. I have tried different approaches, incl…

I appreciate you replying to my comments! I confess I'm interested to hear your thoughts re: the usefulness of SRS from a more holistic perspective. Gwern writes: >...if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it’s worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition. 5 minutes is the line that divides trivia…

Honestly, I'm not sure I'm a particularly good person to ask about this. I've experimented with Anki for areas other than test taking and language learning, but it didn't stick.

I used it for some geography stuff, and that was fine I suppose, I like geography, but I stopped after a while.

I find it easy to remember things if I care about them. Ergo, if I care enough to put it in Anki, Anki is useless.

Particularly with LLMs being a thing, you don't even need to concretely know what you're looking for - just give chatgpt a vague description and let it list out suggestions until it jogs your memory.

When it comes to physics etc, you'll end up memorising everything relevant to the areas you actually use. In areas like "What is the star type of a star with a temperature of 6000K" - something that I memorised using Anki, and which took me a while - if I actually worked in that area of astrophysics I'd obviously learn that quite quickly.

I suppose it could be useful for maintaining knowledge. Had I not been burnt out I would have kept up my flashcards through my gap year, which would've presumably been quite useful - I'm currently going through the slog of relearning how to integrate so I'm not totally embarrassed at uni!

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#342

Post by mandmandam »

Knork-and-Fife wrote: post #162

I used basically this algorithm in college with the following setup: Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize vertically. Save as PDF Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to memorize in the note field. Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily, drag the note more to the left in the margin.…

This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I'm picturing it right .. You wouldn't have an example file handy?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#343

Post by MarceColl »

aaldrick wrote: post #232

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should wo…

It's tricky I think, I think it comes down to specialized tools for different systems. I'm building a tool for Japanese in this direction. But of course it doesn't generalize to everything since the content and context extraction is very objective dependent.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#344

Post by durkie »

colinnordin wrote: post #300

I’m sure the algorithm can play a huge role in the effectiveness of learning but for me the difficult part was always creating the cards and actually opening the app to practice. I've built Komihåg [1] to try and combat this: Select any text on your iOS device and a flashcard is automatically created for you, and the app is then showing you the cards on the Home Screen / Lock Screen / Apple Watch Face. I haven't gott…

I was looking to use this with the iOS Books app, but I can’t share text to your app from there (but something like safari works). Any idea why?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#345

Post by aaldrick »

MarceColl wrote: post #343
aaldrick wrote: post #232

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should wo…

It's tricky I think, I think it comes down to specialized tools for different systems. I'm building a tool for Japanese in this direction. But of course it doesn't generalize to everything since the content and context extraction is very objective dependent.

I agree, it is tricky. But I believe it is possible, see my response in this thread to the user allenu as a middle ground.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#346

Post by allenu »

jkmcf wrote: post #310
allenu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written my own flashcards app (Fresh Cards) and once in a while, users ask if there's a way to import flashcards from things like web pages and PDF files, but to be honest, I still don't know how it would work, so maybe you can help me. From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated too…

I was an early user of FreshCards, and it’s a beautiful app, but creating cards was too much work. No share sheet or similar integration. The easiest thing, which I believe I suggested, was highlight->action to create a new card front, and highlight->action to creat the back or a new front. It needs to work well casually in general, and easy when focused. I’m sure AI could theoretically help but not sure it’s necessa…

Thanks for the feedback! I'm currently working on a big rewrite of the app, so it's good to know I should work on reducing the friction of creating cards, such as with the share sheet or some other integration.

Like I said in the other comment, I'm going to play around with some ideas regarding an inbox. I think that on its own would help a ton for just recording things to be converted to flashcards later. There's probably a good in-app UI that can be made to go through the inbox and easily convert the notes created into the front and back sides as well.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#347

Post by christiangenco »

aaldrick wrote: post #232

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should wo…

I solve this problem with a system prompt in my LLMs[1].

ChatGPT is the main spot where I'm going to be trying to understand a new concept, so after groking it I'll ask it to make flashcards which I can then just copy and paste into Mochi.

An improvement would be some sort of MCP integration between the LLM and Mochi so it can just add the card directly. I'm sure we'll get there soon.

1. https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a...

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#348

Post by ants_everywhere »

kqr wrote: post #318
aaldrick wrote: post #232

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should wo…

> There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc. Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively. This is also a very diffi…

That's usually done by writing and elaborating notes. I think it's not clear to most people how flash cards improve this. The original idea of flash cards is rote memorization of facts that need fast (automatic) retrieval.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#349

Post by tikhonj »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #251
tikhonj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse for motivation than taking longer? Boredom? Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial? Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams? Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition a hard sell.

> What's worse for motivation than taking longer? Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it. See the popularity of Duolingo vs Anki as an example! Or Quizlet vs Anki. Or the scores of students who revise by half-watching dopamine-ified youtube videos rather than doing past pape…

Yeah, 100%. I worded my comment a bit awkwardly, but that's exactly what I was getting at too :)

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#350

Post by MarceColl »

aaldrick wrote: post #345
MarceColl wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tricky I think, I think it comes down to specialized tools for different systems. I'm building a tool for Japanese in this direction. But of course it doesn't generalize to everything since the content and context extraction is very objective dependent.

I agree, it is tricky. But I believe it is possible, see my response in this thread to the user allenu as a middle ground.

AI definitely helps here (and it's the direction I'm going), although to start exploring the space in a way that makes sense to me (and because it's a problem I have), I've reduced the space into these steps:

  * I wanna be able to watch X in Y language
  * I know these words
  * Help me
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