Does anyone outside of people in school or language learners use these type of tools in any interesting ways?
Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
21–30 of 198 posts
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#22I'm happy to see others in the space, but I wish Anki competitors would implement a decent 'import from Anki' feature. Otherwise, I think most existing users of SRS are unlikely to switch (because we use Anki and have thousands of cards there already). The data format of Anki is a bit complicated but at least it's SQLite. I've seen a ton of shared decks and resources on ankiweb, but it's true you can't easily put the…
Isnt a sqldump just a text file? That should be easily shareable on Github
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#23Ok but what about images and formulas?
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#24> First, [Anki] is ugly to look at, particularly the review screen.
You can customise note types with CSS and Javascript, which means that you can make cards look however you want.
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#25I don't mind people comparing such projects against Anki, this is natural since Anki is quite dominant in this space, but I feel like every criticism of Anki on that list was either highly subjective, exaggerated, unfair, or outright wrong and unkind (in a "one does not climb a ladder by throwing others off it" manner). Not saying this is what Fernando intended to do here, but his sharp opinion does come across a bit like it here.
Personally, I find the interface is extremely functional; the ability to have deck hierarchies to be a massive feature, not a bug; the WYSIWYG being the default being obvious given the intended audience, but one can still easily edit a textfile and import it or edit in html mode directly if desired; converting something into latex math is as simple as enclosing it in "[$] ... [/$]" and hardly the nightmare it's portrayed as; and finally potentially hacky plugins is a feature, not a bug: occasionally you have a very specific problem and some kind soul creates a solution for you, which may be functional but not the most aesthetically pleasing. That's fine. Anki is a bazaar, not a cathedral, and plugins have ratings and reviews which you can consult if necessary.
I have tried many different flashcard solutions, including hacky text-based ones, and I always return to Anki. Despite the fact that most other tools in my stack that I swear by are terminal-based.
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guilty as charged. First time I hear about it. Thanks. Looks like a natively LLM friendly database format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recutils
Yes! I have a whole blog post in the works about how they make an awesome LLM memory layer.
Could you link to it? I'd love to read it. This is also my first time learning of recutils
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#27I wish more people knew about GNU recutils instead of inventing new formats
I wish there were more/better tools for working with recutils. I had a phase of trying to use recutils wherever it made sense, a few years ago, but the format has a lot of redundancy (not a bad thing in itself), and editor support to make working with that easier was basically non-existent (perhaps it exists only for Emacs). Using the command-line interface for everything was way too cumbersome. Visidata claimed to support the format, which got me excited, but in my experience it mangled the file if you had anything more than a basic set of records, and the support for display too was overall very rudimentary.
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#28Markdown is the final perfect form for every text (non-binary) content based system. Every product will eventually use markdown as their content store.
One of the biggest benefits of LLMs is that products are incentivized to have a way to import and export from markdown.
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#29For the bar exam, I used a combination of an outliner and flashcards. Back then, I was usimg a PalmPilot. The idea was: 1. Turn the subject matter into a knowledge tree. 2. If a branch has more than 5 leaves, you split it up. 3. Flashcards are generated by traversing the tree. The parent node is the question, the child nodes are the answer. The benefit of the tree is that it forces you to think about where in your st…
What was the root question of law?
Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
#30I don't mind people comparing such projects against Anki, this is natural since Anki is quite dominant in this space, but I feel like every criticism of Anki on that list was either highly subjective, exaggerated, unfair, or outright wrong and unkind (in a "one does not climb a ladder by throwing others off it" manner). Not saying this is what Fernando intended to do here, but his sharp opinion does come across a bit…
Using Anki every day for about half an hour (I'm a slow learner lol). Anki sucks, but it's good enough that there's no point looking for other apps.