I love anki.
But upon reading this I think it's high time I exported all my notes in simple text format, just in case.
Maybe also try Fernando Borretti's flashcard app I saw (and dismissed) recently here
Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
61–70 of 263 posts
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#62I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on.
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#63At a fundamental level the algorithms predict the probability of a learner to correctly recollect a factoid at a given point in time given a history of sampling that recollection / presentation. It would be interesting to have machine learning predict these probability evolutions instead. Simply recollecting tangential knowledge improves the recollection of a non-sampled factoid, which is hard to model in a strict se…
Isn't FSRS (the new algorithm used in Anki since a few years ago) already based on machine learning?
Too old school and too effective.
FSRS just works, even without a GPU so it's not the cool kind of AI / machine learning these days.
No joke though: the FSRS model is marvelous, and Anki remains one of the best free + open source implementations around.
I've been learning German recently and Anki (in FSRS mode) is one of the most important learning tools I have. No joke.
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Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.
There is furthermore the machine learning / stochastic descent algorithm to better fit the assumed forgetting curves to your historical performance. This is the FSRS Optimize parameters button in the settings panel.
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be true, but as someone who picked up Anki as a desktop app back around 2009 it feels a little crazy. I also can’t imagine making cards on a phone, given how much switching between apps/windows is involved and how poor mobile platforms are at multitasking. It’s difficult to envision it being anything but maddening.
Desktop for creating cards, mobile for reviewing them.
I prefer a laptop for reviewing because it’s still portable, but also more amenable to comfort for longer sessions and makes spot corrections easier.
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#65Possible alternative to check out (not affiliated): https://mochi.cards/
Mochi has really come a long way and has some wonderful built-in functionality. The automatic text-to-speech template options are high quality and randomize a variety of voices in each language. It's also doing some cool things with dynamic cards and LLMs.
Impressively, Mochi now offers FSRS (beta but still available in the app's main settings) and both the type of scheduler (Mochi default or FSRS) and the schedulers' settings are configurable on a deck-by-deck basis.
The developer is very responsive to folks on the forum and often quickly adds requested features.
Overall the app is well-designed and fun to use. I appreciate the swipe left/right to fail/pass cards on iOS. My one complaint is that the web clipper only works with Chrome and Firefox, but not with Safari (surprisingly). It would also be useful to have a global hotkey/palette to quick-add cards to various decks, similar to how OmniFocus lets you quickly add items to the OF Inbox.
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The (paid!) iOS client has always been a disappointment to me, and I've long been jealous of the open source Android one. I don't mind so much that it's paid, given how much use I get for the price, but it sucks knowing it sucks and not being able to help make it better.
Is it still 25$ price? Makes it impossible to recommend Anki to friends/students to "try spaced repetition".
Just have them use it on their computer or the web?
It improved my grades so much in college that I spent the 25 bucks as a broke student so I could have it on my second hand iPad. This was before AnkiDroid even existed so it's amazing the price is still the same.
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#67I love anki. But upon reading this I think it's high time I exported all my notes in simple text format, just in case. Maybe also try Fernando Borretti's flashcard app I saw (and dismissed) recently here
Anki uses a SQLite database for all its data, so it's already an open format.
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#68On the plus side, the actually good mobile Anki client, AnkiDroid, remains out of the hands of this potentially questionable new entity. (AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)
I use the official iOS client everyday. What’s wrong with it?
iOS one is fine, pretty good. I use it daily too. Ankidroid is much better, which I would attribute to being open source with lots of eyeballs on it and making improvements for the love of it.
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The (paid!) iOS client has always been a disappointment to me, and I've long been jealous of the open source Android one. I don't mind so much that it's paid, given how much use I get for the price, but it sucks knowing it sucks and not being able to help make it better.
Is it still 25$ price? Makes it impossible to recommend Anki to friends/students to "try spaced repetition".
The web client works just fine!
Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
#70I feel like there's a lot of confusion, so not sure if anyone can clear up mine, but I'm really struggling to see a significance of this.
Obviously, like all ignorant people do, I am going to oversimplify things here. But still, to me, the "platonic idea" of Anki seems a dead simple thing. All what I care about when using Anki is what's on the 2 sides of a Card, a question + answer, which can only be some visual image (possibly encoded as text, possibly just JPEG, I really don't care as long as it fits in my mobile device memory) + optional sound. That's really it. If it should be bi-directional or uni-directional card is a detail of how the deck is generated/encoded, and the spaced repetition algorithm is a detail of the app that I use to study (so, usually AnkiDroid, I imagine — an unaffiliated 3rd party; who even uses desktop apps nowadays?).
So, I imagine there can exist (and do exist) some minor additional features, like an ability to require a typed answer for a card, but it seems pretty minor, and I really don't see a lot of room for the app to evolve.
So, ultimately people need only a common .apkg format, which exists and is relatively simple (although I suppose it could've been even simplier), and a place like AnkiWeb, where people can share their decks, so Spanish top-2000 or basic integrals deck isn't re-invented over and over again. It's a pity that AnkiWeb isn't more open and will be even less open from now on, but as long as someone is willing to just host it (which is ultimately just paying for downloads traffic) it's easy to replicate, so no super-valuable IP here.
Of course, a primary use-case for Anki is a tool to make decks, but you could really do with pretty simple python script + YAML/JSON/CSV/whatever metadata file to convert it to AnkiDroid-compatible .apkg file.
So, basically, who cares? What is to "own" there?