Augmenting long-term memory (2018)

Anki is great. I am gigging asking 33,000 cards among all of my decks right now, with about 6000 in active rotation. I built what one person called the highest quality Finnish flashcard deck on the Internet, and it was the project that finally convinced me that software was my calling.

Some very scattershot hacker's notes.

- The underlying Anki database is "just" an SQLite database. You can copy it, run Datasette on it, turn on full text search, stream it with Litestream, the works. Anki itself can be very poorly described as a tiny local only web browser-server chimera running one cronjob per entry in this database, written in Rust and JS, which is just phenomenally weird and cool.

- Image Occlusion Enhanced is S-tier. If you don't believe me, use it to memorize the names and locations on the map of your 5 closest restaurants.

- If you can turn it into a CSV, you can import it into Anki, no questions asked. This is the bottom floor for automating Anki stuff.

- If you have what you want to memorize in an HTML table, take a look at running my table2anki (https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/table2anki) or writing your own scraper for it. This isn't useful as often as you would think, but sometimes you see a blob of information already ready to go and just want to dive in.

- Don't obsess about the "20 rules of formulating knowledge", or anyone else's way for that matter. They're helpful, but you know what's more helpful? Actually using Anki every day and figuring out for yourself which cards are helpful and which aren't through ruthless practice.

- Once you get good enough at making cards, IME it can basically replace having Obsidian or whatever for taking notes. I have somewhere around 30 books' worth of notes in Anki, and I attribute probably 20% of my overall career's success so far to them, whereas I'd probably attribute like 5% to traditional notes, because I would never actually review them of my own accord if I did that. If those both sound low, I consider the top ten EE and math degree I got to hover around 10%.

- Making time for Anki is the most annoying part of it. Sucking on a nicotine lozenge while doing reviews helps a lot with habit formation once you have crested the difficulty curve of making cards that are actually interesting and helpful to you personally, but you have to make sure to take the lozenge out or chew it up and swallow it the instant you're done. Pavlov knew what he was doing!

- Anki + LISS cardio is a similar match made in heaven. The hardest part is figuring out how to get a screen in a comfortable position for you to watch while you review. Anki actually has a "Controller Mode"you can rig up to help a lot with this.

- This is extremely niche, but: Having trouble remembering a step in a math problem? Do the work out on paper. Take a photo. Image Occlude just the step you're blanking on. Review this regularly. Boom - instant, targeted, low effort high reward deliberate practice in mathematics, tuned to what your own brain reports it is having trouble on.

And some things I have studied successfully with Anki:

- Language acquisition, natch. Many of my software side projects are related to lowering the activation energy of this for myself.

- Abstract algebra theorems and derivations. I ended up getting a perfect score on my final exam and walking out after 20 minutes in college because of this, up from a C- on the midterm.

- Haskell! I made 3 separate attempts in my life to learn Haskell, but only when I committed from the beginning to put every weird symbol and linguistic turn into Anki did it actually stick. I actually get monads now!

- LeetCode problems. Might be the highest ROI 2 week vacation of my life, considering I went from no DSA knowledge whatsoever to having the whole Grind 75 on mental tap. I did the dumbest thing that could possibly work - problem on one side with a link, open the link -> resolve the problem -> mark Good if successful.

It definitely is! It's unfortunate that what seems to have developed to be the consensus view on SRS within most language learning/high-load traditional academic circles (>90% of the userbase, I'd imagine) that it is, at best, a very useful but unfortunate inevitability, or at worse a torturous and exhausting experience. That obviously doesn't apply to everyone; factors like card design, course content/interest (the passion element which Nielsen rightly identifies as integral) and good old mindset and habituation all vary within those communities and beyond; but I think it is fair to say it's the majority opinion, particularly for those just starting to use the software. Some of that difficulty can be overcome by being patient with the obtuseness I think, but at the end of the day it helps to at least somewhat enjoy what you're studying! Anki can help you love a subject you like, but it usually can't help you like one you hate.

Is repetition necessary for memorization? Why are some memories maintained without repetition?

I put an href on the front side of the card to the problem, and most of the time actually clicked through and redid the problem from scratch (making sure to avert my eyes while I deleted LC's copy of my last attempt). If I felt particularly lazy or confident, I would just mentally sketch out the solution.

Worth noting I also became much more adept at things like list comprehensions and using Counters and DefaultDicts in Python this way. When you type out a solution over and over like that, your brain naturally wants to chunk things down as much as possible.

> Why are some memories maintained without repetition?

They aren't. It's just that the repetition might not come from the outside but from within. Or just by way of daily exposure to something. Or by trauma (which you probably want to avoid of course).

But generally speaking, if there is no repetition at the neural level, you will forget a memory.

A lot of that also happens during sleep. E.g. if you go through something again in a dream, this also counts as a repetition.