I think people underrate the utility of a premade deck when constructed well and used appropriately.
A use case I've found is if you can find a deck that corresponds to a book you're reading.
I found a deck for the Rust book and it's structured such that you can see cards about things in the order you read about them. You simply read the book as usual, learning from your reading and entering code into a terminal as instructed, and then test you understanding with the cards.
When you end up reviewing older cards, you end up getting the benefits of putting them in long term memory but you also get the opportunity to make more connections as you revisit concepts which has its own benefits for deepening understanding.
I've found this makes reading the book 10x more effective. I get so much more out of it.
This all depends on having a source from which you're learning and the deck is just for testing understanding.
But yes anytime you're using Anki to learn/understand instead of to remember, you're likely misusing it. Anki is a tool for memory.
The older one was the original and whoever created it did most of the work and should be blessed by the heavens.
The newer one took the older one, and replaced the screenshots of code with markdown equivalents so they could be rendered by Anki while saving memory. You can see this in the difference in the number of images between the two decks. This is the one I'd download and use.
I love Andy Matuschak! His podcast with Dwarkesh was so enlightening and his blog is great as well. He's one of those people whose work I go back and read every couple of months and I always learn something new
A use case I've found is if you can find a deck that corresponds to a book you're reading.
I found a deck for the Rust book and it's structured such that you can see cards about things in the order you read about them. You simply read the book as usual, learning from your reading and entering code into a terminal as instructed, and then test you understanding with the cards.
When you end up reviewing older cards, you end up getting the benefits of putting them in long term memory but you also get the opportunity to make more connections as you revisit concepts which has its own benefits for deepening understanding.
I've found this makes reading the book 10x more effective. I get so much more out of it.
This all depends on having a source from which you're learning and the deck is just for testing understanding.
But yes anytime you're using Anki to learn/understand instead of to remember, you're likely misusing it. Anki is a tool for memory.