> Also some people just find it fun to go through their Anki deck instead of doomscrolling while on the subway or waiting in line. Whether there's any real benefit for that person is debatable. It's “fun“ in the same way going to the gym, or drinking kale smoothie is fun.
I'm probably one of those people, but commuting is one of those examples where you have a small (hopefully) amount of relatively low value time, time that is somewhat interrupted. What else of value would you do in it? Maybe listen to a podcast, catch up on blogs. All fine, reasonable choices, but doing a bit of Anki is a reasonable alternative.
Only time I feel like I've wasted those periods is when I end up wasting it (just scrolling through social media or random videos). Anything else is I think a reasonable choice.
I haven't found that at all. I'm well past my twenties but find Anki is one of the things I can fit in, mainly because even with kids and responsibilities you can often find small periods (say 15 mins) of time through the day. It's not enough time to sit down and start into something really complex, especially as the time is sometimes interrupted, but it is enough time to try a few questions.
> If an approach is so boring that you don't do it, then what does it matter how effective it might be?
Yeah true, but an obvious argument is that this is where discipline comes in. If you are one of the people Anki works for, then you have to find the level of discipline required to stick with it.
> Spaced repetition is not meant for conceptual things or skills. It's meant for facts.
> It has little to no relevance in math, physics, and engineering.
That's one bit I disagree with. Engineering is full of facts/concepts, things you often need to know inherently to be able to apply them, or even to know to google them at the right time. So I think SRS can apply there too.
it's doable I guess. I think it's more productive to learn a concept and be able to derive everything about the concept from first principles instead though
Obviously depends on your memory. I found that in the past I read voraciously, and spend a lot of time tinkering. Which was good and fun but I sometimes found I'd forgotten the stuff by the time it would have been useful, particularly when learning about topics I wasn't using day by day. Anki an SRS partially solves that.
It's a trade-off though, I now read less and tinker less. Do I regret that, you bet. But still Anki/SRS works for me, especially because I often do it at times when I wouldn't be able to effectively read/tinker (perhaps tired, or getting kids to sleep). That's a long way of saying, do what's effective for you, but there's no point of being so dismissive of what others are doing.
> Aristotle, Leibniz, Einstein or whatever brilliant person you can think of didn't become who they are using cue-cards.
Indeed, but I think that being relevant assumes that people using these techniques believe it will somehow make them brilliant/geniuses.
> Spaced repetition always seemed like those schemes to get you fit or slim in 30 days that never work.
I'm not arguing for spaced repetition, but the whole point is you do some amount every day (or as needed) for the rest of your life (within reason). So it's not equivalent to get fit/slim quick at all, it's more about disciplined improvement of yourself. If that isn't effective for you don't do it, but based on your comment it seems like you're coming at it from the wrong angle.
> I'm not arguing for spaced repetition, but the whole point is you do some amount every day (or as needed) for the rest of your life (within reason). So it's not equivalent to get fit/slim quick at all, it's more about disciplined improvement of yourself. If that isn't effective for you don't do it, but based on your comment it seems like you're coming at it from the wrong angle.
Fair enough, I haven't looked into spaced repetition deeply.
I just always got this weird vibe from people talking about it, like they think memorizing all the world capitals was a way to improve your intelligence. It's not.
Same thing with, like, "memory palace" stuff: being able to memorize a deck of cards is probably fun, and it's a nice parlor trick, but it will not help you solve real-world problems, analyze situations, make discoveries or be a better engineer. The way to do that is to just read books, study, work hard in your chosen field and keep up with the latest developments. That is the only way anyone has ever gotten good at anything.
> they think memorizing all the world capitals was a way to improve your intelligence. It's not.
It definitely is. I don't understand the disdain for facts. If, when talking about a city, I know that it's a capital city, I am smarter than I would be if I did not know, and I have a better ability to participate in the conversation. If I know a bunch of constants (in whatever trade I work in) offhand, I can quickly do calculations in my head. Does knowing how many centimeters are in an inch make me smarter? Yes, it does. There was a reason why you memorized every letter in the alphabet.
> The way to do that is to just read books, study, work hard in your chosen field
Spaced repetition is literally just a way to study. You make the cards as you read books.
> Same thing with, like, "memory palace" stuff: being able to memorize a deck of cards is probably fun, and it's a nice parlor trick, but it will not help you solve real-world problems, analyze situations, make discoveries or be a better engineer.
> The way to do that is to just read books, study, work hard in your chosen field and keep up with the latest developments.
Ahh got you. Yeah agreed on a lof of that. What I do is when I learning something that I think will be useful, but that I'll forget, I stick it in Anki.
Otherwise I know the fact will be written in the sand, it won't be there for me to use at the time when it would be useful. That's terminology from a book on memory I read a while back, which ironically I've now forgotten name of because I never put it in Anki.
Also should say I used to be much more scatter gun with what I put in Anki, but these days I combine it with Obsidian which I think is more managable.
Anyway not trying to sell Anki to anyone, if you don't need it don't use it for sure. I just know (think?) it's working for me, at least compared to the alternatives.
Surely the risk is others respond, would X/FB not be at risk of same sorts of responses from geopolitical adversaries, which given recent events might be more of the world than it was a decade ago?
Twitter and Facebook are already banned in just about every one of the U.S.’s adversaries. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea etc etc all ban them.
Your comment makes me quite alarmed, to be honest. Are people really this clueless about what goes on in the world? Do they not already know that American platforms are already banned in countries that are adversarial to the US?
The white house statement said that TikTok “should remain available to Americans, but simply under American ownership”. If other regions, such as Europe, applied that logic the outcome would be messy. Imagine applying that to X (Musk is part of government) in Europe.
The actual law says what countries cannot run a social media site in America. It doesn’t say it has to be American owned. Just not a country that we’re in a quasi-cold war with (China, Russia, Iran, NK, are the usual suspects.)
If America were a hostile nation to a European country, then said country probably would (and should, heck) ban an enemy nation from running a social media company in their borders. As it is, America is on friendly terms with “Europe” and so the worry isn’t really there.
This is why it’s important for nations to not get to the point where relations are this bad in the first place. It results in isolationism and distrust, which is a slippery slope that results in zero-sum outcomes that are worse than if we had open trade. But that ship has sailed long ago. China has openly declared itself to be in utter opposition to the US and has been engaged in grey zone warfare with us for a decade or more. The next Cold War has already begun.
You mention Europe, which is ironic: China is allied with Russia and is openly funding its invasion of Ukraine. Something the EU hasn’t really done anything to help with, because of a complete lack of resources spent on an independent military from the US’s which they have always counted on to defend them. The idea of EU states souring US relations so much that they welcome China, the very country that is funding the invasion of their continent, is utterly insane. If Germany/UK/France/etc had any kind of sense they’d ban TikTok too out of solidarity.
Also since we are mentioning Google, they had some interesting to say in one of their books [0]:
"Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)"
“It's also a company whose future could be dimmed by advances in artificial intelligence, since some of the developer skills it teaches are becoming automated.”
I don't think there is much vision or editorial control. Anyone with an idea can seemingly produce content for these platforms and it almost always falls short.
How do you position this video content versus documentation? Anecdotally, younger audiences may have a preference at times, but I think it's more about the use case and preparation. I've seen really good video content and bad. Same applies to docs, or any content.
I mean IME with Pluralsight, I fully meant what I said. Most videos barely go beyond the documentation.
I've paid for Lynda (now LinkedIn learning), Frontend Masters, Egghead, educative.io, Udacity, Laracasts, UI.dev, Safari, Ardan Labs, etc.
If you want to interview for a FAANG job, educative.io has the best content. Everything else on the site is extremely poor but hey if you need to refresh on system design or leetcode patterns no other content is as good.
I use to like Frontend Masters, but the decay rate of their courses is too high. You can take a workshop from 2 months ago but the instructor will never mention the version of the language they use and often the project files will fail to install. I absolutely do not think this is a good thing and should absolutely not be tolerated. You can blame NodeJS but it's a terrible indictment when 90% of your catalog is worthless. I've also disliked the new generation of instructors they have where it's mostly the same 3-4 people every year that always talk about the same topics. It's disappointing because this would be a service I use to recommend every frontend dev 3 years ago.
The only thing I continued to subscribe to is Safari/O'Reilly. Here you get books from all the major publishers and some decent courses as well (like Ultimate Go by Bill Kennedy); but I won't be renewing this. Books on extremely advance topics aren't released in massive amounts annually. There's like maybe one or two software books truly worth buying every year. Here's what I've bought the last 5 years (Beautiful Code, The Cathedral & the Bazaar, The Soul of a New Machine, Writing An Interpreter In Go, Game Engine Black Book, Refactoring UI).
Maybe I've progressed enough in my career that I see the best way to learn is to just read the docs ASAP then just build as many things as possible after. I truly mean build too, you can't watch someone make a project for you and copy them. You have to struggle when learning, because that's how you confirm your priors and what you actually know. There's also the benefit of just getting better at delivering software the more you make.
They've done studies about pottery classes where two groups of students were graded differently, one would be graded on the amount of pottery they make and the other would be graded on a single piece at the end of the system. The students that were graded on the amount of pottery tended to do better and make more advance things. This mimics my experience as a dev too.
I'm probably one of those people, but commuting is one of those examples where you have a small (hopefully) amount of relatively low value time, time that is somewhat interrupted. What else of value would you do in it? Maybe listen to a podcast, catch up on blogs. All fine, reasonable choices, but doing a bit of Anki is a reasonable alternative.
Only time I feel like I've wasted those periods is when I end up wasting it (just scrolling through social media or random videos). Anything else is I think a reasonable choice.