bokenator (u/bokenator)

bokenator commented on I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead miguelconner.substack.com... · Posted by u/dothereading

treetalker · 17 days ago

Somewhat related: you might dig Andy Matuschak's Quantum Country project, which aims to incorporate a text's flash cards inside the text itself.

https://quantum.country/

Later edit: I should have said "Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielson's".

bokenator · 17 days ago

Wow, I've been looking for this. Thanks for sharing!

bokenator commented on I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead miguelconner.substack.com... · Posted by u/dothereading

sn9 · 17 days ago

When anyone mentions the Rust book, they're talking about the recommended place to start in the Rust community: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

To find a shared deck, I usually go here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks

Search for "rust".

You'll find two decks with 550-560 cards.

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.

bokenator · 17 days ago

Thanks a lot!

bokenator commented on I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead miguelconner.substack.com... · Posted by u/dothereading

sn9 · 17 days ago

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.

bokenator · 17 days ago

That sounds like an awesome experience. Can you please share the links to the deck and the book?

bokenator commented on How to Bring Back Oddly Shaped App Icons in macOS 26 Tahoe simonbs.dev/posts/how-to-... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

wkat4242 · 3 months ago

I left macOS a few years ago but I had many apps that had such icons. Like cyberduck, little snitch etc.

But I left macOS because of the ever worsening lockdown, Apple constantly messing with the design without a way back and the move towards iOSisms. I'm glad I left when I see the sorry state it is in now.

I use KDE now which gives me a world of customisation options. I don't even have to use the themes or plugins to make it work the way I want to, which is quite different from the default.

bokenator · 3 months ago

Me too. And KDE connect really does an awesome job of creating an integrated multi device experience.

bokenator commented on Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B upstartsmedia.com/p/scoop... · Posted by u/ko_pivot

rogermavis · 4 months ago

It provides central place to store and query data. A big org might have a few hundred databases for various purposes - databricks lets data engineers set up pipelines to ETL that data into databricks and when the data is there it can be queried (using spark, so there's some downsides - namely a more restrictive SQL variant - but some advantages - better performance across very large datasets).

Personally, I hated databricks, it caused endless pain. Our org has less than 10TB of data and so it's overkill. Good ol' Postgres or SQL Server does just fine on tables of a few hundred GB, and bigquery chomps up 1TB+ without breaking a sweat.

Everything in databricks - everything - is clunky and slow. Booting up clusters can take 15 minutes whereas something like bigquery is essentially on-demand and instant. Data ETL'd into databricks usually differs slightly from its original source in subtle but annoying ways. Your IDE (which looks like jupyter notebook, but is not) absolutely suck (limited/unfamiliar keyboard shortcuts, flakey, can only be edited in browser), and you're out of luck if you want to use your favorite IDE, vim etc.

Almost every databricks feature makes huge concessions on the functionality you'd get if you just used that feature outside of databricks. For example databricks has it's own git-like functionality (which is the 5% of git that gets most used, but no way to do the less common git operations).

My personal take is databricks is fine for users who'd otherwise use their laptop's computer/memory - this gets them an environment where they can access much more, at about 10x the cost of what you'd pay for the underlying infra if you just set it up yourself. Ironically, all the databricks-specific cruft (config files, click ops) that's required to get going will probably be difficult for that kind of user anyway, so it negates its value.

For more advanced users (i.e. those that know how to start an ec2 or anything more advanced), databricks will slow you down and be endlessly frustrating. It will basically 2-10x the time it takes to do anything, and sap the joy out of it. I almost quit my job of 12 years because the org moved to databricks. I got permission to use better, faster, cheaper, less clunky, open-source tooling, so I stayed.

bokenator · 4 months ago

Which open source option did you end up going with? I'm in the same boat and would like to evaluate my options.

bokenator commented on Probability-generating functions entropicthoughts.com/prob... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

schmidtleonard · 10 months ago

But I'd rather assume the variables are independent and then blame statistics when I get the wrong answer!

bokenator · 10 months ago

This is a good place to use cumulants. Instead of working with joint characteristic functions, which gets messy, it lets you isolate the effects of correlation into a separate term. The only limitation is that this doesn't work if the moment doesn't exist.

bokenator commented on Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves strflow.app... · Posted by u/eguchi1904

dewey · a year ago

This somehow seems to be a solution in search of a problem. The reason people use self texting is that they _don't_ want to use another app. Not because the existing apps are somehow missing features.

> I often defaulted to dumping notes into chat apps like Slack or iMessage

What makes you think people think differently about this app?

If people wanted all these features they would already all be covered by Apple Notes (Including the quick note feature, included in the OS when you mouse into the bottom right corner of your screen) but for free, encrypted and synced to all devices.

bokenator · a year ago

I've also tried out a few solutions for this problem, but I inevitably went back to use slack or signal. The reason is that these messenger apps are just always open and it's far easier to paste stuff into it than opening an app dedicated to this purpose.