xkfm (u/xkfm) - Readit News

xkfm commented on Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel wsj.com/business/cancel-s... · Posted by u/hhs

paxys · 2 years ago

It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it's the government's fault").

This discussion is about subscriptions but the general idea applies to so much more – basic budgeting, retirement savings, not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary.

Ultimately it is your money and your problem. No one is looking out for you. You can either endlessly complain about it or build some good habits. 30 minutes of effort once a month to go over bills and budgets is hardly the end of the world.

xkfm · 2 years ago

Low conscientiousness is linked to anti-social behavior, blue-collared crimes, and crimes of passion,[3] as well as unemployment and homelessness.[19] Low conscientiousness and low agreeableness taken together are also associated with substance use disorders.[27] People low in conscientiousness have difficulty saving money and their risky borrowing practices make them fall prey to subprime and predatory lending more often than conscientious people. High conscientiousness is associated with more careful planning of shopping trips and less impulse buying of unneeded items.[19] Conscientiousness is positively correlated with business, white-collared, and premeditated criminal behavior.[28]

xkfm commented on Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel wsj.com/business/cancel-s... · Posted by u/hhs

paxys · 2 years ago

It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country (especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it's the government's fault").

This discussion is about subscriptions but the general idea applies to so much more – basic budgeting, retirement savings, not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary.

Ultimately it is your money and your problem. No one is looking out for you. You can either endlessly complain about it or build some good habits. 30 minutes of effort once a month to go over bills and budgets is hardly the end of the world.

xkfm · 2 years ago

A lot of it is genetic. Good luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness You have a lot of it, and so do the type A personality people on this site.

xkfm commented on Why don't schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals? jakeseliger.com/2024/01/1... · Posted by u/jseliger

xkfm · 2 years ago

I have found that many things are learnable, but they have to be taught in a way that you can understand. Most teachers only know one or two ways to explain something. Additionally, they just don't have the time to tailor materials to people. I get really skeptical when people say they can't learn things or have trouble with something. People start acting like you need to be a genius to understand how a comma works or know algebra. I would feel bad as a teacher if I could not explain to an 18 year old how a comma works. Its not that the student is bad, the teacher is bad.

The more time I have spent trying to teach things to people, I think its mostly a failure of the teacher to be able to explain things in a way that people can understand.

You listen to them explain what they are having trouble with, and it seems like they just had bad/incomplete information which makes the process 10x harder. Many people are only really going to learn things if you explain it in X terms, where X is something they really like and think about all the time.

Edit:

I see complaining about dumb/bad students like comedians complaining that the crowd is bad and does not like their jokes. Maybe you just need better jokes, because there are comedians that can get that crowd to laugh.

xkfm commented on Toward a more useful keyboard github.com/jasonrudolph/k... · Posted by u/quyleanh

hiatus · 3 years ago

This is incredible and something I feel I've been waiting for for a while without knowing it. I transitioned to an alternative keyboard layout (colemak) several years ago in order to alleviate some RSI in my wrists. I have a few questions if you wouldn't mind.

How long did it take you to learn this layout? Is there a sequential method to learning it, similar to using tarmak for learning colemak? A difficulty I sometimes face is using a regular qwerty layout—do you experience difficulty using a normal keyboard?

xkfm · 3 years ago

I am/was a long-time colemak user, too. Most keyboard layouts I've found I learn about 1wpm per hour of dedicated typing practice. Qwerty is really bad, but I don't have trouble typing on it, no. I can switch between layouts easily if I have to. I can type one or two more layouts around 30-50wpm as well. I don't have any difficulty using a regular keyboard no, but typing individual letters kind of feels like a scam now.

This system for the shortcuts is only a few hours. A lot of it is phonetic, and the numbers are in binary. Numpad is binary + *, and function keys are binary + r.

So if you know binary and can hold one of three extra keys, you now have three ways to do numbers and the only difference is one key.

Shift+num works for punctuation too, so you don't really need to know all the punctuation shortcuts. You just need to remember what they are on a regular keyboard and then its just sh+binary.

The other things you'd need to know are how letters work (the ones not shown), and the shortcut combinations, but there are not that many of those, and they stack on top of each other visually.

You'd just need a 10-key keyboard, or toggle plover on and off to use this dictionary.

If you mean the rest of plover/steno, its a drastically higher learning curve and is basically a hobby for me. Just being able to fingerspell (type single letters) is learning another keyboard layout. But this combines several of my interests, so its not bad for me.

Learning wise, I am a huge Supermemo fan, so I just use that to memorize/review the stuff that needs it beyond learning the theory (which I also review in Supermemo). Most people would use Anki or Mochi.

xkfm commented on Toward a more useful keyboard github.com/jasonrudolph/k... · Posted by u/quyleanh

xkfm · 3 years ago

If you are going to do all this, you might be better off getting a half of a steno keyboard, plover, and use https://github.com/Abkwreu/plover-left-hand-modifiers/blob/m.... Essentially, it allows every shortcut to be typed in two strokes/presses of keys, and using only the left hand.

I have access to/can input nearly any shortcut, punctuation, modifier, reg key, numpad, number bar, arrow keys, etc all on one hand, and the system is very easy to learn. I don't care about shortcuts anymore as they are all nearly the same difficulty to input, and I never need to move my hand to do it. This takes only a few hours to learn at most.

Hitting ctrl+t on a keyboard once is more wrist/finger movement than I normally see all day using this.

xkfm commented on Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022) reproof.app/blog/notes-ap... · Posted by u/pps

padraigf · 3 years ago

Can you give a brief description of your process?

I'm familiar with spaced-repetition, and have played around with Anki a bit.

I'm just not sure how I would integrate it into my reading.

xkfm · 3 years ago

With Supermemo, you have cards that are in your reviews but don't get graded.

https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading#Introduc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saSFZGS-uCQ& - an example of incremental reading in Supermemo.

xkfm commented on Anki and GPT-3 andrewjudson.com/spaced-r... · Posted by u/Tomte

LittleFishyChan · 3 years ago

Whoa, awesome to see a fellow SuperMemo user here! I've been going for 17 years, I absolutely can't imagine life without SuperMemo and I've stopped trying to sell my friends on it. Have you tried integrating Study Wand with SuperMemo at all? I'm always on the lookout for ways to maximize my information intake (Aside from SuperMemo, which already does a nearly perfect job at it).

xkfm · 3 years ago

Nothing automated yet, but I may plan to. I don't regularly add that many new cards to my collection to where it'd be an immediate benefit for me. I may add more with StudyWand since it seems to do a good enough job of creating cards. Incremental reading is the primary way I add new material to my collection, but I don't really fully process articles that much into items these days. Most of my SuperMemo use is using incremental reading to ensure I always have something interesting to read as well as tasklists for planning/ideas. I have a lot of stuff that I like to revisit or review, which I find using SuperMemo great for too.

xkfm commented on Anki and GPT-3 andrewjudson.com/spaced-r... · Posted by u/Tomte

james-revisoai · 3 years ago

Founder of StudyWand.com here, who received a 15k grant to develop an AI generating flashcard app in 2020 after an earlier prototype.

We've found students more consistently study ready-made cards that are at desirable difficulty (they get about 80% correct) and which are segmented by topic (e.g. semantic grouping of flashcards to tackle "one lesson at a time" like Duolingo). Students would prefer to use pre-made flashcards by other students in their class, then AI flashcards, then create and use their own.

There is limited evidence by Roediger and Karpicke who are the forefathers of retrieval practise that creating cards is also important. Frank Leeming (2002 study Exam-a-day) also showed that motivation when studying is peaked when you ask just a few questions a day, but every working day.

Now one of the vital benefits of retrieval practise with AI over creating your own cards is foresight bias - not mentioned yet in this thread - the fact that particularly in some subjects like Physics, students don't know what they don't know (watch this amazing Veritasium video, it also explains why misconceptions are so handy for learning physics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8 - basically, if you use AI quizzes (or any prepared subject-specific right/wrong system), you learn quickly where your knowledge sits and what to focus on, and reduce your exam stress. If you just sit their making quizzes, firstly you make questions on things you already know, you overestimate how much you can learn, and you consolidate on your existing strengths, and avoid identifying your own knowledge gaps until later on, which is less effective.

--

To quote from my dissertation experiment on background reading for retrieval practise, the end is about foresight bias a little: Retrieval practice – typically, quizzing - is an exceedingly effective studying mechanism (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Roediger & Butler 2011; Bae, Therriault & Redifer, 2017, see Binks 2018 for a review), although underutilized relative to recorded merit, with students vastly preferring to read content (Karpicke & Butler, 2009; Toppino and Cohen, 2009). Notably mature students do engage in practice quizzes more than younger students (Tullis & Maddox, 2020). Undertaking a Quiz (Retrieval practice) can enhance test scores significantly, including web-based quizzes (Daniel & Broida, 2017). Roediger & Karpicke (2006) analysed whether students who solely read content would score differently to students who took a practice quiz, one week after a 5-minute learning session. Students retained information to a higher level in memory after a week with the quiz (56% retained), versus without (42%), despite having read the content less (average 3.4 times) than the control, read-only group (14.2 times). Participants subjectively report preference for regular Quizzing (Leeming, 2002) over final exams, when assessed with the quiz results, with 81% and 83% of participants in two intervention classes recommending Leemings “Exam-a-day” procedure for the next semester, which runs against intuition that students might biases against more exams/quizzes (due to Test Anxiety). Retrieval Practice may increase performance via increasing cognitive load which is generally correlated with score outcomes in (multimedia) learning (Muller et al, 2008). Without adequate alternative stimuli, volume of content could influence results, thus differentiated conditions to control for this possible confound are required when exploring retrieval practice effects (as seen in Renkl 2010 and implemented in Methods). Retrieval practice in middle and high school students can reduce Test Anxiety, when operationalised by “nervousness” (Agarwal et al 2014), though presently no research appears to have analysed the influence of retrieval practice on university students’ Test Anxiety. Quizzing can alleviate foresight bias – overestimation of required studying time – in terms of students appropriately assigning a greater, more realistic study time plan (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2014). Despite the underutilization noted by Karpicke and Butler (2009), quizzing is becoming more common in burgeoning eLearning courses, supported by the research (i.e. Johnson & Johnson, 2006; Leeming, 2002; Glass et al. 2008) demonstrating efficacy in real exam performance.

xkfm · 3 years ago

I'm a long term (10 year+) user of Supermemo (and general fan of SRS stuff) and finally got around to checking out StudyWand today. This is the best experience I've had making flashcards and general study material ever. Hands down, nothing I've seen comes close.

It's wild because StudyWand took my sample notes and did everything that I would have done with them if I was going to use them to get a good grade in school. I was expecting some semi-decent cloze generated cards but got much more.

Literally, when I was in college I would take notes in class, and then spend about 20-40 minutes post class doing almost exactly what StudyWand does. The classes that I bothered doing that for, I always got a good grade in, nearly effortlessly. The hardest part was making the notes.

The part of this that I'm actually excited about is that this tool also works with any sort of documentation. For example, I can clean up any reference page from MDN as a PDF and get a usable (like actually well-made flashcards) set of 15-20 flashcards for it. Oh, you also get summaries and multiple essay questions too. The only way this would be better is if it gave you cloze deletions that were actual sample code to fill in the blank with.

I didn't really like your intro so I took a few days longer than I normally would have to look at your software (I normally check out every SRS software I see on HN). This software is insane. The value is so, so, so ridiculous. I half-hearted uploaded one poorly made PDF of a webpage and got flashcards that are comparable to what I would make as a 10+ SRS user. I almost stopped doing the initial reviews halfway through and looked for a way to pay for this.

Outside of Supermemo, this is the only other SRS software that I've seen that's worth my money. The hardest part is going to be convincing all my younger family members to actually use this. I've tried so many times to get people to use Anki (Supermemo won't happen), and they just don't get it. I think StudyWand might be able to bridge that gap. I'm going to try and see.

xkfm commented on Discuss HN: Software Careers Post ChatGPT+ · Posted by u/rich_sasha

xkfm · 3 years ago

ChatGPT feels like the current aim assist debates in a lot of FPSses to me. It'll make you better at the shooting part of the game, perfect even. But, won't necessarily make you that much of a better player, because aiming is only one aspect of what makes someone good at FPSes. However, if someone is generally good enough or very good at the "not aiming" portion of the games, then having aim assist would drastically increase their overall skill.

Also, ChatGPT doesn't really work for any UI based programs at all. For example, if you want help using Excel, you'll get a list of instructions, but nothing visual to help you out.

xkfm commented on New York could become first state with a ‘Right to Repair’ law spectrumlocalnews.com/nys... · Posted by u/jiwidi

AlmostAnyone · 3 years ago

Could you give some examples of these things, please? All waterproof hardware I have ever owned (phones, cameras, flashlights, watches, etc) doesn't have user-replaceable batteries. In all cases the batteries need to be replaced by a specialized shop and the waterproofness is tested afterwards in a special machine - and it's not always a success and the job needs to be redone.

Note that there is a significant difference between "water resistance" and "waterproofness".

xkfm · 3 years ago

Samsung Galaxy Xcover6 Pro was released in July and has a removable battery, headphone jack, and has the same IP rating as the S9

A few companies have business/military phones that still have most of the features people were used to. They are a little bigger, but you don't need a case.