While I do like Plato, it's got a lot of bugs and design issues... It can't handle epubs without chapters/really large chapters, it is noticeably worse on battery life than KOreader or the stock firmware, the amount of time taken to load the dictionary is proportional to the number of dictionaries, etc.
Have you verified that these "academic bureaucracy roadblocks" exist? Surprisingly, I was able to pick my studies back up after almost 20 years, and not only were all of my existing credits counted, but they also exempted me from new requirements that had been added in the subsequent 20 years.
When I was last working in Chile on a SaaS product for use in Chile, we deployed everything to US-EAST. We still had local CDN caching, but it is always nice to be closer to your hardware. I can't tell from the article what types of datacenters these are, but if these are new Azure and Google Cloud availability zones, this will be a great for latency.
I don't know that that will happen- not even Windows is as smooth as MacOS. But that's because Microsoft and Linux developers are tackling a more difficult problem- getting an OS to work with effectively infinite hardware permutations. Apple has given themselves an easier problem to solve, with just a handful of hardware SKUs and a few external busses.
That said, Android is pretty stable, because a given Android distro typically only targets a small hardware subset. But I don't think that's the kind of Linux distro that most people contributing to FOSS want to work on.
Apple has also yanked backwards compatibility a few times. I bet Microsoft would love to trash a few legacy API decisions from decades ago.
That being said, I still think Microsoft should have developed a seamless virtualization layer by now. Programs prior to X year are run in a microVM/WINE-like environment. Some escape hatch to kill off some cruft.
I'd be curious to understand their rationale for not making a small, reasonably priced phone like the iPhone SE used to be. I probably will be leaving the iPhone ecosystem the next time I have to buy a smartphone (even though I use a Mac, iPad, and Airpods, which all work together really well) because I'm uninterested in using a large phone.
Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?
Phones are used to consume content. Bigger screens make consuming content better. Therefore smaller screens do not sell well.
The sales back up my statements.
Yes I romanticize about an iPhone 17 mini pro but in the end I like being able to watch some downloaded content on a plane without having to bring an iPad from time to time and I'm not going to do that on a tiny screen.
I feel like the sales data would back you up, if it wasn’t for the fact that the 12 and 13 mini were larger than the iPhone 6 and 6S which for many people was too large.
It’s a bit like selling increasingly carbonated water and then selling slightly less carbonated water and pretending that it was still water that you were selling- and using the data (of nobody buying it) to tell everyone that “nobody likes the still water; so we will continue only selling carbonated and carbonated+.”
> if it wasn’t for the fact that the 12 and 13 mini were larger than the iPhone 6 and 6S which for many people was too large.
I don't get why people make statements like this.
6: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .27 (D)
6s: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .28 (D)
13 mini: 2.53 (W) x 5.14 (H) x 0.30 (D)
The only dimension in which the mini was larger than the 6 or 6s was in depth, and that was just barely. It was smaller otherwise.
It did have a larger display, but it fit it into a smaller device.
----
All iPhones before the iPhone 6 were smaller than the 12 and 13 minis. The 1st gen SE was smaller. Everything from 6 on, including the 2nd and 3rd gen SEs, have been larger, though barely for the SEs. The downside to the SEs compared to the minis was that they have smaller displays than the minis.
I literally laid them on top of each other and the 6 was marginally larger.
Betrays the point anyway: the ideal size was the 5 and it was nowhere near that, even by your official numbers (which I would guess are excluding the rounded edges maybe? - regardless, not the point)
Apologies, what I meant was "larger than an iPhone 5/5s";
I provided pictures in a sibling comment thread to show what I mean, there's about 20% of a difference between the iPhone 5 and 6, and that size difference is very similar for the mini.
If people wanted to buy a phone that was the size of the 6, they would have purchased the SE from 2020, which was that roughly that size.
The SE didn't sell well. They want people who not only buy the phone but also buy content through the App Store and through the media services like Apple TV/music.
It's my thinking too but Android phones are just as big so I really don't know where to go when I won't be able to fix my iphone SE 2016... Maybe a 13 mini...
The point of the SE line was never to provide a small phone, it was to provide a cheap phone. The first SE reused their manufacturing process from the 5/5s, and the later SEs used the chassis they were using from the 6 to the 8.
You won’t find anything smaller in the android ecosystem without sacrificing security. The smallest android phones with good security are the same size as the base iPhone model.
I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary terms, symbols, etc is useless. However, once I am introduced to a concept for the first time, then I add it to my Anki deck so I can make sure I remember it. The key is the context, and writing terms / definitions etc that speak specifically to me. I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.
I haven't used Anki for language learning, but I imagine that if I did, it would be to add some new vocabulary I had just learned from a book, conversation, film, etc. I don't think it would help me learn a language from zero though- that would require practicing it.
In summary, Anki is great for reinforcing something you've just learned, but you can't reinforce your way into the context that is necessary to truly understand something.
Using someone elses deck is such a siren song, and I honestly believe it's detrimental to properly using Anki. Making and curating your own cards is an essential step in learning the new concepts.
Yes, thou the main problem stated in the article ("memorizing the rectangles") is very real.
Now, I don't think you need much magic / LLM stuff to overcome that problem:
1. Instead of the usual "1 new word, 1 card" have 2 - 3 new words on each card, and have each new word in 3 - 4 different cards (ideally with different inflection, meaning, nuance, etc)
2. Review cards fast and very few times each. Like 5 - 8 times / card (max) instead of usual 15 - 20.
3. Don't punish yourself, keep moving on even if you just half-remember. First familiarize and then internalize language patterns instead of just memorize words.
Review intentionally, totally concentrated on the task. 10 mins / day well done >>> 30 mins / day mindlessly.
Outcome: more fun, more effective learning, no memorizing rectangles.
Forty years ago, my French teacher said the easiest way to learn a language is to go live there for a few months. He didn't mention the boy/girlfriend part.
Yeah. Anki (and flashcards in general) are great for helping you remember something _you_ learned (from a book, video, class, etc.). Not for transferring knowledge someone else learned.
Writing my own cards as I'm learning is the only way I've found it effective.
First learn the material. Then use SRS to schedule the practice of effortfully recalling the material just before you would have forgotten it.
I think too many people use SRS to learn the material instead.
As I recall, the creator of Supermemo had a list of 20 suggestions or so, in which he urged people to first comprehend the information; then to learn it; then to memorize it; and then to rehearse it (SRS) so as not to forget it.
So I definitely agree that this is 100% the best way to use Anki, that's why I wrote the line about "Writing cards that trigger memories of experiences I had in the real world always produced better cards."
I couldn't give you a percentage, but I made most of my own cards, including all of those 2000+ kanji cards. There's lots of debate in the language learning community about vocab cards or sentence cards, and generally the ideal is the sentence cards, as it provides the context that helps you use is naturally (as opposed to literal translations from your native language).
> I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.
I agree that sentences are generally superior to vocab. Vocab cards are extremely problematic once you go beyond beginner level, because words can (and often do) have multiple translations in both directions. This could be because there are multiple words meaning the same thing, or because a word has multiple meanings.
For example if the English prompt is "watermelon" - are you supposed to recall the Italian word cocomero, anguria, or melone d'aqua (all of which mean watermelon)? If the English prompt is "bank" - is that a place you deposit money, a river bank, to bank (turn) a plane, or to bank (count) on something happening? You end up having to build in messy hacks like giving clues in the prompt as to which translation is intended (which means you memorise the clue instead of the word) or having cards for bank(1), bank(2), bank(3), and bank(4) which becomes very tedious for recall. Sentences mitigate these problems somewhat.
I now only use vocab cards for object nouns where there's only one important translation, and mainly because I can put pictures on these cards so that I'm learning from e.g. the concept of an orange instead of the English word for orange (which saves you the step of mentally translating when you aren't yet fluent with the word).
I'm so tempted to try improving my language skills with Anki, both for my native language and my daily use language. But the commitment feels so daunting- I've barely missed a day in my reviews for the last two years, and only have 28,000 reviews total. I'm very impressed by your 98,000!
I guess the best way to start is just to create a new deck in it with one card and then go from there. I already have a daily review habit, which is the most important part.
Yeah I was definitely doing too many for it to be fun.
I think that when you have a really high level, Anki is actually even better than when you are at a lower level, because you already have the intuition for the language in general and you are just adding one small component. At lower levels you are making more assumptions about how the word will be used and that can lead you astray.
I can't agree with this when it comes to language learning specifically. I've used all sorts of tools to learn the language of my in-law side of the family: books, audio lessons, videos, tutoring, apps, etc. I've never made as much progress as I have with Anki. My language skills have improved in leaps and bounds so much with Anki that I now rarely bother with anything else, other than for sentence mining to create more Anki cards (e.g. from grammar books or apps) or just for a bit of variety to make the process more enjoyable. I actually find classes/tutoring (traditionally seen as the "best" method) frustrating because of how slowly I learn with them compared to Anki. In a 1 hour lesson we might cover a handful of concepts and words/phrases that I will almost certainly have forgotten most of by the time the next lesson comes around. In that same hour I can create and review a ton of Anki cards and I'll remember most of them.
With tools like Google and Microsoft's neural TTS and Anki's AwesomeTTS add-on my cards have audio that is so realistic that I am also constantly exposed to near-native listening. I do 3-way cards (Writing only -> English, Audio only -> English, and English -> Other language) so I'm actually getting a reasonable simulation of real life practice (reading, listening, speaking) on an individual sentence basis. My process is: (1) find a high quality sentence from a book / app / website / ChatGPT (with verification from a native speaker); preferably one that is fairly simple apart from a single word or verb conjugation that I haven't learned yet, in keeping with the i+1 rule, (2) create an Anki card for that sentence using my own custom note templates, (3) add audio with AwesomeTTS. Creating a card like this takes me perhaps 10-20 seconds as its mostly just copy-pasting and clicking a few buttons.
Of course to become truly fluent you need practice. But when I practice I'm already able to follow the gist of conversations and I can stumble my way through speaking in most situations: I've got a huge head start thanks to all the latent vocabulary and grammar that my brain knows thanks to Anki, instead of having to constantly look blankly at the other person while I pull out Google Translate.
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
What language / framework are you using? I ask because in a Node / Typescript / React project I experience the opposite- Claude 3.7 usually solves my query on the first try, and seems to understand the project's context, ie the file structure, packages, coding guidelines, tests, etc, while Gemini 2.5 seems to install packages willy-nilly, duplicate existing tests, create duplicate components, etc.
Interesting... I asked o3 for help writing a flake so I could install the latest Webstorm on NixOS (since the one in the package repo is several months old), and it looks like it actually spun up a NixOS VM, downloaded the Webstorm package, wrote the Flake, calculated the SHA hash that NixOS needs, and wrote a test suite. The test suite indicates that it even did GUI testing- not sure whether that is a hallucination or not though. Nevertheless, it one-shotted the installation instructions for me, and I don't see how it could have calculated the package hash without downloading, so I think this indicates some very interesting new capabilities. Highly impressive.
Are you sure about all of this? You acknowledged it might be a hallucination, but you seem to mostly believe it? o3 doesn't have the ability to spin up a VM.
Thats so different from my experience. I tried to have it switch a flake for a yarn package that works to npm and after 3 tries with all the hints I could give it it couldn’t do it
I find that so incredibly unlikely. Granted I haven't been keeping up to date with the latest LLM developments - but has there even been any actual confirmation from OpenAI that these models have the ability to do such things in the background?
If it can write a nixos flake it's significantly smarter than the average programmer. Certainly smarter than me, one-shotting a flake is not something I'll ever be able to do — usually takes me about thirty shots and a few minutes to cool off from how mad I am at whoever designed this fucking idiotic language. That's awesome.
I use flakes a lot and I think both flakes and the Nix language are beyond comprehension. Try searching duckduckgo or google for “what is nix flakes” or “nix flake schema” and take an honest read at the results. Insanely complicated and confusing answers, multiple different seemingly-canonical sources of information. Then go look at some flakes for common projects; the almost necessary usage of things like flake-compat and flake-util, the many-valid-approaches to devshell and package definitions, the concepts of “apps” in addition to packages. All very complicated and crazy!
Thank you for your service, I use your work with great anger (check my github I really do!)
I forgive you as I hope you forgive me. Flakes are certainly much better than Nix without them, and they’ve saved me much more time than they’ve cost me.
No worries I also have to say I haven't had me morning coffee when I was writing my comment and maybe reacted overly emotionally. To me prioritizing Flakes being succinct was a priority.
FWIW, they said the language was bad, not specifically flakes.
IMHO, nix is super easy if you already know Haskell (possibly others in that family). If you don't, it's extremely unintuitive.
I mean, a smart programmer still has to learn what NixOs and Flakes are, and based on your description and some cursory searching, a smart programmer would just go do literally anything else. Perfect thing to delegate to a machine that doesn't have to worry about motivation.
Will be interesting to see what this looks like in the cooler seasons. Temuco and Santiago especially are in bowls, and with lots of diesel vehicles and woodburning stoves, these cities are very smoggy in the winter.
All West Coast states have free healthcare (medicaid) available if your income is below a certain threshold. And there is no time limit on that. It won’t help with rent, but at least these folks won’t be completely without healthcare access.
There's pretty much no way they'd qualify for Medicaid if they were a dev at Dropbox. The income limit for Medi-Cal is $20,783 for a single adult, $28,208 for a household of two adults. Chances are they were past that income limit the first few months of the year. You don't just immediately qualify after making $140k annualized for the first 10 months and then hit $0 one day.
Plus, they're getting 16 weeks of salary. At $140k/yr, that's $2,692/wk. Lets say their severance starts next week. There's 8 weeks left in the year. So they'll get 8 weeks of pay in 2025. $2,692 * 8 = $21,538. So no, they won't qualify for Medicaid at all in 2025 if they make that much as a single person.
True but even making $140k/year does qualify you for tax credits on ACA marketplace health insurance plans. COBRA is kind of obsolete, honestly. You should be switching over to a insurance plan purchased through your state's health insurance marketplace.
Totally agree there. Chances are they'll be better served with a marketplace plan unless they've got a complicated health situation/very specific care that might be questionablly covered without thoroughly shopping around.
I'm just pushing back at the idea someone can go from making six figures and turn around and hop on Medicaid. It's not that simple. It should be IMO, but it isn't.
Even if one does qualify for those programs, the sign-up time is on the order of almost a year here in California. Applications are Supposed To Be™ reviewed within 45 days, which is already a long wait, but they are using the new normal “due to higher than usual volume, fuck you” approach just like every other modern bureaucracy.
Expenses incurred during the coverage gap need additional approval for retroactive repayment, meaning you have to have the funds to pay upfront for however many months/years the sign-up process takes, then once your coverage starts you have to apply/wait/hope to be paid back for everything paid out-of-pocket which might just get denied: https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/formsandpubs/forms/Forms/mc210a0907....
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