• 26 Posts
  • 96 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2021

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  • Thanks for sharing your method.

    As to your take on Anki, I think it’s fair and accurate. I agree with you in that the learning curve is not in the features or the interface, but as you said: in the pacing. I really hope I can try to space the cards as much as possible, so that a regular practice doesn’t become burdensome.


  • I’m generally skeptical of comments on the internet, so almost every time I have read comments like this one that you’re reading right now, I’ve been like “yeah right”. Kinda like how “lol” means “laughing out loud” but when you read it online you don’t really expect whoever wrote “lol” to have laughed out loud? Anyway, I was drinking coffee, I read your comment, I snorted in laughter, and now my white shirt is full of coffee.

    I guess I’m also kinda mad at myself for laughing so hard at such a silly joke. Regardless, have an updoot 👍




  • I agree that economics has serious problems that can leave it looking like a shriveled science not worthy of the title “science”. There is a reason for this. Economics has been undermined for more than a hundred years.

    When capitalism was born, classical economics had the goal of describing and understanding these new dynamics. It sought to answer questions such as how prices are determined or how labor dynamics affected profits, to name a few. It came up with answers through observation, statistical modeling, and what we would call today the scientific process.

    It was later, in the late eighteenth century, that economics shriveled as a science and bloomed as an ideological and political tool. Many of the classical observations —such as how pricing is set by firms, how costs change through time, or how labor affects the production process— were scrapped. This new perspective didn’t see the market as turbulent, war-like, and aggressively cost-cutting. Rather, it portrayed the market as a perfectly lubricated machine that optimally distributes resources, maximizing personal utility as well as social utility.

    This perfect machine was not science, but a political tool so that classical economists wouldn’t dare being critical of market economies. Even more so, this perfect machine was built so that politicians would not dare interrupt the motions of the machine.

    If you’re interested in learning how this perfect machine was built and how classical economics sees the world, you can check out Anwar Shaikh.







  • Ah, I see how my wording was confusing. I mean planning in the sense of “How will we complete the work that we already committed to?” and “What will we do today to achieve our Sprint goal?”

    I arrived at the word planning because Scrum is sometimes described as a planning-planning-feedback-feedback cycle. You plan the Sprint, you plan daily (Daily Scrums), you get feedback on your work (Sprint Review), and you get feedback on your process (Sprint Retrospective).


  • My brother has a Framework 13 and mainly uses a combination of NixOS and Windows. Most of the time he uses NixOS, but sometimes the software he needs is broken on Nix. When that happens, he reverts to a previous version of Nix or he boots onto Windows. He has Windows installed in one of the external-drive socket thingies that he keeps plugged in at all times in case he needs Windows.

    Apart from the occasional broken Nix package, he has had issues with the hyper-sensitive two-finger scrolling in Gnome (which I would say is not directly a Framework or Nix problem). Also, a while back, when I bought the computer with him, we bought Oloy RAM because it was fast and cheap, but that lead to weird crashes. Framework support helped us test the sticks and eventually we sold those sticks and got the Framework-tested Crucial sticks, which solved the problem. Finally, I remember he had to be careful about not just closing the laptop but actually clicking “sleep” and then closing it, because otherwise it would get super hot and lose a lot of battery.

    Despite these struggles, he recently told my Mac-loving girlfriend that he will not get a “disposable” computer. I take this to mean he will keep using his Framework laptop.



  • Professionals have large networks of neurons. They are sturdy and efficient from repeated use. Memory palaces help to start the construction of these large networks of neurons. Afterwards, as another commenter noted, the knowledge is deeply processed. Mnemonics are replaced by networks of meaning. It is no longer “This algorithm rhymes with tomato”, but “This algorithm is faster if the data is stored in faster hardware, but our equipment is old so we better use this other algorithm for now”.

    Broadly, the progression of learning is: superficial learning, deep learning, and transfer. Check out Visible Learning: The Sequel by John Hattie for more on this.

    Edit: To directly answer your question, experts have so many sturdy neural hooks on which to hang new knowledge that mnemonics become less and less necessary. Mnemonics may be particularly helpful when first learning something challenging, but are less necessary as people learn.

    You could also check out a paradox called the expert paradox. We used to think memory is boxes that get filled. This idea was directly challenged by Craik and Lockhart’s Levels of Processing. Levels of processing supports the idea that “the more you know, the faster you learn”. Note that this is domain-specific. In other words, an expert in dog training won’t learn quantum mechanics faster than anyone else.




  • How do you choose what facts matter? How do you choose how to communicate them? Who do you communicate them to? What does news reporting mean to you? What about news reporting makes it worth your precious time alive? What purpose do the people around you have when they amplify, ignore, or quiet your facts? These are all questions that are answered, explicitly or not, by everyone who communicates or relates to facts.

    We could play the impossible “no agenda” game. We could lie to ourselves and to others. Or, we could notice that whenever we are dealing with the truth, we have a point of view. We stand here and not there. We can learn to travel around the mountain of truth, so that we mitigate our blindspots. We can be explicit about where in the mountain we are standing (The north base? The vegetated slope? The summit?).

    Instead of playing the “god trick”, we can situate our knowledge. That’s the best we can do. Check out this article by Donna Haraway on situated knowledge. It changed my life. https://philpapers.org/archive/harskt.pdf