Every time I open the Anki app I really don't know where to start or how to use it. There are just too many options distracting me.
It would be easier if the features were reduced & the app kept minimal. Think the apple notes app & Google keep, but for space repetition. Anki feels like Microsoft Word.
Also a sample collection of decks with something to start learning right away (just to understand how the app works) would help me alot. Maybe a language, math theorems, APL verbs etc.
Which app are you using? AnkiDroid seems fairly straightforward, at least for basic usage. There are a lot of confusing options buried in settings, but the fundamentals aren't that hard to figure out. Maybe it just needs a better on-boarding experience, like a link to the download pages for a few featured decks?
Are there any good platforms out there that people would recommend where you can have your code reviewed? Either paid for or for free.
As this article points out, feedback is an essential part of learning, and open source projects would be a great opportunity to get feedback on something you have sole agency over as opposed to many workplace projects where it's harder to receive feedback for your individual decisions.
Sadly with the limited context sizes on LLMs, you can't ingest a large project at all once to ask for feedback on the more abstract requirements of "good" software practices/design.
That is unless the context sizes have significantly changed in the past months.
Open source projects are flooded by low-quality PRs, they can't afford to give mentor-quality feedback to them. Better to join the project's chat server and have back-and-forth discussions.
20-40 books a year, keeping a page tally is important too if you really want to quantify your reading. This is all on about 30 minutes a night, with some longer spells on the weekend.
I keep a little index of the books I read every year, along with a rating, how many pages the book was and the completed date.
I wish I started writing down what I read a long time ago, I've twice recently started reading books only to realise that I had read them in years prior.
1) Unfortunately I am already squeezing as much as I can get out of the existing data. The public APIs (there's a different one for each city) don't cover all fields in the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). I would love to incorporate more data as time goes on, I hadn't thought of sources of data outside of the public transport providers themselves, weather would be a great example to extrapolate comparisons from, thank you!
2) Yeah, I must admit there is a bias at play. Obviously there are a couple of parts of the site that have a negative spin. In an ideal world, there'd be no negative spin to create!
Have you done any other form of work that you don't find so disinteresting? To be honest most office work is quite banal, coding is probably amongst the most interesting roles in the building.
> The candidate is certainly putting in more work than you are for that money, no?
No. I don't understand why they would have any claim on it. Typically when I interview, I'm looking forward to my potential salary. It wouldn't occur to me to try and take someone else's bonus.
> It’s a win-win for both parties.
It's not a win for me if I have to give away half of a bonus I earned. Or are you saying that a competitive salary isn't enough of a win for the referee?
I'm curious, how many times have you personally been involved in a transaction like this? You've given away referral bonuses? People have given their bonuses to you?
It may be relatively less common but the slow death it inflicts is highly unpleasant, especially for the people around you. I strongly prefer to die of a heart attack.
The worst part is that there isn't a well-defined point where you can say "I'd like to have a medically-assisted suicide" that isn't going to upset people (assuming it were legal). By the time you reach it, you quite possibly won't have the cognitive capacity to request it.
My dad is a good example of this. He was very adamant he wanted to die if he became debilitated by dementia. Unfortunately he ended up having three strokes in quick succession while being diagnosed for vascular dementia and is now a totally different person (with zero recollection or connection to his previous personality or memories, as far as anyone medical can tell) living a pretty miserable life in a facility with 24/7 care, zero language abilities, etc. There was no singular moment he could have made the call. He was entirely cogent one day and absolutely not the next.
I would be very happy to sign off on his wishes, but there is no legal or medical route to do so, so whatever is left of him gets to suffer until his body gives up. I support them introducing some mechanism for this one day and would likely use it myself (all my ancestors went through dementia).
I don't believe there should be a "point" where you can say that. Medically-assisted suicide should be available for everyone. Of course with a prolonged evaluation period.
I took the parent to be saying something like "even if medically assisted suicide were available as an option without restriction, there is no point at which you would decide to do it because the onset of dementia is so gradual." That is, it would be difficult to make the decision (for some/most people at least) while you were still having lucid moments where you could still have some quality of life. And by the point where you have completely lost it, you are no longer of sound mind to consent to a medically assisted suicide.
I think one way to go is to do this early, with a clear bound. For example, one might set a rule that if they can:
* no longer compute ∫x²dx
* remember the capital of France; and
* recall where they were born
Then they have crossed that threshold.
Personally, though I don't want to be killed. At least by my values, killing is not okay. I think there are much better things to do, such as:
- Being frozen in Antarctica, in case medical technology improves in a century or two to the point where I can be revived and cured.
- Go some place where I will surely die, but where I can still do some good (running a school for girls in Afghanistan when the US was there is a good example)
- If none of that is possible, do something interesting and dangerous. For example, if my brain is going anyways, experimenting with drugs and dying by drug overdose seems like a decent way to go.
And to be abundantly clear, that's my opinion and my values. I'm not trying to decide for anyone else. I don't think these sorts of decisions should ever be forced, mandated, or imposed.
Footnote: Thresholds are hard to define. I did have one relative with complete loss of short-term memory who seemed to be having a wonderful life. They were happy, friendly, and told grand kids wonderful stories from decades past. It helped that they had a very easy-going personality. On the other hand, they didn't know how they got to where they were, or what we were talking about five minutes ago. They also didn't have any recent memories (e.g. if a relative had been married within the past half-decade or so, they wouldn't recognize the spouse). There was a point where I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have passed any reasonable threshold, but they seemed to be living a very full life surrounded by a big family who loved them. On the other hand, if my brain was where their brain was, I'm pretty sure I'd be completely miserable.
> - Being frozen in Antarctica, in case medical technology improves in a century or two to the point where I can be revived and cured.
Given that cryonics is currently essentially just a scam, you might just as well. For all practical purposes, it's equivalent to killing. (Legally, you need to have just died though, in most Western countries, so I think you don't actually have this option.)
Or you meant just traveling there, going on an extended hike from which you don't return because you just purposely one day didn't get out of your tent. That's not a pleasent way to die though, and nobody is going to go there 300 years from now to unthaw you.
> - If none of that is possible, do something interesting and dangerous. For example, if my brain is going anyways, experimenting with drugs and dying by drug overdose seems like a decent way to go.
How do you know that a drug overdose is a pleasant experience? You could be hallucinating the most terrible things in the world for as it may feel like an eternity. Unless you are talking about sleep medication, but then again, just taking a bunch of sleeping pills is not different from a "classical" suicide.
The cryogenics industry is a scam, but I'm more optimistic of the progress of the potential progress of technology. I'm not going to describe what's going to happen, since I think there's an infinite number of options, but I'll give one scenario:
- Machine learning advances, and we have LLM-like/SD-like models for the human brain, which can reconstruct a plausible brain from limited data.
- DNA preserves pretty well (and again, see above for restoring from degradation).
- There is an archive of what I look and behave like
It's not beyond the realm of plausibility that in a few hundred years:
- "Frozen in Antarctica in a concrete container" will preserve enough data to reconstruct a person
- We'll have bioengineering technology to do so
- There will be enough curiosity about what people were like a millennium ago to try
Will it work? Probably not. However, it somehow moves this out of "suicide" into "morally acceptable" under my values.
> How do you know that a drug overdose is a pleasant experience?
Perhaps I'm more interested in interesting experiences than pleasant ones. Again, you're trying to map your values onto me.
How is going to Afghanistan and manage a school something you should once once you reach advanced dementia? You’d think that it would make some good? To whom?
Setting a rule is difficult because in n+1 years of dementia you've effectively started to become another person, and at some point you don't know if that person will honour the rule you made, or even be aware of how incapable of satisfying it they have become.
Unlikely: Organ donor is only an option in some circumstances. It's more typical with young people and accidents than elderly. There's no age cut-off, but for example:
1) The organs need to be fresh (e.g. you died in the ER).
2) The organs need to be in good shape (e.g. not sick)
Irrelevant: It doesn't solve the fundamental question of values and ethics. I am against actively taking a life, including my own. I am not against putting my life at risk, especially for a good cause.
Even with prolonged evaluation, there have been events where doctors are killing people who in the current state of mind changed their mind and resisted the entire time in front of their families.
I'm of the opinion humans will never be able to not abuse such a system. We easily see now the data on assisted deaths before tax holidays.
I've thought about it a lot. I want to die while I'm still enjoying life. So I can say goodbye to family and have them remember the person I was, not the shadow I became.
Yeah same day might be a bit excessive, come to think of it. Probably give it a week or so to set up a get together. Like a "living funeral" or something.
And on it goes. Nephew really wants to say goodbye but has to finish studying for finals so a week turns into a month. For those who enjoy life, these decisions are easy in theory just like losing weight. And much harder than imagined when attempted to carry out.
I mean in general it makes sense. As you age your body becomes more brittle, injuries take longer to heal, some you might not recover from at all.
Also psychologically you will have experienced more injuries so you will instinctively avoid doing the same again.
My point was rather that if you know you will die a slow painful death, but not now,and you don't want to commit suicide, you could try riskier stuff that you always wanted to try but would be too dangerous.
Problem is that it's not all-or-nothing. Lots of activities have failure modes that leave you severly disabled for the rest of your existence, even unable to do any of the standard suicide activities or even speak/write.
That's all worse than having another decade of a good life.
Or perhaps even a broken hip that never heals is not too great. Now you won't just get dementia, but you'll do so while you can't even go to the toilet yourself even on your clear days.
This is an ideal use case for chatbots. Hook your carbon monoxide controller to an LLM trained to administer a reverse Turing test. I'm kidding, but not really. Our family is dealing with this and I am considering wiring this up for personal use down the road.
It would also help if conservatives and believers would stop to work against the right to assisted death. It should be a human right to end ones life if so desired.
> It should be a human right to end ones life if so desired.
Why? I have no opinion one way or the other, but what makes you feel that this particular action should be afforded the protections of the term "human right"?
Yes they are. Materials used for safer, less painful suicide methods (such as helium) are made purposely hard to get. Plus the authorities will lock you in a psych ward if they find out about your intent.
Yeah, that's sort of the conclusion I've come to in the last ~6 years. There are so many likely-true benefits to exercise that it almost doesn't matter if a few of them turn out to be false, since no matter what you will probably still benefit from the net result.
The "neurobiological effects of physical exercise" page on Wikipedia gets submitted on HN frequently with few votes, but man is it a fascinating read. Beyond the well-known runner's high, you get cognitive improvements in both short and long term. It even slows down Alzheimer's after you get it, allegedly.
Exercise is no panacea, but people really don't realize how many things it (allegedly) can do, even with super short durations you see in these interval training regimens. Don't force it on people with ME/CFS, sure, but most of us really can and should set aside an hour a week (or less, if you do SIT instead of HIIT).
Well look, the sales pitch for SIT is that you get most of the HIIT goodness at three minutes per day of exercise. Now to hit the required intensity… how much is an indoor bike anyways?
I know doctors that refer to alzheimers as type-3 diabetes. Their gut instinct long ago was that it was indirectly related to insulin regulation. I don't remember exactly how much more (its a large factor), but being overweight and/or having type 2 diabetes makes it much more likely to get alzheimers.
