It was a crazy year. Spent half of it living in my college building (Read about huge nationwide student protests in Serbia where students blocked all colleges because of the government corruption for almost 9 months).
Spaced repetitions only work if you use them every day with minimal or no breaks. If the algorithm actually does the recall probability very well like FSRS does, you will keep failing the cards if you don't do them consistently. I learned the hard way where I almost forgot like 80% of my spanish deck that I was certain that I will be able to retire and recall it. But nope, even that word that you felt was rock solid in your memory is gonna fade, so just trust the algorithm.
I would assume many consumers are gonna have to switch to more of DIY approach for many tasks that required some domain expertise. For example, most of my friends completely stopped buying useless skincare products because chatgpt would make them a table of INCI list and explain them the benefit of the ingredient. Turns out most of products are BS. Vitamin C doesn't even penetrate the deeper skin layer, it just evaporates on your skin. My bet is that many companies will have hard time marketing on customer's naivety.
The book may be a good read or bad one, I am unfamiliar with it. However, terrible recommendations are made on HN all the time, as well good ones, so I’d caution against “recommended a few times on HN” (on its own!) as an indicator of much anything.
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EDIT: changed wording from “multiple times” to “a few times” to be more clear.
It may be an indicator of popularity / mindshare of certain ideas. It says little about the ideas' substance, but may still be very important in practice, if you deal with people.
The git cli tool is mentioned countless times over many years on HN, surely an indicator that it’s in popular use by the commentatorship here.
I’ve seen many (seemingly informed) mentions of the jj cli tool in the last year — not unreasonable to conclude interest in it is growing among folks here, and enough to pique my curiosity.
I responded to:
This is the second time [I’ve seen that] someone has recommended this book on HN
I am genuinely curious how well this would go. There are so many books I “should” read, but will never get around to doing it. A one hour podcast would be more engaging than reading a Wikipedia summary.
On the gripping hand, there are probably already excellent 10/30/60 minute book summaries on YouTube or wherever which are not going to hallucinate plot points.
