I spent so much time and effort comparing the various spaced repetition software before finally, grudgingly, choosing Anki over Mochi.
My rationale was that, while Mochi's UX is amazing, the algorithm matters. SuperMemo seems to justify this - SM18+ is a highly refined algorithm and 'seems' to provide much, much better performance than SM2/Anki.
So Mochi's incredibly basic 'engine' seems, by this logic, to be a pretty significant downside.
In the end what I care most about is memorization, and it seems like the best 'engine' for that is (Supermemo if you're on Windows, otherwise...) Anki + FSRS.
I'd appreciate being convinced I'm wrong - Using Mochi was a vastly more pleasant experience than using Anki.
I'm with you. The fact that Anki is FOSS, is still actively developed, and has a SQLite database that is easily queryable are also important considerations for me when selecting tools that will be used over such long periods of time. I've just been burned too often by online services that shut down or change significantly from what I originally wanted to use them for.
Fellow ADHDr here, also living the many tabs life.
I highly recommend the Sidebery addon (Firefox). Not just tree style tabs, but tree style tabs with customizable panels so you can sort everything out quite tidily. I'm able to manage hundreds of tabs without mess, and prune through them on a weekly basis seeing what needs to be bookmarked or can be safely forgotten.
Okay, fine, I'll assume you're a decent person who's heart is in the right place.
The vast majority of homeless people suffer from mental illness, and have come from broken homes - experienced severe childhood trauma.
These are people who, mostly, never had a chance. This is the key point. They were dealt a truly garbage hand in life, and no amount of 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' is going to change that.
They need care, they need education, they need homes. They need people to invest years of work into their rehabilitation.
And, in pretty much any developed country, providing that is roughly equivalent in cost to what we currently spend punishing them.
The state is paying the cost of homelessness, but it is doing so in a fashion that both fails to solve the problem and makes the quality of life for these people even worse.
> These are people who, mostly, never had a chance. This is the key point. They were dealt a truly garbage hand in life
Have you talked to any of them? Most of the ones I've talked to don't want anything to do with work. Yes, work on its own is not enough to rejoin society. But work is a prerequisite for rejoining society. It is necessary but not sufficient. If you don't want to work you cannot rejoin society.
At some point you need to assert some tough love and force them to do things they don't want to do. Like work. Or not drink/do drugs.
> At some point you need to assert some tough love and force them to do things they don't want to do. Like work. Or not drink/do drugs.
Your thinking is essentially the tough on crime mentality: Blindly lock people up until they behave the way you want them to. That's how the US ended up with the largest per capita prison population in this solar system and absolutely fucking nothing to show for it.
Tough on crime has failed. Spectacularly so. I wonder for how many more decades one can keep running in the wrong directions with fingers in their ears, telling themselves that approach will start working any day now.
Worse, your proposed punishment may actually constitute an improvement in living condition to the people you're trying to punish ("Off to free meals and a warm bed I go!"). Are you really willing to spend lots of money imprisoning people to give them what you could have given them for way cheaper, just so you can tell yourself you're "punishing" them? At that point one might as well stop pretending one has anyone's best interests in mind and admit to pettiness.
“Go to work or go to jail” is antithetical in a country that emphasizes freedom.
They probably don’t want to work cuz working low wage jobs is a shit experience and are one bad day from losing their job and becoming houseless again.
> Hope it succeeds enough with commercial partners (especially ereaders!) that you can offer the browser extension for free on Chrome someday.
This is 100% our plan. As our B2B revenue goes up, we will reduce our B2C pricing, hopefully to $0. We've already released one tool for free, our iOS extension for Safari. [1]
I have struggled my entire life with these issues. The post you see here isn't something that's new.
Whatever is causing this is inherent to my being.
I've seen doctors, and had both depression and adhd diagnosed. The ADHD meds were amazing. They "solved" this problem. I feel better, I feel happy, I feel more motivated, I feel more natural interest and ability to hold my focus. I feel less foggy and tired.
But, I can't stomach being on stimulants my entire life. I hate that idea.
So yea, the one thing that works, I'm not willing to take. Hard to have much sympathy for me if I'm not even willing to take what is being prescribed.
I keep saying to myself I need to just man up, and take the medicine. I do it for a week, I feel great, and then I start to hate feeling different (even if different, is quite good), and I attribute it to being loaded with amphetamines, and how bad that must be for my body.
So I stop taking them and revert to feeling shitty and looking for a new solution.
You have my sympathy regardless, for whatever it's worth.
I don't yet have access to stimulants (beyond caffeine), but I've found cannabis relieves the ADHD symptoms when used sparingly (A very short hit from a vape, essentially microdosing).
Even still, I'm on a 4:2 cycle. 4 days medicated, 2 days off, because I find myself feeling stretched thin if I remain medicated for too long.
This fucked up brain of ours just doesn't belong in this fucked up world of ours. Do whatever you need to do to cope.
You might want to just try a lower dose. While it may be different because I don’t take stimulants for ADHD, I don’t feel like myself if the dose is too high.
Also, different medications work for different people. Vyvanse works the best for me, but I’m just after stimulation (for idiopathic hypersomnia).
Greyhounds are as full of love as they are glorious stupidity. I highly recommend them to anyone considering dog ownership.
I do wish I had a border collie (very intelligent working dog) in my life though. I should go round befriending local farmers so I can play with their dogs :D
There's so much bullshit in mainstream energy analysis; there's too much incentive. Energy is central to civilization - what we use, where and how we get it, how we use it, how much of it there is and when we can use it - change any of those variables, change the shape of the entire civilization.
Yet the conversation around energy technologies is entirely dominated by dollar cost. This obfuscates so much, and lends a false equivalence to pricing/market/financial mechanisms - it implies that if something can be sold cheaply (low price) then it can be produced/extracted cheaply (low cost).
We are quite capable of, and actively involved in, stealing from our futures (high cost) in order to achieve low prices in the present. The economic externalities of our energy usage don't go away - by definition, that which is finite and we use now to do this, cannot be used later to do that.
That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit. Junk nobody needs that we'll convince them they want anyway.
And why are we doing this mad, insane, thing? Because we're convinced it doesn't matter, we're convinced the price of energy will always be low. We're convinced we're not the ones paying the costs.
> That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit.
We should limit it's use to making medicines and materials instead of burning it to heat our homes and propel our cars.
Not only does the latter consume a lot more fossil fuels, it does so by dumping a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere. Plastics consume 14% of global petroleum production today [1].
We could ban all the "disposable, toxic plastic shit" tomorrow (and I agree that we should find ways to create a less disposable culture) and we would still have a huge CO2 problem caused by fossil fuel powered space heating, transportation and electricity production.
I choose to play fighting games, and I get my current fix from Dark Souls - an asymmetric fighting game. I enjoy winning, and I structure my play around intentional practice so that I can improve.
But I don't want to win. This is an important nuance.
Do you know what winning means? It means the game is over. It means there's no more challenge, no more adversary. It means boredom and purposelessness.
Rather than winning, what I want is to fight. Focusing on the outcome of the fight is missing the forest for the trees - the fun is in the conflict, in the struggle with your opponent(s), in the instinctive collaboration with your occassional teammate.
In the glory of the defeat, as well as victory. Unless you've got firsthand experience of this, you won't believe how wonderful it feels to get your ass handed to you by a truly superior player.
To put the gaming analogy aside, life will always have its ups and downs. Life will always take you somewhere unexpected. Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life.
It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games.
A superior player can easily trap you in a corner and take your life down to half or more with a single combo string. It's like playing chess against someone entirely more skilled; everything you try to do gets responded to at a level far above you. There really isn't any "wonderful" about it; you could end up watching a video and getting the same result, for all you could do in the match.
There is no "glory" in this. A lot of the "play to improve" mindset is a result of needing to make a stupid level of effort to win games, with players going on long loss series due to low population and over-skilled players in the brackets they are in. This is why the fighting game genre struggles to get new players in the game at all-you have to work so much to get to where the fun is or to feel good about your efforts.
Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets.
I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me.
To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own:
Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands.
This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state.
The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat.
My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B.
Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that.
Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state.
Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight.
Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.
Yeah, this is you being idiosyncratic. If you look at most people in these situations, they do not get in a flow state from being pummeled, nor do the pummelers restrain themselves to have a fun match.
In example 1, the player often DCs or rage quits, because there's no value in such a matchup. If they see the end of the match, they quickly leave to find one more balanced to their skill. You could have just stayed in training and worked on labbing combos for all the effort you went through.
And labbing is one of the big problems of that genre, where people feel they have to train hard just to have fun.
The second...yeah, no they usually demolish them and move on. A high skilled player also gets little value out of owning someone, and they often smurf in lower ranks for an ego boost. "Watch me stream bronze to grandmaster!"
A lot of this is more people trying to convince people to stick with something despite a lot of negative experiences. Fighting games are seriously at risk of being a dead genre, and a lot of the problems are not easily solvable.
>It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games.
It depends on the person. You're right that games that cater to the lowest common denominator and allow casual players occasional wins are way more popular. But for most multiplayer genres there are people that derive most of the satisfaction they get from gaming from playing competitive stuff with a super high skill cap.
I like Arena FPS games like Quake. Most people don't. Some like going for world first raid boss kills in MMOs, most MMO players just want to kill some of the bosses eventually or get some shiny loot without much effort.
I've made peace with the fact that most popular online games cater to casuals. I'm getting older so its hard to justify spending as much time as I used to anyways. I still love intense competition. I'm nowhere near the best in the world and I never could have been, but the pursuit of self improvement is still fun.
It has little to do with casuals imo, the ultra hard stuff drives out the midcore over time too. World firsters will beat in 2 weeks what many players would struggle with over a whole expansion, and you literally can not make difficult content catering to them that isn't impossible to 99% of the playerbase.
The problem is that the high end is absurdly high in skill. Like a casual may be bad, but he is not going to be as bad in relation to the average as a high skilled player will be good. There will always be someone who can beat the toughest content in a game using a guitar hero controller or something.
Competition sucks because of this. The high end often has insane talent and makes something their life; how on earth can average people even exist in an ecosystem like this?
This is to some degree also why real time strategy genre is in a coma and the arena shooter genre is practically dead. Small differences in knowledge and skill manifest in consistent crushing wins that demoralize new players.
It takes a particular personality to enjoy learning these punishing titles and from my personal experience it seems that the way people respond to this form of learning through loss is transferable to other domains outside of games.
Its one thing to deal with rare losses, but a lot of competitive gamers seem really unhappy trying to deal with constant loss and feelings of powerlessness or low status. Its not something you can be average in any more.
I worry those kind of games will eventually mirror rl sports, where we have a professional class and a majority of watchers.
Back breaking labour, very long working hours, poor health care and for the most part, endentured servitude to those who own the land/mills/factories you toil away in?
All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society. Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs, and a much much worse deal than hunter gatherers.
Oh and this
we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
The tl;dr is that renewables cannot provide equivalent levels of surplus energy to fossil fuels, cannot offer the same reliability as fossil fuels, cannot perform the same functions as fossil fuels (e.g. shipping).
Not now, not ever. Not possible.
Your own link puts the EROI of renewables in the same range as conventional oil (wind slightly better, PV slightly worse), and way better than shale or sand oil.
And of course you can make liquid fuels by cracking water and then doing chemistry to add carbon (which can be from atmospheric CO2). This is what Musk has planned for Mars, the process is from 1897: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Further chemistry can turn that into long chain hydrocarbons, from what I remember of school.
>All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society
I don't think that's accurate at all. For one, we no longer have prevalence of childhood leukemia that we used to have. You could run down a long list of similar examples related to health.
For another, we have robust labor standards in most of the world which we didn't didn't used to have. Warehouse workers do indeed have appalling work conditions measured by modern standards, and we should be incensed by those. But I think any serious consideration of what, say, dust bowl Texas was like prior to rural electrification, or what an experience of hunter-gatherer life would be like for a person who actually wanted to go out and try it, I think it would be nuts to say such conditions are preferable.
As others have mentioned, your own link to EROI doesn't appear to make the point that you think it does.
I spent so much time and effort comparing the various spaced repetition software before finally, grudgingly, choosing Anki over Mochi.
My rationale was that, while Mochi's UX is amazing, the algorithm matters. SuperMemo seems to justify this - SM18+ is a highly refined algorithm and 'seems' to provide much, much better performance than SM2/Anki.
So Mochi's incredibly basic 'engine' seems, by this logic, to be a pretty significant downside.
In the end what I care most about is memorization, and it seems like the best 'engine' for that is (Supermemo if you're on Windows, otherwise...) Anki + FSRS.
I'd appreciate being convinced I'm wrong - Using Mochi was a vastly more pleasant experience than using Anki.