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I think we've all found ourselves looking up a command line option for that one bash utility for the upteenth time. Throw it in a flash card and never look it u
by istjohn 6y ago
I think we've all found ourselves looking up a command line option for that one bash utility for the upteenth time. Throw it in a flash card and never look it up again. The same with text editor shortcuts, API's, etc.
My shop teacher would tell us to write down when we needed to borrow a tool. If we had to borrow a tool twice, it was time to go and buy it. I think the same rule is useful for spaced repetition. Even if you'd learn it eventually by regular use, once you have it in Anki you'll never forget it, even if you spend a couple years away from that particular technology. When you come back, you'll still have those configuration flags at the tip of your fingers.
- xupybd 6y agoThat's a good point. I'll try it out for that. See if I can't finally get tar down. https://xkcd.com/1168/ https://xkcd.com/1168/
- AstralStorm 6y agoAnd you have used hours of training on a thing used once every blue moon. Congratulations, I guess? Generally something is worth optimizing it this much when you're going to use it more than 10 times. Insert obligatory xkcd chart here: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ There are things that are this useful, but they're generally in category of mathematics, potentially physics, chemistry or linguistics. Learning parameters of a shell command, especially all of them, is a waste. Learn useful things first. This is the main problem SuperMemo and Anki sets face, the ordering is by difficulty only and not by product of difficulty times usefulness.
- istjohn 6y agoSomeone calculated they expect to spend a total of around 5 minutes over their entire life studying each new Anki card. That's not such a high bar for inclusion. Spaced repetition is very efficient. Of course, it's still not reasonable to memorize entire man pages.