4 ms·

Wozniak estimates that you actually get a maximum of~300,000 based on his decades of data, so it seems the simplified model misses some effect and so converges

by gwern 2y ago

Wozniak estimates that you actually get a maximum of~300,000 based on his decades of data, so it seems the simplified model misses some effect and so converges to the wrong total: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/How_much_knowledge_can_human_brain_hold https://supermemo.guru/wiki/How_much_knowledge_can_human_bra...

triyambakam 2y ago
Wow, never heard of SuperMemo and this Wozniak. What an interesting and awesome rabbit hole
- epsilon-delta 2y ago
  I still remember vividly the day I first heard of SuperMemo and Wozniak, I spent the next ~6 hours reading everything about him and his software. Interesting fact, SuperMemo is written in Pascal.
  - iyn 2y ago
    Yeah, I've been in the same (amazing) rabbit hole, can recommend. Are there any public sources about SM being written in Pascal? TIL
    - hereme888 2y ago
      Turbo Pascal: https://super-memory.com/articles/soft/sm2.htm https://super-memory.com/articles/soft/sm2.htm
- david_allison 2y ago
  The site's a great rabbit hole to go down for a few days. Woz is the father of digital spaced repetition. Be aware that it's not peer reviewed, and some of the findings take a lot of experimentation if you want to dive deep and reproduce them. My understanding is that his thoughts on sleep are pretty controversial within the sleep optimization community.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I used to dabble in the sleep space since my circadian rhythm is shot anyway. But the self reporting aspects of the “data” always made me suspicious. People in certain phases of sleep dep, hypoxia, or a number of other debilitating events don’t know they’re experiencing symptoms until someone else tells them they are. That’s why you’re trained to look for signs in others. So I am sorry but I don’t trust you if you tell me you feel great on four hours of sleep a day. Let’s do a task or a test and see if you can brain or you’re just euphoric.
    - david_allison 2y ago
      There was a HN post a few months ago, [sadly I can't find it] which correlated healthy sleep with faster card answering times in Anki. I haven't used Supermemo, but believe it has fairly strong sleep tracking capabilities. I've dabbled about doing the same in AnkiDroid. We could pull data from Android Health, and do something interesting with it, but we've got hundreds of other things to do, Google will probably pull our app from the Play Store if we request health data, and it at the moment it's a little out-of-scope and would be better for an addon using our API
      - hinkley 2y ago
        I complained on that one about how repeating tests like this usually results in better answers over time so the fact the author saw the same results may mean no negative effects, or just very slow decline. Which tells us something interesting but doesn’t mean it’s necessarily harmless. You have to be careful and spread your tests over a bunch of subjects to find the patterns.
        david_allison 2y ago
        Interesting! Thanks for the insights. Do you happen to have the link to hand so I can delve into it, rather than refer to it anecdotally?
itronitron 2y ago
As a colleague of mine used to phrase it, "yeah, I could learn that new thing but then I'd have to give up an episode of Gilligan's Island" ...
road_to_freedom 2y ago
But this estimate is for "free learning"?
adham-omran 2y ago
Wozniak is incredible, it saddens me that SuperMemo will probably drift into obscurity due to being closed source and the chances of seeing its source code drift away day by day, it took a few years to get anything beyond IE support after that died. I wish to see a FOSS incremental reading application in the very least, such an underrated concept.
- david_allison 2y ago
  > I wish to see a FOSS incremental reading application in the very least, such an underrated concept. Be the change you wish to see in the world
- turbojet1321 2y ago
  > I wish to see a FOSS incremental reading application in the very least, such an underrated concept. There's an Anki plugin[0] though I know almost nothing about Anki or incremental reading, so I have no idea who good it is. 0:https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/999215520 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/999215520
- ehnto 2y ago
  There is some progress in open source implementations. Anki originally used a SuperMemo-2 implementation, it now uses the improved FSRS algorithm. There is also an incremental reading addon. It's a fairly opinionated space, which is surprising since there is good data. But regardless, SuperMemo, FSRS, both work, you will make progress with either. People can just pick either and get started. https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-repetition-scheduler https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-repeti... https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/935264945 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/935264945

by gwern 2y ago

triyambakam 2y ago

Wow, never heard of SuperMemo and this Wozniak. What an interesting and awesome rabbit hole

epsilon-delta 2y ago
I still remember vividly the day I first heard of SuperMemo and Wozniak, I spent the next ~6 hours reading everything about him and his software. Interesting fact, SuperMemo is written in Pascal.
- iyn 2y ago
  Yeah, I've been in the same (amazing) rabbit hole, can recommend. Are there any public sources about SM being written in Pascal? TIL
  - hereme888 2y ago
    Turbo Pascal: https://super-memory.com/articles/soft/sm2.htm https://super-memory.com/articles/soft/sm2.htm
david_allison 2y ago
The site's a great rabbit hole to go down for a few days. Woz is the father of digital spaced repetition. Be aware that it's not peer reviewed, and some of the findings take a lot of experimentation if you want to dive deep and reproduce them. My understanding is that his thoughts on sleep are pretty controversial within the sleep optimization community.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I used to dabble in the sleep space since my circadian rhythm is shot anyway. But the self reporting aspects of the “data” always made me suspicious. People in certain phases of sleep dep, hypoxia, or a number of other debilitating events don’t know they’re experiencing symptoms until someone else tells them they are. That’s why you’re trained to look for signs in others. So I am sorry but I don’t trust you if you tell me you feel great on four hours of sleep a day. Let’s do a task or a test and see if you can brain or you’re just euphoric.
  - david_allison 2y ago
    There was a HN post a few months ago, [sadly I can't find it] which correlated healthy sleep with faster card answering times in Anki. I haven't used Supermemo, but believe it has fairly strong sleep tracking capabilities. I've dabbled about doing the same in AnkiDroid. We could pull data from Android Health, and do something interesting with it, but we've got hundreds of other things to do, Google will probably pull our app from the Play Store if we request health data, and it at the moment it's a little out-of-scope and would be better for an addon using our API
    - hinkley 2y ago
      I complained on that one about how repeating tests like this usually results in better answers over time so the fact the author saw the same results may mean no negative effects, or just very slow decline. Which tells us something interesting but doesn’t mean it’s necessarily harmless. You have to be careful and spread your tests over a bunch of subjects to find the patterns.
      - david_allison 2y ago
        Interesting! Thanks for the insights. Do you happen to have the link to hand so I can delve into it, rather than refer to it anecdotally?

itronitron 2y ago

As a colleague of mine used to phrase it, "yeah, I could learn that new thing but then I'd have to give up an episode of Gilligan's Island" ...

road_to_freedom 2y ago

But this estimate is for "free learning"?

adham-omran 2y ago

Wozniak is incredible, it saddens me that SuperMemo will probably drift into obscurity due to being closed source and the chances of seeing its source code drift away day by day, it took a few years to get anything beyond IE support after that died. I wish to see a FOSS incremental reading application in the very least, such an underrated concept.

david_allison 2y ago
> I wish to see a FOSS incremental reading application in the very least, such an underrated concept. Be the change you wish to see in the world
turbojet1321 2y ago
> I wish to see a FOSS incremental reading application in the very least, such an underrated concept. There's an Anki plugin[0] though I know almost nothing about Anki or incremental reading, so I have no idea who good it is. 0:https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/999215520 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/999215520
ehnto 2y ago
There is some progress in open source implementations. Anki originally used a SuperMemo-2 implementation, it now uses the improved FSRS algorithm. There is also an incremental reading addon. It's a fairly opinionated space, which is surprising since there is good data. But regardless, SuperMemo, FSRS, both work, you will make progress with either. People can just pick either and get started. https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-repetition-scheduler https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-repeti... https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/935264945 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/935264945