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0 pointsBeetleB6mo ago0 comments

There are two problems with physical flashcards:

1. The lack of a good spaced repetition algorithm.

2. You'll end up with an order of magnitude fewer flash cards. When it's easy to copy/paste, there's no way you can create all the flashcards you need by hand in a decent amount of time.

> The flexibility of being able to dynamically generate a ton of Anki cards using a script is trumped by just using ChatGPT ...

I would never advocate doing it with a script. All my flashcards were created by me - either by typing or selective copy/paste.

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shermantanktop6mo ago

What works for one may not for another. Content on screens just doesn’t tickle my memory mechanisms in the same way. I wish it did.

Part of it, for me, is that “magnitude fewer” is a benefit, not a drawback. Mastering a bounded scope and then intentionally expanding it by hand writing new cards keeps me focused on the rock face that I need to practice and internalize. Having the next 1000 words be two clicks away, and then dozens more decks waiting after that, makes the whole enterprise seem incredibly daunting.

That may not be your experience, of course, and I wish Anki were effective for me.

BeetleBOP6mo ago

I think a happy middle ground exists.

Most of my cards are manually typed - not copy/pasted. And yes, it totally sucks, so I don't produce as many.

I've been doing it since 2018, and the total number of cards I have is a few thousand - probably under 5000. If you review daily, you'll often end up with days where you have nothing to review. Very manageable.

I recently got back to coding in C++. I'd forgotten some aspects of the language, and also needed to come up to speed with many of the newer features in C++23 (I was mostly an 03 and a bit of 11 person).

It's a lot of cards to create! I'm doing it slowly, but this would be totally infeasible if I had to do it by hand. Still mostly manual typing, although I do copy/paste code snippets.

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