ouija

I think my problem is that I'm not using the system as intended. I learn new vocabulary mainly by reading texts or watching videos in the target language and use spaced repetition to keep track of my progress. If I can't remember a word (as indicated by SR), I'll reread the text/rewatch the video where I've first encountered it. I don't want to keep reviewing the same word in my spaced repetition program, especially not in the same session.

Interesting. I was never really happy with any spaced repetition algorithm, so I recently implemented my own dumb system which simply asks you for the number of days after which the card shall be shown again: https://github.com/kldtz/vmn

Usually my intuition about how well I know something is not too far off. If you don't specify anything, it doubles the time since the last review.

Yes, you can write Python code that runs with missing or wrong type hints. Not ideal, but you can add a static type checker (mypy) as a step in your CI pipeline and reject commits that fail this step. Not much discipline required.

Seems like a lot of effort went into typesetting this, wow!

I can recommend "Calculus: Basic Concepts for High Schools" by the same author (L.V. Tarasov) to anybody unfamiliar with calculus: https://archive.org/details/TarasovCalculus/page/n1/mode/2up. It's written as a dialogue between author and reader.

Just some test feedback: On my phone I have to scroll horizontally to read the text on the website. A part is always cut off. (Same problem on the linked example sites.)

The author gets the whole system backwards. Medicine is the most expensive thing you can study at a German university (~30K € per student per year). That's why the number of slots is very limited. Now the demand is higher than this limited number of slots, so universities need some criterion to reject applicants. The criterion happens to be mainly the GPA.

But I agree that the situation is suboptimal. Ideally, there should be more available slots. If we had too many physicians, we could pay them less and the demand would drop.

You sound like the banker in "The Bet" by Chekhov. I hope nobody makes a bet in this thread. :D

Thanks for the feedback! I agree, manipulating the social environment sounds evil and may lead down a dangerous path.

I was mainly thinking about what Skinner describes as bringing "the individual under the control of some remote consequences of his behavior". For example, the prospect of ultimately bringing about the extinction of humanity in a few hundred years is too remote to have an effect on anybody's decisions. It would be good to have a system that mediates the effect. I guess, "internalisation of external costs" sounds less threatening.

I can't read the whole article because it's behind a paywall. From what I see, it's about the inaccessibility of primary data from mRNA-vaccine trials by Biontech/Pfizer and Moderna. Possibly related English source: https://ebm.bmj.com/content/27/4/199

It's a charming idea, kind of whimsical. I like that. But the screen really seems too small, even for writing. I recently bought a used ThinkPad X220 for 180€ (typing on it right now). OK, the battery won't last 100 hours, but I'd take it any day over this.

I agree. It also seems wildly inefficient to ask every student to read all those originals instead of systematic modern introductions. History is accumulating, so this becomes an impossible task at some point. If the ideas expressed in a text cannot be separated from their "original presentation", maybe they aren't that good after all. Exactly what I had in mind when I wrote this recently: https://verzettelung.com/22/09/10/

Real minimalists use a USB telegraph key and type with their fist. ;)

Actually out of the three cities mentioned, only one (Dresden) is in Thuringia or Saxony, none is in Thuringia. ;)

You are overgeneralizing. The "valley of the clueless" referred to places like Dresden and Greifswald that were not able to receive broadcasts from West Germany and hence were somewhat more closed communities (also for other reasons). On the other hand there are places like Leipzig that didn't have this problem and as a historical center of commerce and trade always received guests from all over the world, even during GDR times.

Saxony and Thuringia are not one homogeneous place, sentiments and opinions differ and so does the political situation.

I prefer the Python code here. The import is explicit, so if you want to know where "date" comes from, that's easy. In a modern IDE I don't write imports manually anyway.

You could write it as a one-liner in Python as well, but I would prefer not to.

  print("It's Saturday") if date.today().weekday() == 5 else None

That the Python library doesn't define constants for days is unfortunate, but not a limitation of the language.