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rsanekon Flashcards are "dead fish": rethinking spaced repetition around highlights

Should have a (2024) label

Google employs thousands of people in Canada...

rsanekon ASML's strong orders ease fears AI spending boom is running out of steam

Excluding dividends is a pretty big asterisk, including them you're back to even within 6.5 years.

rsanekon Ex-FTC boss Khan: break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent

>would likely have been under the level allowing for straight probation (go to a sentencing calculator and plug the values in)

Depends alot on the values inputted into such a calculator. See [0] for a solid discussion of what his future could have been (search for "That brings up the important question of how much time Swartz was actually facing"). TLDR, it's certainly not the case that only probation was guaranteed or even particularly likely.

[0] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...

rsanekon iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27

Finally some more DPI options for those of us with non-Apple high-resolution monitors. Still, the upgrades only go up to 5K. Crazy to me that Windows support for ultrawide screens is so much better than Mac, especially when it's not a particularly new category!

rsanekon How to buy a good car for $1000

The median US commute distance is <10 miles [0], which is well within ebike or motorcycle range. You can get a new ebike on Amazon that will go up to 30mph for $500, or get a used motorcycle that will go highway speeds for ~$2500.

There are of course other trade-offs with these modes of transport, but they are usually just as fast (and sometimes faster) at single-digit-mile distances. My hope is that as we improve biking infrastructure, biking will become an increasingly-viable primary mode of transit.

[0] https://nhts.ornl.gov/assets/2022/pub/2022_NHTS_Summary_Trav...

rsanekon How to buy a good car for $1000

What's interesting is other items, like food or housing, are also much cheaper in India.

rsanekon De-Brainrot Vacations

For a more truly "web-native" treatment of math, see https://www.mathacademy.com/. I've also heard good stuff about https://physicsgraph.com/ for physics.

rsanekon I refused to train the AI that could replace me

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA

rsanekon Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?

For those seeking a more level-headed view, the Fed reports on foreign-owned gold monthly. Going back a couple of decades:

  Month       Tonnes
  July 2006   6,606
  July 2011   6,197
  July 2016   5,807
  July 2021   5,742
  July 2026   5,755

rsanekon Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

For those seeking a more level-headed view, the Fed reports on foreign-owned gold monthly. Going back a couple of decades:

  Month       Book value ($M)  Tonnes
  July 2006   8,967            6,606
  July 2011   8,412            6,197
  July 2016   7,883            5,807
  July 2021   7,794            5,742
  July 2026   7,812            5,755

The linked report is talking about a change of 1.5% from the latest-reported total amount in tonnes.

rsanekon The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations

With only ~5% of shares floated, the recent SpaceX drawdown didn't correspond to nearly as much economic value really changing as the headline numbers imply. The DeepSeek-caused Nvidia crash from 2025 is much more of a "real" loss (since mostly recovered).

I haven't seen any evidence that Anthropic is delaying its IPO; they're slated to unveil the public IPO prospectus in a week and start trading sometime in October.

rsanekon Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

China is much more of a "fossil fuel country" than the US. They've got a ways to go to even catch up.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=stacked-di...

rsanekon AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you.

This hasn't been my experience. Especially when it comes to enterprise software, eventually everyone that was involved with the design of and iteration on a system will have left the company. Yet, often those systems need to continue running because they support "legacy" customers (who sometimes actually tend to be more economically valuable to the company than the customers on the shiny new system).

Before AI, in these cases you just had to dive into the code and start trying to understand it yourself from zero. Usually, you would come to a very limited understanding of the system, just enough to fix the latest bug or keep it running until it hit another issue.

I'm not sure why it's necessarily worse to rely on an agent to do this for you these days.

rsanekon Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Based on your own comments, it sounds like it wasn't really that hard to address the problem though right? Let's be real, it takes like 10 minutes to download OpenCode and point it to DeepSeek V4 Flash. That's an amazing 80-20.

Seems weird to me to not take advantage of the great deal the frontier labs are currently giving for subscription pricing when there's such an easy fallback in the worst case.

rsanekon US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

As a proportion of total energy use, the US is ahead of China in moving away from fossil fuels by about 5 full percentage points. Most of the "energy independence" that China has is just based on burning coal.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=stacked-di...

rsanekon US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

Only as recently as last year did China stop increasing its net electric generation from coal. And if you look at all primary energy (not just electricity), their dependence on fossil fuels is something like 90%.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?stackMode=rela...

rsanekon Ask HN: How are you using AI to learn?

If you want to skip the clunky csv step, you can utilize https://github.com/jasperket/clanki and push directly from AI to Anki.

rsanekon Show HN: Elevators

That has not been my experience, and logically it doesn't really make much sense. If you do so, you are making the problem strictly worse.

rsanekon AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

Another case of study design not really supporting the headline. According to the paper, the comparison here was "no advice" or "AI advice": there was no "placebo" where you have advice / references from non-AI materials. Think e.g. Google's instant answer box, pre-AI. It's hard to say without the comparison, but I have to imagine displaying that would have similar effects.

There's plenty of other issues with the study, one of the primary ones being that they chose a relatively 'dumb' AI (Step 3.5 Flash), but also, specifically hand-selected wrong answers. People that are used to using competent AIs that are mostly correct would be operating off of experience that suggests they should trust AI. In this case, by design, they shouldn't have, but it's hard to fault the user for that.

rsanekon Qwen 3.8

What's been your experience using these models? In my experiments, while it is true that the models are less likely to outright refuse to answer "sensitive" questions, they are still very resistant to actually respond in a meaningful / useful way.

rsanekon The human-in-the-loop is tired

> a Berkeley Haas study which describes how AI usage increases the intensity of work

The marketing around this 'study' has been impressive. They published the HBR article [0] and other promotional material [1] over 5 months ago, but as far as I can tell, the actual study itself (even a preprint version) still isn't available anywhere. Hard to evaluate how believable the results are without being able to actually see the details of how the study was done. For now, all we know is that it's based on ~40 qualitative interviews from a single company in a single industry.

[0] https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...

[1] https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-wo...

rsanekon Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

> cost has nothing to do with it

> customers will flock to the cheapest inference

rsanekon Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

If AA is to be believed then per-task it is about the same cost as Sol. Agree that it's very different from DeepSeek v4 Pro, which is ~15x cheaper than K3.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/kimi-k3#price-cost

rsanekon Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

AA results are out: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/kimi-k3

rsanekon Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity

Critically, that cost excludes the amortized amount the batteries will be over that period. And if you're cycling them every day like this, they're not going to last more than 15~20 years.

rsanekon Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices

> There’s a stew of factors at work behind the rise in consumer rage [including] the rise of AI customer service.

I'm not really sure the problem is AI here. I've had plenty of bad experiences with human customer service agents that were poorly-trained and hard to understand. An AI can be implemented in a shitty way, where it's at best a regurgitation of the help docs. Or, it can be implemented well, where it can autonomously take action without any human involved.

I have had a couple of experiences with the latter. Once you do, you realize that you actually don't need to talk to a person per se -- you just want your problem solved efficiently. That can be done with a human or an AI; it isn't really the most significant bit to be filtering on IMO.

rsanekon Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot

I see tons of confustion in the comments on whether AI can or can't read it. Bit of a marketing miss -- they should have picked clearly different decoy vs. default actual messages.

rsanekon A love letter to flashcards

> Some people also use LLMs to generate flashcards. And of course, the result will be those impersonal, mediocre cards.

> I won’t say LLMs are useless for this. But from my trials, I get about 1 card that’s useful to me out of 10, and even that 1 card still needs rewriting.

I don't know the specifics of how the author tried to do so, but from what I've seen the majority of attempts are, let me drop a chapter of a textbook and say "make flashcards." If that is what we are talking about, then yes, LLMs are useless.

In my mind, though, this is sort of like looking at the very first GitHub Copilot LLM autocomplete from a couple of years ago and concluding, yeah it's nice for one-liners, but it cannot write an app.

If you create a framework around your card-creation AI so that it can use tools, and verify its work to ensure common card-creation pitfalls don't happen, you can get pretty high-quality cards. In my experience, you go from a 10~20% hit rate to a ~90% hit rate, which in my mind is good enough. I got to ~75% quality just from a two extra LLM calls that would assess a potential card against a standard set of rules (adapted from [0]). There are huge Pareto gains to be had here.

I've generated thousdands of cards over the last few months this way. I let the AI add it directly to Anki via AnkiConnect. Then, if when I go to review I find a card that my AI created and I don't like it, I just delete it.

Removing the limitation of card creation is really quite compelling, and I think the area is still highly under-invested in. Would be cool to see a generic framework evolve that one could use. For now, I've been using a personal fork of clanki [1].

[0] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulatio...

[1] https://github.com/jasperket/clanki

rsanekon A Love Letter to Flashcards

It's a balance. Maybe a helpful analogy would be a book -- yes, reading a book is effortful, and yes, "almost everyone" does not read. Still, I think most wouldn't consider it crazy to say that reading can be "fun."