Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning

Does the rationalist blogosphere need to update?

Patterns I keep coming back to

Legacy & Anonymity in the Age of AGI

The Payments Engineer Playbook, April Cools edition

Legacy & Anonymity in the Age of AGI

The personal site of R. W. Blickhan

AI is here, and its impacts on education cannot be overstated. Let’s put aside the issues of cheating; I assume that you want to learn, perhaps with the assistance of LLMs if they are actually helpful. But how do you know you’re not using AI as a crutch, versus using it to augment learning? The former setting outsources your thinking to AI, whereas the latter can help you reveal gaps in your understanding, bypass blockers that prevent learning, and/or tailor education to your style. In this post, I provide an analogy between learning and phase transitions in statistical mechanics, and describe recommendations and warnings on using LLMs in different learning scenarios.

“To flash conviction on the mind.”

I’ve been a big fan of both spaced repetition in general and the Anki spaced repetition system in particular for a long time now. So today, after a fresh new install and blinging out of Ubuntu 23.10, I decided to take the next step, as I often do with programs I use a lot, and try to build and compile it myself. This turned out to be pretty easy! The docs warn that ./run is slower than the non-optimized build, but I don’t notice much of a difference on my machine. It did however leave me with the question: Where should I put the anki symlink to ./run?

On May 10th, I passed the Series 65 Uniform Investment Adviser Law Exam. I spent ~5 weeks studying for a total of 83 hours. In this post, I’ll describe the tools and techniques I used to prepare, and provide tips for more efficient studying based on my experience.

This is still an evolving draft. If you have any feedback or suggestion, welcome to comment on Substack, or send me a message via twitter, facebook or email…

Legacy & Anonymity in the Age of AGI