• 13 Posts
  • 259 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Be careful with the plastic spatula used to flip your eggs I guess.

    Except you know, plastic isn’t a real chemical. There’s polyethylene, polypropylene, polyurethane, and silicone… of which there are food grade versions and non food grade versions of said plastics (and many thousands of formulations).

    Anyone bullshitting with scare words like ‘Plastic’ are immediately discounted by me. Real scientists are at least specific with their terminology and not using weasel words that have effectively no meaning in a serious discussion


    Meanwhile my buddy gets fucking arsenic poisoning and there’s not even a ruckus about it at all. Do you know what a REAL poisoning is like?



  • Anki is far more grueling than beginners realize. And it’s very difficult to predict future work.

    Adding new word isn’t just work today (maybe 5+ viewings to get Anki to make you think you’ve learned the word…), it’s also multiple showings over tomorrow, later this week and more.

    You must change your words/day to something that is doable. Keep an eye on your Anki usage, if it’s longer than you want then cut down on your new words/day until you master your current review set.

    And always be careful with the new words button. It’s more work to learn 20 words than you might realize, so don’t double or triple it to 40 or 60!!!


    20 words/day is about 30 minutes of Anki for me, because 80 reviews + 20 new words == 100 cards. But I need around 300 flips to finish Anki.

    That’s 30 minutes of Anki in practice (a card flip averaging 6 seconds, 10 cards per minute and yes 30 minutes/day).

    If I drop down to 0 new words/day, I still have the 80 reviews per day (at least until those old words are mastered). Eventually I get quicker and Anki believes I’ve learned the words but it can take literally days before your workload decreases.


    You must also remember that Anki / Flashcards is rote memorization. Its your “brute force cudgel”. You can never truly reach mastery with Anki alone. Anki is great for spelling practice, pronunciation practice (if you have included real-world audio .mp3 with your flashcards)… and if necessary is a forced German -> English vocabulary memorization tool.

    Useful skills yes, but language mastery can only happen with reading, writing, listening and speaking. Aka: “Immersion”. Anki is great because it helps minimize the time spent on flashcards. If you aren’t saving time but instead feel like you’re wasting time, then you need to change Anki settings to something more useful.



  • Another small note on FSRS settings - adjusting the desired retention a little bit can be helpful. Defaults at 90%, turning it down makes review intervals longer, up makes them shorter. For large decks (vocab lists), I prefer it down at mid-high 80s. You want familiarity, not perfection, so less overwhelming reviews can be better.

    Depends really. If you are drilling der/das/die genders and spelling, you might want perfection.

    But yes, drop the FSRS setting to 80 or even lower for familiarity. If you are focusing on reading/consuming, it’s better to focus on familiarity instead.

    But if you are studying writing/speaking, you need to set that retention back up to 90 and also aim for perfection on each card.

    In general, 90% is closer to perfection and the highest you typically should go. However, medical students have been known to aim for 95% or higher (!!!) because they want to pass an exam and then forget about it later, lol.

    So even going above 90% makes sense for some communities out there.

    Medical students are willing to drill 4-hours per day on their subjects and want near 100% memorization in time for their exam. It’s a different kind of learning, but Anki does support that.





  • Trump has almost a 90% approval rating among Republican voters.

    Yeah. Because he’s better than Harris to Republicans.

    But go talk to Republicans about Tariffs. They kinda disagree with him on that. That’s a “hold your nose and accept it” deal. Many Republicans aren’t racists, but they’ll hold their nose and vote for racism for the good of the party. (See Latinos for Trump and so forth).

    You can’t even figure out the basics of politics so you’re gonna lose again at this rate. So lets be clear: no one likes their party that much in American politics. But we all know that “the other side is worse”. Republicans truly don’t agree with much, they just believe Trump is better than the alternative.

    If you can’t give that level of support to your side (be it Biden or Harris, or whoever else comes up), you’re gonna lose to the next guy again. Whoever it is after Trump. With any luck Trumpism can be defeated, but Republicans will remember this win from Trump for the rest of their lives. You’re stuck with Trumpism as a philosophy for the next 15+ years at least. I kid you not, because Republicans see and think that its working.










  • Ummmm.

    ACH is how you get your paycheck, and it’s being updated to FedNow.

    Zelle is an independent network as well.

    And of course, there is Discover and AmEx.

    There is also cash, check, money order. They still work today, just people largely forgot how to use them.

    IIRC some Brazilian network was getting very popular off of this. If you want to look at non-US options.

    There are plenty of competitors to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal.



  • What’s that one dude who wore the hoodie and had the stroke and then turned out to be fucking insane? My guess is the stroke wasn’t what made him a republican.

    His staffers were literally crying and large numbers of reports are that he is a changed man after the stroke. Its uncommon, but it happens. Brain damage can result in personality shifts.

    He’s some Pennsylvania Politician, I forget his name but maybe a Senator.

    Anyone who possesses the kind of money that they possess, even Yang, are only in it for themselves and their cronies.

    Well yes. But that’s traditional American Politics and its been like that for a long time. People prefer the devil they know (money / greed) rather than other vices.

    If anything, being openly greedy makes people more comfortable with the personality.


  • I’m not on YangGang and I never liked that guy.

    But it’s clear that this new party is Elon Money + Andrew Yang right now. This is somewhat worrying as Yang was a Democrat (albeit one that couldn’t win any primary and never reached critical mass, but a Democrat nonetheless). So there’s political power here that we need to consider as part of the equation

    It gives Elon political cover and makes him look independent and looking like he’s splitting the Democrats. So we can’t fall for it but people out there will fall for it.