Hello! How are you doing? Hopefully well! Here are some updates on my end:
MY LIFE
My mom is doing great! She recovered physically and her speech is pretty much back to normal! Her ability to enunciate certain syllables was the one thing that was notably lagging behind, but we did daily speech therapy for about 10 minutes over FaceTime.
I used ChatGPT to come up with tongue twister stories that featured syllables that she had a hard time saying. I was also able to choose the direction of the story so that it included family inside jokes! I would recommend using ChatGPT (Or any other compatible AI tool) to come up with sentence exercises, especially for pronunciation. Rather than reading the same stories day after day (Which we did for a couple of weeks), by choosing the subject matter, you can keep the sentences fresh!
Outside of that, I can’t think of much happening in my life. Oh yeah, when I went back to the United States to help out my mom, I was able to go to my first concert in like 10 years! I saw Alvvays, a really happy and catchy indie shoegaze-y rock band. Their discography is small but each album is filled with great songs! Definitely check them out!
BOOK
The book itself is pretty much done, but there are a few holdouts that I want to MAKE SURE work before I say “hey, try this!” I hate when I see people talk about the system they have been using for only a few days, I want to know what system has been working for MONTHS or YEARS.
AI IS USEFUL FOR LEARNING
AI continues to be a big source of hype; much of it is unfounded, but in terms of learning, it is quite the game changer. For me this has been mainly in two ways:
1. You basically have a tutor that you can contact at any time of the day and can explain things to you that you do not understand. You can also ask if the flashcards you make are accurate (This has been a big help)! There are many various applications of AI with SuperMemo (and specially incremental reading), but I will get into that a bit more in the book.
2. AI Generated visual mnemonics. Although it sounds like I’m beating a dead horse, the quality of images that various AI models can output continues to astound me. Aside from the many real world (And meme) applications that pop up across the internet, highly detailed mnemonic images makes “encoding” memories SO MUCH FUN! For the purposes of SuperMemo, I have made about 7,000 images so far, and I can recall them mostly with very little effort.
IPHONE AND IPAD INCREMENTAL READING
My other project has been trying to figure out a low friction way to make a simple imitation of incremental reading on my iPhone or iPad.
While I would love for there to be an official app that allowed for incremental reading, unfortunately there isn’t one. I have spent the last few weeks playing around with a simple system that imitates the most useful aspects of incremental reading. It is very simple in terms of features (I don’t want to pay a subscription fee for something) and it seems to be working very well. I have incrementally read and analyzed a number of articles and books. I also wanted a way to “capture” my conversations with ChatGPT, since the responses are often dense with useful information that I would like to “break apart” like I would a topic in SuperMemo.
Assuming that it keeps being useful for me, it will occupy another section of the book.
If you have any questions or stuff you want an answer to before the book comes out, let me know and I’ll try to answer it in the comments section!
Enjoy your day, keep on learning!
Hey Nathan! Glad to hear about your mom! I'm curious about IR and it's application to language learning/SRS. How does it differ from SRS? Also, I'd love to help you find something for iPhone/iPad (since I have an iPad), and since I use an android Phone, maybe I could find an equivalent app/system. If IR is not too much different from SRS, there is Anki for iOS, but it's around $20 (and not a subscription, but still money nonetheless).
ReplyDeleteIR is kind of hard to describe, since only SuperMemo truly does it "the way it's supposed to be done." At its core Incremental Reading is a "reading management" technique, basically it lets you engage in the act of reading, reflecting and drawing conclusions within the text but without wasting any effort in keeping track of all of that stuff. You don't sync your notes with program x and then export them to program y and then make flashcards in program z, it is a perfect self-contained eco system. For a while I have been trying to figure out the closest way to approximate this workflow, and it's REALLY hard to do so.
DeleteThe book is about Supermemo and AI?
ReplyDeleteNot really, but AI has become such an interesting and versatile tool, it has made SuperMemo even more useful. Mainly in the form of: 1. AI images for mnemonic purposes and 2. turning extracts into ChatGPT conversations and then picking the conversations apart for flashcards. Incremental reading basically turns the act of reading into an interactive process, and ChatGPT (Or any other AI chatbot tool) makes it even more so.
DeleteFor an app that can do incremental reading, you could install moonlight on it, and then connect to a PC running sunshine to be able to use Supermemo on the go that way.
ReplyDeleteYes, a streaming tool is a simple answer to this problem. But what frustrates me is that Incremental Reading is such a computationally simple process to do, yet our phones and tablets cannot fully replicate IR, despite the fact that they are more than capable of running sophisticated programs on them. I am more interested in getting "as close as possible" to Incremental Reading on my phone and tablet. What I want to do is be able to sit on the couch/bus/toilet, and in less than 30 seconds be able to make progress is reading something in the same way I would do it if I were reading something incrementally on a Windows tablet. To me that is the main goal. When I use IR on my computer I feel like my brain is being used and there is zero waste as I read something, but I don't feel that way when I read an article OUTSIDE of IR on my phone or tablet.
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