Hello! Long time no see!
Here are the notable updates for 2023:
ChatGPT and Dall-E: ChatGPT (and other similar AI tools) have been extremely useful at summarizing information and topics that would usually require a great deal of Incremental Reading to arrive at. Asking ChatGPT to summarize a topic and give you single sentences that cover the basics of an idea is SO useful when learning about a new subject, as those sentences can easily be put into SuperMemo. Also, Dall-E has CHANGED THE GAME when it comes to creating mnemonics to remember things. Instead of coming up with elaborate stories, Dall-E can quickly create a visual that sticks SO EASILY in the mind. It has invalidated many many hours of work I have done in the past to come up with a "mnemonic alphabet" of ideas using existing fictitious characters; it works SO MUCH BETTER, so I'm very happy to discard my previous methods.
For the last couple of years I have been working on a book that covers my SuperMemo journey as well as almost every useful productivity "lifehack" that I have found useful for the last 10 years or so. It is mostly completed, but I'm not sure how to release it. Should I record myself reading it and release it as an audio book on YouTube? That is probably how I would like to consume it if I were on the receiving end of it. The only parts of the book that need to be firmed up are about AI (Want to make sure they work long term as well as they seem).
Other than those two things, my life has been pretty unchanged and my SuperMemo habits remain the same. I am on day 6,525 of doing my daily flashcards, and I still love it!
Unrelated note: a game called Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was released, and it's a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio! I was not a very good student and spent a lot of my time in middle school playing the Sega Dreamcast. Needless to say, this game is fantastic has hit the nostalgia bone HARD! They even use some of the same music samples for their soundtrack (Along with Hideki Naganuma contributing a couple of tracks)! Here is a sample:
Hi, LittleFish. Glad to see you back. I agree with your takes on ChatGPT and image generators. Great tools to speed up SuperMemo. Keep the grind! Best, Mateus
ReplyDeleteI'd prefer reading a release
ReplyDeleteSo you would prefer an ePub file?
DeleteNice to see you're alive and well. If you happen to release such book do let know via this blog, looking forward to it!
ReplyDeleteI fully admire how committed you're to Supermemo. I have ups and downs with this tool, although I get back to it in the end as there's nothing better to me (especially in regards to the work-related learning and keeping some concepts active in my memory).
I got hit by retro gaming nostalgia as well. Currently I'm watching youtube channels with people running a lot of emulation stuff on their miniPCs. After new year I intend to buy one for me and installl Batocera with number of ROMs from a different era...
It's funny, when I was growing up I was a Nintendo kid, and even after I purchased a Playstation 2 to play Final Fantasy 10, PS1 games still somehow felt like "they weren't mine." I recently bought one of those emulation gaming handhelds that can play up to Dreamcast(!!!) level ROMs, and I'm finally getting the chance to play through some old PS1 games I would only read about in EGM. Even though it's been so many years those ideas still stick to my brain.
DeleteePub works for me!
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of question would you ask Dall-E for it to make a mnemonic image? For me, it keeps putting the Japanese text over the image, but it can't write in Japanese, so the character comes out as a completely different one.
ReplyDeleteI'll get into more detail on it in the book, but it seems like AI is not good at coming up with mnemonics when you ask "help me come up with a mnemonic for xyz," but if you have a mnemonic system of some sort, you can use AI to help take those various chunks and form them into something more memorable. For remembering Japanese characters (kanji), the book "Remembering the Kanji" was extremely helpful. In that book, the author helps to create a mnemonic system to memorize the characters using stories and images, and you had to come up with the stories yourself. In this case, you would need to rely on a memorable story (words only) to remember. NOW, with AI image generators, instead of relying only on a good memorable STORY, you can turn that story into a memorable IMAGE, and use that image as a way to remember that story even better. So in application, as of now, AI cannot give a good response to the prompt: "What is a good mnemonic to remember that the Chinese character 紅 means "crimson"?" But if you use a mnemonic system to such as "Remembering the Kanji" you have the elements of 糸 = Spiderman and 工 = i-beam. You can ask ChatGPT "Create a one sentence story that ties together the following elements: Spiderman, an i-beam and crimson/red." Or if you already have a good story, you can ask an image generator to create an image of that story. "Create an image of spider man's suit covered in crimson paint/blood after being hit with an i-beam." (It depends on how strict the content filters are with your AI image generator). While AI is not the be all end all tool for everything, it is EXTREMELY helpful at taking your mnemonic ideas and adding life to them. In the past, I thought to myself "if I had unlimited time, it would be fun to make an art project out of my kanji mnemonic stories," but now with tools such as Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, that is very well within the realm of possibility! I think using AI images for mnemonics is an extremely useful facet of the recent AI revolution.
DeleteI see. Ok, I'll try that.
DeleteHello little fish.
ReplyDeleteHappy belated xmas and new year!
Glad to see you alive and kicking.
A year has passed since my last post and I am still using SM, doing my repetitions every single day.
I'm getting around 150-230 flashcards shown in a day, always finishing them.
My question is: How many flashcards are in your outstanding queue every day after so many years?
Also I'd be glad to read your book incrementally! :D
Good morning! I just finished SuperMemo now. This morning I started with about 310 flashcards. I can do about 50 flashcards in 6 minutes (I time myself). If I were to stop adding new flashcards, my daily repetitions would rapidly go down. If I look at "workload calendar", tomorrow I have 301, the day after 312, but by the end of the month it goes down to about 200. By March 2024 if I didn't add any more, it would be around 150. If I stopped adding new flashcards, my daily amount would go down pretty drastically. I just love learning and adding flashcards so much, the rate never really goes down. Right now I'm on vacation, but after I get back I have a bunch of AI generated images to add, I know the daily burden is going to shoot up again, but the AI images have been SO EASY to remember, I don't think it's going to have as big of an impact as normal flashcards do.
DeleteHi! I would also prefer to read it. I think that my favorite format for this kind of book would be a PDF. This feels like a book that I would like to "study", and that works better with PDFs.
ReplyDeleteAh, good idea! I was thinking of only releasing it in ePub and as a SuperMemo database so it could be incrementally read, but PDF is a good idea also! Thanks!
DeleteStill eagerly waiting for the book :) have you thought of a release date?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, because of that I made an update post! I think within the next six months it should be done and out. Thanks a lot for your patience, I'm still figuring out the implications of using AI image generators to aid in remembering stuff. While it's not revolutionizing EVERYTHING, it is most definitely a significant addition at making information "sticky"
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