Anki on Mac in 60 seconds

lukeprog

Spaced repetition - like the 'Anki' program does - is one of the most efficient ways to learn new things. (For research citations, see 'Study methods', here.)

I previously explained how to get up and running with Anki on an Android phone. Here's the guide for using Anki on a Mac:

Go here and click 'Download Latest Release' (or here if you're on PowerPC).
Open the downloaded .dmg file, drag the Anki icon into your Applications folder in the dock, and then run the Anki application. (Click 'Open' when warned that the application was downloaded.)
Click 'Download' and search the list of decks for 'Less Wrong'. Download the 'Less Wrong Sequences' deck.
Set your review options as desired, then click 'Review.'

That's it!

(This full process will take longer than 60 seconds because of download speed, but will probably require only 60 seconds of interaction with the phone.)

Spaced repetition - like the 'Anki' program does - is one of the most efficient ways to learn new things. (For research citations, see 'Study methods', here.)

I previously explained how to get up and running with Anki on an Android phone. Here's the guide for using Anki on a Mac:

Go here and click 'Download Latest Release' (or here if you're on PowerPC).
Open the downloaded .dmg file, drag the Anki icon into your Applications folder in the dock, and then run the Anki application. (Click 'Open' when warned that the application was downloaded.)
Click 'Download' and search the list of decks for 'Less Wrong'. Download the 'Less Wrong Sequences' deck.
Set your review options as desired, then click 'Review.'

That's it!

(This full process will take longer than 60 seconds because of download speed, but will probably require only 60 seconds of interaction with the phone.)

Probably much of the value of the deck would be (1) figuring out which things are useful enough to know about that would seriously help someone if they forgot about them or were ignorant in the first place and (2) making those decisions available for other people to memorize without having to do all the prioritization and searching.

My personal impression is that tools seem to follow a sort of exponent or power law where a few tools are used a ton of times, many are used only once or no times, and there's a reasonable middle ground of things used from time to time.

Tools in the first category are so common that SRS offers nothing. I don't need a flashcard to remember ls or cd. Tools in the third category would be wasteful to put into SRS, per my previous comment about search being quick and faster than 5 minutes.

The second category might be useful in SRS, but how do you generate them before-hand? I don't think you can. Everyone uses a different 80%. That sort of list can only be generated with heuristics like 'if I use a tool twice, then memorize it' or in retrospect ('I used tools x, y, and z with frequency n, and the total search time for each was >5 minutes').

That article says that each person uses 20% of the tools, not 80%. If everyone used a different 80% that would seem to imply at least a 60% overlap in usage for two people, and at least a 40% overlap for three. Probably the overlaps would fall more or less slowly for different tools along the usage curve you proposed. It seems like there should be some way to at least estimate the expected value here...

Maybe you could check package download statistics and history data (or something?) to see which things are most installed and most used. If you had data... (read more)