Some of these observations aren't particularly surprising, but this line really took me out of it:
> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.
The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.
Using the scheduler estimates from the FSRS simulator [1], for desired retention held equal at 85%, I received approximately 20-30% improvements in workload upon switching to FSRS from SM-2. Even disregarding the "internal" improvements, the ability to reduce the number of parameters that require modification/present risk to performant scheduling is heavily reduced to only setting desired retention explicitly (a benefit in and of itself) as well as minor decisions (e.g. inclusion of suspended cards). Interpretability really is far less of an issue than efficiency, and frankly the achievements of the team behind FSRS (including their decision to make it publicly available) should be lauded.
> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.
The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.