Which really begs the question: why not have it open-source at that point? Obsidian isn't making money from things hidden in the code, but rather their Sync service.
Might as well open-source it (and perhaps get more people helping with the development), keep the Sync service, and stem competitor projects like these in the bud.
That's definitely true, though probably only limited to CS (and maybe the top 5% of people going to investment banking). The vast majority of the most intelligent people at any Canadian university will stay in Canada, and given the current political situation, I think that's probably only going to become more true.
Also, anecdotally, I would wager that schools with significant numbers of Americans (e.g., McGill) probably have more US students staying in Canada than vice versa at this point (with perhaps the exception of CS).
It's quite sad that ADHD is as stigmatized as it is: even though it is a very well-characterized condition in psychiatric literature, the most common 'pop-science' take one hears about it is that ADHD is completely overdiagnosed and may not even exist as a condition. Also, I know multiple people, even though well-managed ADHD would not negatively affect their careers, are barred from certain professions (like high-security military careers and being pilots) simply due to having ADHD and being medicated for it.
What sort of privacy implications? I'd imagine that Anki data would be relatively privacy-concern free, as it contains no PII, and for the AnKing decks, all of the content is standardized and so wouldn't contain personal notes. Though, having never worked with this data, please let me know if I'm wrong!
Also, having used those decks in the past, and downloaded the add-on/look at the monetization structure of developers like the AnKing, I would be very surprised if aggregate data on review statistics wasn't collected in some way. I.e., if the AnKing is collecting this data already to design better decks/understand which cards are the hardest—probably to target individual support—then I imagine that collecting some de-anonymized version of that data wouldn't be too much of a stretch.
Plus, considering that all of the developers of AnKing-style decks are all doctors, they probably have a pretty good grasp at handling PII and could (hopefully) make pretty sound decisions on whether to give you access :)
While I do agree with a lot of what you're saying (wrt. people in the US feeling that their country is slowly falling apart, perhaps into fascism) I just wanted to point out that I don't actually live in the US.
Though I think the nascent feelings you describe are very universal: living in a (thankfully) stable democracy, I think these feelings that the world is slowly unraveling are quite universal—we constantly see in the news that the U.S. is slowly falling apart, that there are now large-scale land wars in Europe again, and that China is inching towards a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. I think for a lot of people it feels hard to imagine a world that gets better in the short-medium term, especially as the U.S. slowly starts to unravel itself (from an outsider POV).
I'm not really sure whether the world is slowly starting to become more crazy or whether this has always been the case (I wasn't even a teenager when Trump was first elected), I sometimes wonder if the feeling that things are reaching a breaking point is the same feeling that people had in 1928.
| The main challenge in building content-aware memory models is lack of data. To my knowledge, no publicly available dataset exists that contains real-world usage data with both card textual content and review histories.
I wonder if the author has ever considered reaching out to makers of Anki decks used by premeds and medical students like the AnKing [1]. They create Anki decks for users studying the MCAT and various Med School curricula, so have a) relatively stable deck content (which is very well annotated and contains lots of key words that would make semantic grouping quite easy) b) probably contains loads of statistics on user reviews (since they have an Anki addon that sends telemetry to their team to make the decks better IIRC), and c) contains incredibly disparate information (all the way from high-school physics to neurochemistry).
This was one of the most incredible essays about war I've ever read. At some points I forgot that I was even reading an essay about war, but everything came together in the end.
I think Sandlin was one of the few authors (perhaps alongside Remarque) that could adequately capture the silent resignation into fear (or 'fey' as he put it) that so many people have; my father was one of those people, and while his time at war was something I barely understand and was never told about—probably to shield me—his description of those restless nights dreaming of patrolling Okinawa (or Fallujah, Kandahar, or Kashmir) are something that truely can't be described by the language of peace, or even by people who were not there—like myself.
There's a certain melancholy in the tone of the entire essay, something that I think grips so many people in my generation (and that Sandlin mentions while describing Wagner): the belief that while life continues on as normal today, the world is about to be irreparably changed for the worse; perhaps we'll go to war with China, Russia, Iran, or some other country, but in the aftermath, everything we've taken for granted in life will be completely gone. I think an entire generation of young men now believe that they'll eventually be shipped off to some war and might not return—and if they do, just like Eugene Sledge, the entire world around them will be completely different. And eventually, no one will care to hear about their war stories and their memories of it will fade.
I completely agree—though it would be very difficult to measure the information contained within methylation/acetylation. If, naively, we assume that epigenetic modifications act only to increase or decrease the rate of transcription (or promoter binding, nucleosome coverage, and/or things we barely even understand as of now), and also assume that only cytosine bases are modified, then we still increase our estimate for the amount of information by at least an order of magnitude—and this neglects other modifications like methylation on nucleosomes, of which there are hundreds.
Might as well open-source it (and perhaps get more people helping with the development), keep the Sync service, and stem competitor projects like these in the bud.