memkit

Joined 2 years ago

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96
Submissions
42
Member since
Jun 9
MemKit is the spaced-repetition flashcard app I've always wanted. Here's what I mean:

- Minimal friction to use. You can immediately start using the app. You are automatically given an account. You don't have to sign up or type in a username or password. A lot of times I'm reading a book and I only have my phone on me. It's super annoying to log into an app when you get signed out, especially on your phone and especially if you don't use a password manager on your phone. MemKit lets you jot down interesting things you learn without signing in and then merge them into your account later. This is made even easier through email one-time passwords.

- No demands. You don't have to set an email, phone number, or even a username! But you can, if you want to. Email or phone number is a necessity for account recovery, of course. Note that phone numbers are not yet implemented.

- No ads. No selling data. No emails besides those for sign-in and account recovery. No algorithms to maximize use — users should only use the app if and when they want to.

- Maximal simplicity / minimal complexity. There is really only one feature — tags. Tags allow you to group together arbitrary things for ease of review (e.g., #math groups together all math things). When you make a thing, you can associate to it multiple tags. And a single tag can be associated to multiple things. You don't need "courses," and "flashcard sets" preclude the association of a single flashcard to multiple sets, in many competing apps. I have attempted to avoid bloat and complexity as much as possible.

- You grade yourself. Many education apps grade your answers for you. I think self-grading is a crucial part of the learning and memorization process.

- The right technology. This is the most contentious point. I chose Rust and an extremely fast server-side rendering framework, Maud, coupled with a minimal amount of vanilla JS. Nginx is my web server and, I know this is somewhat dubious, redis is my primary DB. I want to see how far I can scale on one $30/month server and a $15/month email service as my only costs, outside of domain registration.

Please let me know if you like it!

Roadmap:

- Phone numbers to reduce friction to sign in

- Better insight into time-to-review, how often a thing was missed, etc.

- API, image, and sound support to enable, say, uploading 1,000 most frequently used Finnish words

- AI generated quizzes. Obviously comes with all current downsides of LLMs but self-grading avoids many of these problems.

https://memkit.app/

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Fire retardant itself is much more harmful than heavy metals in this context.

It essentially causes neurodegenerative diseases, especially if you inhale it.

This applies to unintuitive routes of exposure, like taking a hot shower on an Air Force base that used flame retardant in fire drills decades prior and breathing in the water suspended in air.

Comment · 1 year ago
I did this after breaking my ankle. I was carefully walking the next day, hiking within a week, and skateboarding within 2-3 weeks. Fully healed after a month or two. Everyone thought I was insane but I'm very glad I did it.

I thought, why should we try to intervene with millions of years of evolution? Inflammation has to be there for a reason. Nitpick that statement all you want but in this specific case I'm glad I didn't mitigate the inflammation.

I was unaware of the acronym HELM and told everyone I was doing the exact opposite of RICE on purpose.

Comment · 1 year ago
Finland has huge toxic algae bloom problems.

The link between BMAA (from toxic algae blooms) and neurodegenerative diseases in predisposed people is basically causal and proven at this point, but it's allegedly suppressed by Big Fishing and Aquaculture.

You may be right. There are many other components contributing to the problem in Finland, too.

Comment · 1 year ago
Yes, I apologize for being combative. I see your point now.

I think I'm also wrong.

I thought about my original response some more and this is a more coherent version of what I was trying to say:

A problem being in NP is sufficient but not necessary to reduce it to an NP-complete problem.

But that's wrong. It's both sufficient and necessary to be in NP. It intuitively feels like you're tacking on more than you need to by introducing the "necessary" constraint, but it makes sense.

Comment · 1 year ago
I agree with you, I just think the condition "being in NP" is needlessly confusing. The whole point is that you can always find a reduction from easier problems to harder ones. It just so happens that NP encompasses all the problems easier than SAT.

The reason why your statement is confusing to me is that if you generalize it beyond NP, it breaks down; for an arbitrarily hard complexity class M and an arbitrary M-hard problem, you don't need to be in M to be able to find a reduction to the M-hard problem.

Comment · 1 year ago
> While it is true that their presence in NP-Hard does not require their pressence in NP (and thus are not proved NP Complete)

You're confused here. The two conditions for a problem being NP-complete are (1) it being NP-hard and (2) it being in NP.

You suggest (2) is the issue, but usually it's harder to prove (1) rather than (2). In the context of factorization problems, the factors are simply the certificate that satisfy condition (2).

Comment · 1 year ago
Your last statement is misleading. A problem being NP-complete isn't exactly the property that allows you to reduce any NP problem to it. Suppose there was a complexity class MP-hard that has no efficient reduction to an NP-complete problem. Then a problem being MP isn't what allows me to write a reduction to the MP-hard problem; I could just as easily write a reduction from a problem in P to the MP-hard problem. Your statement is misleading but incidentally correct because the true condition (NP-hard or easier) happens to be equivalent to your stated condition (NP) for this particular complexity class. It would be clearer to simply state that you can always reduce an easy problem to a harder one.
Comment · 1 year ago
The link between BMAA and neurodegenerative diseases is well established. New Brunswick has huge BMAA problems. The fishing and aquaculture industry is alleged to suppress the BMAA theory, because less people would buy and eat New Brunswick lobster and fish.
Comment · 2 years ago
Everything in finance is isomorphic to some combination of borrow-lend agreements. Betting markets and futures markets are functionally one in the same. The only difference is the oracles and the series of bets required to construct your position.
Comment · 2 years ago
Amazing comment.

But hamburgers and dildos are good. It's not pleasure itself that has an ugly face; rather, it's seeking pleasure in spite of the cost to others.

You offer spiritualism as a cure. I think our higher end should be not spiritualism but the well-being of those we care about.

It's nice that spiritualism covers all bases: you should care about and help your friends and family; you should practice gratitude; etc. But we should state those things directly, lest fundamentalist screwball ideas like restriction of individual expression creep in under the guise of moral righteousness.

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