Andy Matuschak
patreon
Big milestone today: generic embeddable prompts
🕑 Added 2020-05-06 21:47:48 +0000 UTCHello, kind patrons! I mentioned in the last post that I was working on a next iteration of the system behind Quantum Country that can be embedded anywhere on the web: blog posts, e-books, Twitter threads, academic papers, etc. Today I hit a milestone I've been working toward for a couple months!
In the video, I've doctored collaborator Michael Nielsen's great notes on direct air capture to include prompts like the ones on Quantum Country. It looks like no big deal—after all Quantum Country's been doing this all year! But there are two enormous differences.
The first big difference is that Quantum Country's a package deal. The essays are built in a special way and are deeply integrated into the review system. But the notes I show in the video are just a plain web page that could be anywhere on the web: they don't have to be hosted on our special infrastructure or built in a special way. A simple HTML tag is all it takes to add the prompts seen in the demo.
The second big difference is that the video shows dedicated review apps. To review prompts from Quantum Country's essays, you can go to a "review page" on Quantum Country, but to review prompts from dozens of web pages, we'll need to establish a separate place that aggregates all those questions. What you see on the right are native macOS and iOS review apps, displaying a review session based on the prompts collected on the web page at left. But they'd also display prompts from anything else you read. There'll be a web-based review option, too, not shown here.
The interface shown in this video is basically a placeholder: I've been focused on the platform infrastructure. Lots of design work awaits. But I've imported my Anki library into this system, and for the last couple weeks, I've used these apps instead of Anki for my personal spaced repetition practice. That practice helps me feel all the rough edges viscerally and pushes me to make the experience great. But I'm already enjoying the automatic syncing and the modern native (not Electron-based!) macOS app.
Anticipating the obvious question: no, this stuff isn't ready for others to use yet. But that's what the next few months are about. You all will get access long before this is all public. Thank you for your ongoing support!
—Andy
Comments
Marta Krzeminska
Just as an FYI, my partner is working on this but for the specific case of language learning. The additional pedagogical idea here being that to review conversation/speaking standard methods still rely on spelling which is a waste of energy at the best of times, and a source of confusion in the worst (French spelling vs. speaking, languages with a new scripts). Work in progress that one, but just wanted to comfort you Arthur: there are Anki nerds working on this idea! :D I'll also be curious how it can be adapted to non-language cases, hoping for exponential progress in what I'm trying to learn.
Marta Krzeminska
Great work and an exciting feature! The ability to create flashcards from reading on the web would be a game changer for me. (Current system: collect notes in Evernote throughout the week, then copy paste to Anki. Far from ideal, didn't even bother playing with csv imports...).
Andy Matuschak
Indeed! A hands/eyes-free interaction model has been on my mind for a while. I think that could be very interesting.
Nice work! One idea I had around SRS which I would love to see experimented with / implemented in native apps is audio reviews with TTS. Not just reading out cards (which iirc is already implemented by Anki), but also allowing you to mark cards as correct / incorrect by, for example using play / pause features on headphones. There are some obvious limitations (eg may be hard to represent images/equations), but seems like a potentially very powerful review system that could allow review in many contexts in which you currently can't. (For example, if you are on-the-go, doing on a walk, etc etc).
Can Sar
This is incredibly exciting! Congrats!
