- ⬡ Swimming Duck
- ⊢ every user-facing learning app needs to be a swimming duck
- > You press the button, we do the rest
- ◊ Behavioral Self Growth Direction Check
- ⌣ knowledge acquisition rate
- flow tunnel
- ⇄ simulation room & debriefing room
- ⋱ Aleatoricism
- ⋱ make software
- ⋱ make a website
- ⋱ architect software
- ⌣ cohesion
- Goldilocks Principle
- ⚗ dead simple auth for a tiny userbase
- > Anytime “mushed” accurately describes your architecture, you likely have a problem.
- > Uncertainty multiplies through dependencies
- ~ syncable state means bugs
- > The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility
- > complexity very, very bad
- ⬡ fast, slow, slower
- ~ prepend parameter names with an indefinite article unless the object has a specific role
- ~ inline the invocation, but don't inline the implementation
- ~ warning systems do not warn that they can no longer warn
- the public folder of a js app is a little mini backend
- ⋱ visually design software
- ⌣ interface design
- ~ the best interface is the one you can forget exists
- ⋱ innovate
- ~ accept no substitute for actually observing your (potential) users
- ⋱ design a game
- ⌣ motivation in game dev
- ~ games introduce voluntary obstacles
- ◊ twitch decision
- Inverted U
- ◊ game
- > If you wish to develop a skill or impart knowledge, create a game that closely matches the end state you wish to achieve
- > Mechanics that interact with many other mechanics smell like elegance.
- ⁓ have side effects that change constrains
- ~ have emergent complexity and your game is good
- ~ ask﹕ can the player 'get good'﹖
- ask﹕what's the Essential Experience﹖
- ~ most products fail, even if executed competently
- ⬡ Omniscent Designer
- ⋱ make
- > Simplify, then add lightness
- > "extremely unsafe" and whatever, but works
- > You cannot solve a problem you do not have
- > You can’t have five North Stars
- ~ it doesn't matter what you think of the problem
- ◊ minimum valuable product
- ⋱ plan
- ~ never hesitate in front of the canvas
- ~ in 1-person teams, no-testing no-tools may be the fastest approach
- > any project worth doing might not work
- > fix big problems first or weep hard
- ⋱ build a startup
- > Your target customers have to love you more than they hate change.
- ~ B2B > B2C
- > They own the problem, you own the solution
- > Always try and incorporate short-term, immediate wins for a client
- ~ launching your project successfully is not a guarantee of traffic long-term
- ~ build mini apps around your startup, launch them separately
- ~ ads can be scaled as soon as you find a working approach (which is the hard part)
- > Don’t start a business until people are asking you to
- > Always start from the problem, not the solution
- > You aren't running a charity. You're running a business. If people won't give you money for your product, you have an existential crisis on your hands.
- ⋱ price
- > Make people an offer so good they would feel stupid saying no.
- > sell your product based on value not on price.
- market > marketing > product
- > Success hides problems
- > People don't pay for solutions to problems they don't mind having
- > A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what’s going on.
- ⋱ market
- >People pay for speed
- ~ set goal﹕ 5 conversations with new potential customers per week
- ~ build plugins
- ◊ offer
- > Problems come in all shapes and sizes, and the only thing you can be absolutely certain about is that you will have some
- > Weniger aber besser.
- > give me the freedom of a tight brief
- > even though I know I should trust the process, I don't
- > Occasionally, time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But usually it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.
- ~ “This tree is too small” is not helpful early feedback
- > Nobody knows anything
- > Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
- > The opposite of “remarkable” is “very good.”
- > Never trust a test until you have seen it fail
- > Remember that there is no code faster than no code.
- > Build with monetization in mind
- > I regret to inform you that your code has to be deployed
- ~ point of TDD is to force you design your code to be testable
- ◊ automated testing
- > ask﹕ what demo can I do next
- > Our brains are terrible video game simulators.
- ⋱ document software
- ⋱ tracking knowledge
- ⋱ affect the world
- ⋱ change own behavior
- any system that needs regular manual maintenance is already dead
- ⬡ Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It
- ~ medium-to-large intention change leads to small-to-medium behavior change
- ~ don't miss twice
- > Side effects pile up when you repeat a behavior a lot
- ◊ behavior change
- > To initiate action, doing must be easier than thinking
- ⌣ motivation
- > We may be nourished by the idea of the carrot more than the carrot itself.
- ⌣ learning motivation
- > I'm just not particularly motivated to learn for learning's sake
- > When I don't have skin in the game, I am usually dumb
- ⌣ skin in the game
- genchi genbutsu
- > Imagine how cool Pop Tarts would be if the brand manager was the sort of person who ate them for dinner.
- > It's amazing how someone's IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them
- > Successful digital games involve players in a way that leaves them believing they have something emotionally and personally at stake
- > those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions
- ⌣ skin in the game
- > When I don't have skin in the game, I am usually dumb
- ◊ plateau
- > Just-in-case learning sucks compared to just-in-time learning.
- > I'm just not particularly motivated to learn for learning's sake
- ⋱ build a habit
- > People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures
- > In contrast to will and discipline, which require pushing yourself to a particular behavior, a ritual pulls at you
- ◊ habit
- ⋱ build things people care about
- ~ don't change what people want, but how they get it
- ~ market by making something so remarkable that tiny adopter group won't stop talking about it
- ~ if you don't talk to potential customers, you drown in your assumptions
- ~ can't have a dinner part without guests
- information gap
- > If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.
- > Smart businesses target markets where there’s already otaku.
- ⋱ enable repeat usage of software
- > We trust things more when they look like they were done for the love of it rather than the sheer commercial value of it.
- ⋱ communicate
- ~ get closer
- ⋱ change own behavior
- ~ experts know the basics of every adjacent field
- > Apply new techniques, even when you don’t need to
- ⋱ learn
- Synthesis
- ◊ deliberate practice
- ◊ learning
- ⬡ the dip
- ◊ passive review
- ~ learning for mastery means asking "what meaningful thing can I do with what I learned"
- > Without forgetting, the brain would be as dumb as a tape recorder.
- ⇄ individual interest vs. situational interest
- ◊ learning research
- > Learning takes way longer than you expect, but its scope is often further reaching
- > Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted.
- ⋱ build expertise
- > Do work that fully reflects the final work you wish to produce.
- > All experience must be purchased
- > intense practice of very simple activities leads to very surprising and dramatic rewards
- ~ to make progress, increase intensity
- ~ to learn, dip into related fields
- > the octopus is not sitting in its room watching YouTube videos
- ~ master fundamentals
- > Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying.
- > You can step back onto the path of mastery anytime you want.
- > Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst
- ⌣ Dreyfus Model for Skills Acquisition
- ~ knowledge acquisition isn't the end goal, but a requirement for skill acqusition
- ~ to build expertise, conscious strategy and desire to improve are needed
- ◊ accelerated learning
- ◊ training session
- ⋱ teach
- ~ gradually increase the grain size of learning
- ~ remediation = Sanierung = fixing of common learning bugs
- > One of the least efficient means of coaching is lecturing about how to perform a task.
- > Qui docet discit
- Erfahrungsbasierter Lernzyklus
- extramural
- ~ practical experience leads to reflection and generalization
- ◊ Suzuki method
- ~ they are an infinite amount of ways to teach anything; choosing is hard
- ◊ coaching
- > Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
- > take on a lofty goal that will monopolize your mind
- > to understand something, you must actively engage with it
- > A bird cannot land once on a great tree and claim to know it.
- > First, find a good teacher
- > How would I do this, if doing it well were all that mattered﹖
- ⋱ learn
- ⬡ i⧸o loop
- ◊ near transfer
- ⌣ transfer of learning
- > The likelihood of positive transfer is a function of the similarity between the trained task and the transfer task
- ⁓ DP may not allow learning transfer
- > Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view
- ~ far transfer is rare
- ~ measuring (far) transfer is extremely hard
- ⌣ transfer of learning
- ~ start with identifying ZPD precisely
- ~ automation fails when automating whatever possible and leaving the rest for the humans
- ◊ Spaced Repetition
- ◊ Rapid Spaced Repetition
- ◊ card stages
- ⚗ Creating a spaced-repetition game to learn the Arabic numbers from 1-100
- ⁓ ideal initial interval for practicing a chord switch is definitely not 1 day
- ⁓ memory consolidation may be the goal of SR
- ~ any SR is so much better than none that the specific algo doesn't matter
- ⌣ cost per trial
- ◊ trial-based scheduling
- incentive problem with SR
- ~ putting something into a (good) SRS is costless
- > Repetition is the mother of learning
- ◊ no-feedback spaced repetition
- ⌣ complexity of learning material
- ~ SR may lead to overfitting, because you learn only this answer to this question
- ⋱ measuring learning success
- ⊛ represent expertise as production rules
- image-making
- ◊ note-taking
- ⬡ user research
- > When you make assumptions about your users, you run the risk of being wrong
- > If you want to know what people might do in the future, you need them to tell you true stories about what they’ve done in the past
- ⋱ research
- > surest way to make progress in science is to improve on the conceptual definition of what one is studying
- > If you do not know how to measure a phenomenon, you can always begin, by way of introduction, with an arbitrary qualitative scale
- ◊ academic research
- > Never pay for complexity of presentation when all you need is results.
- > read every single source that has ever been written on that topic
- > Rats can't be sped up by any amount
- > I was concerned with investigating truth, not with questions of personal prestige.
- ◊ experimentation
- ⋱ solve a problem
- ⇄ faster horses debate
- > It’s always worth testing the sketch on the napkin.
- ⊛ Obsidian plugin based on title startswith prop
- ⬡ lead magnet
- ⬡ hook, retain, reward
- ⬡ hook
- ⬡ reward
- ⋱ make content
- ~ when doing social media, keep the number-go-up counters at arms length
- ~ share a 5 minute story every day
- ~ never try to say 'something interesting'
- > just commit to making a video once a week, every week, for 2 years, and your life will change.
- ~ people come back to media for the predictable emotional experience
- ~ mini essays structure﹕ intro, body, conclusion
- ⋱ write mini essay
- ⋱ write
- > if there is a first principle on drafting, it is to ignore most of the advice about how to do it
- ⋱ draft
- > What are we to do with what we have written down﹖ Certainly, at first, we will produce mostly garbage.
- ⋱ edit
- > We all read into our own writing what we want readers to get out of it
- > Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out
- > Make every paragraph earn its keep
- ~ bad writing comes from refusing to go from Beginning to Middle to End
- ⋱ edit
- > What are we to do with what we have written down﹖ Certainly, at first, we will produce mostly garbage.
- ~ results over thought process
- > speed kills the censor
- > Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.
- > Details are what make your words come alive.
- > Write concisely. Preferably, not at all.
- > behold needs of tribe﹕ story, story, story!
- > write like you don't know what's going to happen next
- ⋱ write a book
- ~ clearly separate writing and editing
- ⋱ write
- ⋱ write mini essay
- ⋱ design a learning tool
- > Serve businesses, not people. People will do anything to not pay.
- ◊ Page Fragments
- ◊ language islands
- ◊ language learning strategy
- ◊ grammar–translation method
- ◊ back-chaining
- ⋱ learn a language
- ◊ language learning
- ~ structural lang learning is only good for beginner stage
- > There’s no reason to become fluent in a badly pronounced language, because no one will speak it with you.
- > 15 minutes a day can teach you a language
- ◊ sentence generation
- ◊ sentence learning
- ◊ language learning strategy
- ⬡ paradigm shift
- ~ superior memory is explained by spatial learning
- ~ deep work should be first action of the day
- ⋱ finish things
- ⋱ be productive
- > Limit the number of choices you need to make
- ⋱ prepare productivity
- > ruthlessly cull the ungainly stack of projects clouding your productivity horizon
- ◊ distraction
- ~ you will be much less effective at the jump point
- > each Monday I record in a simple text file a plan for my upcoming week. There are no rules for this plan.
- > If you don’t know when you’re doing something, chances are you won’t do it.
- > We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training
- > I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
- > You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it’s distracting you from
- ⋱ prioritize
- > if you don’t give your time a job, it will dissipate in a fog of distracted tinkering
- > Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.
- ~ a complicated life probably necessitates complicated systems
- ~ ask﹕ given my goals, how can I best spend the next half hour﹖
- ◊ dopamine detox
- ◊ accountability partner
- ⋱ decide what to do
- productive recluse
- ~ anti-goals are sacrifices you're willing to make to achieve goals
- ⋱ prepare productivity
- ◊ ten-minute rule
- > Proximity isn't progress
- > you'll rarely earn points in life for repeatedly thinking about something you're not doing
- > The one thing we control is the time we put into a task
- ⌣ focus
- progressive pomodoro
- > The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like
- ~ physical work environments are full of peripheral cues
- ⁓ do it anyways
- ◊ goal setting
- > Limit the number of choices you need to make
- ~ enthusiastically diving into a project is resistance
- ⋱ be productive
- ⬡ Adapter Pattern
- ~ examples of user empowerment﹕ command line, spread sheet, the internet
- > Don’t read this book for its content; read its content for its practices.
- headword
- memory drum
- > technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things
- ◊ automation
- > What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t﹖
- > Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
- > The trouble with automation is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do.
- > Automation remakes both work and worker.
- > Not every task is a chore
- > men have become the tools of their tools.
- ~ in a high-stake scenario, don't say 'what' without 'why'
- ~ it's easiest (but not best) to present machines as well as humans with numbers)
- ◊ automation
- ~ SQLite is an excellent db, even deployed
- ~ delay decisions until the decisions would be made for you by inaction
- ⇄ refactor vs. restructure
- > If you think Psychological Science was bad in the 2010-2015 era, you can’t imagine how bad it was back in 1999
- ~ systems often start integrated, then evolve into modules
- ~ you have neither no power nor infinite power
- ⌣ system theory
- > If it requires great energy of mind to create a system, it requires even greater not to become the slave of the creation
- ⇄ roads vs. buildings
- > YouTube doesn’t care if the video you’re watching is funny or not.
- > Decades ago, General Motors didn’t set out to design mediocre, poorly built cars, but they did.
- ⌣ system theory
- ~ you have neither no power nor infinite power
- ◊ compartmentalization
- ◊ breadth-first
- memorizing poetry
- ~ material can be learned during testing
- ⌬ minimal pairs trainer
- ⚗ Memorizing vocabulary using the Picture Superiority Effect
- ⊛ chatgpt extension﹕ learn something while the llm is thinking
- ⌣ Hick's Law
- > language is simply a means of telling stories
- > For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong
- ⋱ handle information
- > Reading rots the mind
- > false information is not dangerous if it is not credible
- > Constantly think of applications
- ⋱ think
- > The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
- > Aim to be proven wrong.
- ⋱ change your mind
- > Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.
- ~ be ready to joyfully accept that people don't need what you thought they need
- ~ simulations help people recognize their mental models are wrong
- ~ the faster you're proven wrong, the less time you will spend being wrong
- ~ balance all extremist views with counter books
- > The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea
- > Demand a consistent mental model.
- > If the treatment isn’t working, question the diagnosis
- > No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory.
- > Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well
- > The art of being wise, is the art of knowing what to overlook
- ~ eufriction is good friction
- ◊ zettelkasten
- > cull your inputs
- > A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
- > You get no competitive edge from consuming the same stuff everyone else is consuming.
- ⋱ handle information
- > When you’re ill or injured, the world becomes one of can’ts
- ◊ work in public
- > The UNIX command line is the quintessential end-user programming environment.
- > At this level of the development of self-regulation, players begin to develop a mental model of the game that allows them to move from the concrete experiences of the serious game to more abstract notions of the game
- > academia is struggling at doing science nowadays also because you’re stuck doing all kinds of other things with your time rather than actual research
- > My work on this was an extremely long-drawn-out affair, and it was only after some twenty years of it that I reached some degree of understanding of my fantasies
- > Run in the other direction
- ⋱ position
- > Sometimes the best copy to sell a horse is 'Horse for Sale'
- > We are THE low-fare airline
- ⇄ painkillers vs vitamins
- ⌣ product market fit
- ~ ask﹕ whom do my (potential) users trust﹖
- ~ prices are signals
- > If explaining your startup idea takes a minute, think twice.
- > you can't out-Amazon Amazon
- > if your mission statement is much longer than this sentence, it could be too long
- > If You Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything
- > “Tastes like chicken” isn’t a compliment.
- ~ you can't build a brand for everyone, so don't try
- > keep your identity small
- ◊ target group
- > people like us do it like this
- ~ find the two axes where you are the extreme
- ⋱ position
- > (DBR-style) research can change reality rather than just study it
- > Command-line interface isn't simply text, it's a conversational UI.
- > Learn three new things before you come back to us
- > The blade itself incites to deeds of violence
- ⋱ read
- ◊ fact
- ⊛ make a lang learning game purely based on comprehension
- ◊ loosely coupled
- ⊛ learning game﹕ adventure capitalist with learning-related quests
- ◊ loci
- ◊ commander’s intent
- ~ you can't use reels to teach complex content
- ◊ Intelligent Tutoring System
- ◊ description-similarity slip
- ◊ error
- ~ give meaningful error messages
- ◊ failure
- > I missed more than 9000 shots in my career
- > Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something
- > failure has been achieved, thank God
- > Failure is regarding the rung of a ladder as a resting place
- ~ after a break, allow yourself to stop practice only after you reached your previous level
- > Designers need to avoid procedures that have identical opening steps but then diverge.
- > The rat is always right
- ◊ error
- ⊛ situation on the Hail Mary as a learning game
- nature vs. nurture
- > My working habits are simple - long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
- ◊ high acuity, low occurrence
- > I'm always thinking about how to measure distances in the universe
- how to start learning app projects with building a toy﹖
- ⌬ learn the world map
- ~ don't demand global solutions to local problems