Incremental Greetings! 2024 a nice up the year in a different light than I expected. This video is out of schedule in the sense that it was not in my plans but it's important enough and I want to shoot it non-incrementally.
so you can just listen to this video so if you remember I said well I just use a subset of the features and being proficient in supermemo doesn't mean you use all of the features. right so follow that is way some people just don't don't use a subet of features they just completely move on they stop using supermemo at all which this is not news, this have happened since day one because Supermemo has a tremendous amount of friction points you have to tolerate. So what's happening now that more users are moving on Supermemo is more frequent even especially the long-term Supermemo users: three, five years or whatever that they have invested a ton of time to build their knowledge, their collection and so on.
What make the difference? FSRS. In case you don't know, it's free space repetition software (or system) that basically it's an open-source algorithm that tracks to mimic Supermemo's algorithm with the three component long-term memory components: difficulty, stability and retriability with some heuristics because there's a lot of missing information because in Ani you only have the flashcards, the final product of the learning process.
The learning process it's not there, but hey wait a second, there is people who actually use Supermemo like this! They do the reading elsewhere: Kindle, whatever that may be. Then they export the flashcards so they only have items.
So if I only have items in Supermemo so I'm skipping all of the incremental reading features and I have Anki, what was the difference? The performance, the scheduling algorithm that in Supermemo you could have the same retention rate doing a lot less repetitions and when I mean a lot less, in my usage was like a quarter nd even with a higher retention rate than in Anki, so timing is really key. But that's not the point of this video.
The point is that what I call the FSRS wave, now makes sense to move on from Supermemo to Anki because the difference yeah you will have an algorithm that performs more or less the same for short term intervals and then for long intervals, there's still elucidation needed, and real usage with long-term intervals. For now now the long intervals are from cards that existed already, so they use a different algorithm before and so on, so it's not the same thing. It's not to surprise that more people are moving on if they haven't used Incremental Reading or they stopped using Incremental Reading I will have done the same, and spoiler alert, I did for language learning.
I'm still using Supermemo obviously, for Incremental Reading but if I was not using Incremental Reading I will not use Supermemo because everything else, all of the language learning is an Anki, I have one video will be one corner how I converted my Advanced English collection to Anki, using some heuristics of the missing data, what is not one-to-one transfer, that was just an experiment but turns out long-term that Ooops! I'm not doing English, well I'm doing some sort of English in my incremental collection the names of theories, authors, and so on which appear there, out of what I'm reading, but for the sake of grammar, spelling, pronunciation and so on I have a dedicated collection for English, that if I'm honest in 2023, I think I opened like just to add information, not to review information. Yes most of the items were in the multi-year interval already so that could wait, but wait!
I had a copy in Anki as well, where all cards are mature already, in the two years, year and a half intervals already but you know what? Now I have FSRS let me actually try it out Well the results are not as good as a new collection because the intervals already set at one year and so on so the scheduling algorithm doesn't adapt to my performance because a couple of million repetitions have happened already with a different algorithm. So yeah I get this , but skipping all the details, it's good enough but even before that, even before FSRS, even using the default scheduling, I still used Anki for language learning.
Why? Because the cards were not new were in multi years [intervals]. So if I usually the performance is worse at the beginning, right?
The first intervals I skipped all of this but for now, now that I can do all the new cards as well with all the the convenience that Anki offers which by the way, I don't use Anki on the phone, I don't use Anki web to sync because I'm way above the [fliesize] thresold even though for me it's enough to have full support of modern standards that uh uh uh I'm not going back to Supermemo for that. There's no chance, no chance! Even if Supermemo releases a new algorithm with machine learning or whatever it's not it's.
. . .
I don't care! I don't care an improvement in my retention rate It's not worth it the price I have to pay, the windows only, the audio registry, super cheap solution with templates and so on so makes total sense that people are moving on Supermemo because of FSRS. I know people who use Supermemo and quite long term, more than a decade, who actually don't use Incremental Reading at all.
So I would like to see what happens, what these people do in the long term Yeah I get that some people like that actually they never used Anki because they predate Anki, they started using Supermemo before Anki existed. So if they have never used Anki, I can understand they just keep what they are familiar with but for people who use both, or first Anki and then Supermemo, they know Anki really well, it's an no-brainer. I'd do the same, I have done the same, at some extent.
Feel free to speak your mind and if you want to share you have also moved on Supermemo and let's see what the feature unfolds for Supermemo because every time I see less and less light into the future. don't want to be pessimistic but I don't know, I don't know . .
. Nothing more to today and see you incrementally!
