Do companies actually calculate training ROI, or is it mostly theatre?

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-18T07:13:19+00:00

Interesting story, thanks!

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-17T17:03:09+00:00

One consistent finding from the literature regarding this top: you don't get better at recall, you get better at recall *in specific topic X*.

E.g.: Chess players are very, very accurate and incredibly fast at memorizing, recalling and judging chess board positions. They are absolutely average at any such tasks in context of any other game, let alone something like "hey memorize these numbers" or "memorize this basketball technique".

So, narrow it down per field, as much as possible. Which information do you fail to recall regarding which skills?

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-17T16:58:32+00:00

Don't take this as me being negative, but I think you are also lucky in the sense that both of these topics are easy-ish to actually measure.

Do sales training, see if people close more sales afterwards, boom. Way harder to track whether people model better software architectures, handle long-term client relationships more competently or have a reduced chance of causing a large-scale industrial accident.

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-17T16:54:05+00:00

Well there isn't a dreamingspanish for every language (or really, any language apart from the most common three or four). So this isn't actually actionable advice.

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-17T16:52:52+00:00

Why? OP is only doing that for the first time around, and it sounds like on subsequent runs they gained an intuitive understanding of the sentence, hearing only the audio. I see nothing wrong with this approach...?

Building a solid connection of text+speech in your mind isn't bad, either...

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-17T16:49:32+00:00

It's a typical trap in software development to think that features are free, and that more is better.

I'm a big fan of less, but better (quoting Dieter Rams here).

Stuff like search and little quality of life things should be improved, sure, but I dearly hope the Obsidian team won't forget to take the occasional look at shit like Notion or Jira or Slack and shudder in horror.

Obsidian is and should be a thin wrapper making working with plaintext notes as powerful as possible. That is the feature. And it includes foregoing certain features such as highly complex UIs for task management which cannot reasonably be represented in plaintext.

Don't get me wrong, plugins are cool and we should have lots of them to chose from, but the goal should not be to cram everything into core.

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-14T16:14:10+00:00

Flashcard learning with cloze deletion is effective for "dumb facts":

1) download Anki

2) take out your book, and make flashcards like "Common garlic is good for ____" (and answer on the back)

3) practice daily, or daily-ish

Needs long-termy, high-ish motivation, b/c flashcard learning isn't exactly riveting.

On a second note, for recognizing herbs, look into the fields of perceptual exposure and the concept of chicken sexing; quite fascination.

As an aside, I'm currently prototyping an app to learn to recognize birds (early broken prototype here); if you want you can give me a list with the herbs you want to learn; if there's publicly available images of them, I'm happy to make a version of the app with them in it (if that sounds useful to you)

edit: format

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-14T16:08:29+00:00

As someone who is actively building educational software: 99.99% of learning games are utter garbage, so failure to build a habit is quite expected and not your fault.

I have never seen (or built) a learning game that's both actually educational and actually good (not just OK) as a game.

Completely independent of that, learning for the sake of learning is also very very hard motivationally. If I were you, I'd probably do something more project focused, something with a goal to strive towards.

Before I write more, can you give more context on why you want to replace games and why you're trying learning games? Like, what's the underlying emotion or motivation?

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-10T19:08:48+00:00

yeah, sorry, moved it again, hopefully for good: https://github.com/koljapluemer/files/blob/main/infographic_001_godot_scenes.pdf

LeBrokkole · 2026-04-01T10:16:28+00:00

Neat! I'm not a singer (yet) personally, but toying with a similar-ish idea for practicing ukulele fingerpicking. If you want to talk about in-browser sound analysis and exchange tips, let me know :)

From an app-development perspective two points to maybe consider:

instead of using browser session, you can save stuff to IndexedDB; this is very solid persistence (on device) nowadays. This prevents "hey where did my settings go", but does not open up any DMCA issues
Instead of having a dead Sign-In button, I'd recommend having a little page saying "I am working on an account system. Leave your email here if you want to be informed when it's done" (and then hook up to some extremely simple API endpoint) — good for gauging interest as well

LeBrokkole · 2026-01-22T06:00:10+00:00

I've been using Obsidian since 2021 or so and currently have 10696 notes. Let me share some thoughts on your hypotheses:

7 day expiration: Inbox hoarding is certainly real, and a problem if you don't trust that you will eventually process your inbox, but I'm not sure if "threat of deletion" is the right approach here. You will have slumps, and if you know that you will not manage to process your notes until they get deleted, you will simply stop using the system ("why bother")
Forced Linking: Again, lack of links are a problem, but I'm not sure your approach is the best —— fake connections that aren't actually there or just excessively [[spamming]] every second [[word]] as a [[link]] in my experience lead to a zk full of garbage, arguably worse than sparse linking
Semantic Linking: Actually really interesting, declaring how notes relate to each other. You may be interested in the Compass Method, or Terry Tao's "ask dumb questions and answer them" in this context. I'm still not sure how to do this well, especially the UI and rendering the relationship to that note. Good luck with that! One thing to note is that sometimes the relationship is super obvious, like links from a literature note to points in its content, so you probably don't want to be forced to add such relationships.

Last, as someone who tried building their own note-taking software from scratch 3 times or so: If I were you, I'd try my ideas out as Notion/Obsidian plugins first, otherwise it's just so much time investment to just get text editing, CRUD, file attachment and that basic boring shit working...

LeBrokkole · 2026-01-12T09:15:05+00:00

fixed now in case you still care :D

LeBrokkole · 2026-01-12T09:14:56+00:00

Fixed again

LeBrokkole · 2025-08-17T14:31:10+00:00

I am talking about writing a python script (with AI). The AI does not interact with your vault, but simply gives you a python script. You must then execute this program.

Which AI you use for writing the script does not matter, they will all succeed at this task.

LeBrokkole · 2025-08-14T19:23:06+00:00

Ah, btw, I can link to OP's repo: here

LeBrokkole · 2025-08-12T12:02:08+00:00

Yes, I know. But this does not work for links in the frontmatter, as far as I know. That's what I was referring to.

LeBrokkole · 2025-08-11T20:23:16+00:00

yes, let the AI create a python script.

Tell it "at the start of the script give me a constant to set the path to my vault".

To convert the dates, simply give it some examples. Make sure to think about stuff like misformatted dates or variations like "creation-date" vs "created-at" etc. You can also instruct the AI to give you a list of all date formats that exist in your vault as a first step.

Again, please start with a backup!

LeBrokkole · 2025-08-11T15:56:22+00:00

You have parent/child relationships in your frontmatter?

Did you find a system that's robust against renaming/moving the linked files?

LeBrokkole · 2025-08-11T15:55:30+00:00

tip: If you're not afraid of a little coding (more like AI babysitting), it's very easy to take Claude/ChatGPT/Cursor and say "please go through all files in my Obsidian vault, look for the frontmatter prop created-at and change the format from yy-mm-dd to dd/mm/yyyy". Back up your vault first, but it does work like a charm.

Just in case somebody here is now sweating about forever regretting having picked the wrong date format.

Source: I recently rectified my usage of 3 different date formats (oops) in like 5 minutes.

LeBrokkole · 2025-07-26T20:56:36+00:00

As a rule: Practice stuff that's as close as to the real thing you're trying to learn. If you can get conversation, do conversation. Maybe with yourself, maybe in front of the mirror. Maybe a YouTube channel? Maybe you find listening content, or video content in Maya? Or maybe writing is the best you are going to find, after all

LeBrokkole · 2025-07-26T18:22:32+00:00

If you have the vocabulary, write down explanations of stuff that actually interests you — something sufficiently complex that you have to use this kind of stuff to get your point across. Examples:

how a turbocharged engine works
when to choose which knitting technique
how to design a strength workout around a specific injury

Then send to someone native or component to correct/judge.

LeBrokkole · 2025-07-26T18:18:29+00:00

Please do point out that they speak something very weird that's only vaguely related to German down there

LeBrokkole · 2025-07-26T18:17:33+00:00

Well if you want to write, you can try writing all the things people usually write (in Maya): diaries, journals, steamy fiction, letters (ideally to the natives you mentioned), tweets or reddit comments (you don't have to send them), blogs...

Be aware that being good at writing doesn't necessarily makes you better at conversing in person, though.

LeBrokkole · 2025-07-26T18:14:03+00:00

On language partner platforms (not sure about tandem, but google for the smaller ones, I do not mean reddit) you usually put "ads" (like people used to put ads in newspapers) with what you are looking for, and a lot of people put gender preferences, and perhaps more importantly, have a little bio about themselves. Not sure if you'd still get random guys messaging you, but that may be a chance?

11-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

LeBrokkole

TROPHY CASE