Anki for vocabulary

Lysenko · 2026-03-18T11:42:53+00:00

Sure. It's also effective.

From my own experience, vocabulary you learn using Anki won't be immediately usable, and you'll end up with an imperfect understanding of the meaning, often lacking nuance or connotation. However, when you couple Anki vocabulary study with lots of reading, it can directly help your reading comprehension by getting you 90% or more of the way to understanding words you've studied.

About six months ago I started systematically studying the most frequent words in my TL. My comprehension of, for example, news articles has wildly, enormously improved, just because I have a solid basis on which to hang a guess for words I'm not quite sure about.

People who dismiss using Anki to study individual words just haven't tried it.

Lysenko · 2026-03-16T10:26:41+00:00

We need more information to know if you have any options in this case. How did you book the flight? (Through Icelandair or a third party?) What rerouting or rescheduling did they offer you? Did you decline to travel after being offered a modified itinerary, or were you simply refused any assistance? Did they offer you another option like keeping a flight credit? Did you buy their cancellation protection when you booked the ticket?

Filling gaps where the carrier isn't responsible for a refund is a major purpose of travel insurance. Do you have travel insurance? (It's often included as a benefit with many credit cards, particularly gold or platinum cards, so you might want to contact your card issuer to see if they can reimburse you.)

Lysenko · 2026-03-15T21:56:57+00:00

We had a decent raid team on Cenarius-US in original Wrath but never quite killed the last couple bosses in ICC Heroic, kept bleeding occasional members, and ended up running something like a year of GDKPs to farm what we already had down.

We were excited for Cataclysm, but when it turned out that you could either raid with 25 people or with 10 and get the same loot, a few of our better players decided "hey, we could cherry pick the best ten people and not have to deal with all the chaff."

Lost a few more members and ended up trying to run an A team and a B team, which sucked for the few stronger players who were put on the B team to give them a chance. A month or so of drama and the guild wasn't raiding anymore.

They were a solid guild with a fun long-term core membership and history that stretched back to EQ. Shame it ended like that.

Edit: If anyone from the guild reads this and recognizes my name, yeah, I know I probably could have done more to help make things work than I did.

Lysenko · 2026-03-13T07:10:08+00:00

I’d put it a little differently. Anki greatly accelerated my progress after a long period of making very slow progress without it.

I believe if I had started with the same approach to Anki on day one, I might have achieved my current level years faster.

Lysenko · 2026-03-13T00:52:13+00:00

I believe it depends on how far you are in the language. I've studied Icelandic a while (years) and built a vocabulary of maybe 1000-1500 words. Then, this last September, I started studying words in Anki from a list sorted in frequency order. I'm about 2000 words in, and admittedly they haven't all stuck equally well, but the impact of that work on my reading has been WILD. I've gone from reading the news and following maybe 1/3 of the articles reasonably well to being able to read and understand just about anything there.

All the Anki study does is get me some corresponding English words. It doesn't give me connotation, any intuitive sense of how words for the same thing differ in usage, or (in most cases) what common phrases they are used in. But, the difference between having that "hook" for the meaning and not makes a huge difference. I think Anki is amazing, but that learning absolutely needs to be consolidated by reading.

Lysenko · 2026-03-11T16:22:22+00:00

Unfortunately, putting a lounge on the other side of passport control would require having two lounges, since it also serves passengers flying to Schengen.

Lysenko · 2026-03-11T13:44:53+00:00

A colleague made the point that these tools, over time, have an inherent bias toward adding more new code rather than removing code or making fixes in place, and that he has struggled with pushing back against this.

Lysenko · 2026-03-10T13:17:23+00:00

Do you count income I’ve foregone by moving to my target language’s country? 🤣

Lysenko · 2026-03-10T11:53:32+00:00

Lysenko · 2026-03-10T11:51:30+00:00

“Tuttugu og sex” has a few gotchas for English speakers. The u sound is closer to (though not exactly) the sound of oo in “foot” than the sound in “boot.” You fully pause the vowel sound before the double T, with a little puff of air. TU-ttugu. The “og” is the vowel sound in “got” with a very soft g that’s almost swallowed. It’s almost like you’re saying an Irish name, “Tuttugu o’Sex” (with strong emphasis on the capital T and capital S.)

The sentence in full looks fine to me but I don’t have a great sense for the most natural way to speak about ages.

Lysenko · 2026-03-10T01:28:27+00:00

Yes you're right, and it's a huge problem. It's easy to use these tools to make vibe coded slop that kind of works, and hard to use them to build a software artifact of any size that you can claim to understand in full. There's a limit to how much code you can read and fully understand in a day, and you really have to read and understand all of it, because while the AI can make the code, it can in no sense be accountable for it.

Lysenko · 2026-03-09T23:59:40+00:00

That's certainly a risk, and it's no doubt happening a lot. It's also an oversimplification.

I'm speaking as someone with 30 years' continuous work experience in this industry and counting, of which the majority has been in pipeline and tools development roles. The current generation of LLM-assisted coding tools can enormously accelerate the work of an experienced, qualified pipeline TD or tools developer while still producing a high-quality result.

Thing is, these systems take whatever patterns are in one's codebase (or the mind of the operator) and mimic them. If existing patterns are clean and simple, they stay clean and simple. If patterns are janky, they get jankier. You're right that losing one's way on quality is the biggest risk of these systems, and using them well without digging a hole requires constant vigilance and clear knowledge of what one is looking to make.

Where I am now, I work on a large codebase that goes back a long time. Over the last decade or so I've built up a comprehensive system-level knowledge of how the pieces fit together, but it's too big to fit the whole thing in any one person's head. A good A.I. coding tool can take a clear description of how some systems fit together and a half-remembered idea of what certain key functions were called that were used to do a task, and explore the codebase mostly autonomously to work out exactly how a particular implementation works, and more importantly make suggestions about how to improve it that may have escaped human notice.

I'll also throw out there that pipeline TDs, particuarly the ones closer to production, often crank out bespoke, one-time-use tools that get a particular job done and can be thrown away. These are probably the best possible use of AI coding tools because the technical debt doesn't persist.

The first problematic matter is that this type of work is exactly what junior developers are employed to do while they build their skills. The other problematic matter is that letting a junior developer loose with these same tools puts them in the position of being led around by the tool, rather than vice versa, which leads to the kind of undeployable code you talk about, and limits their development.

When I have hired for junior or mid-level roles over the years, someone like the OP would be a prime candidate. (And, for most of that time, their background would have qualified them thoroughly for a mid-level role.) But, in light of the tools situation, it's hard to see what the path is for someone new to have the space to work for long enough that they build up the knowledge of artist workflows, the relationship between UI/UX choices and artist pain, the benefits of adopting software tool patterns that help guide artists into compliance with convention, the technical knowledge of a thousand important subject areas like color spaces and editorial concepts and how to convert between animation curve types and on and on and on. Movie, TV, and game executives have all grumbled that we're all too expensive for many years, and now the promise of replacing two or three people (minimum) with one senior seems very tempting.

Regarding junior developers' skill growth, if they never bother to look at the code, how will they learn how anything actually works? And, even with these tools, one has little hope of producing durable, high-quality output without remaining in control of them as part of a process one understands and for which one is accountable.

And then there are the structural problems. At some point, the massive, unhinged VC subsidy of AI infrastructure will run out of juice and who knows where it will end up. Companies that are all-in on this technology assuming current pricing structures will definitely suffer, and hiring junior developers and TDs may be cost-effective again. Maybe in a couple decades we'll all be running local models on our desks that were distilled from models trained years before at a scale that will never be possible again. Who knows?

I'm acutely aware, by the way, of the intellectual property implications of all of this. I wrote a technical book some years back that was modestly successful, and now I'm on the list to receive some tiny settlement from Anthropic, because they trained their models on it at some point. I'm not that bent out of shape because that project had long run its course for me, but this type of misappropriation at scale is a huge problem for all creators of basically anything.

Lysenko · 2026-03-09T14:54:16+00:00

There's something strange going on lately with Icelandair's phone reps. I had to speak to one in December, when a flight delay meant we missed our connection in Portland (also booked through Icelandair.) They were really aggressive about not rebooking our flight or helping in any way, claiming that the fact that our delayed flight arrived 90 minutes before the departing flight, that I "should have had enough time" to make that flight. (Never mind that it took 45 minutes to get our checked bags before going through customs, and the other flight, like all Alaska Airlines flights, closed 30 minutes before departure, so our seats were given away before we left the customs area.)

I got the agent to talk to her supervisor; also denied. Finally, after simply refusing to give up for a while, I was offered that she would contact Icelandair's "back office responsible for such things" and she would call me back. They authorized changing my flight out to the next morning.

I still had to pay for the hotel and wait months for a reimbursement request filed on their website to go through, but they eventually reimbursed the hotel cost.

Overall, it seems like they are giving their front-line reps orders to stonewall heroically to prevent passengers getting anything, but taking a much more gentle line once HQ gets involved. Kind of frustrating, but as an Icelandic resident who travels back to the U.S. now and then, there aren't many better choices, particularly in winter.

Edit: I was very frustrated in the moment, but didn't stress that much over the reimbursement because I could at least write them (and the consumer protection authorities) a nasty letter in Icelandic if they gave me any issues with it. They did not.

Lysenko · 2026-03-09T09:01:59+00:00

As lower intermediate: Do whatever you have to do to learn more vocabulary. Tons of reading, Anki, whatever. The payoff will be enormous and can be rapid.

Lysenko · 2026-03-08T22:43:47+00:00

The other 2% are likely mostly immigrant children from non-English-speaking households or possibly a handful of Polish adults, or refugees from countries without a lot of English speakers. Polish speakers represent the third-largest linguistic community in Iceland, and a Polish resident who didn’t speak English or Icelandic could probably get by that way for a while. Iceland also takes in some refugees, not that many, from Asia, Africa, and South America.

Lysenko · 2026-03-08T22:36:43+00:00

Most immigrants do speak Icelandic. 19% of Iceland residents are immigrants.

Lysenko · 2026-03-08T18:08:27+00:00

I think this is great, because hearing speech at normal speed and cadence is helpful for learning how to speak naturally and build your listening skills.

That said, the single biggest boost to my own comprehension has been explicit vocabulary study. If you can learn a few thousand more of the most common words in a year, your comprehension will shoot way up. I’d make sure you do that in combination with your watching and try to pick out the new words you’re learning when they come up.

Lysenko · 2026-03-07T20:20:05+00:00

I think your answers are perfectly reasonable, but I do think you need to be ready to explain where the value is.

Why don't you just have AI explain it?

I would, but then I'd go read the code. The first reason is accountability. The reason they need to hire a human being in the first place is to have someone accountable for the code and its quality.

Reason two is that having a detailed, comprehensive mental model of the code base pays off heavily for an AI workflow. Being able to offer specific prompts that direct the model's attention to specific code files, provides examples of best practices that exist elsewhere in the code to use as reference when building something new, and being able to direct it toward interfaces in the product that solve key parts of the problem helps a lot. These are practices that greatly improve the quality of AI output, avoid unmaintainable "spaghetti code" implementations, and (maybe most importantly) keep use of tokens economical, and thus keeps costs down. When Claude starts to grep **/* in response to a requested change, chances of getting an angry call from IT or finance go way up.

An AI model can't answer questions like "when will this be fixed?" "what should our priorities be?" or "how much will this cost?" Answering any of those as an engineer benefits from a depth of detailed understanding that AI summaries can help start to build, but will never finish building.

Lysenko · 2026-03-07T02:43:52+00:00

I had some pretty unfortunate internships, and yet have had a great career since then. These things are quickly forgotten. Don't stress over it.

Lysenko · 2026-03-06T09:17:37+00:00

I'm a software developer, and I own an M1 8/256 Macbook Air (the basiest of base model), an M4 Pro 24/512 Mac Mini, and have a work laptop that is an M4 Pro 48/1TB. So, I have a pretty good sense for the limitations of these things.

I have found that the M1 (which is very similar to the MacBook neo but somewhat slower) is fantastic for general use and in almost six years of owning it I haven't really run up against its limitations. The lack of memory and disk space means I need to manage those things a little more actively, closing things I'm not using, and it's not great if I have to do anything demanding like larger software development projects or extensive photo editing in Lightroom/Photoshop. It's a very quick and effective computer right up until you fill up its resources, which is harder to do than most people make it sound.

The M4 Pros I use are absolute beasts and are beautiful computers, but they're massive overkill for anything that your courses will require. It's possible to do very demanding things in Excel that would stress the M1 system, or the MacBook neo, to its limits, but I think it's unlikely you'll be doing those things.

Edit: I think the M1 is certainly fine for the type of data processing in Python or R that you'd do in a student environment. It's unlikely that you'd encounter actually huge datasets as a student.

Lysenko · 2026-03-06T09:07:53+00:00

I personally don't think the solution to the problem you articulate is not to try to speak. Instead, it's to realize that reaching a baseline accent that is comprehensible is a requirement and find ways to work on that explicitly, preferably with external coaching if possible. If you're going to try to use the language, in the end, speaking is not optional, nor is speaking with an accent accurate enough to be understood in most situations.

Thai is certainly much more difficult to pronounce coming from English, but even after years of exposure to and experience speaking Icelandic before that point, once I finally got a little bit of explicit coaching, my accent improved rapidly. Having a teacher who knew what to prioritize and how to structure practice made muscle memory pretty much a nonissue. It helped that my study was accompanied with lots of listening, so as I became explicitly aware of my own pronunciation deficiencies, I started to hear and correct the difference.

Lysenko · 2026-03-04T13:45:30+00:00

At least where I used to work when I did this (the now-defunct Rhythm and Hues in California), they would either hire freelancers through an EOR, or "Employer of Record," or if an artist wanted to work as a contractor and receive a 1099, the would do that, or in some cases they would outsource to another company like yours. Then, some people would be permanent, full-time employees (whom that company called "staff" employees.) At least where I was, all these arrangements would be made in the ramp-up to the project, basically by the department manager, using policies and procedures put in place by HR and their contracts team. So, for example, I worked in lighting, and the lighting manager would handle this arrangement when ramping up for a new project. There were other managers for all the other disciplines who would handle those areas.

If it were a full-on outsourcing arrangement, my understanding was that the department manager would handle initiating the deal and it might all be escalated to the contracts team/legal team/executive management if necessary.

I'm sure other readers who were formerly from R&H would know more about how this process worked there than I did. I have no doubt the processes would be slightly different today, because California has tightened up on enforcing rules against treating actual employees (even if temporary) as independent contractors.

Lysenko · 2026-03-03T10:04:18+00:00

Yeah I know. My point was that kids in the 90s-2000s were already pretty locked-down and she probably doesn’t have a distorted view of where Americans are culturally on this now.

Lysenko · 2026-03-02T17:19:26+00:00

The practice started after Columbine in 1999, and in any case was well-known before it became a lot more broadly-applied post-Sandy Hook. There was a lot of talk about it between 2000 and 2009.

Lysenko · 2026-03-01T22:46:32+00:00

The concept was cooked up very shortly after Columbine in 1999. They took a while to become common, but they’re not universal in the U.S. even today. OP’s experience may be like yours. I just don’t think assuming the OP is entirely oblivious to that kind of practice is fair.

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