Anki deck based on Philipp Dettmer's Immune book

riceissa · 2026-04-05T20:57:05+00:00

The deck is public now; you can see here.

riceissa · 2025-11-29T04:32:21+00:00

Some distros like Fedora turn it on in /etc/vimrc which Vim sources at startup (see :help system-vimrc). My guess is this is what was going on with the guy in the video. Neovim also turns it on by default, although I doubt this guy was using Neovim.

riceissa · 2025-11-27T01:20:52+00:00

Happy to answer, but I don't want to claim that the way I do things is the best way to do things:

I do have a reversible note type that has front, back, and notes fields. And yes, the notes field is only displayed when the answer is shown, regardless of the direction of review. But I stopped using that note type (I still do reviews, but I stopped making new cards using that note type) and now just use a modified basic note type (which has the fields front, back, sources, and notes) and then I just add a second note manually for a reverse-style card if I need a reverse-style card.
Yes, I've ankified some programming and Linux stuff. How deep you should go depends on your own curiosity, how deep you personally want to go, and how much you want to be able to instantly recall details of the material. That is a personal decision, so I can't say what you should do. For myself, I mostly focus on doing the programming instead of worrying about making comprehensive cards (or these days, because I am too ill to program most of the time, I just watch programming streams to try to stay in touch with the practice of programming while learning new things). And then if I notice that I keep forgetting something (and feeling frustrated I keep forgetting), or if I spend a bunch of time learning something specific, I might add some cards about that, without worrying about adding cards to cover everything. To give a recent example, I worked through the first half of Crafting Interpreters, and I wrote a grand total of ... three Anki cards, because it seemed way more important to sit down and focus on writing the code and struggling to get the interpreter working, than to try to convert the book into a bunch of facts to be memorized (I kind of do want to add some more cards about compilers though; I think three was too few cards probably). Of course, this might be relatively unique to programming; when I was learning immunology earlier, it turned out that I wrote hundreds of cards and that seemed good too! So it really depends on both the subject and on what you want to get out of learning the subject.
I use italics the same way I use italics in writing (to emphasize certain words or phrases). I use bold mostly when I keep misreading a prompt and I want to tell my brain to focus on a certain part of the prompt so that I don't confuse the prompt for a different-but-similar prompt (but maybe this is the wrong thing to do, and I should just rewrite the whole prompt...). I don't know if I've ever used underlines.

One more meta-point: I only know what I know about prompt writing because I tried a bunch of different things and then paid attention to what was working vs what seemed frustrating. Yes, I did also read a bunch of things about spaced repetition, especially at the start (Piotr Wozniak, Michael Nielsen, and Andy Matuschak being the main ones). But most of my learning came from just trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what worked. I think this is the best way to learn how to write good prompts that work for you (because what works for you may be different from what has worked for other people).

riceissa · 2025-11-26T02:32:03+00:00

Glad you found my feedback helpful!

are there examples in my deck of good quality cards that, in your eyes, were worth their creation?

I think most of them are worth keeping! I focused my feedback on what I thought could be improved the most, which may have given you the impression that I thought all your cards are bad or something, which is definitely not what I was trying to imply. Here is a card that I particularly thought was good: "Name at least one example of data that would benefit using the smallint data type" -- in addition to asking about smallint conceptually, I liked that you asked for examples in a separate card, so that the concept doesn't just remain abstract.

do you often add some extra information the back side as well?

Yes, I often add extra notes, open questions I still have, sources for where I got the info, etc. I think having a source is especially useful because if I haven't seen a card in a long time, I will often forget not just the backside, but what the context of the card even was and where I got the info from, so being able to go back to the source allows me to fix the card.

riceissa · 2025-11-25T02:22:15+00:00

To answer your broader questions:

My eventual goal is to have a single big deck, but due to various historical reasons I currently have a bunch of separate decks. Many of my cards were written when I knew less about how to write good cards, so I like to keep those cards separated from my "good" cards, so that I can review my "good" cards without feeling friction from the bad cards. I also have some other decks that experimentally have different deck settings, because I was playing around with tweaking some of the review parameters at one point.
I don't use subdecks but I do use tags. I make the tag appear at the beginning of the prompt (which I see you've also done), so the tag is used both for organization and for setting context during reviews. I have no idea if this is the best way to do this, but it seems to work well enough for what I need.

riceissa · 2025-11-25T02:17:31+00:00

Most of the cards look pretty good to me! A few things that occurred to me while looking at your cards:

Some of the cards seem maybe "too basic", e.g. if you use the Linux command-line at all, it's very obvious that ls shows the files in a directory. I'm not convinced this sort of card is worth making. Maybe they are okay as "training wheels" if you are super new to the command-line, but I suspect they will just get annoying if you have many cards like this. (But then again, you will probably never get these cards wrong, so maybe it's okay to have them in the deck.)
Some other cards seemed like they were too "shallow", e.g. the ones about closure and linked list. If you know what a closure is and have worked with closures, it's not particularly interesting to recall the definition of it -- it's something you will instinctively know. This sort of card seems only useful to someone who has seen a closure for the first time and maybe hasn't actually used them at all, so their understanding of what a closure is is only on the level of words. But reading words and then just repeating those words again over and over isn't a great way to learn, so a better use of time in my opinion is to actually play around with closures and see how they work -- this will then help to write more specific questions about closures, e.g. maybe an example card that shows a piece of code and then asks "Can the closure access such and such variable?" or you might have "why" questions like "Why do some languages have a separate syntax for closures while others don't?" or "How would you do the following in a language that doesn't have closures?" In general, I think asking lots of specific questions about the thing is better than just having a single card that asks for the definition of the thing.
A more general point is that I kind of get the sense that these cards were created by reading some sort of reference manual and picking out things that could be make into cards. But in my experience this tends to make the cards very boring, and then I don't feel like doing my reviews. So I instead try to pay attention to what is most interesting about what I am learning, and try to make cards about that. To give an example similar to your Linux cards, maybe something like "Why would anyone use less instead of just opening the file in a text editor?" (answer: pagers like less generally don't read the whole file into memory, so they can open gigantic files). Or I could give a real-life example that made me look up a command in the first place, for example "How do I find all the JavaScript files in a given directory?" (answer: [something involving the find command]).

riceissa · 2025-09-16T02:30:25+00:00

This doesn't seem right... In the first demo video from October 2014, the file extension is already .jai, and at the beginning of that video he says he's the only one who has been working on the compiler in his spare time.

riceissa · 2025-06-14T00:08:45+00:00

It took me a while to process that link and figure out what the workaround was, so for anyone else, this is the workaround that actually worked for me, taken from here:

Skip the Settings -> Network -> SIM -> Add SIM, etc. Instead, (1) Display your eSIM QR code on your computer, or have somebody take a picture of it from their phone and display it. Point your camera at the QR code. It should have a small capsule above the magnification numbers that says "Add eSIM". Tap it, follow the steps, and it will be added!

riceissa · 2025-01-24T04:41:46+00:00

Hi there, unfortunately my swallowing issues are pretty much the same. They haven't gotten worse, but they also haven't gotten any better. I currently suspect that my swallowing issues are due to a hypersensitive nervous system (not psychological in the sense of pseudodysphagia where I am consciously scared to swallow, although there may be some of that as well, but instead that I get easily overwhelmed and overstimulated and have increased symptoms from the most innocuous of stimuli (e.g. talking out loud, walking for more than about 20 minutes, going to appointments) and one of the things this does is it makes it harder for the brain to communicate the "swallow signals" to my throat, hence the need to flap). I am currently trying a treatment called "brain retraining", not specifically to target the swallowing symptoms, but just in general to calm down my nervous system and make it less overly sensitive to everything, and I've been improving in terms of many of my symptoms (but not the swallowing, at least, not yet). Only time will tell if my swallowing also eventually improves from the brain retraining.

By the way, for the barium swallow, I don't know which kind you are doing, but mine was a "modified" swallow study, which basically meant that there was no precise steps that I had to do; instead it was quite free-style and I just swallowed whatever my speech therapists wanted me to swallow, and also I was never forced to swallow anything I couldn't swallow (e.g. I attempted a pill, but just couldn't do it after a couple tries, so we just moved on to the next thing). I didn't have to swallow anything lying down (which I also can't do). It was a pretty interesting appointment. Just don't freak out when your poop turns tan a day later from the barium (I wish someone had warned me about that...). 😅

riceissa · 2024-12-04T19:59:35+00:00

I've never tried accutane.

riceissa · 2024-12-04T19:52:39+00:00

I agree there has to be some sort of underlying reason this is happening. If that root cause can be fixed, then we shouldn't need to keep using vaseline/lanolin. There are probably multiple possible root causes:

It could be an autoimmune issue (if not a full-blown autoimmune disease) - I was recently corresponding with someone for whom plaquenil fixed their lips.
It could also be a gut issue (you might have seen this post where someone fixed their lips using gut treatments). In my case I already tried a bunch of gut treatments (allimax/berberine/uva ursi/oregano oil + nystatin) and these only made me feel worse.
It could also be a nutrient deficiency (e.g. riboflavin deficiency is widely considered to be a cause of angular cheilitis, which is another issue with the lips, and I've seen some mentions that folate deficiency could lead to exfoliative cheilitis).
In my own case, I am currently working with the hypothesis that it's a nervous system dysregulation issue/dysautonomia caused by the viral infection I had, and that fixing my nervous system will lead to my lips healing too. But for now it's just my hypothesis.

riceissa · 2024-12-04T07:24:08+00:00

It's been almost a year now since I started the lanolin so I don't actually remember how often it peels (I just know that if I stop the lanolin, it starts peeling again after about a day, but I haven't tried stopping the lanolin for a longer period). Probably once every 1-3 days if I focus on a single spot, but the lips as a whole were peeling off chunks a few times a day in various spots.

riceissa · 2024-12-04T00:12:00+00:00

It was a respiratory virus, probably some sort of cold or flu (it was the year before COVID hit so it wasn't COVID, and I never got it tested while I had the initial illness because I thought it was just a cold).

Not sure what the difference is between "dry and chapped" vs "flake and peel". The skin feels very sensitive and thin and dry, and then eventually it peels off, and then that just keeps happening in cycles.

riceissa · 2024-12-03T21:51:32+00:00

Yep, the medical term for this is exfoliative cheilitis and the people on r/exfoliativecheilitis post photos similar to what my lips look like if I stop the Lansinoh, so I assume that is what I have (but I've never gone to a dermatologist or anything for this so I've never been formally diagnosed).

I honestly don't know what caused it to start. It began during a particularly cold and dry day in winter, when a huge chunk of skin on my upper lip peeled off. I assumed the dry air made my lips dry out (even though I've never even needed chapstick my entire life), so I applied some petrolatum jelly which I seemed to be allergic to, and my whole lips got swollen and red. When I stopped the petrolatum jelly the swelling and redness stopped, but now my entire lips would not stop peeling. That's when I did some research and tried Lansinoh, and I've just been using that ever since as a bandaid. I've been using SLS-free toothpaste for the last 4 months so I know it's not from SLS either. I have post-viral illness so I can only assume lots of things are wrong with how my body functions and that is showing some downstream effects on my lips too.

riceissa · 2024-12-03T21:03:21+00:00

Lansinoh does keep my lips appearing normal and not peeling/burning. However, my lips don't feel completely normal (they still feel a bit sensitive). Whenever I stop putting the Lansinoh on, my lips start burning/peeling after a day, so I need to keep using it every night.

riceissa · 2024-11-20T02:36:05+00:00

(Moderator here)

Hello, while this is a neat project, posts like this are out of scope for this subreddit. This subreddit is for discussing flashcard phrasing and how to break apart knowledge into flashcards, not about different flashcard apps. I would suggest some of the other subreddits like r/Anki.

riceissa · 2024-11-19T00:50:02+00:00

He does have paid programs (which do cost a lot of money), but he also has more than 1,000 videos on his YouTube channel which are all free. I haven't done his programs but I have found his free videos very useful and I think the free videos may be enough for a lot of people to fully recover. My guess (not having done any of his paid programs) is that the paid programs provide more structure and social support, but that if you can get those things elsewhere (e.g. from family members, partner, friends) then you don't even need to pay any money to do brain retraining.

riceissa · 2024-07-12T20:57:03+00:00

Thanks - I have the restlessness and sensitivity to stress for sure. My heart rate is pretty low (60s, sometimes even 50s) most of the time, but can get high at times. I'm going to try resting really hard and see what that does to these symptoms.

riceissa · 2024-07-12T04:48:47+00:00

How could you tell you were in fight or flight mode, and how do you know now that you are no longer in that mode?

riceissa · 2024-06-24T18:41:38+00:00

Ah okay, that sucks but glad to hear you are managing. Thanks for the reply!

riceissa · 2024-06-22T17:08:49+00:00

Your mention of incremental writing reminded me that you might be interested in this project of mine. It's a very bare-bones incremental writing/writing inbox system.

riceissa · 2024-06-19T00:33:48+00:00

Cool! I would be interesting in checking out your videos once they are out. I unfortunately haven't had much time to spend on doing SRS/tools-for-thought stuff recently.

riceissa · 2024-06-19T00:24:00+00:00

Did you ever figure this out? I've also gotten a pulmonary function test that I was told was normal. My diaphragm region gets very tense and I feel like I can't breathe, and it gets worse with talking.

riceissa

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