Issues With My Current Readwise Setup

In the context of thinking about spaced repetition 202212271223 stuff and also how Zettelkasten-style note-taking is a sham 202212271346.

I like Readwise 202212271446, but I have some issues with it.

Why is the UX so bad? Why does it take 4-5 clicks to get from readwise.io to the dashboard, which is the place where I actually want to go?
- Why are the cloze / question&answer type flashcards only available after you’ve ‘mastered’ a flashcard? Why can’t I access them before that?
I don’t currently use highlighting judiciously enough. Only some highlights are structured in a way where spaced repetition 202212271223 makes sense. For others, it’s a bunch of random crap (notes for myself, things to follow-up on, stuff that I thought was interesting, etc) that is very difficult for me to follow up on without context about why I highlighted it. (See Spaced Repetition Doesn’t Work Without Context 202212271503).
- how can I fix this?
  1. Add all the context necessary to understand a given highlight - whether it’s through a note or just by highlighting more text.
  2. Look into how to edit Readwise notes to make them all have a specific point (to make them more like spaced repetition notes).
  3. Add tags to notes — like this This is a note! .tag-here The issue with this solution is that it doesn’t help with the previous notes I have saved.
  4. Think about what I want to use Readwise for in the first place. If I just want it to remind myself about what articles I’ve highlighted in the past so that I can think about them again, it does a perfectly reasonable job of that. If I want to use it for more specific stuff, I think I’m going to have to configure it more.
I don’t mind the drawbacks of my setup mentioned in The Disconnect Between Using Readwise As A Source Of Truth And Taking Notes On The Archive 202212271522 too much for articles, but where I really feel the loss of having such a disconnect is for books. However, for the books I’m currently reading, maybe I should take some notes on them using Readwise and export them once I’m done to The Archive 202207051453. This will help me look at them again, which is a form of Spaced Repetition 202212271223.

uid: 202212271447 tags: #notetaking #tools-for-thought #blog-ideas

February 22, 2023

# The truffle industry is a big scam. Not just truffle oil, everything

source: https://ift.tt/ulC4Gdo tags: #literature uid: 202212091044 —

There is a good joke: because of sanctions against Russia, the price of tartufata will increase. I may not be objective about the quality of the joke, as I invented it, but the fact is: what is sold as truffle flavor is 2,4-dithiapentane, an organosulfur compound that is naturally found in truffles, and though it is practically impossible to extract it from truffles, it can be extracted from oil.

Liters of this petroleum-derived product, the colorless 2,4-dithiapentane liquid, are sourced for a few euros from Italy, Germany, or China, and then they end on your plates and refrigerators, in pasta, tartufata, oils, cheeses, and sausages, but also in expensive delicacies with a prostituted label “truffles.”

Some will compare the difference between the natural flavor of truffles and the artificial truffle flavor with the difference between sex and sniffing dirty panties.

Winter white truffle, or noble white truffle, is the most expensive and prized truffle. It can be found only in late autumn and winter, no earlier than September 15, no later than the end of January. The world’s most famous winter white truffles are found in Alba, Italy, and Croatian Istria is also known for them.

An excellent real truffle is mild and expensive. Which means it has to be the king of a dish. There is no point in hiding or masking something that costs hundreds or thousands of euros with other flavors. The only right way to serve truffle dishes is to: prepare a mild, neutral dish (such as pasta with butter) and grate truffles in front of the guest.

In Alba, Italy, this is done as follows: a dish arrives in front of you (you can smell it to make sure it doesn’t have the artificial truffle aroma) together with a waiter with a scale. The waiter weighs the truffle and then grates the truffle on the dish until you say stop. After grating, the waiter will weigh the truffle again and charge you the difference. Outside of Italy and France, this practice almost does not exist.

February 22, 2023

Quadtree

Source: https://jimkang.com/quadtreevis/

Quadtrees are a way of partitioning space so that it’s easy to traverse and search. Some possible uses of that include:

Hit detection

Let’s say you have a bunch of points in a space, like in the maps above. Someone asks you if some arbitrary point p is within your bunch of points. How can you find out if you have that point? A:

You could set up a quadtree. When you have it search for p, it will find out which quadrant it is inside. Then, it will find out what quadrant within that quadrant it is inside. And so forth.
After it finds its way to that rectangle node, it merely needs to see if any of the four children equal p.

Finding the nearest neighbor

Rather than ask you whether any of them match a given point, someone asks you what the nearest point you have to an arbitrary point among your points. With a quadtree, while searching, you can say, “OK, there’s no way anything in this quadrant has any chance of being the nearest neighbor” and eliminate a lot of point comparisons that way.

Other uses:

Image processing
Mesh generation
Spatial indexing, point location queries, and range queries
Efficient collision detection in two dimensions
View frustum culling of terrain data
Storing sparse data, such as a formatting information for a spreadsheet or for some matrix calculations[citation needed]
Solution of multidimensional fields (computational fluid dynamics, electromagnetism)
Conway’s Game of Life simulation program.
State estimation
Quadtrees are also used in the area of fractal image analysis
Maximum disjoint sets

Created from: Algorithms to know before system design interviews 202211231052

uid: 202211231054 tags: #algorithms #software-engineering

February 22, 2023

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