Paper of the day: Test-Enhanced Learning, Roediger and Karpicke 2006
This is my first paper read in the learning science space (hopefully the first of many!)
Key finding: While reading over info has a lot of short term retention, testing is what builds long term recall.
Matt McWilliams retweeted
What if AI was conscious, but across a different dimension than humans? E.g. humans are conscious across time, but AIs are conscious across something else, like tokens or something. So consciousness would look fundamentally different in AI's discrete space and human's continuous.
i always use youtube music while studying, and when my studying involves youtube i need to pause the music just to start youtube.
i made a tiny quality-of-life chrome extention to do this for me:
github.com/matt-mcwilliams/y…
Matt McWilliams retweeted
Today is the 10 year anniversary of Founders.
It’s my life’s work.
Thank you for listening.
AI has the potential to eliminate "busy work" in education.
Instead, by cheating with it, students turn everything they do into busy work.
Matt McWilliams retweeted
"The pursuit of excellence does not need justification." 🎯
Mind boggling to me that I can make a thing faster and there's always people that ask "but why?" What kind of mentality is that? The pursuit of excellence does not need justification. Also, I find in so many cases, we can't know the impact of an improvement until we do it.
For example, one I've talked about before: Ghostty's high IO throughput has enabled terminal program (emulator and TUI) fuzzing at a speed thats incomparably fast to prior solutions. This has resulted in upstream patches to resolve issues in popular projects like btop, tmux, and more.
Speed enabled that anecdotally example that lifted the tides of adjacent communities that don't rely on Ghostty technology at all. I didn't predict this.
Make things better because they can be better and let the results naturally play out.
Matt McWilliams retweeted
Whenever you encounter an inconvenience today, just remember there’s a woman in the 1800s who birthed 8 kids naturally, worked on a farm before the invention of weekends, and was considered soft.
You’re gonna make it.
Matt McWilliams retweeted
"Dear 5.6, do a full 360 interview on my life and find the real needle movers that'd be the highest leverage positive change makers. Read between the lines & there's nothing off the table, you're allowed to think outside the box. Then, help me come up with a handful of specific deliverables/projects, break them down to their subtasks & split into 20-40 pomodoros for me. It's important to design them in a way that creates min resistance and avoidance + max enjoyment and flow for me - quick feedback cycles help a lot with this. Makey no mistakey."
Matt McWilliams retweeted
Lack of focus is a form of cowardice.
You don’t believe in yourself enough to go all in.
Matt McWilliams retweeted
The 2-4 hours you spend scrolling each day (or 730-1460 hours each year) is more than enough time to write a book, build a business, or get in shape. In the moment, it seems like nothing. That's why it's so dangerous. Your time disappears without you being conscious of it.
Matt McWilliams retweeted
Jordan Peterson on a truth that should humble all of us:
“I’ve never seen anyone get away with anything. Not even once.”
You might twist the fabric of reality for a while — bend the rules, cut corners, play games — but it always snaps back. Sometimes years later, in ways you never saw coming. That’s why “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” Not terror, but deep respect for the order of things.
You get away with nothing in the end.
In a culture that increasingly celebrates short-term cleverness and moral flexibility, this is a sobering reminder that reality keeps perfect score.
God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.
What about you — have you ever watched someone “get away with it”… only for it to catch up with them later in unexpected ways?