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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   1495 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 16, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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New pastime:

I've always been a fan of simulating TTRPG sessions using AI. I thought Claude was great at it, but I was always hamstrung by low message/chat length counts on the free tier. Alternatives like ChatGPT 4o just weren't as good, and ran into rate limit issues just as they got interesting.

With Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking, not an issue any more. It's a great writer, especially with some guidance, and for the purposes of fairness, I enabled code execution for the simple purpose of rolling random die. Works great, I'm enjoying my current Delta Green campaign set in 2027 where it turns out that advanced AGI research has rather interesting consequences when it comes to getting the attention of Lovecraftian entities. Mask on a Shoggoth, anyone?

How would you get it to manage a virtual tabletop with visual/spatial elements like Owlbear.rodeo?

Does it track turn and initiative state for example?

I had an idea to write up some MCP tools tied together for this.

I haven't used any spatial elements, just text, with abstractions of the game board. Think Choose Your Own Adventure, but with more structure according to the specific RPG framework.

You could probably cobble up some kind of program to create and update a game board, and then input it back as an image. A bit more advanced than I've seen the need for. You could also have (Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental) output images in response, but you'd be sacrificing the intelligence of 2.5.

There is function calling as a specific toggle, but I'm not sure how it plays into MCP.

Odd experience:

Training to try to do Murph (Mile run, 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, mile run) on memorial day, figure trying it a couple times a week is good conditioning anyway. Working up to it, I'm thinking wow I suck at this, I wonder what the record is and/or what a good time is online?

Normally when I look up CrossFit benchmarks, or powerlifting standards, like Fran or Grace the elite numbers and even normal standards strike me as basically impossible, numbers I can't imagine Hitting.

This time, it wasn't THAT bad. I'll definitely reach mid, which will make me happy at the event.

Just weird feeling. Normally I find out I suck worse than I thought.

Hopefully that carries over to the weekend: I'm going to a BJJ open mat at a different gym while I'm out of town for Easter. Hoping not to be embarrassed.

How many sets on the pullups? 1?

As many as needed, is how I've normally seen people do it. When doing very large volume I like to do a wave like 2-3-5-10. When you finish the 10, the 2 doesn't seem like any big deal, and the 2 isn't much so the 3 seems ok, then you've done two small sets so 5 is good to go, then you've rested up for your 10, etc.

But I might just stick with doing them partitioned, so 20 sets of 5-10-15 pull ups push ups squats.

I just looked up The Murph.

I won't type the expletive I thought upon reading it, but if I did, then this is where it would go, in all caps.

You neglected to mention the weighted vest. I keep staring at the number 100 before the words "pull-ups" and I can't get my mind around it. Like I can't imagine myself ever either having been able, or ever being able, to do that. I'm reading that some partition those but the Rx is uninterrupted. How many pull-ups are you doing?

Edit from that link:

In 2020, professional athlete Hunter McIntyre set a world record for completing the Murph Challenge in 34 minutes and 13 seconds.

I really figured some freak would have done it sub twenty, based on prior experience of seeing elite Fran times that were under 2:30 which I still find farcical.

My understanding is that the Rx is unpartitioned, not consecutive, meaning that one can break each exercise into sets but that one can't mix the exercises. Currently I'm practicing them partitioned. I can knock out sets of ten pull ups without too much pain, which I alternate with sets of five.

I plan to introduce the weighted vest in May, which will probably suck way more than I think it will.

Yeah going to stick by my earlier comment.

This time, it wasn't THAT bad

Ah but were you wearing your official ROGUE(tm) 25lb plate carrier with Punisher skull patch?

I have a mucho cheapo vest from Amazon that I intend to use in the final event, I might have been able to stomach the sticker on the Rogue vest then I realized it DIDN'T INCLUDE ANY WEIGHT, which is just insulting.

Music recommend thread:

I find new songs in a rather haphazard way. Maybe a video on Reddit or YT has a bopper, which I then use some kind of audio recognition to identify and add to my playlist. Spotify manages to get me to add a song to my favorites at a rate of about 1 every 2 weeks. This time, it did share a banger, one I've got on repeat.

YouTube link: So Cold by Balu Brigada

The bassline has probably gotten people pregnant, I can't help but nod my head along.

(My taste in music borders on schizophrenic, not that I don't listen to mainstream music)

Saved ! Great song. Thick basslines make lives.

We finally fired the guy. (I'm a SWE at FAANG.) I'm so relieved. You would not believe how much time and documentation it took. I'll estimate 20 pages of explaining his mistakes, not counting the code itself, over the course of six months. I have no idea how much time and energy our manager had to put into it - probably more than me. After 3.5 years, he was at what I consider 1-1.5 years of skill. How the hell he got promoted, I do not know.

I got asked to be his lead (kill me), which is good for my shot at promo to senior (results tomorrow!), so obviously I said yes. I immediately start complaining. Our manager doesn't see the problem. After a couple months of casual complaining (read: spending ~half my highly-valued weekly 1:1 sharing examples), I put together a meticulous spreadsheet. He sees the problem and says Junior needs to rapidly improve or will be fired. Junior makes no progress. Junior insists he is making great progress. Four months later, Junior is offered a severance or PIP and, in his first display of real intelligence, takes it.

Two of my favorite mistakes:

  1. He asserted that my code review idea to use an interface was conceptually impossible because when he tried it, the compiler said "attempting to assign weaker access privileges; was public," which apparently he found inscrutable. Solution: change the impl to also be public.
  2. On a project whose entire point was "set a timestamp, then filter stuff out if it's before that time," he set the timestamp wrong. It was set to the epoch. He had no tests that caught this. After this was pointed out, he pushed a new commit that was also wrong (differently). Twice. After four months on this project, he almost finished - the smaller half of it, which should have taken 2-3 weeks.

I have complained about this ongoingly to everyone I know for months. It was getting to be a problem. Work is so much chiller now. I can literally see the day he got fired in my sleep tracking metrics, as everything discontinuously improved.

What drove me the craziest was that my manager, reasonably, was too discrete to be straight with me about his agreement. I'm not sure at what point I really won him over. This left me chronically feeling unsure if, in the eyes of He Who Writes My Reviews, I was nitpicky and disagreeable, shitting on a coworker who he thought was just fine. Thankfully, the ending of the story strongly suggests he didn't think that, but it's still unclear if it hurt my reputation.

Or helped it - I did just save the company over 1 SWE-yr/yr, in perpetuity.

Got the promo! 6.5% raise, although it'll be more over the next 5 years as the 4 year stock grants (each March) come in at senior size, and the base will continue to go up, etc. Maybe 50% total, long term.

This isn’t particularly related to your post, but I’m curious about what it takes to get past that initial screen to be considered at FAANG.

Long story short: I have a PhD in (pure) math and am finishing up a postdoc, but I’m just done with academia for a number of reasons and wanting to transition to industry. Other than a brief 1 year stint at a small company before starting grad school, almost all my coding experience is in an academic context.

I’m fairly confident I would demolish most Leetcode-style DSA interview questions and can learn new skills pretty fast, but it’s hard to get my foot in the door because I don’t have any shipped products or industry connections. I’d really appreciate any guidance or advice!

I don't think we're really hiring, so hard to say. In practice, the answer is, as it is for everyone at all times, grind leetcode and spam recruiters/your network.

With a PhD, you'd come in at typically mid level (new grad + 1, aka senior - 1). Expectation there is just leetcode, no system design. If you can comfortably do mediums, and communicate well while doing it, that's likely good enough. You might catch a hard now and then, but we'd really rather see if people can write clean code for a medium and communicate well (tradeoffs in algorithms or naming, working through examples, etc)

Thanks for that, I really appreciate it. I’ve been grinding leetcode and feel very confident, if only I could manage to get my foot in the door. I’ve just haven’t had any luck getting interviews in the first place. I’ll try spamming more recruiters, but as for networking, I don’t think I know anyone working in FAANG at the moment.

I'd expand from just faang. Get your foot in the door by looking at every generic startup. If you don't already live in the bay (SF), consider moving.

How did he get through the interview? Was it on-site, or could he have used AI?

It was virtual. I don't think he used AI. I think he got in during a low bar covid era. Leetcode is just easier than the job, in some ways. It's a test of "can you grind for a while with lots of money on the table." It doesn't show if you can sustain that, or if you have the attention to detail, or - in particular - the critical thinking to solve novel problems needed for the job.

As much as I could tell you a thousand stories of him being not up to snuff, he wasn't totally incompetent. I think he'll be adequate at a startup. Hell, he might even be OK if he started with us at new grad level today and just took ramping up more seriously. The bar isn't that high at FAANG, perhaps especially at mine, but it's not low, either.

Reading this and then seeing how the same corps fire people by the thousand without any fault of theirs, and also knowing if I sent them the resume they'd probably not even notice it (not that I actually want to work at any of them but maybe Netflix, but still), gives me really eerie impression. I'm old enough to be fine with a lot of things in life making no sense. But this involves a lot of obviously very smart people, who control trillions of dollars, and yet it all makes so little sense... Why must it be so wrong?

fire people by the thousand

Generally, this is layoffs, not firing. It's about juicing the stock and moving employees to lower cost areas, not about firing for performance. Re-orgs are also good for your resume as the person doing the re-org: I figure it's like when I refactor the codebase to be leaner, just with people instead of code. Lines deleted are still part of the git diff --stat count, so reorg layoffs are by analogy good.

The difficulty of firing is more about aversion to lawsuits for wrongful termination/discrimination. He was in some protected classes, which idk if lengthened timelines. I don't think so honestly. As much as I'd love to be able to say I think he was a diversity hire or treated more easily because of it, because I do think that happens in general not infrequently, I think this was actually all just par for the course megacorp inefficiency and incentives.

E.g. the actual answer to how did he get promoted is almost certainly that it'd been a reasonable amount of time, and it looks good for everyone for him to get promoted, so he did. I think that doesn't happen as much with the later promotions - the bar for senior seems genuinely high to me (although we'll see what I have to say in 97 minutes after I get my news) - but consider that without the entry -> mid promotion, one is fired by about the 4 year mark.

The ignoring of resumes is weird. I referred a hilariously well qualified friend and he didn't even get a recruiter phonescreen.

I applied to major corps (FAANG, MS, etc.) several times over the years, and I knew I am at least qualified enough to get the interview (I think qualified enough to do like 90% of tech jobs they have, but that's just my opinion) but the only time I ever got a call back was when it was a referral through a specific person to a specific team (not that it always worked - I had several referrals that led to nothing at all). I got an offer then, decided not to go for it, no regrets about it - but I am just wondering, how do they actually source? Is that just random luck? Is there a secret code? Is there some criteria I miss? I mean I'd be fine if they talked to me and said no thanks. But there's never even a call back, ever. Not that I really need it - of the FAANG five I probably would only consider Netflix - but I'd like to understand the process.

Despair, but hope!

I’ll start with despair. My work situation has been bad. We’ve been dead and so I’ve been dead. I took the service tech position expecting 45hrs a week and daring for 50, and have wound up struggling to hit 35 while riding the clock like a rented mule. The driving remains insane; I’m on pace for 60K miles this year, and oh yeah we’re into week six of a fleetwide maintenance freeze so I haven’t changed the oil (but have added oil out of my personal stash) in 15K miles in my company truck. Our phones were shut off for 8 days, allegedly a coordination issue with the new people who’ve bought us out. I hope (and, cynical as I am, expect) that they’ll make payroll on Friday. I’m bleeding working this job, and hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from my supervisor almost feels like gaslighting. If I’m one of the top techs in the company while barely doing anything and usually failing to hit 40hrs a week, what are the rest doing? I literally cannot afford to continue working this job. Upon telling my (divorced) parents about the job situation, both have offered a rent free place to stay and get back on my feet. I’m glad to have that option, but oof that hurts and I’d have to get rid of my cats (I…uhh…kind of like the little fuckers, and I don’t want to move if I don’t have to.). I’m on the verge of applying to a local box factory. It’ll suck, but if it’s as advertised there’s lots of overtime available.

Let’s move on and give a cheers to hope! I had a round one interview with a trucking company today for a position as a dispatcher and it went well. This lead has been months in the making, but I think we might finally be getting somewhere. The local guy (who I’ve known for years from my time as a bartender and would be my direct supervisor) clearly wants to hire me. He played it cool, sat on my application, and allegedly of the ~80 applications received mine was one of two his boss forwarded his way (better to let it be his boss’ idea to hire me). The way he tells it, I’ve got it in the bag, but of course I’m going to do my best in terms of interview prep and so on. I’m actually interested in the job (Trucking dispatch seems like a logical path forward from all but running a third party food delivery company.), and while I anticipate a learning curve I am confident that I can learn the job and do well. The local guy tells me that he’s dead convinced that I’m the guy for this job and spent more time trying to sell me on the job than interrogating me on my past experience. We’re more than in the right place in terms of compensation. I’m not going to count chickens until I make it and sign an offer letter, but holy shit I’m excited and this might really be my path into something better and a company that I can grow into.

OP's prior post

Your job sucks. It sounds like the company doesn't want to pay its staff and is having cashflow issues. Expecting you to do massive long round trip drives and pressuring you to not count those hours somehow (eg your lunchbreak was while you were on the road or some similar bs). Also not paying maintenance on your truck so you have to pay for maintenance out of your own pocket?

I’m bleeding working this job, and hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from my supervisor almost feels like gaslighting.

Of course. They're underpaying you and you're working for free. He will say whatever he needs to to keep you bleeding for the company and his own KPI's.

I know you're already doing it, but get another job ASAP.

Your job sucks...

Correct on all counts. The company (at least from where I'm looking) is clearly struggling for cashflow, and thus we get issues like personal vehicle reimbursements being paid chronically late (not an issue for me, but a chronic source of drama with the line cleaners), fleet maintenance freeze, overtime crackdowns, issues ordering inventory, layoffs, and so on. The job would be tolerable on paper if I were actually paid for all my drive time, but as it is I'm expected to drive 10 hours a week (barring the rare exception in which I get a call in the town I live in) for free.

With that, things were slow in Q1 (averaging two calls a day with occasional line cleaning days) but have gone from slow to apocalyptically dead in Q2 (Rarely more than one call a day. I had a whole week where I ran one billable call.). We lost a major line cleaning contract to a competitor and instantly laid off a quarter of our market's line cleaners (One was a new hire in the middle of training!), so I've been spending most of my time covering (now quite barren) line cleaning routes for the guys we laid off. My supervisor has all but given up (Today was one of her Thursday sickouts after having been seen at the bar the night before lol.) and just tells me to do whatever and find some lines to clean or go to the storage unit and rearrange my truck when I don't have calls, whereas before I would get a list of spots to hit in order of priority.

I doesn't take a degree in economics to see where things are going. Relative to most markets for service techs (who have apparently been quitting en masse in other markets) the service area in mine is gigantic. It can be made to work given sufficient call volume that I drive to the city 2.5 hours away (or better yet the city an hour away, but that's where we just lost that line cleaning contract) and have three calls scheduled or the 1-2 calls are sufficiently lucrative. When the call volume drops, we lose economy of scale and wind up doing money-losing things like sending me to the same city a 5 hour round-trip drive away on two different days in the same week to run two different one-hour calls. Adding insult to injury, the "run one call and then clean lines" routine isn't even productive for line cleaning because the cleaning routes are heavily morning-weighted to hit places before they open and are serving product. Tomorrow I'm going to drive that 2.5 hours for a 10AM call (Can't do it any earlier than when they show up.), and then am assigned to "clean whatever you can" in a city an hours' drive away, so I'll be showing up in the middle of places' lunch rush trying to clean beer lines on a route I've never run before. Such productivity!

In all seriousness, I hope my supervisor is keeping it professional, putting on a brave face, and looking for jobs herself instead of drinking the kool-aid because this situation isn't looking very tenable. I would be far from surprised if the new investors take one look at the books from market to market, start shutting down marginal/money losing markets, and pulled out of our market entirely.

On the bright side I submitted the necessary information for my background check at the trucking company gig, and hopefully we'll get to the interview next week.

Really hope it works out for you. I've been in jobs before where the collapse is inevitable and its a horrible feeling.

Also not paying maintenance on your truck so you have to pay for maintenance out of your own pocket?

Yeah this was a red flag to me as well. @solowingpixy maintenance on the company owned vehicle is their problem, not yours. Stop paying their bills for them posthaste, and if the truck dies because they're too cheap to change the oil that is just how it goes. Sucks to suck, as the kids say.

Yeah, if there's a next time (Uh, I don't know how many more "next times" can be done before the oil in there turns into 100% sludge.) they're getting invoiced for it. As it happened, I just didn't want to go on a 10 hour round trip drive mostly through the middle of nowhere knowing full and well that the engine was 1.5 quarts low, and I had a jug sitting at the house.

Want to know the punchline? That 10 hour round-trip was for nothing because the parts they sent me with didn't fit.

Since I asked my question about protein Sunday, I went and bought a proper food scale and found that a pound of meat really isn't that much after all. In fact, my default "gonna eat some air fried pork or chicken with some seasoned salt on it now" meal is around a pound. And two chicken leg quarters seem to weigh something over 2 pounds before cooking, with the bones weighing something negligible like 3 or 4 ounces between them, which makes it make sense that I don't want to eat any more chicken after eating two chicken leg quarters.

Now my question is: what's the cheapest protein nowadays, and what protein isn't even worth your time? A few years ago, I tried tracking "protein per dollar". I think chicken breast and chicken thighs ranked pretty high in protein per dollar, but dried beans made a pretty good showing, too. The problem with beans in my opinion is that they're pretty high calorie for the protein they have on offer, and they also need a good amount of fat on top of that to make them palatable. Bad deal, I think.

Kettlebell get-ups and swings are fun. Get-ups are surprisingly tiring and work out a surprising amount of your body, and kettlebell swings are pretty exhausting. I'm wondering when I should start trying some of the exercises later in the book; I started doing one-armed swings the other day, and my left hand somehow didn't know how to grip like the right hand did and I ended up going too far away from a hook grip and every swing pinched the base of my fingers. This incident really progressed the state of my calluses.

This video has fairly recent US numbers, pause at the time stamp for the table.

Absolute cheapest are lentils and skim milk. Cheapest "pure" protein sources are chicken, canned fish, and whey. He doesn't have soy protein on there, but it's probably about the same as whey if you are doing isolate. It's probably slightly better to space your intake out rather than having all your protein in one giant bolus, especially for whey. Two feedings is already a lot better than one. You probably face diminishing returns beyond four.

Beans, tofu, etc are not good sources of protein. They contain more protein than, say, lettuce, but nothing comes close to meat. Costco sells eye of round for very cheap. It doesn’t taste good, but it’s low fat and leaves you a lot of calories to fill with tasty stuff. Costco also sells protein powder cheaper than pretty much anywhere else. Finally, pasta is cheap and 10-12% protein, which can add up to a lot after a few bowls.

Tofu is absolutely a good source of protein. Super-firm tofu is 14g tofu and 2g carbs per 90g. Sure, it's not meat, but if you're better off eating tofu rather than a few bowls of pasta if you're trying to hit a protein target without blowing out your calories.

Tofu's decent but my problem with it is that it's pretty expensive. It's something between $3-5 for a block of it at my grocery store. I'm going to Sam's Club today, though, maybe I'll see if the calculation goes like @deluxev2 said.

You can get blocks of it at Asian stores for about $2.

Any good advice for making it taste and feel less boring? That's my issue with tofu. It's got incredibly boring taste and texture.

By the way, if you have an Asian store nearby, try the different tofu brands. Some are curdy and some are silky (independent of the "firmness" on the box) and some prefer the silky type.

You gotta sauce it. Try something like this.

Tofu is, indeed, a relatively blank canvas, but that means that it can take on wildly different flavors. Check out something like this to get a bit of a sense of the range available.

Combining it with meat is cheating. The whole point of tofu (for me) is to get protein without the long term health risks of constant meat consumption.

I've tried marinating tofu with spices but then I'm getting large amounts of sodium

Ah, Kenji's still got your back. I imagine you could make some adjustments to make it a bit easier or to vary the flavor profile.

FWIW, I'm not super convinced that there are all that many health risks of eating meat, and it wasn't part of the initial assignment. I'd still suggest giving something like this a shot to at least get a sense for the range of flavors that are possible. I also get the sense that choices on sodium are a bit orthogonal here, too. One can choose low/high sodium versions of both meat and tofu.

Have you tried kitsune udon? They cook the tofu so it’s a little crispy and caramelised on the outside. Might not be healthy though.

Well the sake would be unhealthy. :) Looks interesting though. Thanks.

To add some numbers to this, sourcing prices from Costco:

Non Cake Flour Products (bread, noodles, etc): 0.028g/calorie -> 56g/2000 calories, 25g/$

Black Beans: 0.067g/calorie -> 134g/2000 calories, 53g/$

Tofu: 0.12g/calorie -> 240g/2000 calories, 43g/$

Chicken Breast: 0.2g/calorie -> 400g/2000 calories, 53.5g/$

I stated previously I had a goal of doing 200 54# kettlebell snatches in a row. That was maybe 2 months ago? Maybe a week after I posted that I fucked up my back royally after maxing out at 120 reps. Oops.

No clue what I did. Felt like the mother of all knots in a really bad spot in my mid back, off towards the right. But it was so bad I'd wake up in the middle of the night, my entire torso seized up in pain, struggling to catch a breath, because I rolled over wrong. Almost made me wonder if I tore some cartilage or got a stress fracture in a rib or something. Or maybe I'm just a huge baby and/or getting old and that's just what really bad knots feel like now. I don't know.

Took a rest, added more warmup and stretching to my workouts, started off slow again, added more variety, and reduced my marathon snatch days to once a week. Doing more 70# one arm swings, 88# goblet squats, pushups and pullups never hurt, and oodles of stretching and the occasional run.

Managed 110 snatches today and felt like I had more in the tank. But I also didn't experience any pain, nor feel any creeping up, so yay.

My only advice is don't get old.

You know what's good for kettlebell-induced back pain? More kettlebell swings! 2-handed for stability. I tweaked my back pretty bad doing one-armed swings with a 32 the other day, so I switched to two hands for a few sets, which got me back to about 70%, and the pain was all gone by the next day.

It probably depends on the exact nature of the injury, but it's worked pretty reliably for me.

I'm pretty sure 2 handed swings are good for stability in the same way a machine is. Which is to say, you don't feel it because you aren't using it. I've had better luck dropping down to a lower weight so my stabalizing muscles aren't as taxed, but still getting worked.

It's not just that it doesn't aggravate the injury. It makes it better.

What I meant by "for stability" is that you probably don't want to do heavy one-handed swings with a fresh back injury.

It's been 5 years since I started using Anki (Wow!). For those of you who don't know, Anki is a flashcard software that uses spaced repetition to optimize remembering whatever you put on the flashcard. You can use Anki for just about anything, although higher skill levels are required for certain kinds of cards (math cards, cards that randomize questions, etc.). I primarily use Anki for language learning (Spanish and Italian), but I also have cards for lots of work things (biology, stats, math) and things like peoples birthdays and phone numbers. I'm thinking of making an effort post on my blog/here/r/slatestarcodex about this at some point, but I'm struggling to think of objective measures I could use to show that Anki is actually working/useful/worth it. Thoughts TheMotte?

Anki is one of those things that I get excited for about 3 weeks every 3 years, start going over my abandoned vocabulary desks only to quickly give up again. I find the the mental effort simply too much and the whole thing rather too boring unfortunately.

I once read about a strategy that only adds cards that you find super interesting and want to keep reviewing, and deletes/archives all other cards so you get the benefit of remembering atleast those facts.

Do you need to manually create your cards or are there prepared decks to download?

You can download shared decks from ankiweb.net. I've used some for spanish colloquial phrases, logical fallacies, and basic vocab for Italian and French. Most of my cards are self-made though.

replaced my nightly twitter doom scroll with anki decks for geography, presidents and amendments a few months back. Highly recommend.

Whoa, deck for geography sounds really neat. Is it online anywhere?

Wouldn't the "objective effects" of an Anki deck just be the benefits of spaced repetition? That's well established empirically AFAIK.

I agree it's well established, but the last time I made an effort-post on /r/slatestarcodex there were many people that seemed to doubt that Anki was an effective way to learn things.

There's also the question of long-term effects of spaced-repetition. Ebbinghaus's original experiments certainly didn't go as far out as five years, and neither have any academic studies. The long-term posts I've seen on less wrong and other blogs are also not as glowing. I haven't really experienced this, but I'm not sure how to convey it.

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