#110: Effects of AI in School, Avoid Becoming a Connoisseur, Make the Best Anki Cards

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at the implication of AI in schools according to Andrej Karpathy, enjoying the fine things in life along with the ordinary, how to increase your long-term memory, and more.

Let's dive in:

Implications of AI In Schools

One of the more interesting thought experiments around AI is imagining how it will change the school setting and the way students learn. How will it reshape homework? What will teachers’ roles look like moving forward? And can schools actually control how much AI students use to make sure they’re still learning the material?

Open AI co-founder Andrej Karpathy recently shared his thoughts on the topic:

1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI.

2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later.

3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators.

4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc.

TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.

Avoid Becoming a Connoisseur

You’ve probably heard of work-life balance, but have you heard of product-type balance?

Over this Thanksgiving holiday break, I ran into a situation that felt like a roller coaster. I was staying in a hotel that wasn’t exactly luxurious - and by that I mean the first room I checked into didn’t even have a window. This was just hours after I’d been upgraded on my flight and had an incredible experience at no extra cost. The gap between those two moments had me thinking about how much perception shapes our circumstances, and then a perfectly timed string of tweets popped up on my timeline that felt directly connected to what I was feeling.

Pieter Levels was recently traveling in China when he shared a picture of a meal he got in economy class. Someone replied and asked why he wasn’t flying business, and his response reflected a deeper truth:

Business class was full, also it was a short flight and this is also fun

I think it's more fun to mix very cheap and very luxury to feel the contrast

I started to realize luxury business class, and luxury hotels, and all that, it just gets very boring very fast if you don't mix it with cheap/regular stuff

You feel kinda isolated and it's more boring

Travel is more fun being on the road and experiencing real life even if it's less comfortable

This was then quote tweeted by author and startup founder Jason Fried, who talked about appreciating every experience life brings your way:

One of my favorite bits in "A Guide to the Good Life" by Irvine is to avoid becoming a connoisseur.

Connoisseurs end up only liking the upper-upper crust of whatever it is that they pursue, and eventually find that hardly anything meets their bar. So nearly everything's a disappointment. A truly tragic way to go through life.

What's better is appreciating nearly all things, and all experiences, for what they are. Not purely seeking out the best of the best, not trying to one-up every last thing I've had, owned, experienced, etc.

I've taken this lesson to heart and life's been better and more interesting since.

I found this to be an accurate reflection of how the mindset I want to cultivate and (hopefully continue) to have as I progress through life. This lastly was related to a Nassim Taleb quote also shared under Pieter's post:

The problem with opulence: the more you pay for a service (meal, hotel, airplane ticket), the more dissatisfied you will be with the smallest imperfection, the slightest error.

Compare constipated old Park Avenue couples riding first class, for whom traveling is some kind of exercise in bitterness, to partying passengers in the back of the plane for whom any beer is “good enough”. It is as if life wanted to get even with them.

Which leads to the paradox that the only way to properly enjoy wealth is to avoid spending it.

Inner Excellence and Being Present

Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy is one of the few mindset books that actually broke through my usual skepticism, even after years of reading this stuff as a former athlete. I don’t get excited about most new mindset titles anymore, because they usually sound like remixes of the same ideas, but this one genuinely feels like the best thing I’ve read on elite mental preparation.

The book exploded earlier this year when Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown was spotted reading it on the sidelines during an NFL playoff game. Almost overnight, it went from being relatively unknown to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list, with sales jumping to 200,000 copies as people tried to figure out what he was reading.

Murphy recently appeared on Shane Parrish’s The Knowledge Project, and the conversation is just as compelling as the book itself. His backstory includes spending around five years writing Inner Excellence, going $90k into personal debt, and grinding away in relative anonymity.

He talks openly about the spiritual side of his work, the idea that everything in life is there to teach and help you, and how extraordinary performance and a meaningful life actually follow the same path. There are also these small, almost cinematic moments in his story that give the whole thing a very human, humble feel.

If you’re looking for something to reset your mental game and give you a deeper framework for pressure, purpose, and performance, make it a point to dive into both the book and the podcast this holiday season

The Power of Anki on Long-term Memory

Anki is one of my favorite tools for building long-term memory. I started using it heavily while learning Spanish, dumping tons of sentences into it with words I already knew and ones I was just starting to pick up. I tried to capture everyday situations I’d actually find myself in, so I could practice the kinds of things I needed to say on a semi-regular basis.

But Anki is useful for far more than language learning. In his 2018 essay, Augmenting Long-Term Memory, Michael Nielsen argues that 'Anki makes memory a choice', and he walks through all the different things he started reinforcing with it, including an attempt to memorize the entire Tale of Two Cities.

The tweet that put this essay on my radar came from @sayidislearning, who shared some of his favorite takeaways. He had just explained how he used Anki to memorize the 85-step Linux boot process, complete with examples of what his best cards looked like. Which naturally raises the question: how could you use prompts to consistently create cards at that level?

What follows is a pretty long breakdown, but it’s an incredibly thorough response from Sayid on how to design your own cards in a way that actually sticks.

Template for Creating Anki Cards

You are helping create Anki flashcards for someone who reviews thousands of cards daily. The cards must eliminate all second-order thinking and friction to enable automaticity.

Core Principles

Eliminate Second-Order Thinking

Bad: “What are tasklets? A simpler way to create bottom-half work” Forces questions: “Simpler than what? How are they used? What’s the alternative?”

Good: “What are tasklets? There are 10 softirq slots. Only one handler function can be registered to each softirq slot at a time. If a device registers to a slot and another device wants to access that same slot, it has to handle coordination/access logic.

Tasklets are a way for devices to create a “tasklet” datastructure and drop it off at the handler function & let it process it for you.” No follow-up questions needed

Make Cards Follow Up Proof

Each answer must pass the “interview follow-up test” - if someone could reasonably ask “but why?” or “how?” after your answer, the card needs more detail.

Bad: “Why does interrupt coalescing improve performance? Reduces overhead” Interviewer asks: “What overhead? How does it reduce it?”

Good: “Why does interrupt coalescing improve performance? One handler entry/exit cycle processes multiple interrupts instead of separate cycles for each interrupt” Complete mechanism explained, no follow-up needed

Use Natural Language, Not Academic Language

Bad: “CPU-generated interrupts triggered by illegal operations” Good: “CPU-generated interrupts triggered by invalid operations like dividing by 0” Bad: “Processes in uninterruptible sleep state awaiting pending I/O operations” Good: “Processes go into uninterruptible sleep state waiting for slow I/O operations to finish”

Match Question and Answer Specificity Bad: Generic question with specific answer:

Q: “What’s the performance benefit of interrupt bottom half processing?”

A: “Bottom half can process multiple network packets in one function call” Good: Either make both generic or both specific: Q: “What’s the performance benefit of interrupt bottom half processing?”

A: “Multiple similar operations can be batched into fewer function calls” 5. Avoid Vague Comparative Language Bad: “Easier”, “smarter”, “better”, “more efficient” without context Good: Concrete technical mechanisms

Bad: “NAPI is a smarter way to handle network traffic” Good: “NAPI switches from interrupts to polling when packet arrival rate becomes too high”

Eliminate Abstract Terms That Create Follow-Up Questions Bad: “High-performance subsystems” → Good: “Networking and block I/O” Bad: “Critical sections” → Good: “Shared data while it’s being modified” Bad: “CPU cores become bottlenecks” → Good: “CPU cores hit 100% usage” Bad: “Overhead” → Good: “Handler entry/exit cycles”State Complete Cause-Effect Relationships Bad: “Hypervisor processes hardware interrupts then delivers virtual interrupts to guest VMs”

You have to infer: “Oh, so it processes twice, that’s why it’s higher overhead”

Good: “Each hardware interrupt gets processed twice - once by hypervisor, once by guest VM - doubling the handler entry/exit cycles compared to bare metal” Complete logical chain included Quality Checks Before finalizing a card, ask:

Second-order thinking test: Does this answer require me to make any inferences?

Interview test: Could someone reasonably ask “but why?” or “how?” after this answer? Natural language test: Does this sound like how people actually talk?

Specificity test: Do the question and answer match in detail level? Atomic fact test: Is this testing exactly one concept that can’t be decomposed further?

Common Fixes

Replace “overhead” with specific operations (context switches, handler entry/exit) Replace “bottleneck” with concrete measurements (100% CPU usage) Replace “critical sections” with specific scenarios (shared data modification) Replace “race conditions” with actual consequences (data corruption) Replace “high-performance” with specific systems (networking, block I/O) Replace “consider switching” with concrete actions (time slice expired)

Replace academic terms with natural speech (“illegal” → “invalid”)

Output Format Question[TAB]Answer[TAB]Tag

Example of Progression Original: “What are work queues? Bottom-half work handed off to kernel worker threads that can sleep” Problem: “Handed off” is vague, “that can sleep” makes you ask “why does sleeping matter?” Fixed: “Bottom-half handlers executed by kernel worker threads that can sleep and block unlike other interrupt processing”

100 Lessons for Your 20's

@thebeautyofsaas shared a long post, '100 lessons for your 20s'. I founder there to be quite a lot of truthful, relatable statements spread throughout. These don't have to apply solely to those in their 20's, as they can be learned at any age:

>everything in life compounds. Attending a random conference might seem useless at first. The same as going to the gym every other day. It is not. Quite the opposite. Everything counts and applies across all areas of your life. The only way to win the long-term game is by relying on compounding principles.

>knowing how to communicate clearly to the masses puts you on top. Extra points if you can adapt to different social circles and adapt accordingly.

>never allow yourself to become someone who can only talk about work. Read books, watch documentaries, enjoy music, travel, and experience things others around you do not. The more you can talk about multiple things, the more people will be interested in what you have to say.

>the environment around you is everything. One of your goals should be to attach value to everything that enters your reality. From the basic pen you use to the art on your wall. It has to have a certain meaning or a reason for being in your life.

>contrary to what most like to think. 20s are largely about finding the balance of being good at multiple things at once. Studying. Working. Building a side business. Social life. Falling in love. Traveling. Going on side quests. Do you see the problem here if you are ONLY operating on the extremes? You are limiting yourself.

>there are two things you should relentlessly pursue, and something you have to remember for the rest of the list: a) What relaxes and puts you in the present moment b)What inspires you and provides you with energy

>under any circumstances, you should not envy or be jealous of the people around you who win. It is one of those unwritten rules of life that if you don't understand, it will stop you from reaching your true potential. Learn to be happy for others. Let them win. Because sooner or later, you will be the one winning.

>call your parents often… Do it now and ask them how they are. They gave you everything, and this is the least you can do for them.

>the healthiest way to look at your career is as a golden ticket to start your own business. It will teach you to treat people with respect, not to take things personally (it is just a business), and to worry about yourself… While giving you enough space and funding to start something of your own.

>the more fun you are having, the quicker time goes:a)Until the age of 20 your time passes slowly. b)20-25 your time starts to pass slightly faster c) 25-30 is when most get hit with the reality that time passes fast d)30+ time is flying by you

>the secret to winning? There is none. Just never give up.

>basic order of the finances and how you should approach it. W2 Income (career) > Side Business > Investing.

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Undiscovered #110: Effects of AI in School, Avoid Becoming a Connoisseur, Make the Best Anki Cards

#110: Effects of AI in School, Avoid Becoming a Connoisseur, Make the Best Anki Cards

Implications of AI In Schools

Avoid Becoming a Connoisseur

Inner Excellence and Being Present

The Power of Anki on Long-term Memory

100 Lessons for Your 20's

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