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780 points domenicd | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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aaldrick ◴[] No.44022472[source]
I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved.

What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important:

It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should work almost as OS additions to make everything feel native and frictionless; I don’t need another standalone tool that does X Y and Z, I just need some sort of pipe into an SRS that is Mac friendly and does the job whilst not being in the way.

If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it.

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kqr ◴[] No.44023292[source]
> There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs

I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc.

Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively.

This is also a very difficult skill which, I believe, is why many people fail to appreciate SRS. They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up.

EDIT: This also leads to another common misunderstanding, that SRS is only good for memorising facts. With proper elaboration (thanks child comment), it can be used to build understanding of complex subjects too.

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paulluuk ◴[] No.44023905[source]
> They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up.

But if that's the case, then wouldn't a program that takes a long text (like a book) and creates GOOD flashcards, be way superior over someone making their own bad flashcards?

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andy12_ ◴[] No.44024185[source]
I have just tried this afternoon to create with Gemini 2.5 Pro Anki cards to study for my exams. I've been doing it raw: I just paste the whole material (like 100k worth of tokens) into aistudio and generate the flashcards in txt format.

For now it's going great, and I think that the cards are good enough as they are (there might be a couple here and there that I would remove or edit, but they don't get in the way of learning).

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j1elo ◴[] No.44024366[source]
Is there any prompt tips you have learned on that path, that you could share? or the obvious request has been useful already without too much fiddling?

I was thinking to use some study material to test drive Google NotebookLM for this use case.

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1. andy12_ ◴[] No.44024398[source]
I haven't tried many variations yet because a basic prompt seems to work well, thought it is important to remind Gemini of not using ";" inside the text of the cards if you use it as a separator. I imagine that with better prompts you could get it to generate very nice flash cards, but I'm in a little tight schedule, so I can't play around it for too long.

Another nicer option I think would be using the structured output of the API to generate the cards in JSON format, and the parse it to the Anki format with a script, but I think this approach is fine for me.

The prompt I'm using is this

---

Using the information in these PDFs, make some Anki cards to study for an exam.

The format for Anki cards is

```

front1;back1

front2;back2

front3;back3

```

Remember that you can't use ";" inside a field because it is used to separate the front and back of a card.

If the back of a card is a list of elements, prefer to use "<br>" to specify a newline.