Damien,
Re: funding
If you create a patreon account, I will be your first supporter.
Here is Glutanimate’s:
Re: Anki’s potential growth vs Linux …
It is my belief that exponentially accelerating innovation is creating the conditions whereby everyone is feeling the pressure to
1: Learn more faster and
2: Retain what we have learned with less investment.
Anki is the natural solution to this problem
I believe that Anki decks will be offered by educators to help students to commit what they have learned to long term memory because this meets the need that students have to (1) learn more faster and (2) retain what they have learned with less investment.
I also strongly suspect that a decentralized system of anki deck sharing is the best solution to the problem of censorial centralized narrative control which hinders innovation. I believe the new version of Wikipedia, for example, will be a decentralized AnkiPedia where each Wikipedia page will be available as a browsable filterable anki deck and where access to different perspectives will be available.
I have reached out to Larry Sanger with this idea because he is already working on trying to solve this problem.
Why will Anki be bigger than Linux?
Elon Musk says that a value offering can either (1) meet a big need of a few people or (2) a small need of many people.
I believe that Anki will be much bigger than Linux because it has the potential to meet a big need of billions of people. In the process of doing so, I believe it will create the conditions for the emergence of the hive mind which will further accelerate innovation to solve big problems (cancer, alzheimer’s, COVID-19, etc,) which plague us all.
More details here:
Re: The Mythical Man Month
Re: Brook’s Law: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.
This was true when IBM was building OS/360 in the 1960s, but the subsequent emergence of the Linux OS a few decades later seems to have disproved this. Linux today has many thousands of developers committing to many repos concurrently.
What changed?
Better tools and processes certainly helped, but I would argue that the most important innovation is that of architecture.
Specifically, the discovery that the optimal architecture of any system is the one that breaks the system down into a set of subsystems such that (1) cohesion within each subsystem is maximized and (2) coupling between subsystems is minimized.
Why is this important?
Because minimal coupling between subsystems creates conditions more favorable to innovation within subsystems.
Stated more plainly, if the change you want to make is likely to trigger a cascading set of bugs - due too high coupling between subsystems - you will be less likely to make the change.
By contrast, if the change you make is unlikely to trigger a cascading set of bugs - due too low coupling between subsystems - you will be more likely to make the change.
Lower coupling = Higher innovation
For example, one of the problems I’ve run into using the Cloze Overlapper addon is the inability to alter sibling-spacing rules on mobile platforms because this requires changes to the scheduler which requires addon support which mobile platforms do not have.
One solution to this problem might be to refactor the architecture to extract the scheduling subsystem so that innovators could compete against each other with internet-based schedulers. i.e. If the scheduling code resided externally to the app, the same code could be used by implementations across platforms. Innovators might subsequently compete against each other by offering superior scheduling and/or feedback to users on how to get a better return on their investment of time and effort in spaced repetition practice.
I’m not suggesting that this is the best solution to this problem. I’m just giving an example of the kinds of concurrent innovations by the community which refactoring to “reduce coupling between subsystems” makes possible.