if the initial stability of again, hard and good is shorter than 1 day and the desired retention is 90%, the intervals of those three buttons will be the same.
I may be off base here, but I’m assuming what people really want is for FSRS to do the scheduling as optimally as possible without any inflexible learning steps getting in the way. If so, then when the stability is less than 1 day, could we not leave the card in learning and schedule it exactly according to the stability?
That is certainly what I would like to happen at least.
That is a more complicated change than the one that was proposed above, and I think it’s probably a bad idea. If FSRS calculates a stability of, say, 6 hours, it’s going to cause a bunch of questions like “I just studied in the evening, do I now need to wake up in the middle of the night to answer this card?”
That one doesn’t show time in hours. Anki converts sub-day intervals to days if it crosses a day boundary. So that wouldn’t create any psychological pressure.
I see. We’re worrying about people that use the setting to show the intervals above the buttons. I personally turn that off because seeing that information causes me to start second guessing the algorithm instead of studying and I know from experience that that is an absolute disaster for my studying.
If we’re talking about psychological optimizations, I figure removing that option is much better than intentionally doing sub-optimal scheduling.
Also, let’s not forget that not everyone studies at one specific time. I study throughout the whole day for several hours every day. Having optimal sub-day intervals would be a major boon for me and others like me. Should all of us really get intentionally suboptimal scheduling because optimal scheduling might confuse some users?