Let me ask this: within beeminder, do I add anything as a goal?
Yes. You should create an odometer goal that the addon will add data to.
I just reviewed a few hundred cards. Synced, also ran the beeminder sync, no data points were added to the beeminder goal …?
EDIT: I got it working! I think the issue was that it wasn’t set to an odometer goal.
Thank you!!!
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Yay.
I should make it have a clear error in that case.
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Btw, this addon also works with the Anki “gain weight” goal if you can’t afford infinibee.
Just set the units while creating the goal to “Rotestock” or “Anki cards not due”. Your starting rotestock is not something you may know, but you can find out when you connect the plugin to your anki goal and logs the first value. From there you can either ratchet or make a new goal with the correct starting rotestock.
The only issue I know of is that a gain weight goal will by default only log your maximum rotestock for the day, so if your rotestock decreases during the day and Anki logs it, it won’t count. This is not a huge issue as it will still count the next day if Anki logs the same value.
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Hey Haem. thanks so much for this. Do you know where within Beeminder I would find my starting rootstock number? I’m not sure where to look nor which number it would be within Beeminder.
edit: for context, I have set-up the Anki add-on and linked it with a Beeminder goal.
If I understand what you’re asking correctly, you should just be able to sync in anki, and then it’ll send a datapoint to the beeminder goal. Then you can just look at the goal and see what the datapoint is!
Is this not what you mean?
Thanks Poisson. Yes this is what I’m wondering. But I’m just not sure where in the Beeminder goal interface I can find this datapoint that tells me the rotestock starting number.
Right. So, if I go to my rotestock goal, I can just see the list of all the points that have been entered. (…there haven’t been any recently because because I haven’t synced anki in a few days 
)
I go to the goal page (for me, it’s anki_rotestock – poisson – beeminder)
Then I click on the “data” tab:
Then I can see all the recent datapoints. Of course, for me, none of these is the first datapoint. But for you, if you’ve only synced once since setting up the extension and making the goal, there should only be one datapoint:
(Actually, I could press “show all datapoints” and scroll down to see the first one!)
(Holy shit, I haven’t synced in two weeks? how much buffer did I have! I’d better review some cards…)
Anyway, let’s do that. You can see that for me, the first datapoint was 156!
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Okay this is awesome, thanks Poisson.
It was a fairly dumb question in hindsight, but when I saw the first datapoint on my end (which shows 6 as of now… not sure if I edited it after the fact…), I was a bit confused, as I didn’t expect that number, and was wondering if I was looking in the right spot. Thank you for clarifying this is indeed the datapoint I want.
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Hey all,
The extension isn’t working as I expected for me. Context: I’m catching up on a large backlog of cards, so I have a lots of cards that I naturally forget; cards which I previously ‘knew’.
I think maybe I’m misunderstanding what the extension is tracking, because when I forget a card, it seems to increase the number of cards I need to do that day by 1 for each card I forget.
This obviously is not wanted as then the number of cards I need to memorize (not just go through once, but memorize) each day increases beyond what I was expecting (e.g., Beeminder will show I need 10+ ‘cards not due’, but after I start reviewing cards, and refresh the goal in Beeminder to see my progress on the goal, the datapoint jumps to 16+ ‘cards not due’ needed).
Any help understanding if I can still use this extension in my situation, and how, is appreciated.
I think the confusion might arise from the fact that when you hit “I forgot” button, Anki schedules the next repetition for today, and possibly even a few of them (depending on your settings). For the add-on, all of these scheduled repetitions are contributing to its idea of how many cards are not “done” for today. But these repetitions are not scheduled immediately, but for later for the same day (again, depending on what repetition schedule you have in your settings - it’s 4 hours for me, for example), so when you end the session, it looks like you have studied everything that was due at this point but owe beeminder more, because the add-on sees these cards as such for which a revision is still due today.
Partly this derives from the fact that Anki is pretty awful with backlogs — and the extension works best with what also works best in Anki itself, that is, adding just a few cards a day and learning them little by little. (I know, backlogs are supposedly something we already “knew” once, but then for Anki it’s a ton a cards that are all in the same status of “due a ton of repetitions today” once we hit “forgot”, like the really new ones.)
UPD: I just imitated forgetting a few cards, and I don’t think the add-on should add multiple additional items due, just not count them as done for that day. E.g. I had +55 due today, hit “forget” for 2 cards, reviewed 2 other cards all right, and now I am +53 due => this might be still the origin of your problem, because in Anki itself, they are not “due” yet, will be in a few hours, but beeminder is still “unsatisfied” for this exact amount.
Another origin of discrepancy might be that the add-on often has different ideas of how much will be due today when it last synch’ed yesterday, vs. today. E.g. after yesterday’s synch, the datapoint for today was such that only +27 was due, but I intentionally synch’ed before the experiment, and it turned to +55. Can you try that (synching before a session) to confirm that those additional items due do not arise at this interface between what the add-on forecasts will be due on a specific date and what is actually due on that date?
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I believe it tracks the number of cards that are currently ‘known’, if only for now because they’ll become due for study again eventually.
The clue is probably in the plugin’s name: it’s about ‘maintained’ progress, not new cards or the number of studied cards. Though obviously there’s a relationship, and so yes, marking a card as forgotten will reduce the number of cards that are currently known and impact how many you need to study in order to stay on track.
My own beeminder goal using this plugin almost always has a flat or near flat slope. Looking at the history, it has never had a slope any greater than +1 per day. Currently it’s at +0.36 net maintained cards per day.
For me, that’s been enough to keep me using Anki and (mostly) remembering the cards I’ve added. I think it would work less well if I were adding and removing collections regularly, e.g. to study material related to a course and retiring the deck after the exam.
I have occasionally set the goal to have a negative slope, in exactly your situation where I anticipate marking many cards in a backlog as not known. In that case, it’s correct that my level of ‘maintained progress’ will go backward/reduce before it increases again through regular study.
PS: there used to be other plugins that tracked the number of cards studied per day or similar, but their authors didn’t maintain them as new versions of anki were released. If you find any that work, I’m sure that’d be useful to know!
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Beeminder graphs now show pessimistic datapoints differently than normal datapoints.
To have this show on your anki graph, you’ll need to make a simple edit to the plugin files.
There is, however, a side effect that you might not like : your anki goal will always be at the top of your Beeminder graph, even when it’s green.
On my mac this was the process :
- menu Tools > Add-Ons
- Beemind Maintained Progress > View Files
- edit
addon.py - change line 93 to include the magic string
#THISWILLSELFDESTRUCT - save & restart anki
return "{}-day PESSIMISTIC PROJECTION (will be updated by anki addon) #THISWILLSELFDESTRUCT".format(day)
Because of those self-destructing datapoints, your anki goal will appear at the top of your Beeminder dashboard in the default 'urgency sort. I think the logic that puts it there checks whether the most recent datapoint is a self-destructing one,
There’s a potential UVI to improve that behaviour because there is (or was) something not quite right with the logic from my pov already. The urgency sort should exclude future datapoints from this check, but include datapoints from, say, the last week. Too often I have a pessimistic point from yesterday (i.e. I need to enter data!) but then the dashboard reminder about that disappears as soon as I enter data for today. If my data entry for today is done without looking at the dashboard, then I never see that I’m missing data.
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But they are already kind-of self-destructing, when the script runs the next time, because it takes care of making sure that only one datapoint exists for any particular date?
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It’s not about the destruction! You’re right about that part; the plugin updates those datapoints as it goes along.
It’s about the new visual appearance of explicitly self destructing datapoints. Makes it easier to see days with missing data, or in this case, projected data.
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Thanks for the clarification! I see the visual difference now.
Such a UVI feature raises the possibility of user-level goal scheduling. To make sure that a goal is front of mind on a particular date, it’d be sufficient to create a datapoint for the relevant date that contains the magic string #THISWILLSELFDESTRUCT. Magic, indeed.
I found another side effect, one that is a deal-breaker for me: Beeminder metagoals don’t count self-destructing datapoints (and presumably other special non-datapoint datapoints) so my pjh/anki-sync goal hasn’t received anything since I made the above change.
Ah well. Undoing it now.
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