📓 Stop Memorizing English — I Built an AI App That Actually Works ⚡ The Hook You try to learn English. You memorize words. And then… you forget them. 🧠 The Real Problem Most people learn English the wrong way: memorizing random word lists switching between apps and dictionaries learning without context That’s why nothing sticks. 🚀 The Idea What if learning English felt like this: 👉 You read something interesting 👉 You click a word you don’t know 👉 You instantly understand it No interruptions. No friction. ✨ Introducing: English Notebook A modern AI-powered app where you learn English by interacting with real content . generate stories click unknown words build vocabulary automatically 🤖 Generate Stories Based on Your Level This is one of the most powerful features. You choose your level: A1 → Beginner A2 B1 B2 C1 C2 → Advanced And the app generates a custom story just for you . 🖼️ Story Generator 📖 Learn by Clicking Words No more: copy-pasting opening dictionary tabs losing focus Just click any word: definition translation (your language 🌍) example sentences 🖼️ Word Interaction 📚 Smart Vocabulary Notebook Every word you click: 👉 automatically saved 👉 turned into a flashcard You can: review anytime mark as mastered ✅ 🖼️ Vocabulary Notebook 📊 Track Your Progress (Game Changer) This is where things get serious. You don’t just learn — you measure your growth . Dashboard shows: total words learned active vs mastered words daily streak 14-day activity trend 🖼️ Dashboard What gets measured gets improved. 🕘 Nothing Gets Lost (History System) Every story you generate is saved. You can: revisit old stories continue reading anytime track your learning journey 🖼️ History 🔊 Learn with Audio listen to stories follow highlighted words improve pronunciation naturally 🌍 Multi-Language Support You can choose your translation language: Persian 🇮🇷 Arabic Spanish Hindi and more 🎯 Why This App Is Different Most apps: ❌ force memorization ❌ feel like school ❌ break your focus English Note

A follow-up to Part 1: the self-recall thesis — the series runs through Part 6 . Code: RE-call — everything below is measured and reproducible ( make eval ), full study in docs/ENTAILMENT_SUPERSESSION_STUDY.md . I published a thesis post about agent memory and got five comments that were better than the post. Two of them didn't just critique the design — they described, precisely, why it would fail and what would fix it. So I did the only reasonable thing: I turned both into experiments, ran them on the same eval harness the series is built on, and shipped what survived. That's RE-call v0.3 , and this post is the receipt. I want to be explicit about why I'm writing it this way. The point of publishing this series was never broadcast — it was error-correction . A design you keep in a drawer accumulates conviction; a design you publish accumulates objections , and objections are the cheapest high-quality signal you will ever get. The comment section of Part 1 did more for this codebase than any week of solo iteration. This post exists to pay that back with the thing commenters almost never receive: evidence that someone listened, measured, and changed the code. Comment 1: "A similarity score is not a confidence score" Vinicius Pereira put it in one line I've been quoting since: Proximity is a candidate; entailment is the evidence. His argument: the near-misses that hurt most are high-similarity and wrong — memos semantically adjacent to the query that don't answer it. A threshold-based gap_warning (Part 3, Part 5) waves them straight through by construction , because their similarity clears any threshold you could calibrate. The abstention signal cannot be the retriever's own score. You need a separate check that the retrieved memo actually entails an answer. He was right, and measurably so. I built a held-out challenge set of 10 near-miss queries — each names a strongly on-topic memo that does not contain the asked-for fact ("how much did the cache reduce memory usag

Part 6 (finale) of Retrieval-Augmented Self-Recall. Code: RE-call . Part 5: the gap threshold that didn't transfer . I fine-tuned the embedder on my own domain expecting a win. I measured it properly, on held-out queries. The improvement was exactly zero. Δ+0.00 MRR. Δ+0.00 nDCG@10. Not "small". Not "within noise". Zero. It's also the result I wanted, which takes some explaining. That's the first half of this post. The second half is how the whole engine ships, so an agent can actually use it. The fine-tune that did nothing After Part 5, the natural next question: if calibrating the threshold helps, would a better embedding help more? So I fine-tuned one on my domain. The setup: all-MiniLM-L6-v2 , OnlineContrastiveLoss on query/gold-chunk pairs, trained on the 14-document corpus. The result: Model Test MRR Test nDCG@10 Base 1.00 1.00 + Fine-tuned 1.00 1.00 Δ +0.00 +0.00 Zero lift. And that is the correct outcome, not a failed experiment. Here's the reasoning, because it's the whole point. The base model already scores a perfect MRR and nDCG@10 on this corpus. There is no headroom left to recover. The only ways to manufacture a "gain" from here would be dishonest ones: evaluate on the training set (and measure memorization, not retrieval), or artificially cripple the baseline so fine-tuning has something to fix. Reporting +0.00 is the honest read, and the honest read is that off-the-shelf embeddings already saturate this corpus. But the full result is more nuanced, and more useful. On a harder , opaque-jargon corpus — one where the base model genuinely struggles to map queries to the right chunks — the same fine-tuning gave +0.24 MRR . So the real conclusion isn't "fine-tuning doesn't work." It's: Fine-tuning helps when the base model doesn't already cover your vocabulary. When it does, you get nothing. Know which regime you're in before you spend the GPU hours. That's the value of a null result. "+0.00" told me my corpus was already well-covered by a general-purpose

I wrote a cleanup routine that matched processes by command line with a wildcard pattern. It reported success on every run. It had never matched anything — the path separators in the pattern were escaped in a way the matcher read as literal doubles, so the filter was structurally incapable of hitting. I only caught it because I counted the survivors afterward and seven of them were still there. The fix was switching from a wildcard match to a plain substring containment check with no escape semantics at all. A filter that cannot fail loudly will lie to you politely forever. Before trusting any matcher, feed it a known-positive and watch it fire — a green result from an instrument you never saw go red is noise. What's the equivalent lesson your worst bug taught you?

It's been a good few weeks for games on rails. Nintendo's Star Fox remake wisely kept the tightly scripted, action-packed levels from Star Fox 64 largely the same, and they're still fun to fly through nearly 20 years later. Denshattack!, a new game from Undercoders, similarly features levels packed with carefully orchestrated sequences to great […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 136, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope your neighborhood isn't as smoky as mine, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been recording the next season of Version History […]

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