Big milestone today: generic embeddable prompts

Hello, kind patrons! I mentioned in the last post that I was working on a next iteration of the system behind Quantum Country that can be embedded anywhere on the web: blog posts, e-books, Twitter threads, academic papers, etc. Today I hit a milestone I've been working toward for a couple months!

In the video, I've doctored collaborator Michael Nielsen's great notes on direct air capture to include prompts like the ones on Quantum Country. It looks like no big deal—after all Quantum Country's been doing this all year! But there are two enormous differences.

The first big difference is that Quantum Country's a package deal. The essays are built in a special way and are deeply integrated into the review system. But the notes I show in the video are just a plain web page that could be anywhere on the web: they don't have to be hosted on our special infrastructure or built in a special way. A simple HTML tag is all it takes to add the prompts seen in the demo.

The second big difference is that the video shows dedicated review apps. To review prompts from Quantum Country's essays, you can go to a "review page" on Quantum Country, but to review prompts from dozens of web pages, we'll need to establish a separate place that aggregates all those questions. What you see on the right are native macOS and iOS review apps, displaying a review session based on the prompts collected on the web page at left. But they'd also display prompts from anything else you read. There'll be a web-based review option, too, not shown here.

The interface shown in this video is basically a placeholder: I've been focused on the platform infrastructure. Lots of design work awaits. But I've imported my Anki library into this system, and for the last couple weeks, I've used these apps instead of Anki for my personal spaced repetition practice. That practice helps me feel all the rough edges viscerally and pushes me to make the experience great. But I'm already enjoying the automatic syncing and the modern native (not Electron-based!) macOS app.

Anticipating the obvious question: no, this stuff isn't ready for others to use yet. But that's what the next few months are about. You all will get access long before this is all public. Thank you for your ongoing support!

—Andy