In Correspondence #54

40 years, Anki and Cursor

What I’ve been up to

• I celebrated my 40th birthday with friends on Viggsö (a wedding present, thank you Harry!)

• I was very impressed with the Nobel Week Lights in Stockholm

• Laura and I enjoyed an evening at Yasuragi (another wedding present, thank you friends!)

• I spent a few days in London, primarily to visit my new baby niece. I also dropped into E5 Bakehouse · 21Sid · Finch · London Fields Lido · Coal Drops Yard · Mare St. Market · Limehouse Library Hotel spa

• Hilma Church-Turing and I published several more chapters of the Technological Metamodernism book:

  • What is Technology?

  • What is Metamodernism?

  • Proto-metamodern thinkers on technology

  • d/acc

How I use Anki

I’ve now learnt 5000 Swedish words with Anki. This is my current setup, evolved over the past few years:

• For the actual cards, I downloaded the Swedish Kelly word list, a freely available frequency-based vocabulary list, and then used AI (Google Gemini Flash) to create examples sentences for each word

• I use two addons:

  • Pass/Fail to reduce the overwhelming default of four options (Again, Easy, Good, Hard) down to just two

  • HyperTTS with realtime Google Chirp 3 to speak the sentences out loud

• I check dubious translations using DeepL for macOS with the ⌘CC ‘copy to translate’ shortcut

• If I have questions, I use the ChatGPT macOS app via the ⌥ + space shortcut

I find I can reliably review 150 cards and learn 30 new words in a 30 minute session.

How I use Cursor

I used over half a billion tokens in Cursor in 2025, mainly on improving Dandelion (which has now been used to sell 150,000 tickets worth almost £5.5m)

• With Tool AI/Keep the Future Human in mind, I use the editor/code-centric view (rather than the agent view)

• Key shortcuts:

  • ⌘L: add selection to context (followed by ⌘N if I want to clear previous context)

  • ⌘/: change model (Composer 1 is my default, I switch to Opus 4.5 for tough questions)

• When working on Dandelion, before I commit, I often use my /diff slash command to Run `git diff`, inspect any altered files and verify the changes look good to commit. A commit and push then triggers the test suite to be run as a matrix on Github Actions (setup here).

• I commit using OpenCommit with commit messages provided by moonshotai/kimi-k2-0905:nitro on OpenRouter (as a small way of supporting open source AI)

What I’ve been reading/watching

• The Thinking Game documentary on Demis Hassabis/Google DeepMind (see also his recent interview on the DeepMind channel)

• Vitalik Buterin’s latest piece Let a thousand societies bloom

• The Resonant Computing Manifesto

• The Strange Physics That Gave Birth to AI, on spin glasses (which I did my dissertation on back in 2008!)

Offerings from friends

See all my recommended events from Dandelion at stephenreid.net/events

• Ace Collectiv’s NYD 2026 Midwinter Festival

• Music therapy in Stockholm with Corinne Elfving

• Lara's Adventures children’s books on feelings, needs and empathy

• Real Love, the new spoken word EP from Gaia Harvey Jackson

• The new planet:health site

And finally…

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, when on this shortest day here in Stockholm, the sun will rise at 8:43am and set at 2:48pm (that’s 6 hours of light/18 hours of darkness). We are very much looking forward to the return of the light! ☀️

Mettā,
Stephen

p.s. I love to hear from readers. Hit reply and let me know what you appreciated.