I never really understood the point of anki outside of vocabulary learning. I would be happy to have it explained to me. Even when learning a language, I found anki to be a bit useless since often times the grammar was as important to learn (e.g., any language with genders and cases). Like I guess I don't see how anki would help me be the scientist I am today, how it might help me learn new topics that I am interested in to pursue new research directions. I am not against anki, I simply don't see how it would benefit me although if you could explain it to me I am all ears.
In particular I liked the section partway* through the article where he talks about using Anki to get up to speed on the AlphaGo paper for an article he was writing for Quanta.
It's great for learning the Ham radio test answers (publicly available), Major System, and NATO Phonetic Alphabet. I did not particularly enjoy Anki when I first tried it for Japanese-learning. I also found using it on my phone (AnkiDroid from F-Droid) worked better since I could grind it out anywhere I was. I never used their sync thing, IIRC it's proprietary. I also had success once using it to study for a technical interview (tech support, not programming, mostly shell commands and important paths).
I stopped using it a couple phones ago when the app seemed to break after trying to copy over my data. I've had several incidences since where I regretted not knowing the Major System well anymore, as I ran into a long number it'd be useful to memorize for a bit. I mostly used public decks I downloaded, though I did make my own for the interview study.
I use a spaced repetition system for learning Russian vocabulary. But tbh I find speaking in Russian and interacting in Russian to be better at learning words because they get associated with memories.
