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Sam Rawal
Personal blog · samrawal.substack.comaihealthprogramming
Sam Rawal writes m3, a personal blog at samrawal.substack.com about ai, health and programming. Since 2022, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “The Relationship Between Memorizing and Understanding (2022)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-25, and you can follow it by feed.
thoughts from the intersection of my interests. Launched 4 years ago.
Most-linked posts?
- The Relationship Between Memorizing and Understanding (2022)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-03-18
What Hacker News says?
I used Anki quite a bit in med school, where it’s extremely popular. Admittedly, it took me a couple years to fully buy in to it as a tool for cramming hundreds of facts, especially coming from an academic background (computer science) where memorizing facts at a high rate was not a huge emphasis at all. After using it for a while though, I began to value how the quick recall encouraged by the system actually seemed…
Comment linking /p/on-the-relationship-between-memorizing
on “Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards”Submitted The Relationship Between Memorizing and Understanding (2022) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wrote about some similar observations in the clinical domain -- I call it the "human -> AI reasoning shunt" [0]. Explicitly requesting an AI tool to perform reasoning is one thing, but a concern I have is that, with the increasing prevalence of these AI tools, even tasks that theoretically are not reasoning-based (ie helping write clinical notes or answer simple questions) can surreptitiously offload some degree o…
Comment linking /p/the-human-ai-reasoning-shunt
on “The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI”Submitted Augmenting clinical reasoning, without replacing it as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI commented on this on HN a couple months ago, but I had a similar conclusion regarding the value of memorization when I joined med school after studying computer science in undergrad and grad. It took me a while to buy in to high-volume memorization as a learning technique (especially coming from CS, where memorizing facts is not a huge emphasis). After a while though, I started recognizing how the quick recall enc…
Comment linking /p/on-the-relationship-between-memorizing
on “I rewired my brain to become fluent in math (2014)”Submitted The Human → AI Reasoning Shunt as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis doesn’t necessarily apply to this particular offering, but having working in clinical AI previously from a CS POV and currently from as a resident physician, something I’m a little wary of is the “shunting” of reasoning away from physicians to these tools (implicitly). One can argue that it’s not always a bad thing, but I think the danger can lie in this happening surreptitiously by these tools deciding what’s…
Comment linking /p/the-human-ai-reasoning-shunt
on “Microsoft's new Dragon Copilot is an AI assistant for healthcare”Submitted On the Relationship Between Memorizing and Understanding (2022) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI built a local developer-mode plugin that gives ChatGPT access to a local directory [0] -- it's pretty basic in terms of functionality (just simple bridge to access/read files) but I've found a surprising amount of value from it [1]! [0] https://github.com/samrawal/chatgpt-localfiles [1] https://samrawal.substack.com/p/example-driven-development
Comment linking /p/example-driven-development
on “Show HN: OpenAI dev assistant GUI with local code interpreter”Submitted Large Language Models for Clinical Applications as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI also had a similar thought process regarding understanding vs memorizing facts while transitioning from studying CS (where I emphasized understanding the underlying concepts rather than trying to memorize atomic facts that I could derive) to medicine (where having facts memorized is also a key component). Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of t…
Comment linking /p/on-the-relationship-between-memorizing
on “Anki-Fy Your Life”Submitted “Semantic Macros” with Emacs and GPT as a story · 1 points
HN discussion