basics · memory, made visible

Your memory, and the machine's

The recall cards on this site quietly keep a little data — what you remembered, what slipped, when each idea is due again. None of it leaves your browser. Here it is, drawn as a picture: your own forgetting curve and the ladder your cards climb. Then flip the switch and watch how differently a machine "remembers" the same thing.

Your memory ladder

Each time you recall a card, it climbs a rung — and the gap before its next visit widens: a day, three, a week, then months. Forget one and it drops back to the bottom. That widening ladder is your memory getting stronger; the drops are forgetting, made visible.

Make it yours

No data yet, or want to watch it move? Answer a card — honestly — and the picture above updates on the spot. Two about memory itself, so the act of answering is also the lesson.

What does recalling something just before you'd forget do to your memory of it?

It resets the forgetting curve. Each well-timed recall strengthens the trace and buys a longer gap before the next one — which is why the rungs widen.
When an LLM "remembers" something from a past chat, what's actually happening?

Not recall — retrieval. It looks the item up in an external store (embeddings / RAG) at answer-time. No strengthening, no forgetting curve; what's worth storing was a human's call.

Working memory ≈ the context window

Hold a phone number in your head while you dial: that's working memory — a handful of things at once, gone in a blink. A model has its own version, the context window: everything in the current conversation, held all at once, and just as gone when the chat ends. Both are small and both evaporate — which is why we lean on outside scaffolding to hold what won't fit.

Where the two part ways

Past the blink, the paths split. You move things into long-term memory by consolidating — each retrieval rebuilds the idea and lays the trace down deeper, which is also why a real memory is hard to vary. A model doesn't consolidate anything from talking to you; between sessions it keeps nothing. To carry knowledge forward it retrieves from an external store someone built. The lookup is fast and tireless — but the judgment of what was worth keeping stayed human.

Carry it on

Two short notes go deeper on the human half: retrieval beats re-reading and spacing fights forgetting. Come back to this page whenever — the more cards you answer across the site, the more it's a picture of your memory, not an example.