This is a bad case of whataboutism (I hate this word but it describes the answer you gave), what do you mean by accelerating understanding? Maybe they are good as suggestion engines, but it is very early to state what you did.
Theyre alot more than "suggestion engines". They can reason with you, show you examples, tell you how to dig deeper and verify what theyre saying, etc.
This is actually the truth, we all have tens or hundreds of priceless saved links. However, I claim that 90% are forgotten after a day or two, maybe that's actually something that small language models can fix ?
Before I started the project, I was already vaguely familiar with the notion of an inverted index [1]. That small bit of knowledge meant that I knew where to start looking for more information and saved me a ton of time. Inverted indices form the bulk of many search engines, with the big unknown being how you implement it. I just had to find an adequate data structure for my application.
To figure that out, I remember searching for articles on how to implement inverted indices. Once I had a list of candidate strategies and data structures, I used Wikipedia supplemented by some textbooks like Skiena's [2] and occasionally some (somewhat outdated) information from NIST [3]. I found Wikipedia quite detailed for all of the data structures for this problem, so it was pretty easy to compare the tradeoffs between different design choices here. I originally wanted to implement the inverted index as a hash table but decided to use a trie because it makes wildcard search easier to implement.
After I developed most of the backend, I looked for books on "information retrieval" in general. I found a history book (Bourne and Hahn 2003) on the development of these kind of search systems [4]. I read some portions of this book, and that helped confirm many of the design choices that I made. I actually was just doing what people traditionally did when they first built these systems in the 1960s and 1970s, albeit with more modern tools and much more information on hand.
The harder part of this project for me was writing the interpreter. I actually found YouTube videos on how to write recursive descent parsers to be the most helpful there, particular this one [5]. Textbooks were too theoretical and not concrete enough, though Crafting Interpreters was sometimes helpful [6].
> Language learning: I have a couple of languages that I want to focus on this 2026. Both for the enjoyment of learning and using said languages, and also because it will help me improve work-wise.
May I ask which languages are you talking about here? and what methods you will follow?
Sorry, human languages. Progress in my Italian and start learning some of the other more complex languages such as Russian and/or Arabic.
I will try to make the learning process as natural as possible. Italian I already have a base and my native language is similar, so the learning process will be based on immersion and grammar learning. For the other ones, I will try to get a more structured learning path such as courses or programs to get to learn as fast and simple as possible.
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