Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Four new decks for the words behind the headlines
by Miles Corran · October 27, 2026
Some topics come up every week, in the news, at work, in the family group chat, and rarely get explained properly. We've made four short decks about them. Each has 16 cards: plain-English flashcards, plus a few scenario questions that explain the answer once you've picked one.
They're free and public. Study them like any deck, play them in Tower Defense, or remix one to make it your own.
AI words, explained
Tokens, context windows, hallucinations, RAG, agents: the vocabulary behind the AI headlines, without the jargon.
Context window: How much text a model can take in at once: your prompt, any files and its own reply together.
And one of its questions: a chatbot confidently cites a court case that doesn't exist. What is this called? (It's a hallucination, and it's why you check every citation.)
Spot the scam
How phishing, fake delivery texts and "your bank" phone calls work, and the habits that stop them: unique passwords, multi-factor authentication and passkeys.
SIM swap: A criminal gets your phone number moved to their SIM card, so they receive your texted codes.
It's a good one to send to family. The questions walk through real situations, like a text asking for a $1.99 fee to release a parcel.
Crypto without losing it
Safety basics for anyone holding crypto: seed phrases, self-custody, fake airdrops, address poisoning and token approvals. This deck is about not losing what you have. It isn't investment advice.
Address poisoning: A scammer sends a tiny transaction from a look-alike address, hoping you'll copy it from your history.
Study Crypto without losing it
Stats that fool you
The everyday mistakes behind misleading numbers and charts: correlation and causation, base rates, survivorship bias, cherry-picking, and charts whose scale doesn't start at zero.
Relative vs absolute risk: "Doubles the risk" can mean going from 1 in 10,000 to 2 in 10,000.
One question asks what matters most when a 99%-accurate test for a 1-in-10,000 condition comes back positive, and why the answer is the base rate.
Make them stick
Every card goes into your spaced-repetition reviews, so it comes back just before you'd forget it. If you'd rather play, each deck works in Tower Defense: answer the questions to earn gold and hold the road for ten waves.
Pick the one you'd most like to explain to someone else, and start there.