- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
- Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
- Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.
You must log in or register to comment.
What is the point of this news that talk about a walk back that is doing nothing to walk back?
deleted by creator
“AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.
Now please explain in more detail how this advice should be followed, practically, by someone you just fired because AI was cheaper. Give examples of how they can “stay ahead of it” so as to “remain in control of the product and mission” they are no longer employed to work on. How should they “embrace” this transition and “respond with curiosity” to no being newly unable to afford food or rent? “Uncertainty for all of us” my ass.
The former employees are now curious about how they will pay rent and eat, so there’s that.
Reminds of Proto CEOs faux pas
Good to see the normie finally turning on these cult of personality clowns imitating Steve apple…
I can’t be believe we had to suffer 15 years of it.
These parasites been getting high on their own farts for too long while normie LARPed everything they said.
faux pas
Not much of a “faux” pas. Not only did he double down on it, but the board supported him.
“the board” lol yeah they used to be governing mechanisms instead of a clown car full of sycophants.
The plural of faux pas is also faux pas, because you know, French. But this is less one false step in the dance, than doing entirely the wrong dance altogether.
Oh thanks for re-teaching me that one! It’s been far too long since I last used French reallistically.
Even tho it’s better that I took that than German, otherwise I’d understand the ich_iel memes which would make them lose half their charm.
I just started using Duolingo to learn Spanish. Can anyone recommend alternatives they have had success with that function the same way?
Anki is free. If you need gamification, then perhaps memrize is for you. I’d just go with anki though. Ankidroid is a good app to work with the anki decks.
I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)
The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.
This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.
Use free Anki and get a free 1k or 5k high-frequency community deck from Anki website. Or get Refold 1k deck (paid) for anki.
If you find Anki too complicated and you don’t mind paying a sub (look for discount/vouchers), use lingvist (paid) or memrise (not sure how this app is now after the changes) to learn 1k words. Any app that focuses on high frequency vocab is fine I think.
Cancel subscription once you have learnt 1k words or can read comfortably a simple native book or graded books, or understand a podcast designed for learner (example InnerFrench), probably will take 1-3 months at about 10-30 words a day.
The main difference between 1k and 5k decks is that the 5k decks include very common type of words like “the”, “a”, “he”, “she”, “is”, “are”, which are so high frequency that you will acquire them by just doing anything in the language. Either type of deck is fine, it is up to you.
Try reading graded readers with audio at the same time as you are going through your deck so you are getting more context for new words you learn. You will encounter new words while reading before seeing them in the deck, which has a positive effect in remembering the word. Reading also helps serve to test how much you have improved in using the language.
Read up on some basic high frequency grammar in your target language. Depending on language you will have to also actively learn the alphabet, numbers, phonic and so on before doing any of the above.
The main idea of learning high frequency vocab is to start consuming content as soon as possible. Never forget that using(reading, listening, writing, speaking) the language is the main purpose of learning languages.
If you like gamification and keeping scores, count the books/article read, count the words learnt, count the hours spend listening don’t count coins or gems.
Anki - https://apps.ankiweb.net/
AnkiDroid - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki
Anki shared decks - https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=french
Refold decks - https://refold.la/category/decks/?show=all
Lingvist - https://lingvist.com/
The missing comma in the second bullet point changes the meaning of the sentence.
I hear good things about Pimsleur as an alternative.
Pimsleur has been making “real” language courses for 20+ years, you could get CD’s with languages back then, there should be plenty to choose from.
I used Pimsleur to get started on my L2 way back when. I am now pretty much fluent, after living immersively for a long time. The immersion, and dedication, and tutors, and language school did the heavy lifting. But Pimsleur gets big credit for helping me get started and get confidence.
Interesting.
I have switched to Mango Languages because my library gives free access to it. So I’ve been trying to share that information with people. Or, at least, check your local library to see if they offer something.
That’s great advice. At least for as long as libraries still exist. 😫
It can go either way, some people like the method, others hâte it because it’s not gamified. Pro tip, get pimsleur courses from your library if you want to try them for a real trial rather than what they give you
I love this headline so, so much
I want every headline to end with “…, fails”
“Amir, on his way to become successful in life…”
I gotta say, the icon of Duo looking like this, plus a snot coming out of one of its nostrils is what did it for me. No way to turn off this “feature” either. I’m not easily grossed out, so seeing it once or twice would have given me a chuckle. Seeing it every time I opened my phone? Nope.
I knew I wouldn’t be renewing my subscription right there and then (there were other reasons, but that one moved the decision faster.)
wait what… they made the official icon look miserable and added snot? wtf?
I think on iOS they added a thing where it would change based on the days you didn’t use Duolingo. Honestly at this point I think it speaks more about the sorry state of their company more than anything.
Yup! Google “Duolingo snot icon” and it will be the first image result.
Or you could visit the orange site and check it out there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/1f2deam/im_sick_right_now_and_this_is_the_app_icon/
holy fuck
I mean, it is too late. Canceled my sub, won’t be coming back.
I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.
Same. Deleted the app this weekend and let my 918 day streak evaporate.
I’m actually kind of surprised at how little it affected me, to be honest. I had a little bit pre-regret about losing the streak before deleting the app, but now a couple days later that feeling certainly doesn’t exist. AND there’s that benefit of no stupid owl guilt tripping you every day.
Check out “Language Drops” and “Rosetta Stone” if you’re looking for replacements. They both have very different approaches to language learning (both from each other and from Duolingo), but their content is at the very least much better curated than Duolingo’s.
I haven’t gone out of my way to check but AFAIK neither of them is jumping on the AI-before-anything-else train.
Drops had an ai feature where it would show you a “fact” at the end of each session, which was often completely wrong etymology.
My recommendation is Language Transfer, a freely-available system for multiple languages that, in my opinion, helps you to think in another language better than any other system I have tried.
It has only 10 languages :(
Many libraries also give out subscriptions.to Mango. That is usually a paid app and much better than doulingo
Any recommendations for japanese?
I think both of them have Japanese (I remember seeing Rosetta Stone being praised for its Japanese content 20 years ago and I hope it would only have improved since), but I haven’t gone very far in the language in either app.
Thanks for the recommendations!
I have actually switched over to Mango Languages because my library gives free access to it.
But if I don’t end up liking that I’ll give these a shot.
Would you recommend one over the other and if so why?
I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?
Sometimes the icons annoy me too and I wish the app had an option to always show the icon’s label, but at least you can tap on the icon to see the label.
As a complete beginner, Drops is pretty good for learning random words and increasing vocabulary. As you advance through it you start seeing sentences too, but it doesn’t teach you how to make your own sentences, only to memorize the ones they pre-created.
Rosetta Stone doesn’t translate anything. All of the content is in the language you want to learn and it tries to introduce you to things in a natural way. For example it shows a picture of someone biting an apple and says “the man eats an apple”, then later shows other pictures related to one or multiple men, fruits and verbs, so you can get used to the differences between things just by observing those.
Where is the discussion for replacing CEOs with AI? Seems like predicting market trends based off of historical data and managing corporate resources would be just the sort of thing that AI would be good at. Plus it would cost way less and not require massive bonuses nor ownership of the company.
Well, the crux of the problem is that AI is trying to approximate intelligence. That’s not useful for a CEO.
boom
Respec the AI with lots of points into Charisma and Legal Dexterity. It also needs a large amount of Gold to get started.
FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.
So…tries and fails? 😛
except his AI.
Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis
boring, broken garbage content. monthly subscription fee. get the fuck out of here
AI is social cancer
It’s a lie told by marketing companies that have gaslit artists into automating their creativity and gaslit governments into automating fascism
Automated fascism completely defeats the purpose of fascism. The whole point is to lord power over people, if a computer is going to do it automatically then it’s no fun.
AI is social lung cancer. Behind social media, which is social bone cancer metastasized.
There should be a federated system for blocking IP ranges that other server operators within a chain of trust have already identified as belonging to crawlers. A bit like fediseer.com, but possibly more decentralized.
(Here’s another advantage of Markov chain maze generators like Nepenthes: Even when crawlers recognize that they have been served garbage and they delete it, one still has obtained highly reliable evidence that the requesting IPs are crawlers.)
Also, whenever one is only partially confident in a classification of an IP range as a crawler, instead of blocking it outright one can serve proof-of-works tasks (à la Anubis) with a complexity proportional to that confidence. This could also be useful in order to keep crawlers somewhat in the dark about whether they’ve been put on a blacklist.
Did you comment on the wrong thread?
