151–160 of 348 posts
Anyone who doesn't think that AI is going to disrupt everything in software hasn't watched as software ate the rest of the world. this is the latest iteration.
My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…
Learning a new language to any degree of proficiency requires motivation. It's easy to start and hard to continue if you're not willing to put in the effort. There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app. In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their motivations d…
> if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app
Learning a language to fluency requires real commitment, and I’d say an app could never possibly do it on its own. One of the most key things Duolingo gave me was consistency and a lack of an excuse to constantly practice and learn. But you also have to (and I did) use the language daily, watch content in the target language, travel and speak with locals in the language, etc. I’m not sure where Duolingo ever claimed that it alone was enough to actually reach proficiency or fluency.
Duolingo’s gamification and streaks and leaderboards gave me a reason to put a lot of effort into learning the language, and I don’t know where I’d be without it. There’s a lot of things about Duolingo I don’t love but I’m incredibly grateful that it exists.
For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower. I switched a while ago to Seedlang ( https://www.seedlang.com/ ), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo. Every exercise involves a real video of a real German spea…
I studied German for 3 years in university, dabbled in German duo-lingo, and completed all German courses on Memrise. I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these applications.
For beginners to German these days, I heartily recommend the free “Nicos Weg” course from DW that goes up to B1 at least. Also has, unusually for language classes, a cast of likeable characters played by reasonably good actors carrying a consistent, building storyline throughout the lessons.
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A lot of customers left. And, typically CEO’s say things like this to try to scare/get leverage on employees.
Like at least 500? I'm sure that will hurt.
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I take issue with assuming that based on his name alone. Is there a wealthy von Ahn family I’m not aware of? If there is, having that name doesn’t mean you are part of that family.
My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…
Duolingo is really only useful at the A1/A2 levels anyway. Once you reach B1, you're pretty much past the point where the vocab and grammar basics from Duolingo is useful and you need to move on to other activities (watching TV in your target language, having conversations with native speakers, reading books in your target language, etc).
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It's not stinginess, it's value. If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs. I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more…
> If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs. Because the "customize it" part is not trivial. That is the value add for most people who can not do that customisation themselves. That said, I've found LLMs to be terrific if the goal is to learn the rules of language's grammar. But to actually learn to speak the language, find Hel…
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I cannot imagine being the CEO of a software company and proudly proclaiming that some other software — which we do not make and can easily be had very cheap or for free— is better fit for purpose than what we’ve been able to accomplish in over a decade with almost a thousand employees, and expecting that to impress investors or users or both. Like that would be like the Chipotle CEO proudly announcing that they’re f…
Chipotle already doesn't manufacture the vast majority of their ingredients. Their business consists of delivering supplier-originated ingredients to a standardized storefront in your city and consistently assembling them into a quality burrito, with small amounts of prep work for things which can't be consistently sourced locally and in-store cooking for things which must be prepared fresh. I don't know where people…
It would be quite surprising for there to be some other company with capacity to supply thousands of restaurants with exactly what you need.
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I've noticed that a strong thread of the hacker community, including HN and the guys who wrote GNU and linux, are extremely cheap . Like, you'd rather write a product clone yourself than pay $15/month for the official product. Why is this? What's with the inherent stinginess?
If you're going to drag Linus and Stallman into this, at least read up on your history. A commercial Unix or Lisp Machine was quite a bit more expensive than $15/month. They both got shafted by companies that couldn't care less about anything beyond profit. It's part of the ugly side of capitalism, fuck people and fuck the world.
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I do think AI could be a better language tutor than an average language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's approach is very effective. The ideal AI-powered tutor would work more closely to a private language tutor. It would speak with you and gradually integrating language concepts into the conversation. When you make mistakes, it could correct you on the spot and keep track of where your strengths and weaknesses…
> I do think AI could be a better language tutor than an average language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's approach is very effective. No offense, I can tell you're neither a linguist nor a language teacher. This is one are where the human input is invaluable and irreplaceable. Because language (the complex kind) is inherently human. It quite literally is.