161–170 of 348 posts
Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago. This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Cl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It is actually quite trivial.
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…
Sounds like they suffer from the same illness as dating apps: Being successful means users graduating and leaving the platform.
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.
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…
Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago. This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Cl…
> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
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 just a mobile game where you role play learning a language. Similar to how you role play being an emperor in Civ: you learn a thing or two but it's no where near what the real thing is. That's fine as a game!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I think the opposite is true: I'm deliberately choosing the usually more expensive DIY route even though I'm aware of cheaper commercial offerings. If you hate ads, deception, and dark patterns as much as I do, then most software has a negative value. But I'll only pay for it if the value exceeds the price. That means there's a rather large (and probably growing) share of the software market that I'll just never pay…
And there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. How else do you let your potential market know you have a product that they would benefit from? It's not always deception to get into their wallets, sometimes it's a genuine fair value trade.
Though I do think modern practices are full of immoral patterns, especially what George Lucas pioneered of brainwashing children into buying things. So yeah I agree that in practice, most modern marketing is just plain deception.
On the other hand, you then have millions of young, talented developers wasting their time and energy on open source projects that are hugely innovative and useful, but because they wholesale reject marketing, their projects never get anywhere, and they settle for unfulfilling jobs that society could do without.
And maybe the saddest part of all is that many such young talented devs spent so much time making useful projects for free, and never saw a dime because of it, despite the fact that corporations are now profiting from their work daily. You may say, well, the dev put it out there for free and didn't ask for money, but in the current market, what other choice is there? The race to the bottom has already been won and first place was $0.
Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value. If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then I’ll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.
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?
Duolingo being crap and costing anything/month is the problem.
(Paid Duolingo user and long time GNU/Linux user here)