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  • 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.
  • LeroyJenkins@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company. just a couple months ago, duo mascot and Duolingo streaks were cool and fun. they had a good thing going. but now it’s just another shit tech company again. they lost all the good will in like a month.

  • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    People are unfair with this “CEO”. Its statement helped me move on from duolingo, which has seen significant decline in quality while never going beyond “a moderately bad way to start learning”, toward better, more developed, more cared for, cheaper, solutions.

    So, thanks for that.

      • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        I’m mainly interested in Japanese, so I’m currently looking at https://www.renshuu.org/ . In addition to just throwing random stuff at you, it gots some more in-depth training, explanations of stuff (something that never happened in duolingo), additional hints for alphabets including some mnemonics, and years of dedicated experience in the language. I can’t tell how it would feel long term, but so far even having some basic explanations is a great improvement.

        • Novaling@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          I’m not gonna lie, I stopped using Renshuu due to having other resources at hand and because it just looks so rough, but I think it’s great for a free resource. The fact that they offer a shit ton of vocab/grammar/kanji study sets for free and community built ones is reminiscent of Anki, and Renshuu also uses a SRS. Lots of customization for reviews and answer options.

          It’s certainly nowhere as eye-catching and addictive as Duolingo is, so beginners are probably more likely to give up than if they used Duolingo. But honestly, that site lost the point of what learning a language was supposed to be about anyway.

          Sometimes I feel I should pick it back up, but at this point I want to focus more on reading/watching content for practice/learning.

    • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      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.)

  • Child_of_the_bukkake@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.

    Firstly every single company that has tried to replace its employees with AI has always ended up having issues. Secondly even if that wasn’t the case, people are not going to be happy about it so it’s not something you should brag publicly about.

    If you’re going to replace all of your employees with AI just do it quietly, that way if it fails it’s not a public failure, and if it succeeds (it won’t) then you talk about it.

    • sturger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      People keep forgetting that these companies’ product is stock price, not whatever they’re advertising at any given moment.
      Their “CEOs” have gotten sloppy because the grift has gotten so easy they naturally assume everyone is in on it. If everyone is in on the grift, there’s no need to lie about it.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.

      Being a CEO has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, I guarantee you that Duolingo has employees who are far more intelligent than the CEO.

    • nandeEbisu@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      People who are smart in one or two domains often overestimate how smart they are in other domains. They develop a mental model, confirm it quickly, and never re-asses it.

      The issue with AI, is we’re probably hitting our first real S curve with the current technology’s performance but a lot of people who bet big are only see the exponential part and assuming there won’t be a level off, or that the level of is far away.

      There is no Moore’s law for AI.

    • HeartyOfGlass@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Intelligence has nothing to do with success. These people are born into wealth, are wealth-adjacent, or are expert ass-kissers.

      • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        They also tend to be more greedy than others for wealth, status and power, and not imaginative enough to see that life is about more than this. So they dedicate their life to crawling up to the top of the corporate heap while everyone else gets on with actual real stuff.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      If they do it quietly, they won’t get the stock price bump every company gets from saying they’re going to replace (costly) employees with AI.

  • arc@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    What I’d wonder is why it’s such massive expensive for Duolingo to hire 2 or 3 people to cover a language anyway. Presumably most of the work is contractual - hire somebody competent to produce a course, get somebody to say the lines, refine the course based on feed back and that’s mostly it.

  • Jimmycakes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis

  • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    If anyone wants to practice their Japanese or have questions, they can message me.

  • jhonmu648@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Just say AI bad use is cancer for human kind. Good use can help humans to do their task with less effort. So its all depend on usage.

  • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    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

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      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.

  • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they’re part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.

    Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.

    Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student’s progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.

    Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It’s known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.

    My advice is to skip language learning apps. The “motivation via gamification hypothesis” is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don’t stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It’s because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.

    A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.

    • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      …or join a reputable language learning academy and go to class in person.

      Though I know this is not for everyone. But neither is self-learning online.

    • Kuma@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      You put into words exactly how I’ve felt about language learning apps. Every time I try a game or app that’s supposed to teach you, it feels like I’m starting over, and it never actually becomes fun. I tried Duolingo, but after a while, I found myself just doing super easy lessons to keep my streak going so I wouldn’t have to sit through the boring ones. It felt pretty bad, so I stopped using it when I hit 800 days.

      My friend didn’t use any apps and instead started by texting and talking with people and managed to learn Korean in just a year, well enough for casual, everyday conversations or hobby-related stuff. Meanwhile, I’ve been using apps and still can’t hold a conversation with anyone…

    • clutchtwopointzero@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      exactly. I also don’t appreciate the app changing the icon to guilt trip me back into their odd choice of/irrelevant vocabulary that I am supposed to learn