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.)

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.

I want every headline to end with "..., fails"

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.

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

crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company.

they lost all the good will in like a month.

Twitter enter the chat

wait what... they made the official icon look miserable and added snot? wtf?

FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.

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/

FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.

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.

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.

• 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.

wait what... they made the official icon look miserable and added snot? wtf?