Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
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I love this headline so, so much
I want every headline to end with "..., fails"
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Yeah of course, winning or losing a game has no bearing on anything. It's still winning or losing.
The main objective is to complete lessons. You have to pay to do that or wait for energy to replenish.
No, you don't. It's only when you lose hearts. You get to make 5 mistakes. You can use gems to replenish them or they replenish over time. After playing for a while you earn plenty of gems to restore your hearts mid lesson every now and then. You can watch an ad to replenish your hearts between lessons, but not during. If you're not making mistakes then you can keep going. It's not that difficult to not make mistakes either, a lot of times they flat out give you the answer by tapping on words.
There are plenty of things to shit on Duolingo as a company. Calling the app pay to win really isn't one.
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主よ、如何なさいましたか。
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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.
Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis
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I hear good things about Pimsleur as an alternative.
Learn New Languages Online: Effective Programs for Beginners
Learn languages online with Pimsleur's effective language learning programs. Start learning another language in a fun way at your own pace. Sign up today!
Pimsleur (www.pimsleur.com)
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.
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Any recommended alternatives?
workbooks and videoes and a good dictionary
thousands of great tutors are on sites like iTalki too
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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.
boring, broken garbage content. monthly subscription fee. get the fuck out of here
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A completely optional, side objective that has no bearing on anything else? You can completely ignore the leader board and still progress. It's not competitive.
You can set your profile to private to completely disable the leaderboard stuff.
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Yeah of course, winning or losing a game has no bearing on anything. It's still winning or losing.
The main objective is to complete lessons. You have to pay to do that or wait for energy to replenish.
The main objective is not to complete lessons, but to learn. If you use up all your hearts because you make too many mistakes you're obviously not learning. At that point Duolingo completely fails though, instead of telling you to go back and practice, it asks if you want to buy hearts with in-game currency or switch to the paid super max hyper ultra AI whatever it's now called for unlimited hearts. Unlimited hearts doesn't give you shit though, it allows you to bruteforce your way through the lessons to get XP to rank up in the completely optional leaderboards, it doesn't help you learn. It's only pay to win if you see it as a game and not as a language learning app.
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I remember easily getting gems for free. Also the streak basically doesn't matter at all. What made me uninstall is the slow pace. It felt like I was stuck on the same words and topics forever. It felt like I was not actually learning anything, which if you've ever started learning a language if a formal setting, is very apparent.
The old tree system was much better, it allowed you to mix exercises from different topics. The new path system locks you into one topic until you know all the sentences by rote.
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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.
Any recommendations for japanese?
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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
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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.
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.
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I hear good things about Pimsleur as an alternative.
Learn New Languages Online: Effective Programs for Beginners
Learn languages online with Pimsleur's effective language learning programs. Start learning another language in a fun way at your own pace. Sign up today!
Pimsleur (www.pimsleur.com)
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
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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I'm a long time user of Duolingo and you earn plenty to give yourself the occasional streak freeze if you can't go two days without doing a lesson. It's not really as predatory as it sounds. It's nothing like pay to win type games.
Fuck Duolingo for the AI shit though, don't mistake me for a Duolingo simp thinking their blameless. It's just that the monetization is not as predatory as it sounds.
"Freezing" your streak is just silly, even if they offer it for free. Is this just for online clout, so you can brag (falsely) to others how long you haven't broken a streak?
If an alcoholic goes 10 years without drinking, then has a beer, the streak is broken. Doesn't mean you can't recover and improve, but it is what it is. It's dishonest to pretend it didn't happen, especially if you're comparing yourself to others...
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