Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Pro@programming.dev⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://htxt.co.za/2025/05/duolingo-ceo-tries-to-walk-back-ai-first-comments-fails/

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.

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Comments

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underline960@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.

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- ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So…tries and fails? 😛
  
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- Seefoo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  except his AI.
  
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LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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- possumparty@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I uninstalled yesterday, good riddance Duo.
  
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- Pro@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company.
  
  they lost all the good will in like a month.
  
  Twitter enter the chat
  
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  - Revan343@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Twitter was going downhill hard already when Musk bought the place
    
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cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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- tehitype@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Please do share :)
  
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  - cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m mainly interested in Japanese, so I’m currently looking at 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.
    
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KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Image

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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
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  - pyre@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    wait what… they made the official icon look miserable and added snot?
    
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Child_of_the_bukkake@lemmy.cafe ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Did you comment on the wrong thread?
  
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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 if it succeeds (it won’t) then you talk about it.

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- sturger@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  People keep forgetting that these companies’s product is stock price, not whatever they’re advertising at any given moment.
  The “CEOs” have gotten sloppy because the grift has gotten so easy they assume everyone is in on it. They assume there’s no need to hide the grift.
  
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- ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
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- nandeEbisu@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
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- HeartyOfGlass@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Intelligence has nothing to do with success. These people are born into wealth, are wealth-adjacent, or are expert ass-kissers.
  
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  - floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They also tend to be more greedy than others for wealth, status and power. So they dedicate their life to crawling up to the top of the corporate heap while everyone else gets on with actual real stuff.
    
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- ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
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arc@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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- Kuma@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I would assume it is more about time than money. It is a big investment making a whole functional system with llm (I have a hard time believing it is actually AI), it will cost a lot if done wrong (just like everything else). You can’t just prompt “make a course in Spanish” and get anything good out of it and you still need ppl who can quality check the output. I could see them use it to mass produce sentences and stories in different levels (not the actual story) and voice recordings, but not actually anything creative and I would assume that is the goal. But we have seen too many shitty products to believe in anything with llm.
  
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- barnacul@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Terminal MBA brain
  
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nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
boring, broken garbage content. monthly subscription fee. get the fuck out of here

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Jimmycakes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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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k0e3@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If anyone wants to practice their Japanese or have questions, they can message me.

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- Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Image
  
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  - k0e3@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    主よ、如何なさいましたか。
    
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  - Hupf@feddit.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Rozen Maiden
    
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gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I love this headline so, so much

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- Amir@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I want every headline to end with “…, fails”
  
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  - elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “Amir, on his way to become successful in life…”
    
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jhonmu648@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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Grail@aussie.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
medium.com/…/duolingo-is-a-dutch-tulip-that-hates…

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SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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

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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  AI is social lung cancer. Behind social media, which is bone cancer metastasized.
  
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- echodot@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
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dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
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- Kuma@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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…
  
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- clutchtwopointzero@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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
  
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Kalysta@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I deleted the app the second he said this. Get fucked, AI.

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- finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Make sure you also start the account deletion process.
  
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corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The missing comma in the second bullet point changes the meaning of the sentence.

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AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
In another thread someone told me you can buy gems or something to keep your streak going.

That would’ve made me uninstall long before his comments.

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- wccrawford@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s worse than that.
  
  Yes, you can pay for a streak freeze. If you don’t, you’ll probably find that you were given one for free anyhow. You’d have wasted your gems.
  
  Yes, you can pay to undo a streak loss. It’s more than paying for a freeze.
  
  It’ll give you multiple chances to pay for all that, too. If you’re out for days and then come back, you can pay to fix your streak.
  
  What is the point of a streak if you can just buy your way back to it?
  
  Also, I had paid for the last couple years, which (IIRC) includes free streak freezes. It still asked if I want to pay for them. I’d say no, and find I had one anyhow, or a friend had miraculously given me one.
  
  But during the last year (365 days) my streak was actually only at 190 or so because I’d used so many streak freezes that I got for free. I wasn’t even trying to keep my streak.
  
  When I finally let my streak die, the icon started trying to guilt trip me into coming back with horrible icons of Duo being sad, heartbroken, or even dead.
  
  The constant mental manipulation that was well beyond what gamification should ever be was what finally drove me to just quit playing altogether. I had already canceled my sub long ago, but I’m not even going to use the remainder of this year I’ve already paid for.
  
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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “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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  - SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Nobody has ever learned a language by using Duolingo anyways. It’s an app that lets you pretend your are doing something useful with your life instead of just slaving away at your job enriching others.
    
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  - finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think it should be added that people who pay premium get infinite lives, everyone else gets 1 wrong answer every 6-ish hours with a maximum of 5, meaning they can answer wrong at most 5 times and fail a lesson, forcing them to do a recap practice lesson to earn a heart and then retry the lesson with only 1 heart or they’re just done for the day.
    
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  - AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ah, okay, thanks for the info! I’ve never used Duolingo so I genuinely don’t know.
    
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I have so many could probably keep a streak foing indefinitely without ever doing a lesson, but I’d need to log in every couple days to repurchase the streak freeze.
    
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- LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Theres also basically zero server side-checking on anything. Hacked APKs let you get premium features for free :3
  
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  - Mildren@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s awful! Could you please let me know where these APKs are hosted so that I may avoid them?
    
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  - Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Got any recommendations for where to find said APKs?
    
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- KRAW@linux.community ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I remember easily getting gems for free. Also the streak basically doesn’t matter at all. What made me uninstall is the slow pace m. 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.
  
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  - zaphod@sopuli.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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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  - Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ve found it’s best for drilling and not for learning. You’ll probably learn faster by reading a textbook or listening to something like the Michel Thomas method that gets you speaking super fast. Then you can hop on Duolingo and make it stick. The secret is knowing the vocabulary beforehand to finish the lessons faster by focusing on your accuracy instead.
    
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iconic_admin@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just started using Duolingo to learn Spanish. Can anyone recommend alternatives they have had success with that function the same way?

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- Litebit@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Use Anki and get a free 1k or 5k high-frequency community deck from Anki website. Or get Refold 1k deck (paid) for anki.
  
  If you don’t mind paying, use lingvist (paid) and learn 1k words from there. cancel subscription once done, probably will take 1-3 months.
  
  Try reading graded readers at the same time.
  
  read up on some basic high frequency grammar.
  
  The idea is to learn high frequency vocab and get to consuming content( using language) as soon as possible.
  
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- Akuchimoya@startrek.website ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)
  
  The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.
  
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- Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Anki is free. If you need gamification, then perhaps memrize is for you. I’d just go with anki though. Ankidroid is a good app to work with the anki decks.
  
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paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Any recommended alternatives?

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- TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  workbooks and videoes and a good dictionary
  
  thousands of great tutors are on sites like iTalki too
  
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Daedskin@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Last year in February I uninstalled the app on a perfect, 2000-day streak when I got the first whiff of AI; I’m probably never going back

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- ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Now say it in Spanish.
  
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Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If you’re gonna be a shitty company and do shitty things, just STFU. I don’t know why they think they can talk their way out of it, it’s like they believe their own BS.

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EndOfLine@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Where is the discussion for replacing CEOs with AI? Seems like predicting market trends based off of historical data and managing corporate resources would be just the sort of thing that AI would be good at. Plus it would cost way less and not require massive bonuses nor ownership of the company.

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EvilBit@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I hear good things about Pimsleur as an alternative.

www.pimsleur.com

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floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

“AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.

Now please explain in more detail how this advice should be followed, practically, by someone you just fired because AI was cheaper. Give examples of how they can embrace this change with curiousity so as to remain in control of the product and mission they are no longer employed to work on.

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