salimmadjd

Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak.

Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.

Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).

If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.

I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.

Add a few more that others may not mention:

Brahms symphony 4 - 1st movement Brahms symphony 3 - 3rd movement Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 3

Jazz

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane In a Sentimental Mood My Little Brown Book

Dave Brubeck Quartet Koto Song

Rock

Pink Floyd Echos (from Meddle ) Animals

With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been reduced to a game.

The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their game pools.

The cynical me thinks this is also a pre-election (“wish selection”) PR to help promote the case for Gavin Newsom as president.

You can imagine a talking point like “under my leadership, California overtook Germany as the 4th economy in the world…”

The reality is Newsom had almost zero impact on it, his leadership should be judge by the growing homelessness issue we’ve seen in SF and rest of California and not take credit for tech economy.

Yes, solving the homeless problem is a huge and complex challenge, but the country now needs leadership that is able to solve the big challenging problem.

We’ve lost our ability to fix hard problems and we need to do that if we want to have a chance in a more competitive world.

Different (maybe controversial)take.

You should be given the choice to be grandfathered into the version of TOS upon first using that service.

I think with social media where value is derived by ongoing time investment of users, the TOS changes should only be applied after mutual agreement.

When I invest hours into helping to flourish a community, I need to be assured the company holds their side of the contract and not change the terms at any arbitrary time.

I disagree with the notion that you can stop using it, if you don’t agree with the new TOS.

social media is different than let’s say visiting Politico, where I’m just a consumer and not a contributor. Politico doesn’t owe me anything.

When you start contributing and building value under an initial sets of policy and agreements that initial agreement should remain in place until mutually agreed to change it.

I understand that causes some operational headaches, but it’s just cost of running a social media company.

I totally agree on the syntax, Haskell is far cleaner.

I’m not sure what the reasoning was here. I hope the author or others can shed some light.

The same polarizing media conveniently blamed Facebook and Twitter (though to a lesser extent) for all the polarization that they have been fomenting for years. I guess that move wasn’t as surprising for me as seeing the number of people in SV who bought into that narrative.

Corporate media should not really be thought of as real journalistic entities.

Simple example. How in the world does CNN allow Chris Cuomo to interview his own brother. The fact that no one inside CNN publicly objected to this, walked away, protested, it tells me everything I need to know about the entire organization.

I don’t remember anyone at MSNBC making a fuss about it, nor at the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness).

Anyone knows how much more efficiency is gained (due to reduced weight) once a jetliner consumes 50% of its fuel?

Curious if for flying it’ll be more practical to use electricity for some kind of direct or indirect carbon sequestration (to be carbon neutral) fuel generation and continue to fly with some type of combustion based fuel.

Yang is underestimating the network effect of the two parties.

I thought running for mayor of NY City was kind of odd. His lack of experience really showed after his initial name ID advantage faded away.

I feel like he is fighting for relevancy but it's approaching it from a wrong angle.

I do understand he is feeling betrayed a bit by the party. He was probably promised (or hinted at) some kind of a position with the Biden admin.

Then he had that disastrous loss as a mayor. I'm not sure starting a third party is really a right move for him.

He is interesting (was authentic) as a candidate, but quite honesty doesn't have a real national name ID or charisma to pull together a successful third party.

At this point, the only person who can reasonably start a third party is probably Donald Trump (not saying he is going to). My point is you need a huge national popular backing.

Yang doesn't have that. If anything he is going to destroy the possibility of having a real competitive third party in our country.

So, yeah another misstep (IMHO) by Yang.