Is it the law that you have to be a complete prick to be CEO of any kind of tech company now?
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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No, investors will slowly cook you into being a complete prick every time but you don't need to begin as one. If they fail to turn you into a prick then they'll replace you with someone else.
Only way to make it big without shitting on people is by using your own money and work to grow naturally - but even in that case you most likely will end up in some situation where someone will force you to choose between giving up either your humanity or your dreams.
Always has been
“Person who has already sold his soul to capitalism says that money making thing is better than human”
that tracks
Once you go IPO, enshitification becomes inevitable.
Didn't their AI already fuck up a shitload, wrong translations and impossible questions.
That was already the state before AI - unless they've been using AI for years already.
Wouldn't be surprised if they did.
I'm guessing most CEOs have no concept of quality and in this case "Better" = Cheaper
This just in: CEOs don't get their jobs (and attached outsized salaries) through merit. What a fucking moron.
This man needs to be fired out of a cannon into the Sun.
you gotta do what you gotta do
And just like that Duolingo went from "supposed to be good but AI fucked it up they say" language software I might have looked at once to - Nope.
This dude needs to go back to school.
(Not OC: via)
I have found there is a way to nuke my duolingo account from orbit and god they don't make it easy, putting instructions here for anyone else who would like to. I am unsure if it's possible on mobile (already uninstalled the app on mobile) but I'm pissed off enough + suspect that they might pay slightly more attention to account deletion en masse rather than app uninstalling en masse. also I cannot see myself ever using this bs again, so...
step 1: log onto duolingo.com
step 2: there's a sidebar on the left. mouse over "more" and then "help."
step 3: scroll down the list of frequently asked questions to the "account management" category. click on "how do I delete my account an access my data" and then on the link to "duolingo data vault."
step 4: hit the big red "erase personal data" button. do not be swayed by the crying owl. he cares not for you, only for your data.
step 5: they should send you an email to whatever account is connected to your duolingo account. you can tell which email it is based on the spam you've gotten for the past several years reminding you to maintain your streak.
step 5.5: if you have a super duolingo subscription or got suckered into their free trial that does not cancel automatically, cancel that separately, they explicitly state that they will keep charging you even if you do not have an account which tracks for the company duolingo is now
step 6: find the email, click on the link listed after "delete my data link"
step 7: wait 7 days. you cannot get your data deleted any faster than this, but you can cancel it during this 7-day grace period.
step 8: apparently it will take "up to 23 more days" to delete your data entirely. pat yourself on the back. you're free now.
jokes aside, I'm still on step 7 myself, but I cannot see myself WANTING to undo my account deletion even if I could, so... for anyone who's confused about how to do this but wants to, hope this can help.
and on a final note, fuck gen ai all my homies hate generative ai.
I would love to have an actual AI language conversation partner to help me learn new languages. Introduce new vocab, correct my grammar and pronounciation on the fly, suggest appropriate phrases and sentences for a given scenario. Run locally with full privacy and no data vacuum.
LLM hallucination is not that at all. Maybe in my lifetime though?
It does sound possible. You'd have to program in the language rules somehow so it doesn't hallucinate conjugation!
Socialising with other kids? Nah that's for losers with empathy.
I’ve been using Duolingo for a month and I don’t really like it. It does not explain anything. It just keeps throwing random sentences and hoping you can figure out the language structure and rules on your own.
They make their “streak” such a big deal and you can’t really set up a schedule that works for you. They want you to use the app everyday. But wait, there’s a fix: you can pay real money to buy gems that can be used to purchase streak freezes. It is becoming no better than those shitty pay-to-win games.
Are you serious you can buy gems? LOL
Oh yeah. Very weird vibes from an “education” app.
The only thing it was good for is memorizing words once you already know the grammar. I wouldn't trust it now, though.
😂😂😂 Fucking moron.
Yeah who needs social skills these days anyways
He can fuck off
Solution? https://lingonaut.app/
Lingodeer if you want a product that actually exists
Oh cool, I’ll check it out.
It’s financially motivated which is frustrating for some people and much less polished than Duolingo from a ui perspective but at least for Japanese (the only language I practice) the courses make much more sense and are more challenging
The only advantage Duolingo has over it really is the ability to practice stroke order for kanji/hiragana/katakana but if you’re not learning Chinese/japanese that’s not really an issue. Lingodeer will still teach you the characters, just not how to write them. And lingodeer integrates writing with the characters far earlier, basically at lesson 1, which is challenging but helpful. Vs Duolingo which makes this entirely optional so you can complete the entire course writing in “romaji”/latin script for Japanese (eg “konnichiwa” instead of こんにちは. And even if you use hiragana you can use that entirely and never use kanji (eg わたし instead of 私 for watashi)
It’s because Duolingo is overly focused on gameification. They artificially make things easier so you progress at all costs even if that means you are overall forming worse habits and learning less. On one hand this is more likely to keep you motivated, on the other it’s more likely to sell subscriptions, keep engagement in the app up, and sell iap items to manipulate the iap system. Then they can portray it as altruistic (“we are keeping you motivated”) when it’s really compromising your education to raise profitability. Yuck
Would love to know more about this. Do you know what languages they will have?
Not sure, didn’t look into it that far. I saw “French” (currently learning) and stopped there.
My kids were in highschool during the first wave of the pandemic with school closures, they did not need childcare they both however struggled a lot with remote learning. My daughter especially needed in person education. Teaching quality isn’t simply instruction it’s also cultural, offering different modes of learning, it’s also social leaning and just general practice on how to be a civil human being, AI can’t prove anything but instruction in one way. To believe this is to fundamentally misunderstand what education is and what its purpose is.
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn believes there's no subject a computer isn't suited to teaching.
How about how to love Luis, how about that?
He's probably right that a so-called-AI software can assist a teacher in making sure all students get to be on the same page. With the unreliability of models today though I would be more concerned with the crap hallucinating wrong math formulae or the Italian-Zimbabwean War of 1647. This needs tight supervision by professionals. But in his defense, he was just shooting the breeze and didn't give a time frame. In a decade this scenario might look less wacko. But we also thought we'd be fizzing around in flying cars already.
What else is he gonna say though? They pivoted hard into it, of course he's gonna sing the praises. In other news, water is wet.
In my experience, the courses on DL are getting worse. Erratic changes, mistakes, etc. I'm just not ready to kiss my 1000 day streak goodbye yet!
probably right that a so-called-AI software can assist a teacher in making sure all students get to be on the same page
BIG nope to this. Source: I teach at a university. AI actively hinders my teaching. 99% of my students use AI and I have to constantly fight it or correct it. My job would be easier without AI.
There’s a difference between a tool being available to you and a tool being misused by your students.
That said, I wouldn’t trust AI assessments of students to determine if they’re on track right now, either. Whatever means the AI would use needs to be better than grading quizzes, homework, etc., and while I’m not a teacher, I would be very surprised if it were better than any halfway competent teacher’s assessments (thinking in terms of high school and younger, at least - in university IME the expectation is that you self assess during the term and it’s up to you to seek out learning opportunities outside class if you need them, like going to office hours for your prof or TA).
AI isn’t useless, though! It’s just being used wrong. For example, AI can improve OCR, making it more feasible for students to hand in submissions that can be automatically graded, or to improve accessibility for graders. But for that to actually be helpful we need better options on the hardware front and for better integration of those options into grading systems, like affordable batch scanners that you can just drop a stack of 50 assignments into, each a variable number of pages, with software that will automatically sort out the results by assignment and submitter, and automatically organize them into the same place that you put all the digital submissions.
I hear you. I just would like to point out von Ahn wasn't talking about today. He's looking at a future where some of these tools actually deliver on their promises. I understand why you're skeptical and frankly so am I. But there is a chance he might prove us wrong in our lifetimes.
In my experience, the courses on DL are getting worse. Erratic changes, mistakes, etc. I'm just not ready to kiss my 1000 day streak goodbye yet!
In these moments I liked to ask myself where the line is. What could they say or do to cross that line? For me, firing the people that know the languages and replacing them with robots that just parrot whatever they read online, was well over the line.
The 1000 is an arbitrary number. I am not trying to take away your achievement. But just like this 5296, it’s 4 digits on a screen. Your learning journey and achievements belong in your self value, not a AI tool and greedy CEO. Break free and choose freedom
I know. I'm a creature of habit.
"Greedy CEO" seems tautologic to me;)