Just move to Lemmy

The techbro asswipes that run Duolingo have been making a lot of noise about AI lately, boasting about how much they're going to use it while firing all of the actual human beings who used to make their lessons

Their newest AI feature is a new lesson type called Video Calls where you chat with an AI bot in your target language. The bot asks you questions about basic topics and then does follow-up questions based on your answers while reacting and commenting on the stuff you say. It manages to kind of emulate the awkwardness of conversation practice in an actual language class with some rando you don't know too well

I've only done a few of these because it feels really weird and creepy talking to a cartoon character on your phone that's actually just a mask for an electricity-wasting corpo machine. Anyway, the AI just randomly brought up my pet that I mentioned a few weeks ago the last time I did one of these lessons. So yes, the Duolingo chatbot retains any information you disclose to it. Cool

The kicker is that this shit is gated behind the Duolingo Max paywall which costs 170 bucks a year, or 13 bucks a month (I run a modded apk with unlocked paid features, I'm not paying a cent for a fucking app)

Edit: I actually wouldn't be opposed to paying for an app, it's the subscription model I'm vehemently opposed to. I will never rent an app or program

What's this world coming to? Is nothing sacred?

The names you see on old gravestones are a hoot

"Eufrosyne"

Instead, you get a new feed with the channel's videos in reverse chronological order broken up by a selection of shorts

You have to click a link on that page to actually visit the channel

I got a new (second-hand) bike this week. It's got swept back handlebars and I just don't like them after riding with them for a few days. It feels like I'm holding onto a zimmer frame and I hate how I have to hold my arms to the sides

I wanna replace em with cool, non-lame handlebars like these

l will almost certainly need longer cables for my brakes and shifters though. How much of a pain in the ass would swapping out the cables be?

The light came with an alternate mount that screws on to the handlebar but it makes taking the light off more annoying, and obviously removes the ability to freely put the light on different bikes

I was hoping this design was universal but none of the straps I'm seeing online have the screw hole. Well, there is one very similar strap but I'd have to pay 13€ postage on a 5€ item which offends me on a spiritual level

I watched a Youtube video about Don Rosa (to any Americans reading: he's a famous Donald Duck artist) today, and learned that in 2023, Disney banned two of his stories from ever being published again, effectively preventing The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck from ever being reprinted.

The two banned stories both feature the character of Bombie the Zombie, who is an African voodoo zombie created by a white guy in the 1940s and you can probably infer the rest

Apparently the modern Don Rosa collections that were published already had a content warning much like the ones Disney puts in front of their old animated features and shorts that contain ~~racist~~ outdated elements but I guess that wasn't enough. Then again, the parent Walt Disney company has never given a single fuck about their comics side and treated the artists like absolute shit so this is completely on brand

An increasing percentage of animal-related shorts seem to be reposted content with an AI narrator spouting completely made-up bullshit clearly written by someone for whom English is a second language at best

One video mashed together several random videos featuring the same type of animal while the narration tried to pass it off as some heart-warming clickbait story about one individual animal

Noticed this while I was going through bank statement .pdfs on my computer. What would Co-Pilot even do with those????

At least Co-Pilot turned out to be easy to uninstall. This was a real sneaky move though, since it's not like it showed up after a Windows update, instead it just silently installed itself on my fucking computer. Also, just the sheer fucking gall to make it the first option when you right click on anything

I foolishly assumed Microsoft wouldn't bother pushing AI as hard onto Win10 since they're dumping it soon. At first I panicked and thought this was Recall, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's coming next

Why even save receipts if there's no fucking way to do text searches on them? It's a fucking supermarket, people go there every day or even multiple times a day.

That's a lot of fucking receipts to comb through if, say, an item you bought ~six months ago broke and you need to get it replaced

The search function was the only way I even found the right receipt the previous times I had to return something

These assholes had the balls to defend this bone-headed move with this logic:

Tällä hetkellä digikuittia on päivitetty niin, että hakutoimintoa ei ole saatavilla, sillä analyysien perusteella asiakkaamme ovat käyttäneet kyseistä toimintoa melko vähän, Kiljunen sanoi.

We've recently updated digital receipts so that the search function is no longer available because our analyses have indicated that our customers have made fairly little use of said function, Kiljunen said.

On average most people rarely call the fire department so we should just shut those down too