• 2 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I’ve seen quality drops of Duolingo, ever since their … IPO, sadly.

    Anyway, here’s some ways you can milk the rest of the Duolingo before completely abandoning it.

    • Use the web version, and type in all the answers if it’s possible. Selecting words are good for introducing new words (and reminder in case you forgot), but by typing it on your own, it’s faster to commit into memory.
    • Use classroom mode to get unlimited hearts, create your own classroom and invite yourself in. I assume that Duolnigo will probably eventually stop this loophole
    • Use search engine to search for the sentences you’re unsure of. No, don’t use machine translation, but search on the internet, and see if the sentence ever being used by the sites (news, academic, or personal homepage) using the target language.

    I sadly still don’t know what other comparable free alternatives to Duolingo. Anki is great, but it’s largely flashcard for words, not sentences (unless you want to create your own deck). The others require subscription fee.

    Other methods? Search for pdf of language grammar files, there are a lot out there. Some are godawful to read, especially those ‘Comprehensive Grammar Guide’ books. Some are amazing, e.g. Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese.






  • Marc Andreessen is too low there.

    Musk is a clown that says vile and stupid thing. An useful idiot for others Silicon Valley VCs.

    Andreessen and Thiel (and too some small extent Luckey) are in the background trying to push for far right libertarian dystopia.

    Andreessen is the guy who kept pushing for web 3.0, trying to dominate it before it becomes big, so that he can monopolize / become a new digital libertarian govt, but of course it got hijacked by scammers, and states like Russia or North Korea, but he doesn’t give a flying fuck.

    Thiel of course is far right financier. There’s a reason why they try to hide in the background.



  • I remember when Joe Rogan was getting giant paycheck from Spotify promoting antivax stuff, and people talked about moving to Apple Music, but it feels like many just stuck with Spotify.

    I came across a post on instagram that says that Al Yankovic’s 80 million stream on playlist only netted him enough money to buy a sandwich.

    Also, Spotify underpaying artists, making fake playlists with cover artists to undermine artists, are not new. It feels like the mainstream crowd just doesn’t care, which pushes me further into depression.








  • It varies from region to region. The problem with TikTok is that, the western version seems to have very different content / moderation than other parts of the world.

    I’m in south east asia, the amount of homophobic content that’s tied up with anti-semitism (accusing jewish people of pushing LBGTQ+ propaganda) is nauseating. I’ve reported so many of those posts, plus the typical ‘here are media companies, and Israeli flags on them’ or ‘the Austrian painter was right / didn’t finish their job’ posts, but they always come back as ‘No Violations’.

    It’s frustrating, because the US / European versions are very progressive, but for the other parts of the world, it’s being pushed towards far right extremism.