This might not be such a good idea as Vegas was begging Canada to come back. Their tourism isnâ(TM)t what it used to be and talk of 51st state has turned off Canadian tourism.

I ran a dedupe on my drive and eliminated 8 redundant copies of the goatse guy.

#SaveWaterWithGoatse

10 years using Duolingo, 4 years in Diamond League, and earlier this month I just had enough of the low-quality AI bullshit.

Out. Done. Gone. Waste of my time, every damn day.

The decline in quality and accuracy was just too much. As an English speaker learning a handful of other languages and concentrating on two, it was interesting to me that the first real noticeable patterns of errors and general slop were actually on the English side. Increasingly obtuse questions or statements, ok fine, I will spit those back in French or Spanish with good accuracy. I don't have any issue whatever with the occasionally-dark humor or the gender related topics that might push others' hot buttons, and I appreciate the occasional foray into curious stories and situations. But... over the past year there has been an increasing level of nonsensical AI-generated questions, erroneous answers accepted, multiple correct answers, etc etc... and it's obvious that no actual native speaker looked at a lot of the new content -- either from the native or foreign perspective. A couple years ago there was an increasing level of having to hit the button for "You should have accepted my answer." But for the past year, it's become a daily occurrence to have to hit the button for "You shouldn't have accepted my answer." The latter is a clear indication of AI slop and drift in the language models, and lack of QA. Real human QA is not optional, and Duo has apparently dispensed with it entirely. The result is gameified garbled nonsense. Playing the game was fun for a while (seriously, still in Diamond league for more than four years straight), but the goal is language learning not to compete with other stupid little games on my device. Feh. Done. Cancelled my subscription, et je vais dépenser cet hundred bucks de mon argent pour un spritz et une charcuterie chaque après-midi pour le reste de l'été.

OpenSSH is the best known OpenBSD project, but they also makes pf (used in pfSense, OPNSense, etc.), OpenBGP, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenIKED, LibreSSL, etc.

Came for this comment.

Like it or not there are legacy industry specific hardware adapters out there for ISA. That's why it was quite late to be removed from motherboards.

For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.

This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.

The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted to the type of things that their AI is able to reorganise for other languages. E.g. it might go further in the direction of vocabulary memorisation.

Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?

Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.

It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.

Newb

The only problem with this is you have to go stand in the sunlight to charge it.

AI is poo.

You're reading my mind. FWIW I've been loving Go the past few years.

Ob: "C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung."

FSF's Zoe Kooyman and Krzysztof Siewicz will give a presentation on Sunday 2nd of Feb:

"FSF's criteria for free machine learning applications"

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedu...

It'll be streamed. Well worth tuning in for. A recording should be online soon after.