Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school itās the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
Iāve been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
I like Babbel. Itās not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
Unfortunately, Babbel has slop integration too.
no idea, sorry. āfind some wordpals onlineā maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
itās just so fucking frustrating
after Iāve previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have āchat to a buddyā as a non-skipable step in course iteration
the ābuddyā is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions āMemBot - powered by AIā at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but thatās a dead link
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Canāt avoid slop reading translated books, canāt learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. Itās the microplastics of the internet age.
Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
Not-so-fun fact: thatās a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using whatās called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customerās TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customerās TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasnāt even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no oneās surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators theyād had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
Iāve logged a support ticket.