salimmadjd

Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak.

Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.

Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).

If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.

I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.

Add a few more that others may not mention:

Brahms symphony 4 - 1st movement Brahms symphony 3 - 3rd movement Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 3

Jazz

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane In a Sentimental Mood My Little Brown Book

Dave Brubeck Quartet Koto Song

Rock

Pink Floyd Echos (from Meddle ) Animals

Bummer! Here’s a photo I captured from their very early days [0].

If I recall it’s a composite (stack) of nearly 100 photos.

my goal was to show an industrial startup in one image.

BTW, I signed a 10-year NDA and I’m guessing their employees probably did too. I got to see a lot of stuff behind the curtain.

Such a shame…

[0] https://www.instagram.com/p/BMiyAIdhCJn/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...

OT - 3b1b did an interesting video on the epidemic modeling [0] that shaped my thinking a bit on the lockdown and caused me to lose a few friends to argue against the prolonged lockdowns.

I believe he used the same technique deployed by major media institutions and health organizations.

Basically the interesting conclusion was unless you apply a very rigorous lockdown (CCP style) the virus ultimately spreads. All you’re doing is spreading the time. As in “flattening the curve”.

As some might recall the initial lockdown was proposed as a way to flatten the curve and allow the medical system to cope better by having a more gradual influx of patients. Which makes me think everyone promoting the initial lockdown understood its limitations and its objectives.

However, for what ever reason “control demolition” of the economy to make Trump lose the election or who knows why it turned into a long term lockdown.

I know this is a controversial topic, but it shouldn’t be. This is a clear case that the science of pandemic modeling suggested one path and for political reasons we were pushed to follow a course that caused a lot of damage, some irreversible, to the society.

[0] https://youtu.be/gxAaO2rsdIs?si=cNkcQ7actTnb5sez

Awni Hannun of Apple AI research team has a deep dive thread on X [0] with some additional info and answers some of the questions

[0] https://x.com/awnihannun/status/1732184443451019431?s=46&t=O...

Curious how many here have actually read this bill?

If you’ve read it and you still support it (as a US citizen) I’m going to be so heartbroken by today’s tech community.

This is authoritarianism in the name of protecting our children.

I understand, TikTok is projected to overtake Alphabet’s and Meta’s video ad revenue [0] and it won’t surprise me if they even lobbied for it. I just see it as a shortsighted move by these companies not to strongly come against this bill.

[0] https://www.fiercevideo.com/advertising/2027-tiktok-video-ad...

With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been reduced to a game.

The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their game pools.

The cynical me thinks this is also a pre-election (“wish selection”) PR to help promote the case for Gavin Newsom as president.

You can imagine a talking point like “under my leadership, California overtook Germany as the 4th economy in the world…”

The reality is Newsom had almost zero impact on it, his leadership should be judge by the growing homelessness issue we’ve seen in SF and rest of California and not take credit for tech economy.

Yes, solving the homeless problem is a huge and complex challenge, but the country now needs leadership that is able to solve the big challenging problem.

We’ve lost our ability to fix hard problems and we need to do that if we want to have a chance in a more competitive world.

We spent $6 trillion on the “War on terror” [0]

We do know we’ve had mini ice age as a result of "Grand Solar Minimum" [1] (in addition to volcanic activities) which means reducing the solar output does reduce surface heat.

At this point we need to really focus on taking action an approaching this from many facets. As cutting of greenhouse gases alone will not work. It requires the entire globe (at least the G20) countries to invest in such endeavors.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-taxpayers-spent-8000-each...

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2953/there-is-no-i...

Different (maybe controversial)take.

You should be given the choice to be grandfathered into the version of TOS upon first using that service.

I think with social media where value is derived by ongoing time investment of users, the TOS changes should only be applied after mutual agreement.

When I invest hours into helping to flourish a community, I need to be assured the company holds their side of the contract and not change the terms at any arbitrary time.

I disagree with the notion that you can stop using it, if you don’t agree with the new TOS.

social media is different than let’s say visiting Politico, where I’m just a consumer and not a contributor. Politico doesn’t owe me anything.

When you start contributing and building value under an initial sets of policy and agreements that initial agreement should remain in place until mutually agreed to change it.

I understand that causes some operational headaches, but it’s just cost of running a social media company.

I totally agree on the syntax, Haskell is far cleaner.

I’m not sure what the reasoning was here. I hope the author or others can shed some light.

The same polarizing media conveniently blamed Facebook and Twitter (though to a lesser extent) for all the polarization that they have been fomenting for years. I guess that move wasn’t as surprising for me as seeing the number of people in SV who bought into that narrative.

Corporate media should not really be thought of as real journalistic entities.

Simple example. How in the world does CNN allow Chris Cuomo to interview his own brother. The fact that no one inside CNN publicly objected to this, walked away, protested, it tells me everything I need to know about the entire organization.

I don’t remember anyone at MSNBC making a fuss about it, nor at the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness).

Anyone knows how much more efficiency is gained (due to reduced weight) once a jetliner consumes 50% of its fuel?

Curious if for flying it’ll be more practical to use electricity for some kind of direct or indirect carbon sequestration (to be carbon neutral) fuel generation and continue to fly with some type of combustion based fuel.

Yang is underestimating the network effect of the two parties.

I thought running for mayor of NY City was kind of odd. His lack of experience really showed after his initial name ID advantage faded away.

I feel like he is fighting for relevancy but it's approaching it from a wrong angle.

I do understand he is feeling betrayed a bit by the party. He was probably promised (or hinted at) some kind of a position with the Biden admin.

Then he had that disastrous loss as a mayor. I'm not sure starting a third party is really a right move for him.

He is interesting (was authentic) as a candidate, but quite honesty doesn't have a real national name ID or charisma to pull together a successful third party.

At this point, the only person who can reasonably start a third party is probably Donald Trump (not saying he is going to). My point is you need a huge national popular backing.

Yang doesn't have that. If anything he is going to destroy the possibility of having a real competitive third party in our country.

So, yeah another misstep (IMHO) by Yang.

I took a mook Erlang class and after that, I couldn’t really get into elixir. Erlang just felt a lot more expressive

Many Americans still do not realize Trump won riding on $5 billions in free media advertising[1]

Hillary also edged Bernie in the primaries receiving over $740m over sanders $320m [2]

We also know free media is becoming more effective than political advertising [3]

Which all means if you want to blame anyone in stealing the election it’s the corporate media. Also brings up the point that we really need to reinstitute some kind of equal coverage time, otherwise all these election donation limits are meaningless when media bosses can give billions to their favorite candidates.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/15/media/trump-free-media-cove...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/2020-election-confirmed-free...

Frontline (PBS)in partnership with Forbidden Stories are doing a report [1] on NSO hacking the phone of Khashoggi’s fiancé and other journalist and activists around the world. Looks like her phone was compromised by NSO based on the reporting on this video.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-nso-group-peg...

From the AP version (h/t @tareqak) [0], "identification of anyone engaged in foreign state-sanctioned malicious cyber activity". Key phrase, state-sanctioned.

This has less to do with tracking down cybercriminals, and more with creating a case for foreign policy agenda.

Remember it was WMD informant "Curveball" testimony to then Secretary of State Powell, that was used as one of the key pretexts to invade Iraq.

Essentially if an administration comes with an agenda to start a new war, they put the right people inside the State Department and then those guys just need to comb for anything (validated or not) to find "informants" to make the case for cyber attack. Followed by making the case in media that cyber attack is military attack and it requires military retaliation.

This will bypass the entire US intelligence system to validate the source of threat. It just needs one person to claim they were involve in cyber attack against US and it was sponsored by the government of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, or any other country we want to go after.

I highly recommend watching this portion of the town hall with former US Congressman Dennis Kucinich talking about how non disclosure rules prevented the Congress from speaking out against US State Department spreading false information to American public [1].

[0] https://apnews.com/article/technology-joe-biden-europe-busin...

[1] https://youtu.be/s-W9b-_K_Xo?t=2433

It’ll be great if you had an “about us” section there so I could easily see who is behind it, instead having to google it.

Your backgrounds [1] seem very solid so why not showcase it?

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/asgreaves

is that because the limitation of his testing insurgents?

IMO this is what causing this huge self-promotion trend.

1 - it's become so much easier and accessible, with twitter, blog, FB, IG, YT.

2 - your ability to promote yourself has great impact in your financial and career growth.

3 - EGO. Remember when you were the smartest kid in your high school and then went to university and realized, there are many smart people like you.

SV, is the next step above. Everyone thinks they're the next Steve Jobs, Musk, etc. until the start working with other smart peers.

You were once the smart kid in the family, high school, your university classes, etc. Then you come to SV and realize wow, so many other smart people here. I'm just another average guy/gal who was in my top 1% of my college or high school. Some of these peers are even more driven than me and they're great hustlers.

So you either accept that you're not so special, or you try to out hustle others for recognition.

His lens tests are excellent. The lens rentals blog is the best place to find them [0]. If you're in market for high quality lenses, lens rental blog is a great resource.

I also like cameralabs' lens tests [1]. Not as scientific as lensrentals, however, it has real samples and images of charts for comparison, so you can get a sense for what the different resolution means in image resolution. It also tests things beyond resolution. Such as out of focus rendering, coma, sun stars, etc.

[0] https://www.lensrentals.com/blog [1] https://www.cameralabs.com/camera-lens-reviews/

Have many of us have become the useful idiots of the corporate media overloads?

I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness.

I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs and stickiness. One of the side effects of this content strategy is the divisiveness we see now.

Yes, Facebook (or twitter) amplifies these, but that's because Facebook provides every one of us a platform to exhale the frustrations we accumulate consuming these anger-laden content.

Ingeniously, the corporate media blamed all these on Facebook and whoever is/was advising Zuck really failed to come up with a solid strategy to counter this narrative beyond rebranding FB app icon and some color scheme changes.

FYI, the author’s LinkedIn profile [0] in case you’re curious how qualified he is.

Am I the only one who doesn’t see anything here that tells you why he should be working for MIT Review writing about cyber security?

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/howelloneill

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. It’ll be interesting if you show some kind of a product roadmap.

Maybe there is a product already out there that does that, but it’ll be useful if google sheet can work in conjunction with your CMS.

We’ve been trying to find a suitable partner in this space. Email me salim at AsthmaMD.org

Anyone looked at the three sample complaints?

7 upvotes, 2 upvotes, 5 upvotes.

For context, the post (I'm guessing he is a co-founder or some senior person at Parler) John Matze has 34,000 upvotes. These posts seem like bad or manufactured examples.

What prevents a competitor from sending a few people to post these things to eliminate competition?

Or worse. Who remembers Knew Knowledge faking Russian bots to smear a candidate as being backed by Russia? [1]

I write this as a muslim American. In my youth having a seasonal job in a well-known resort. I had a local guy come to me, called me a "camel jockey", "towel head" and told me if he sees me in the parking lot he'll take out his 357 and put one in my head. So I have faced some nasty racism. That said, I don't agree with Amazon removing Parler on the basis of these flimsy evidence.

[1] https://siliconangle.com/2018/12/26/reid-hoffman-apologizes-...

I think DT helped resurrect Twitter from irrelevance. Which is why they tolerated him for so long.

Now that he is past his usefulness, they decided to suspend him.

intasa, that didn’t appear in the archive. “A new word!” he crowed. Abu Bashar, our Bedouin driver, proposed that it meant “to be forgotten after having once been famous.”

Wow “to be forgotten after having once been famous”.

This blows my mind, if in fact it turns out to be the actual meaning of this word.

People who had to be on constant watch from predators eating their herds, tribes stealing and capturing members of their family, needing to search for food and water and still valued fame and the desire to be known.

Is retracting enough?

So a news story gets out, millions read it, share or watch it. Then NYT retracts it. Maybe adding a footnote or correction (sometimes they don't even do that [1]) is added to the story. Maybe the story is removed from their site.

However, the faulty information has already registered into the minds of millions of people.

NYT has already intentionally or unintentionally indoctrinated the minds of many readers and with the "retraction" at the same time they can claim the highest standards of journalism.

Unless in good fait, NYT tries to bring as much attention into the correction to the readers they have already impacted, the retraction is journalistic virtue signaling and a very small victory for truth.

Even if they do as much work in publicizing the retraction so many people have already formed a biased view and it'll be hard to undo that.

The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.

[1] https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1187036978463891456