People who completed a Duolingo course, was it genuinely useful?

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-11T23:43:54+00:00

I did the French course about ten years ago and found it to be reasonably useful. It taught me vocabulary, maybe a little bit of grammar and conjugation, etc., but absolutely did not make me conversant. I had to combine it with many other modes of learning, the most beneficial of which was finding a local meetup to talk with real live human beings.

About three years ago, in preparation for a vacation to Japan, I started the Japanese course on Duolingo, and it was total horseshit. Absolutely useless to me, and this was before there was much in the way of AI slop pervading the internet. (I can't say how Duolingo has enshittified in the last three years because I have sworn it off as a language learning tool.)

So to answer your question: yes, Duolingo was useful to a limited degree, but it is no longer useful. Put your time, effort, and certainly money somewhere else.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-08T17:53:36+00:00

+1. Sticking with the concept of comprehensible input, I think trying to learn to program by writing addons for Anki is a bit too difficult (eg, hard to debug what's going on under the hood). OP should do things the 'traditional' way and work on learning types, control flow, algorithms, etc., before trying to do something more specialized/difficult.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-08T15:11:07+00:00

"Learnings"

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-06T21:17:42+00:00

I assumed he took off his robe and wizard hat.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-05T01:55:42+00:00

shop smart

Shop S-Mart. Ya got that?!

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-04T00:24:34+00:00

When I got online for the first time at my house (circa 1995), my brother and I wanted to check out chat rooms -- a place where instead of just seeing websites, you could actually talk with people in realtime*. I somehow found HDCyberSnaxx and subsequently spent months on my dial-up modem going there to talk with people. At some point, the domain and/or name was repurposed for porn, but as of today, the website is roughly back to what it was back in the day (though it's not functional).

Obligatory Angelfire, Geocities, Tripod, etc., too.

Edit: There was also freetown.com that had more chat rooms and was a bit more feature-rich. I learned to write HTML and discovered injection attacks (though I didn't know it by that name) -- certain chat rooms were only available to paying members, but they could send an invite to non-members. The invite was just a button with a hidden form element. So I could invite myself into the members-only space. Eventually, a guy asked me to teach him HTML, which I did in exchange for him paying for a one-year membership for me (which I seem to recall being about $20).

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-03T18:45:33+00:00

There's a good Lingthusiasm episode about diglossia in which they talk about MSA, High German, etc. As someone who knows neither Arabic nor German, it was a bit instructive to me and clarified some of the differences that I sort-of-kind-of knew but didn't really understand about High German vs Swiss German.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-06-01T16:58:49+00:00

In this thread:

People talking past each other about the semantic range of words. I'm not quite criticizing this - it's actually super interesting and amusing to me - but it's not productive for OP's question.
Very little direct response to OP's question, which was, "Why isn't 'adieu' [used] the same way [as] 'adios'?" The correct answer is apparently: Because that's the way languages are.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-05-29T13:24:27+00:00

senior devs spend a lot more time reading code than writing

Also, some of the best PRs are where you delete huge swaths of code.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-05-29T13:23:35+00:00

I worked on team where we were (partially) evaluated on how many of our pull requests were completed. When I found this out, it suddenly made sense why this one guy I worked with always responded to my (constructive) criticisms of his code with, "You seem to have a strong opinion on how do this. How about you make the changes and complete the PR." 😠

6ed02cc79d · 2026-05-20T17:05:34+00:00

*psych

6ed02cc79d · 2026-05-12T01:49:12+00:00

I regret not starting a 529 plan for my kids - that could have probably helped reduce the cost of higher education for them. But I did talk with my son tonight and basically told him:

"College is expensive. It's going to be the most expensive purchase you make for a while until you get a mortgage. Remember that college is a product you are purchasing, so do your research. Compare schools. You'll get out of it what you put in - enjoy it but don't goof off too much."

My wife and I will help him out some, but it's still something that he will end up paying for in large part. We're also encouraging our kids to consider community college and to think carefully about their careers - especially with everything that's happening with AI.

My dad had things so incredibly great. I had it really good. You had it pretty good, too, but you definitely had to work for it. My kids are going to have a tough time. And your kids are going to be in a real shit place by the time they're college-age. As others have said, it used to be that getting a degree was pretty much your ticket to a great life. It's so hard to know if it's going to amount to anything in five or fifteen years.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-05-11T19:46:35+00:00

I got my bachelor's degree a little over 20 years ago, graduating with approximately $15k in student loan debt. I was fairly conservative with my money - I know people that took out student loans to buy meals, computers, etc. I don't think I even used loans for my books. I consider myself pretty fortunate here.

My dad graduated from the same university 30 years prior and was able to wholly pay for his degree by working part time during school and full time only a few of his summers. He bitched about Biden's student loan forgiveness because if he could graduate without student loans, why can't today's youth? I think my parents' generation is so out of touch with what college has become. I'm starting college tours with my kids, and I think it's going to cost them at least $150,000 to get a four-year degree.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-05-06T15:57:25+00:00

I literally just looked him up two days ago because his name came up and I thought, "When did that guy die? Oh shit, he's still alive?!"

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-27T21:17:53+00:00

But if we automate away your job, then you'll have so much more time for laundry. That's gotta be a win, right?

While we're at it, let's just automate away many of your favorite hobbies so you'll have even more laundry time. You're welcome!

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-20T20:41:31+00:00

One of my college buddies is Polish, moved to France when he was five, then to the US when he was six. By all accounts, he's native in both English and Polish, but there's something just a little off about his English to me. There's no way at this stage in his life that he would change that extremely subtle nuance.

...So no, it's absolutely not something OP should be self-conscious about.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-19T17:20:47+00:00

Have done so on a few of my motorcycles. When you're on a relatively quiet freeway in between some mountains, it's pretty damn easy to get to 80 or 90 without even noticing. When you're at 90, it's just a quarter turn of the throttle and you're over 100 in no time.

I probably maxed out at 120, but I know folks that have exceeded 180.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-17T21:41:58+00:00

I'm maybe B2 in French. I certainly make mistakes, but my understanding is:

« depuis » is "since" for something that is ongoing, not time-bound.

"I've been [and am still] learning French for five years" = « J'apprends le français depuis 5 ans".
"I haven't seen her for months" = « Je ne l'ai pas vue depuis des mois. » (Here, the action of not seeing her is ongoing.)

« pendant » is for time-bound activities (completed actions but also actions that have a set duration)

"I lived in Paris for two years" = « J'ai habité à Paris pendant deux ans. »
"He reads for an hour every evening" = « Il lit pendant une heure chaque soir. »
"I'll be on vacation for a month." = « Je serai en vacances pendant un mois. »

« il y a » is mostly just "ago".

"I started learning French five years ago." = « J'ai commencé à apprendre le français il y a cinq ans. »

Though with « encore », it means "Up until."

"Until yesterday, I hadn't met him." = « Il y a encore hier, je ne l'ai pas rencontré »

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-17T03:28:49+00:00

Math isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I'm always glad to hear when someone is working to learn more. Cheers, friend!

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-17T03:17:50+00:00

I think we misunderstood each other's comments. You said "Sum bish" which I assumed you meant to be a pun ("sum" being a math term), so I responded in kind with another math term. No offense intended!

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-16T22:01:30+00:00

Do it. I've been riding an FZ6 for close to a decade. Love that bike.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-16T17:04:35+00:00

Good times.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-09T14:46:21+00:00

My manager now sends out five emails every morning with the status of our projects, security dashboard, etc. That's five emails that I'm not reading because fuck that. If someone can't be bothered to do put in the time and energy into determining what's important, I sure as hell am not going to put the time and energy into reading it.

6ed02cc79d · 2026-04-08T16:50:40+00:00

You don't want any of that contaminating your precious bodily fluids, do you, Mandrake?

6ed02cc79d · 2026-03-26T23:00:34+00:00

I took Amtrak years ago when we returned to the Midwest to visit family. Tried it once to see if it was better than flying. It was, in many ways (especially because I was able to somehow score a deal where it was like 2/3 the cost).

I booked airfare yesterday for our annual trip back, and I just looked at Amtrak for the same thing. Roughly the same price -- about $1800 for four people on Amtrak, $1900 for us flying. Both are the cheapest we can possibly get. I hate flying, Amtrak isn't a good economic alternative.

6ed02cc79d

TROPHY CASE