philipp @philipp@familie-tux.de

From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.

There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.

All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.

Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.

Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.

#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism

There is a reason companies close studios and cancel projects at Christmas... taxes. It's the end of the year and they want everything done before the new tax year. It's not that they just want to be mean and cruel at Christmas, it's that being mean and cruel at Christmas saves them more money. See, not has bad as you thought.

Fun fact: the MP3 file format is as old today as 8-track tapes were when MP3 was invented.

I’m sorry, I refuse to call it Xmas, I’m going to keep calling it Twittermas like before.

A guide to diagnosing weird pauses in apps on modern runtimes:

10ns: atomics
10ms: GC
10s: DNS, it's always DNS
1m: still DNS
1h: locking
1d: you messed up the TTL in DNS
1w: still DNS, you forgot to bump the serial number in a zone file last week

I know you guys like funny or weird source code comments. Here are interesting comments in the source code of SQLite https://github.com/endlesssoftware/sqlite3/blob/master/os.h#L133

Need a file which looks like a scan of a printed / hard copy document, but all you have is a PDF?

Here you go:

https://lookscanned.io/scan

This clever tool (which you can self-host, but it says it runs in your browser anyway and judging from the fan speed while using it in Firefox probably does) lets you choose a PDF, and apply various effects to it - blur, rotate, noise, reduce resolutions, and so on.

But not a coffee stain (yet).

We are a peer-reviewed Diamond Open-Access Astrophysics journal using an arXiv overlay which is free for authors and readers.

To cope with an increase in submissions we are looking for volunteers, especially with experience in Galactic Astrophysics, Solar & Stellar Astrophysics or Earth & Planetary Astrophysics to expand our Editorial Board.

If interested, please let us know!

https://astro.theoj.org/editorial-board

Periodic reminder that the only planet where 100% of Linux systems have working audio is Mars.

To disable Google Chrome's "advanced" ad tracking, why not give Firefox a try?

I asked the librarian if they had any books on paranoia.
She whispered, "They're right behind you!"

It would appear that “former Tory MP Antoinette Sandbach has threatened the University of Cambridge with legal action after a historian named her as a descendant of merchants who enslaved his ancestors.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/31/ex-tory-mp-threatens-sue-cambridge-university-slavery-research-antoinette-sandbach

Oh, my… It would be a damn shame if more people knew of this so please do not boost this post.

#AntoinetteSandbach #SamuelSandbach #Sandbach #british #slavery #britain #slaveOwners #tories #tory #conservatives #uk #cambridge #colonialists #colonialism

‘If you really can't figure out which political party or which politician to vote for, just ask if they're on the side of libraries.

Are they voting to fund their libraries?
Are they voting to keep them free?

Then vote for those guys.
They're probably the good guys.

And by the same token, the book burners, the book banners, they're probably the bad guys.’

— @neilhimself

https://ilovelibraries.org/article/i-will-always-be-on-the-side-of-the-libraries-a-conversation-with-neil-gaiman/

@bookstodon #libraries #news #reading #politics #usa #books

😂 #debian #ubuntu #archlinux #linux #fedora

How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?☕
#poll

Please boost for a wider demographic 😊

Debian Celebrates 30 years! Thank you everyone! https://bits.debian.org/2023/08/debian-turns-30.html #debianday #debian #debian30years