My daughter keeps texting me screenshots of her “streak” achievements as if that means anything. And then when I ask her how to say something in German she barely knows a thing.

It can be done to a stupid degree. Duolingo defines the outer limits.

I hate this app so much now. It has become the poster child of enshittification by gamification.

Rot in prison, bitches.

You talk like ships just routinely traverse our land bound political boundaries! /s

I may need you to walk me past my inhibitions about accepting scientific information from a website called PumpkinPerson that center justifies its articles.

It can be ignored if your only priority is dunking on America. I feel sorry for this young person being made into the poster child for everyone who would like to take America down a peg. Even the concussions will somehow get attributed to “the way things are there.”

Imagine if now, at the height of their success, Apple finally decided, for the first time, to alienate the core audience they’ve always shown undying dedication to: gamers /s

I would venture to guess that the disciplinary action generated more attention than the haka itself. So a good thing in the end.

quickly

That’s the problem. It wasn’t quick. If it had been released quickly and been a failure, that would be one thing. But to hype it and hype it and pre-sell it into new devices for 9 months only THEN to release a failure… now that’s fucked up. Apple hardware has been crushing it for years. Software is a mess. Services couldn’t piss themselves if their pants were on fire.

AND the stock market ROARS BACK to… 80% of previous baseline. O the winning!

In all seriousness I wonder if GCal could schedule something this far in the future…

Spoken like someone who has never attended university. Please don’t come back and say you did - that would be even worse, because it will mean you didn’t learn a fucking thing by being there.

I sob like a kid every time. They are purely innocent and loving. The grief is correspondingly pure.

Everyone cashed out on Skype the day it was sold to eBay. Years later people are still wondering what happened to it?? The train left the station forever ago.

What a brave, original thought. Did an AI write this for you?

I recall all the same arguments about how much energy and carbon are involved in performing one Google search. Does anyone care? Nope.

I’ve always ignored the energy issue on the assumption that it will be optimized away. Right now, leapfrogging the competition to new levels of functionality is what’s important. But when (if?) these tools settle into true mass usage, the eggheads will have every incentive to focus on optimization to save on operating costs. When that finally starts happening, we will know that AI has passed out of its era as a speculative bet and into prime time as an actual product.

You’re too polite. This guy is absolutely full of shit. Our awareness of black holes emerged from pure math, as just one example off the dome. Experimental data came later. And decades later, in fact. A lot begins in the math.

When the theory of everything happens, it won’t be phys.org reporting it.

Until then, you’ll see lots of blogs reporting various papers to get those clicks.

That’s a lot of what the first two world wars were, under the sheet. Germany and Japan had few aligned interests, but they agreed to help one another to each pursue their own local imperial ambitions.

I actually think I’m agreeing with you. I’m just saying that large wars have always been an excuse for regional pissing contests.

It scares me. Think about Putin and Ukraine. The conflict in Gaza helps Putin, because it distracts the world from what he’s doing. Imagine if there were 5 or 6 Ukraine sized conflicts in the developed world. He’d have a much easier time and there would be less available aid for Ukraine.

How many Putin-style assholes need to figure this out and launch their little wars before the world is overwhelmed and descends into a chaos where all bets are off?