u/hamolton

Hey gang, I’m trying to weigh tradeoffs between houses in South Lake proper vs way out in Meyers. In our current era of parking reservations, how long has the driving time been to get to the California Lodge from Pioneer & 50 on weekends? Inshallah we get more snow days this coming year but I’m mostly wondering about normal, peak season crowds.

Hey gang, I’m trying to weigh tradeoffs between houses in South Lake proper vs way out in Meyers. In our current era of parking reservations, how long has the driving time been to get to the California Lodge from Pioneer & 50 on weekends? Inshallah we get more snow days this coming year but I’m mostly wondering about normal, peak season crowds.

Ban them from all public spaces!! Why are they Outside on Lands when they should be Inside in Cages? They should never be allowed to have fun! Back when I was a kid I was lame so all of them should be too!!

I noticed Linguno uses Flaticon for their cards (since they allow unlimited use in commercial projects for $13/mo), and I've been really impressed with it myself. I'm using the add-on Batch Download Pictures From Google Images add-on, searching the Spanish source field with the query flaticon {} with the Qt webengine. If my English sides were as clean I'd use that. I'd say maybe 1 out of 10 images hit some issue, usually because the word means something else in another language, and I need to do small batches so I don't run into captcha challenges.

I guess the illustrations look very corporate, but I like the consistency and lack of distractions you get from stuff like this. I guess copyright/licensing isn't really an issue that Anki deck makers are worried about, but it is cool that you could do this for more legally paranoid contexts.

If anyone has better methods let me know!

It’s cool to see how, now in the streaming era, long songs can be actual charting hits instead of just album cuts, like All Too Well. I think this hasn’t been true since the 70s, back when radio stations were willing to play super long prog rock songs. I don’t think they seem particularly more common now, but it’s always something that has intrigued me like one hit wonders do.

Let’s go with songs over 5 1/2 minutes.

I was looking for some nonfiction to read after giving up on the very history-focused language of Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina, and I found this much more recently published book from 2021. It's basically a chronicle of his travels around Spanish-speaking Latin America, describing scenes and explaining geopolitical situations of places he encounters. The language is super flowery and narrative, with lots of quotes from people he meets. So far, I made it through the first long chapter, Mexico City, (ab)using LingQ to carry me through. I've mostly been reading along with app's Text-To-Speech, but I'm planning on switching to the 30 hour-long audiobook on Spotify. I'd say I'm a B2 level reader, while this is C1+ content for & by natives. It's really fun if you're looking for something intense.

I tend to wear 29"-30" pant inseams. Not sure how to size a bike in general, and what's easy to tweak once you get the bike. I just want to be able to be comfortable while trying to keep up with my friends on long rides.

I originally wrote this as a post for my blog nobody reads. I'm curious what you all think.

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I think Duolingo Inc has been misusing AI to transform their product. By treating AI as a tool to improve courses and scale changes rather than a replacement for human course creators, Duolingo could improve its ability to teach languages.

The biggest criticisms I've heard come up are that sentences feel random and the approach to grammar is disorganized, so many of my suggestions address those two issues. I've used Duolingo for Spanish from English on and off over the years, so my critiques are from that perspective. While the gamification and monetization elements aren't my taste, they've made the app popular and profitable, so my improvements focus on the exercises themselves.

• Replace all the TTS voices, and incorporate accent variation and fewer monotone-sounding characters. TTS has gotten much better in the past 3 years and it's time to take advantage of it.
• Make a well-curated pack of grammar reference guides attached to exercises. When a user makes a grammar mistake, add a button so they can look up the relevant reference.
• Make LLM-graded exercises that are more flexible than the current product. Right now it'll explain why you're wrong, but sometimes even the explanations will say you're right. I know this could be compute-heavy, but it may be possible to offload some grading onto smaller LLM models or locally-run models for newer iPhones with AI chips.
• Add more shorter LLM graded exercises to replace some "put words in order" drills, so that those are just used to introduce new vocab.
• Add LLM-graded conversations where you have to answer and ask questions in an open-ended format.
• Make sentences less ridiculous while still teaching vocab in the same order. Sentences could be evaluated by AI and perhaps improved using an LLM. I like the idea of drawing inspiration from real sentences like Linguee does, or having lessons fit an underlying narrative storyline that's slowly revealed. I know this would be a big change and some people like the randomness of sentences, but I doubt it has pedagogical benefits.
• Localize the lessons more to mix in culturally relevant info like foods and phrases. Talk more about cultural usage and regional differences of things like tu vs. usted.
• Improve the review section by building a model of what vocab and grammar the user struggles with. A bit more involved than "mistakes" as Duolingo has it, I'd add a "struggle topics" review section. Words the user has mis-translated, or just hovered over, can be classified as problematic based on whether they're struggling with the root itself or just conjugations or other grammatical issues like word order. Bias reviews toward sentences involving the user's perceived problems.
• Add an optional comprehensive, adaptive onboarding test, perhaps based on SIELE for Spanish, designed to both place you and identify areas of weakness you might have missed.