ruby

surprise surprise, looks like they're gonna start shoving your shit through AI model training on August 15. yay. you're opted in by default for Starter (ie. free) and Professional accounts (only businesses deserve respect, apparently), so might wanna go turn that off before they start training. steps to turn it off are documented here.

anyways have you heard of penpot

Many current and former employees said Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno preferred positivity over criticism, leading them to disregard warnings about the Ai Pin’s poor battery life and power consumption. A senior software engineer was dismissed after raising questions about the product, they said, while others left out of frustration.

Others repeatedly asked them to hire a head of marketing. The role remained vacant before the product’s release.

and my personal favourite:

“We just want to build,” Ms. Bongiorno said.

this company is the "we needed a little copper" of the ai hype bubble dude i stg. you can't make this shit up

Yet as I've noted before, I feel that enshittification misses one crucial thing — that these companies aren't doing this out of a lack of profitability or failure of their business model, but because the modern internet has become somewhere between a social experiment and a human mining operation.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI don't create anything — they're built off of supporting other people doing things, and have spent decades abstracting themselves away from any kind of labor. These aren't the companies that made Google Search, or Facebook, or Word. They're data brokers by different names that happen to sometimes sell software.

I was already planning on deleting Duolingo when I hit 1000 days just to prove a point, even though I think it's a bad app and is especially garbage for learning Asian languages, but now that I've learned they laid off a bunch of people in favor of AI it ends now, at a completely unround number. good riddance! anyway I recommend HelloChinese if you're learning Mandarin, I credit it with me passing two levels of HSK. eat shit, Duo!

I also fully deleted my account and sent a brief email explaining why. Will it make a difference? Probably not! But it mattered to me

this was posted to reddit 10 days ago, from a throwaway account that's created and posted in this linked thread and nothing else. the only proof we have is a screenshot of an email (which doesn't contain any email addresses - not that those can't be forged anyway but still, it would at least be something) that contains absolutely nothing to prove the claims of either mass contractor layoffs, or the adoption of ai-generated translations. i have also not been able to find a single reputable news publication covering this, which given that it's been 10 days since posting, you'd think someone would have jumped on the "mass layoffs at duolingo" story by now.

for all we know, this could be happening - i can't say for sure. but the evidence we have so far, at least to me, doesn't look very reliable. personally, i'd be very cautious of spreading this reddit post around until we get more details, and statements from a source that's at least a bit more reliable than a dormant throwaway reddit account.

We can confirm that some Duolingo workers have not been renewed upon the completion of their projects at the end of 2023. But these are not layoffs. This affected a small minority of Duolingo workers, as the majority have been retained,

this seems to be a case of some contractors not getting their contracts renewed. it's definitely shitty that companies can just choose to let these people go if they decide "yeah sorry we dont have anything for you to do, okay bye", but like, as much as it sucks, this is kinda how contract work plays out - you stay for as long as your contract lasts, and renewals are at employee discretion. trying to paint a few contract expirations without renewal as "mass layoffs" when that's pretty clearly not what this is doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in these claims, to me.

granted, we don't have numbers - if it turns out that duolingo is using contract expirations as a proxy for large-scale layoffs i'd be changing my tone. but again - one throwaway on reddit is all we know of so far. i'd want to see more there before i feel comfortable jumping to that conclusion

yeah, that's... a decent chunk. and the self-own of saying "oh yeah we did this because we can replace them with ai" like it's nothing is pretty fuckin damning. certainly didnt expect them to just come out and say it outright. that's really fucking disappointing.