Source: @AMLOgamer

Clickbait. They basically say replacing contractors with AI is business as usual for Duolingo and that the real crisis is DOGE.

Here’s the article:

Duolingo announced plans this week to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company — a move that journalist Brian Merchant pointed to as a sign that the AI jobs crisis “is here, now.”

In fact, Merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor who said this isn’t even a new policy. The company cut around 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023, and Merchant said there was another round of cuts in October 2024. In both cases, contractors (first translators, then writers) were replaced with AI.

Merchant also noted reporting in The Atlantic around the unusually high unemployment rate for recent college graduates. One explanation? Companies might be replacing entry-level white collar jobs with AI, or their spending on AI might simply be “crowding out” the spending for new hires.

This crisis, Merchant wrote, is really “a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations,” and it’s manifesting as “attrition in creative industries, the declining income of freelance artists, writers, and illustrators, and in corporations’ inclination to simply hire fewer human workers.”

“The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse — it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of ‘an AI-first strategy,’” he added.

Thank you for putting this behind a content warning.

I mean, I still opened it, so that’s on me.

There’s a DreamWorks logo in the bottom left.

I would agree if we stopped making marriage the end goal of relationships.

I remember a Freakonomics episode that described an experimental alternative to traffic cops: a “good driver” lottery.

If you’re “caught” driving the speed limit, you get entered into a lottery. Less adversarial relationship with traffic cops and more drivers would be incentivized to drive safe more often.

Edit: It was apparently an article, not a podcast.

I see a lot of well-meaning support for this. I can’t help but think there has to be a way to implement these kinds of controls without taking power away from the user.

Like the Fediverse implementing better mod tools rather than expecting Twitter to effectively moderate the internet.

What movie is this from?

In our world.

I would consider Wheel of Time as an example of fantasy with reskinned real world cultures.

Andor is essentially a landlocked version of England, having a “Lion Throne” and ruled by a queen. Cairhien and Mayene bear similarities to France (Cairhien has the Sun Throne; Mayener names are reminiscent of French). Arad Doman resembles Arabic countries and Iran. (source: TV Tropes)

It’s well-written, but by nature of being fantasy, it sidesteps the challenge of writing meaningful interactions between real world communities.

If I were to check him out, what book should I start with?

If they actually made that work… respect.

To who?

Why would you torrent Wikipedia?

deleted by creator

A beta build of Android 16 contains an early version of Google’s new Android Desktop Mode that, in the future, could let users simply plug their smartphone into a monitor and use it like a laptop or desktop computer.

!savedyouaclick@lemmy.world

The first few chapters seemed like someone took all their antisemitic conspiracy theory / murder fantasies and model-swapped aliens for Jews.

I can’t unsee it, and I wish I could suspension-of-disbelief harder, because I was initially really interested in the premise.

Edit: Maybe xenophobic / immigrants is more apt.

Well that’s a rude thing to say to your… girlfriend?

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness. (Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)

Culturally sensitive depiction of… what exactly? Knowing nothing, I see a person with a laser sword and a gargoyle.