Posts by fullfathomfive@aus.social
(DIR) Post #AdR97On1mEaY3WSI1w by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2023-10-17T00:06:04Z
3 likes, 5 repeats
Wow you use pot-holders? I can't even imagine what that's like.#ableism #chronicillness #disability #chronicpain
(DIR) Post #AddpzYFwqSNJeTIg7c by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2024-01-08T14:48:23Z
2 likes, 6 repeats
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
(DIR) Post #AdgbHlORWQqnQG5KSG by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2024-01-09T08:30:35Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it. On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process. Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ... ... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs? Do you really get a choice about it? #enshittification #duolingo #capitalism #AI #LLM #google
(DIR) Post #AheMTXTCJoGrehn7Qm by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2024-05-07T13:56:08Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
#metgala #gaza #genocide #palestine
(DIR) Post #AltKoA1AlMlGsSx2ki by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2024-09-11T10:52:50Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone I unironically want this though
(DIR) Post #Am7XXahOKUmOJyZDlY by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2024-09-18T07:17:10Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone love how the keyboard suggestions in your replies are getting progressively kinkier
(DIR) Post #AmlMZxQS4FepwcEWCe by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2024-10-07T05:39:05Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
#chronicillness #mecfs #chronicilnessmemes
(DIR) Post #AsIvHWCsKMjqnFCZlY by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-03-22T06:22:26Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone Space Nerak
(DIR) Post #AsIwFbNIF3OyCFizfE by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-03-22T06:33:17Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone HARDRICH = Richard YEVHAR = HarveyI think some of the others have initials or partial last names mixed in. Does it have credits? I know a lot of old games don't, but these are likely all anagrams of names of people who worked on the game.
(DIR) Post #Au2e6fbkoACin9aPom by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-05-13T02:53:36Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Never related to Picard more than when he's sitting there with two screens and a pot of tea, refusing to go to bed#StarTrek #TNG
(DIR) Post #Auk0lsHZkJWvUu7nhA by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-06-02T22:29:05Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Another day, another interview with a wildlife conservationist failing to mention that land clearing is the biggest extinction threat in Australia.He's talking about re-wilding instead. Maybe if we pour enough water into the bath, it won't matter that there's no plug in the drain 🙂#auspol #ABCRadio #biodiversity
(DIR) Post #Av8CKXy6QFl1jrVxZY by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-06-14T18:03:14Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
“National Socialism mobilized violence and hooliganism, but did so in the defense of the social order. Nazism simultaneously used roughness and respectability…. The Nazi propaganda machine pictured the SA [Sturmabteilung] as defenders of decent national values and their enemies as decadent thugs.” - Jean-Denis LePageJust posting this quote about Nazi stormtroopers today for no particular reason.#USpol
(DIR) Post #Axt18nI0Lq2HOIGchU by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-09-05T05:38:07Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone It's not supposed to look like that? I've been playing PM2 wrong
(DIR) Post #AxtLoZVDzyIHsTeJVY by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-09-05T07:18:00Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
somehow not The Onion#USpol #gaza #palestine
(DIR) Post #Ay2RsvsX5yXIa6eZO4 by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2024-03-15T14:04:07Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
The Inaccessibility Cycle#disability #ableism #accessibility
(DIR) Post #AzmgzYV3wZXpGGb9qi by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-10-31T21:14:12Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I was woken this morning by two kookaburras making a racket down the side passage. Turns out their beaks were stuck together (!)While they scrambled and fought, trying to pull apart, a currawong sat on the fence commentating the life-or-death struggle.After my sleepy brain had made sense of what the bloody hell was going on, I fetched some gloves and gently prised them apart. They both flew off in high dudgeon. What a surreal start to the day.#kookaburra #KookaburrasOfMastodon #AustralianAnimals #justAustralianthings #birding #birds #wildoz #AussieBirdCount
(DIR) Post #B0VqM6Y4SWUBb1lSr2 by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2025-11-22T00:10:10Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
nothing to see here
(DIR) Post #B1qFK5leNTn0yDbG8e by fullfathomfive@aus.social
2026-01-01T04:09:52Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
dunno why mum keeps sending me pictures of her fence #AustralianAnimals #AustralianBirds #TawnyFrogmouth