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2 yr. ago

  • As a Kbin guy and paying Kagi user I feel weirdly seen.

  • It's not the best, and quite clearly not a priority of the project yet. I'd say map integration is a little bit worse than in DuckDuckGo, which is already not as good as Google. If this is important to you it's probably too early to jump on Kagi.

    On the positive side I didn't realize this before just now when checking it out in order to answer your question, so it hasn't bothered me much. Usually when I need address information I go straight to the service I see best fit.

    I'd love to see Kagi make an effort to push OSM though, but that's probably not exactly on top of their priorities.

  • A lot of people don't have much food on their table
    But they got a lot of forks n' knives
    And they gotta cut somethin'

    Dylan

  • Unfortunately I don't know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I'm liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.

    Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!

  • Yeah, I think it became a bit of an impossible solution the second Ernest's proof of concept suddenly attracted a whole bunch of users and attention after the Reddit exodus. Kbin was clearly not ready, and I admire him for staying on course with the development after that despite pressures.

    That said, users are not wrong to want easy to implement features asap. So I personally think the fork makes a lot of sense, though everyone could do without the occasional bad faith from some of the people involved.

  • Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It's also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it's a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.

  • Never heard of busuu before, but tried it now and am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!

    It's also worth giving a shout-out to LibreLingo, which aims to be an open source version of Duolingo. For now it's only Spanish though, and as I'm not interested in learning Spanish at the moment I haven't gotten any real use out of it.

  • In my experience the typo-tolerance is not very flexible. I write using Dvarok instead of QWERTY, so the typos I make don't always follow regular patterns. On my phone I use a swipe keyboard, so sometimes a typo comes out as a different word entirely. No matter what I don't want to be punished for my mistakes, even if they are real mistakes. I just want to keep on learning without the tool I'm using intentionally trying to make that harder for me.

  • My understanding of the situation is that Ernest, the main developer behind Kbin, thinks of the current Kbin as a proof of concept, and he is doing profound rewriting of the codebase to better fit his vision of how it should be working.

    Meanwhile, other people wanted to contribute to Kevin directly, developing a better product on top of what Ernest considers to be too shaky foundations. So he's not all that interested in pursuing that part of the development before he is happy with the core.

    This also leads to a dynamic where he still has his own vision for the project and it goes through him, whereas other contributors want to make it their own more and develop something different.

    It's hard to see how to make everyone happy here without forking. Hopefully both projects can still gain from each other in the future: Mbin can benefit from the rewritten codebase of Kbin, and Kbin can implement features from Mbin after seeing that they are good and work well. In either case, the continued development as separate projects is probably not all that bad.

  • I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.

    Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.

    I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it's very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don't like the direction the company has taken and I don't want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.

    Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.

  • I guess it's pretty well established that a lot of people push others down in order to feel better about themselves. It's not surprising that many of these people will struggle to make friends in real life, and end up spending a disproportionate amount of time posting their garbage on the Internet.

  • Not so sure about the "all over the world" part - I think it's pretty common knowledge in Europe even among non-German speakers that Swiss German is a bit of a different animal, and I don't imagine many people from Asia or Africa joining in with strong opinions about this either.

    Not pointing any fingers, but I have my suspicion where those people came from.

  • They're feeding the genocidal fear mongering rhetoric of the Israeli far right, effectively becoming useful idiots for Netanyahu and his fascist buddies.

    They're also killing civilians.

    Hamas can fuck right off along with Netanyahu & co.

  • If I ever have kids I plan to coordinate a common gift with everyone I'm celebrating with; just have them all chip in a bit, and buy one very nice gift rather than adding to an ever-growing pile of plastic garbage.

    My sister has made real effort not to spoil her kids, but it's hopeless. They get so much sparkly trash at every occasion, and I feel like I could might as well have given my gifts directly to the landfill.

  • Unless they changed something very subtly and very recently, there's a cap on searches on the lower tier and unlimited search on the higher one.

  • As a Scandinavian, I'm genuinely super happy to hear that! As far as I'm concerned the Christians are very welcome to celebrate whatever they'd like, but they have no right to monopolize the festivities. It's winter solstice goddamn it, it's been celebrated since the beginning of time and belongs to everyone!

  • It's not really one of those situations where knowing what you're doing makes anything any better, is it

  • Always wanted to go to BC, it seems incredibly beautiful. So sad to hear how noticeable the effects of climate change are there already.

  • I've been paying for it for a couple of months now, am pretty happy with it. Feels weird to be paying for a search engine, and as it still only has a finite number of searches every month I still have to get used to not being reluctant to use it, but its results are indeed great. More focused than DuckDuckGo, less bullshit than Google.

  • The famous terrorist organization known as the Red Cross.