ragebutt

If I am murdered please don’t do this. I do not care if you feel like it will help you process the events

Even here I’ve posted about how advertising is a destructive force that ruins everything it touches and literally should not exist and there are people that are so indoctrinated by the industry that they rush to defend it

“But how will small businesses prosper without the ability to annoy you with direct mail marketing and Facebook campaigns!”

And truly misunderstanding the difference between something like a business directory, that you willing submit yourself to as a consumer, and can be listed and compiled objectively without competitive advantage for rich assholes, vs advertising, which intrudes on your life.

Well like I said I’m not outright denying its efficacy, but based on initial reactions the guy is marketing it like pseudoscience and should maybe work on clarifying what his method actually is

The problem is that the description of the teaching method, at least in the theory course, was completely devoid of any rationale for how it is different from any other method of teaching (same as the website)

I have no reason to believe his app and courses don’t provide instruction. My issue is with his grandiosity without substance. An educator of all people should recognize the need to substantiate their claims. This, coupled with the fact that the first thing I am hit with on his site being:

“ABSOLUTELY MAGICAL"

"PURE GENIUS"

"TRULY A MASTERPIECE"

"SERIOUSLY THE BEST LANGUAGE COURSES EVER"

"INSANELY CRAZY GOOD" "LITERALLY CHANGED MY LIFE"

"BLOWN AWAY"

"A TOTAL GAME CHANGER"

"PHENOMENAL"

"WORLD-CLASS"

(None of which are attributed to anyone, of course) makes me really skeptical.

It’s really hard to beat flash cards. I like Anki a lot because it codifies them and makes the process of “have I mastered this” a bit more streamlined. Though I feel like a lot of people just download premade decks and while that’s fine you learn a lot making the deck. You can’t get around hours of studying vocab and grammar, especially if you’re after the critical period (which I would hope everyone posting here is)

The gameification that Duolingo brings is valuable and very motivating for a lot of people. The problem is that over the years like many capitalist ventures Duolingo made language learning secondary to earning income. So the primary goal of the app suffers at the expense of keeping you constantly engaged so that you’re far more likely to buy shit even if that means ultimately dont learn all that much

This is interesting, thanks

Edit: I take it back. I had some time after work and the app appears to be a collection of lectures from the founder who does not actually speak each language, but feels their teaching method is so unique that it overcomes this. Looking at the website there is no actual description of what makes their method different or better, just a lot of fluff and boasting about how it’s so great. I didn’t speak any of the languages to review content but I do have a background in music so I listened to the 12 minute music theory lesson 1 and it was just him gushing about how great his method is, 0 theory covered. Maybe it is revolutionary but this reeks of pseudoscience

Hint books were an experience back then. I remember the hint book for myst had this whole narrative about some other person who got trapped in the book, which was supposed to be like the player. It was this whole story of how they solved all the various puzzles. I remember it being quite long but I was also like 9 so maybe it was just like 10 pages

Duolingo sucks for language learning

Slow input method with the word bank which really doesn’t matter early on but becomes a chore that slows progress later on

Doesn’t really do much in the way of correcting errors unless you pay money for the highest level subscription and even then the error correction is weak. A platform like Duolingo has the potential to do really cool error correction; to literally point out the exact error you made and tie it to an explanation. Obviously that’s difficult especially as things become more challenging but duo has had a decade and millions in development funds, which they’ve spent making the courses actively worse to drive up subscription costs and iaps

The lessons are so focused on the whole “gameification” thing that unless you specifically go back to constantly practice vocabulary (and if applicable characters) you will never retain anything. If you merely pound through a Duolingo course from a-b on the prescribed “path” you will struggle immensely and forget tons of early vocabulary and grammar concepts that are introduced and then never brought back unless you seek them out. There are “weak skills” lessons but they are relatively uncommon so you can feel like you’re constantly progressing

The word banks similarly don’t necessarily test retention and just test your ability to do a quick game of matching

You’ll learn something but if you truly want to learn a language there are far more efficient ways. Duolingo is a practice tool at best

More like the focus group thought the masks were “super gay fauci shit” so home depot went with “guy wearing $2 safety glasses that don’t even have a dust seal”

I’ve never had a gold leaf thing, aside from a shot of goldschlager, but I have wondered this

Maybe the next time I make a dessert I’ll pick up some flavorless, odorless gold to really take my treat to the next level. What a stupid trend

yes obviously

your pricing is higher when volume of sales is lower because you have to cover overheads and still make a profit.

When volume is significantly higher the pricing can be lower. You can still cover your overheads because even though you make less money per unit, you overall still can make the same amount (or in this case, 5x as much) because of the increased sales volume

The “need to increase prices” is motivated by several factors like a weak yen and remaining fear from the commercial failure of the Wii U but it’s primarily greed and hostility to consumers. Mario kart is the most successful nintendo game so it is not fair to use it solely as the metric but it is also not as if their other games all suffer and that they don’t make shitloads of cash; 11 billion last year and 12 billion the year before.

And those numbers don’t include companies that are commonly associated with by divested from nintendo like the Pokémon company, which made another 1.9 billion on top of that last year. And unlike many western AAA developers their development costs appear to be far more controlled, with estimates of 20-30 million per game vs something like Spider-Man 2 for the ps5, which was over 10x that at 315 million. According to the leaks the first Spider-Man game cost over 100 million to make and made 827 million back.

this argument is so fucking dumb

Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream

SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.

SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000 Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000

Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.