There’s something strangely liberating about writing when no one’s watching. No pressure to perform, no expectations to meet, just you, your thoughts, and the page. And yet, I won’t lie, having a reader, even just one, feels like sunlight breaking through fog. You don’t need it to keep walking, but it sure makes the path warmer.
I think I’m learning to live in that space, to write for the freedom of it, while still holding space for the hope that one day someone will stumble across the words and feel a flicker of recognition. Until then, it’s just me, showing up. And I’m learning to be okay with that.
Thanks for putting language to a season so many of us quietly live through.
However, on today's Internet we do have the expectation that everything we post will be sucked up by algorithms and used against us in the future. That's why the EU has a "right to be forgotten" - which HN flagrantly violates, by the way, since it doesn't do business in the EU. (HN's owners, being billionaire VCs, are less scared of the law than random site owners who think if they don't block all IP addresses of RIPE NCC it will count as doing business in the EU)
The "right to be forgotten" is not about preventing information from being sucked up by algorithms as stopping people from finding information about someone easily. It is more complex than that:
In many cases URLs have been removed from search results but remain on the original site.
I have seen far more small sites blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act than I ever saw blocking EU users because of the right to be forgotten.
This really captures a tension that's becoming harder to ignore:
AI isn't "creating" bad practices, it's removing the barriers that used to slow down bad practices.
Vibe coding existed long before LLMs, but now someone can ship fast without knowing (or caring) how fragile their implementation is. And because demos look good and investors want speed, it's easy to mistake velocity for progress.
What worries me most isn't the code itself; it's the cultural signal it sends. If early-stage success gets decoupled from technical soundness, then short-term incentives will dominate, and we’ll lose the developers who understand how to build lasting systems.
The best teams will be the ones who don't fight AI, but who also don't let AI drive them straight into a wall.
What's striking is how much long-term leverage Google has by controlling its hardware stack. An 80% cost edge isn't just about short-term pricing — it compounds over time into faster iteration, more experimentation, and the ability to undercut competitors when needed.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is betting that ecosystem lock-in (via agents, tooling, and user workflows) will outweigh pure cost efficiency. It feels a bit like early iOS vs Android: closed ecosystem polish vs open interoperability.
The wildcard is how quickly OpenAI can develop its own silicon or renegotiate better terms. Otherwise, Google's advantage might not just be hardware — it could become cultural too (faster, cheaper, wider innovation cycles).
It feels like we're watching the playbook for AI-native companies emerge in real time.
Duolingo’s approach, explicitly tying headcount to proof-of-automation limits, baking AI usage into performance reviews, and prioritizing AI-first systems over retrofitting old workflows, is a glimpse at how "AI-first" won’t just mean using LLMs as a tool, but rebuilding the entire operational model around them.
That said, it's a double-edged sword. Contract workers were crucial to Duolingo’s early scalability. Shifting to AI removes human bottlenecks, but also human nuance — and teaching language is deeply nuanced. It’ll be fascinating (and maybe a little uncomfortable) to see if mass AI content keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling.
AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?
> keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling
Duolingo is widely regarded as more of a game than a high-quality learning experience. People obvious learn something from it, but it's a running joke almost everywhere on social media that people can be 100s of days into their Duolingo streak and still not learn much.
Getting people off of Duolingo and onto less gamified, more rigorous language learning courses is a common theme in the language learning world.
They even explicitly admit to this. In the recent Decoder podcast the CEO said they will always choose engagement and gamification over teaching you the 'best' way.
Which is not a terrible strategy. Most people learning languages are doing it for fun or a new years resolution or whatever. If you're serious about learning a language for real (ie you've moved country) then of course you're gonna go to a more serious platform.
Massive plus one for Language Transfer. It's well presented, interesting, and kept me engaged. The whole concept is finding connections to language you already know, and gets you thinking in fuller more complex thoughts and sentences really quickly.
The audio lessons are free on various podcast platforms / YouTube etc.
Was duolingo ever known for high educational quality? To me duolingo's main pitch was a way to gamify language learning. Of course it became a victim of its own success as soon as you could "pay to win".
I don't think so. I see its pitch as "the best kind of exercise is the one you do", maybe preferable to playing a game, but not an efficient way to learn. How useful it is to you will probably depend on how effective the sounds and streaks and home screen notification stuff is for keeping you motivated. Personally, I'm motivated by quick progress and outcomes (streaks don't do anything for me), so Anki is actually stickier, though I must be in the minority.
Because they focus so much on beginning learners for whom nuance isn't important, this change doesn't seem like it'll hurt them.
Being successful at Duolingo was always being like that guy who wins scrabble tournaments in French and Spanish without being able to converse in them. It's just a game and winning at it doesn't necessarily align with being functional in it. Otherwise second language schools would have long been extinct by now.
Far behind are the days when free version of Duolingo was playable. There are so many dark patterns these days to keep users coming back, gatekeeping something or otherwise to just push them to pay for the usage.
I don't think it was ever known for being high quality, it was known for being "accessible" and then they forgot about what their original goals were. They got pretty disappointing IMO when real languages were in need of updates for a long time (I don't know if the Chinese course ever got features like Stories) while they added a bunch of fictional languages.
> AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?
It will be a flop. Either it won't get implemented like the C-levels dreamed in the first place and will remain policy on paper only or it will be rolled back quietly once reality hits.
I think I’m learning to live in that space, to write for the freedom of it, while still holding space for the hope that one day someone will stumble across the words and feel a flicker of recognition. Until then, it’s just me, showing up. And I’m learning to be okay with that.
Thanks for putting language to a season so many of us quietly live through.