They are indeed all run by the same people.

Not as far as I know.

I did the Spanish-from-English course, which I understand was the best course on Duolingo, from start to finish over 2 years. I also skimmed the English-from-Spanish course.

I got good enough to pick my way slowly through Salvadoran newspaper articles, which is basically what I wanted. (This also teaches me more words.) I need to ping my Spanish-speaking friends to teach me how to fucking speak it though, Duolingo didn’t teach me shit.

(The tabloid newspapers are easy. The pompous newspapers write in a fancy tone which ~nobody in .sv uses. I really wanna read El Faro in Spanish, but it writes in high-level sarcastic and pissed-off. Still a subscriber tho. Guess I gotta git gud!)

.sv Twitter was easy, cos it turns out shitposting is the universal human tongue.

I understand Spanish-from-English in particular has decayed badly in the AI era. Apparently it randomly started teaching someone “vosotros” which was never previously introduced. Pretty sure it still doesn’t teach “vos”, which is annoying (.sv uses vos).

Its main advantage was that I did it at all - the gamification tickled my brain just right - and I did in fact learn anything from it.

I was a paying customer, but my subscription finished a few months after the AI memo, so adios.

it’s very easy to say in 2026 that crypto was dumb

it was also very easy to say in 2011 that crypto was dumb

except that it’s all stolen code. whether it’s a copyright violation, well that’s call your lawyer

jesus fuck https://urbit.org/blog/olif-and-urbit-ids

with urbit, you can now sniff each other’s farts

yeah Carvalho was up to his heck in the whole thing at the time

i’ve suffered Masnick’s writing since the early 2000s and he has never learnt to write any better

ehh. i’m not inclined to hand it to marcus. i can’t think of an example of him saying something new and interesting.

nah

the AI bubble, the private credit bubble (this one), the Wall St Bitcoin thing, etc. are all about writing down a big number with a $ in front on thin justification, then borrowing against it

this runs into issues tomorrrow. but not today!

CS 2005 is absolutely worth it, it’s a version of Photoshop that does everything you actually need including CMYK with Pantone.

I also didn’t say it’s a good hedge. It’ll stay uncorrelated right up to the moment you need it to, when it’ll crash in lockstep.

amazed he got through that without somehow blaming sneerclub

“Dark Enlightenment” was invented for Nick Land for his essay of the same name.

more proximately, he also went to the Manifold Markets meetup for statistical predictors that just happened to include Jordan Lasker, which is why he keeps making these posts with curiously Lasker-adjacent talking points. It’s very disappointing.

the rationalists are still not over thiel getting sick of them

i actually spoke to someone in greece who tried tracking this story to its roots, and is pretty sure it didn’t actually happen, but identified places it could have happened, so it seems to have been written by someone who’d been to exarcheia

Apparently it works in binary.

The Stoller piece is instructive - he’s wrong, but it’s a perfect example of the resentment and the reasons for the resentment.