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Robb Owen

@robbowen.digital

Independent Designer and full stack web developer from South Wales. Serial language botherer. Made Synthwave '84. 日本語ＯＫ https://robbowen.digital ※写真はイメージです

1263 Posts5450 Follower724 Folgt
Ash@fishyash.bsky.social · 5d ago

Friendly reminder that Duolingo was initially concieved to trick people into translating articles for free, which they later used as training data for MTL algorithms. Duolingo's primary purpose has NEVER been about teaching you a language, even from the start! slate.com/technology/2...

If it doesn’t charge users and, so far, doesn’t serve them any ads, how does Duolingo make money? It tricks you into working as an unpaid translation service. At the end of some lessons, Duolingo will ask you if you want to practice by translating a real-world document. Which will turn out to be, say, a BuzzFeed article. By melding together enough stabs at this task from high-level Duolingo users, the app can render a surprisingly accurate translation. Which is worth good money. So far, Duolingo has contracts with BuzzFeed and CNN to translate stories from English into languages such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese. This service is already earning Duolingo hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but von Ahn predicts he will be adding a raft of new clients soon. “The language translations market is huge,” he says. “It’s a $30 billion per year market.”
Japanese Talk@japanesetalk.bsky.social · 7d ago

It really irks me when people share their 300, 600, 1000 day Duolingo streaks but still don't know how to use Japanese. Here's an explanation for why apps like Duolingo don't work for learning to any fluency. jtalkonline.com/why-apps-lik...

Scott Riley@scott.is · 2w ago

🦄🌈 launch day babeyyy 🌈🦄 super excited to announce the launch of mindful design products. calm products for a chaotic world. the goal is to build a line of lovely things that are designed for real people. first app is lorist, a writing app that gets out of your way. mindfuldesign.xyz/products/

Mindful Design Products – Mindful Design

Mindful Design products are forever–free products designed from the ground up to be calm, opinionated, and lovely to use.

mindfuldesign.xyz

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · 4w ago

The recent revival of interest in retro gaming, particularly hardware-emulated stuff like the Analogue consoles is so cool to see Really makes me regret selling off my entire collection in 2011 to fund [checks notes] an iPad 2, about six months before it was made obsolete by the retina iPad 🤦

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · last mo.

Heading home from London after a weekend spending quality offline time with some dear online friends. Reminds me that the internet can be very good sometimes

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · last mo.

Not content to simultaneously scare the shit out of me / make me laugh with an emergency alert that was only in Welsh, they got me again ten minutes later with the English alert 🤦

Scott Riley@scott.is · 2mo ago

i am incredibly experienced with freelancing and i've lived and worked through some very good and very bad times in this industry, but right now has to be the absolute nadir. it's so hard to find good work, and so many good folks are struggling. i'm forever an optimist, but times really are tricky.

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · 2mo ago

Tonight my town is smoked out with the second major wildfire in the last four weeks. I've never known Wales to suffer like this. It's normally so damp and verdant but it can't hold out against this heat. Honestly, it makes me so angry to hear local people still dismissing it as "just a hot summer"

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · 2mo ago

The way some folks post on LinkedIn reminds me of a client I once had who would very confidently (and unironically) pronounce it as "Linkydink", and how nobody else in the room ever tried to correct him

AJ Jefferies@moonjam.com · 2mo ago

Hey, that's a nice [THING YOU DO FOR PERSONAL PLEASURE], be a real shame if somebody were to [CONVINCE YOU TO MONETIZE IT, TRANSFORMING YOUR RELATIONSHIP INTO AN OBLIGATION AND ROBBING YOU OF JOY]

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · 2mo ago

Spent the last hour in holiday traffic, behind an imported Mazda Bongo Friendee mini-camper It was enough time that, likely by the name alone, I have convinced myself I now need to own one

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · 2mo ago

Have to wonder if there's a greater sign that the industry's haunted than a system bugging out so badly that it invoices billions of dollars, whilst at the same time being believable enough that people are pausing to check their usage. Truly cursed business models

stephanie@sclawr.bsky.social · 2mo ago

👋🏿 it’s been a while. I’ve been on Threads, but I wanted to post here as well: I’ve definitely caught that KNICKS IN 5 energy 💙🧡💙🧡, and made a little update to my website

Robb Owen@robbowen.digital · 2mo ago

Made a little time to work through this and I have two things to share: @scott.is's writing remains undefeated and @arielsalminen.com has made an absolute banger of a library. If you haven't tried using Elena yet, I can't recommend it highly enough and this post is the perfect intro

Scott Riley@scott.is · 4mo ago

framework-specific component libraries are wild. web components are fucking fab. in this post i walk through creating a framework-agnostic, docs-first design system setup using web standards (and @arielsalminen.com’s wonderful elena). piccalil.li/blog/framewo...