Technology is a choice. If you speak natively you get completely different immersion in culture.
replyImagine your perception as a VR headset, and any gadgets and apps are inserting a layer between you and your VR headset, making it worse.
The same goes with any augmenting technology you perceive not the real thing.
> The feeling is that it is pointless since technology would just do it for you.
replyWhy walk or jog of the car can do it for you?
Maybe because these is an obvious benefit of physical exercises and that there are no health benefits to learn a new topic after having already exhausted your brain sitting +7 hours at work?
replyI know, right? Have the AI go to the gym and work out for you.
replyPersonally, my deadlifts have gone way up since I started doing them with a forklift.
replyMy love life has seen hockey stick growth since I spawned subagents to hang out with women for me.
replyI've been learning Spanish and I find a big positive motivator is finding and practicing slang words and vulgar phrases. They usually have cultural roots and are highly contextual, so it requires a deeper understanding than just translation. I only speak them sparingly with my few native speaker friends, who find it hilarious when I inevitably use them incorrectly - or rarely get it exactly right.
replyLearning a language is still absolutely worth it. The feeling you get when finally being able to communicate with native speakers is not something you could achieve with technology. Sure if all you care about is exchanging information then translation technology does the job, but if you want to actually connect with people I believe you have to do the talking
replyI've been learning Russian by myself since the pandemic and along the way I've picked up bits and bobs about food, history, geography, music, and even electronics. Learning a language is not just about the language per se.
replyI've even realised a few things about my own language.
Приятно слышать, а то иногда народ гов орит, что это мертвый язык...
replyEven if so, once I realized how pointless doomscrolling is I figured I might as well use that time to learn something pointless.
replyIt is helpful in such cases to look up, touch grass, and realise that "do it for you" is doing a lot of work there. The technology still can only emit a convolution of its training, and this is an ontological, conceptual limit on the technology, not something that the next model will just overcome. It's not "intelligence" -- you still have to know things.
replyIt's easy to think, reading HN, that we're in some "post-knowledge" apocalypse, but that's just not the reality. It is, however, tragic that the irrationality of capitalism can be sustained so long, perhaps longer than some of us can stay solvent.