note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone’s best interests
edit: or just acting like a pointless dipshit. jfc you people
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but why is mr wonka so easily offended? all I did was feed myself into the machine that makes chocolate chips but he called me a stupid motherfucker while his staff sang a jaunty tune
he’s probably just triggered. RENT FREE
We have even better solutions for them!
Y’all are wild. Doesn’t it get boring congratulating each other for having the same opinions? You could just talk to yourself, you know.
I’m not interested in continuing this conversation. Any reply to this messags is unwanted harrasment.
no, unwanted harassment is me telling you to go fuck yourself
also, who in the fuck were you talking to? do you often wander into subs and demand nobody replies to your shitty posts?
There seems to be an incredibly large intersection between sociopathic dipshits and failure to understand the basics of GDPR.
“Email address is not PII” is such a deep level of not getting it it’s indistinguishable from satire.
i absolutely love the “clarification” that an email address is PII only if it’s your real, primary, personal email address, and any other email address (that just so happens to be operated and used exclusively by a single person, even to the point of uniquely identifying that person by that address) is not PII
i wonder why that coincidence keeps happening over and over
they did in fact reach at least 20,000 users, and to celebrate they set up a business entity in Germany (they are currently US based), in order to start a tiny little t-shirt printing company. And their goal was to print 20,000 t-shirts to give out, FOR FREE, to their first 20,000 users (with users paying only shipping costs). But I cannot stress enough, they did not just spend money on 20,000 tshirts to give out, they set up a whole new business entity in Germany to run their own t-shirt printing operation, with its own building and warehouse and employee(s? I get the sense it’s one guy but I don’t know). And this cost them 1/3 of their $670k funding round. One, fucking, third. For t-shirts. Did I mention that the t-shirts don’t even have the Kagi name on them? Just the Kagi dog mascot
0% interest rate behavior
I’m in a forum where some person claims that the sealion is actually the reasonable one.
It’s proof to me that this throwaway comic is such a good summary for certain online behavior that there’s an entire subculture built around trying to subvert it.
(also Wondermark is great in general)
I literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow’s post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.
I KNOW RIGHT
they just got THE BEST word of mouth
and then Vlad just …
So close!
We were right there!
And then Vlad had to do his impaling thing…
Ah man, same. Thought I’d give it a go after reading about if from Cory…
Honestly, for what I search for, DDG is sufficient, and it’s not gonna hassle me about subscriptions.
What I’d really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you’ve searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn’t already know.
I dunno. Search and AI botshit is everywhere, and it’s gonna keep getting worse. Self-hosting tools seems to be the only way to take control back.
I was trying and failing to do something like that. Basically, using ArchiveBox to download bookmarks, and then use recoll to index the webpages + PDFs + my own writing. Assumption was that I probably already bookmarked or had copies of what I wanted and just needed a quick way to find them. Was eventually going to import my browsing history as well. It ended up being more trouble than it was worth. (Too many bookmarks, not enough disk space, didn’t know what the best setting for ArchiveBox were, Archivebox has its own search and I wasn’t sure how that compared to recoll, unsure most efficient way to delete useless downloaded pages or curate them, etc.)
I do use uBlacklist and the Huge AI Blocklist subscription to try to clean up my search results. Not sure how effective they are over all though.
@shadow @V0ldek > What I’d really like to find is something like a pihole for search, where you have your blocklist, cache of things you’ve searched already (your own mini search engine?), and then a fallback engine (DDG, bing, Google, whatever) for things it doesn’t already know.
I think SearXNG sort of fulfills this, from what I’ve heard? It’s more or less a self-hosted search engine that can combine indexes from various other engines, and I presume that means you can set your own rules and filters and such. There are public instances as well.
The searxng public instances tend to be a bit shit.
They’re slow. Maybe only several seconds but that feels like an eternity in 2024.
They also frequently seem to be blocked by the services they’re scraping.
I will check out self hosting searxng
Isn’t the DDG guy an asshole as well though?
But you don’t pay him.
He’s not getting paid?
What I’m saying is that for Kagi you have to pay a direct subscription. DDG you can just use for free.
What I’m saying is that free things arent really free.
+5, insightful.
I found that while Doctorow post weird like an ad in the form of a post.
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Not immediately, I guess. But it’s sad to see that good things don’t just happen themselves
We can only hope. I like the idea, the execution is just increasingly becoming shite.
Copy-pasting the alt-text from one of the screenshots because I can’t be assed to type it out myself:
Discord convo from 07/15/22, Vlad: people who really need anonymity are very rare. Probably less than a 100 in the entire world. Definitely not typical Kagi users. Unless they are criminals, in which case we don’t care they don’t have full anonymity (nor we want them as customers)
yikes, double yikes and triple yikes.
I guess he doesn’t care to help women find a safe way to have an abortion in 14 out of 50 US states (source), for starters. Nor to help the doubtlessly more-than-100 queer folk in places that outlaw homosexuality.
Or maybe he’s such a genius that he knows how to keep them safe without actually keeping them anonymous - and in that case, he should start selling such a technique as its own product /s
I want vlad to list his criteria for who makes that list of 100 people, cause something tells me it’s all oligarchs and other powerful and monied people, and absolutely nobody whose life or livelihood is directly threatened by an information leak
No clue why they’d willingly accept crypto - they aren’t doing anything that’d have credit card companies running for the hills.
Eh, nothing wrong with accepting payments in crypto. Sometimes the gas fees are a lot less than what a payment provider / credit card provider would charge.
2018 called, it wants its shitty coiner propaganda talking points back
(actually not sure if by 2018 coiners had moved on from dunking on credit card fees)
wow, you’re fucking lost aren’t you
let me show you the way out
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I was thinking the same thing earlier… it’s also been a hell of a way to find people who have problems with consent…
we’re not actually enjoying what a shooting gallery this post has become
could never imagine that you would. grateful that you do what you do!
Seeing how successful Kagi is when run by someone who actively sets their own money on fire for no reason almost makes me want to try and start a search engine company. I mean I couldn’t do it any worse right? And there is a market for it.
It’s very similar to the feeling you get when you read a very middle-quality novel, innit?
I resemble that remark
Kagi basically admits they’re just piggybacking off of Google, Bing, et al, so getting into the space shouldn’t be a serious PITA.
yall really are making me want to massively overextend and start that federated search engine project based on human-driven indexing and whichever APIs each instance wants to query and cache. yes, like a fancy web directory
maybe this is a good idea for a FreeAssembly project once Philthy’s in a good state? it’s a better idea than starting a shitty Wikipedia clone at least
Personally: I’d love to, but I have a conflicting non-compete so I’d definitely have to quit my job first and I’m not ready for that level of adulting. The good news is that if I ever do quit I’ll have a lot of relevant skills
(feels quite fucky to type the following without coming across as a naysayer; not quite the intended meaning, but… I guess you’ll see)
it’d probably be cool if this could exist, but also there’s a couple of extremely hard problems in going for it, along with a couple of (to my current knowledge) entirely unsolved ones
one of the presently-unsolved things I know of is that we don’t yet have anything like scalable performant homomorphic encryption so there’s no way to do fully-private query operations on a dataset, which thus gives way to the operator snooping space combined with user privacy angles. there are some technical solutions to some aspects of this, and a number of social things that would apply too
might be interesting either way
definitely a hell of a big project.
maybe this is something you’re looking for idk https://github.com/StractOrg/stract they have their own index and their own crawler
Omg so much tech jargon in this comment
welcome to TechTakes!
no, welcome wasn’t the right word now was it
That he called the blog post ‘an incredible amount of research’ is quite odd. Either it is a failed attempt at sucking up, or a sign Vlad has a very bad idea of what research is.
It’s incredible because the blogger based their beliefs off of evidence and reality instead of markov chains and hallucinations.
incredible for him, presumably
‘lol you did more research than I did for my whole company’
Perhaps he is passive aggressively saying that he doesn’t believe it?
I was about to jump off DuckDuckGo as its also going down, was going to go for kagi, in very much reconsidering that now… But then what?
Running your own personal search engine might be a bit much to chew off for most people, but is there a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to, perhaps?
Edit: and before anyone ironically says “Google that yourself”, I already searched and found a lot of blog posts, GitHub projects, but nothing concrete, no “that’s the one!” Project that is and open source and federated…
clearly, finding things is not a good idea
a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to
I’d love to contribute to something like this. it might even make for a good replacement for lemmy’s awful built-in search
A federated search engine sounds terrible tbh, how would that even work?
Why terrible?
you’re right
the other poster was most likely trying to stir up shit given we’re on a federated network (see also their other post), but I have been obsessed with the idea of a federated search engine this weekend
it’s definitely a worthwhile idea, but anything that does federated indexing will have to deal with moderation and abuse prevention first. those are hard problems in ordinary federated networks, but search engines specifically are targets of hostile SEO and spam in ways that few other systems are. those aren’t insurmountable problems though — just ones that need to be solved before federation is practical.
I dunno. Google is currently overwhelmed by SEO optimized crap (at least I guess so, I stopped using it years ago because of that) and I think a federated system where members have different prioritizations would make SEO optimization very very hard to abuse.
I hope so! this is something I’d like to implement, once I’ve got some free deployment resources and time.
I’d say he’s a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.
running through the sales playbook big time over a post with no readers
and now the original blog post, which had almost no readers, is front page on HN as I write this, and (in between the sociopath apologetics) even the horrible nerds are noticing he’s bizarre on privacy, GDPR and AI obsession …
Dare I say… womp womp?
AI obsession
To be fair, of all the problems with that CEO, this one I fail to see
It isn’t in this post, but it’s in the post this one is about. Kagi started as an AI company, pivoted to the search engine, and it’s still trying to put AI into everything.
They didn’t pivot.
The search engine was just a side Idea What Needs Doing the CEO had, that just happened to make the startup famous because of being somewhat less bad than the enshittified crap other search engines have become, then they lost interest (to be fair they seem to be about fifteen to twenty-something people, plus whoever they’ve got in Germany making free T-shirts, only half of them working full time, so there’s only so much they can focus on) and went back to their main thing (which is apparently very bad but very fast AI).
At this point they’re probably just keeping the paid search engine to try and pay back the taxes they owe due to having apparently forgotten taxes were a thing, though it was operating at a loss even before the tax thing (and before they wasted a third of their investment cash on free T-shirts), so they’ll be having to raise their prices…
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I think a lot of folks, in my experience especially those who didn’t grow up with the Internet, don’t see online interactions as “real” as offline. I think it explains a lot of the harassing behavior we see online.
For the peanut gallery, if someone asks you to stop communicating with you but you persist, it’s harassment regardless of the venue.
I’d like to think so, but I think you’re being unduly generous here and actually they’re just entitled shitheads
this sorta shit is why the pinned comment. bye now.
wat
Wait whats this about AI? Can anyone explain? I just started the free trial because i was tired of shitty google results, are they literally doing the same thing now?
apparently so, I’m said to say
Vader voice: noooooooooo
Small AI startup makes somewhat working search engine (as opposed to the enshittified crap other search engines have become) because CEO has Ideas What Need Doing (e.g., a search engine, an Apple exclusive browser, investing a third of the raised capital on establishing a company in Germany to make twenty thousand T-shirts to give away for free, without even the company’s name on them), becomes famous for said search engine (it’s slightly less bad than the others — even if it’s really just repackaging their results —, so people not only are willing to pay for it, but will evangelise for it any chance they get), they lose interest in said search engine (though, to be fair, they seem to be ~fifteen to twenty-something people — plus whoever they’ve got in Germany making free T-shirts —, only half of them working full time, so there’s only so much they can focus on at a time) and focus back on AI (new CEO Idea: fast AI! Doesn’t matter if not good! FAST!), news at eleven.
Oh, and they apparently forgot VAT was a thing (maybe their accountant is one of the half working half time?), and even then were operating at a loss (the free T-shirts might also have something to do with that), so now they have to raise prices from just absurd to outright offensive, to try and pay back the taxes they owe…
(And speaking of the CEO, he not only had Ideas What Need Doing, he also seems to have Ideas, period… like the Idea that email addresses are not personal information protected by the GDPR, the Idea that Kagi doesn’t have to abide by the GDPR because their payment processor already does, or the Idea that only ~100 people in the world really needing anonymity anyway; also his whole approach to privacy seems to boil down to “trust me bro, I don’t want your data, I just want your money… but if you do anything illegal I will report you”).
Depends what you mean by “the same thing”
I was delighted to find a sci-fi story hidden between pages full of AI shilling on the website, and then disappointed because it’s not even funny-bad.
That’s egregiously bad.
The whole internet loves Kagi
Lol no
Also Kagi is a glorified Google front end.
Also Kagi is a glorified Google front end.
The fact a glorified Google front end manages to be less shit than Google is a pretty damning indictment of Google, I’ll give Kagi that. Quoting Cory Doctorow, gratuitous italics and all:
The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google’s enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework
A Danish ad company made a Google interface that they called “impersonal me” which searched Google with no personalisation. And not only was it better than Google search, it found things that normal Google just didn’t show. In particular old comments I had written and lost track of. In the impersonal search they were easily found, in the normal search they weren’t way down on the list, they weren’t in the list at all.
Fascinatingly bad.
This is a reference to the milkshake duck tweet
Yup. Last time I checked, you paid money to get the exact same results. Brilliant.
Ya but they are in a different order
*Bing
