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
Can I ask a sincere question? whats a tech sociopath apologist, could you demonstrate an example?
Again, im sincerely genuinely asking
Someone who takes it on themselves to act as apologist for the words/actions of tech sociopaths
Often seen as “weird nerds coming to defense of $x” (such as musk, or in this case the kagi dudebro)
(And then I glanced at your post history and noticed a trend of JAQing off so I now doubt whether you’re sincere in asking)
yyyyeaahhhhh
Im not sure what JAQing is.
I appreciate your response thanks
JAQing
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions first hit (on google ;) ) which has a good explanation.
E: And I don’t meant this post as a ‘just fucking google it’ or ‘educate yourself’ (well a little bit) but more to show there is more to this accusation of JAQing than just some way to shut you down. The method is used by bad faith actors a lot, so it is a pattern of behavior a lot of people react negatively too. So, assuming you are acting in good faith, it is a good way to learn why people are reacting to you like you are a bit of an bad faith actor. And if you are a bad faith actor, I only wasted a little bit of my time typing this out so nothing really lost.
I call that doing a “Tucker Carlson.”
I had a weird brainfart a while back when I realized that Carlson reminds me of this guy.
The bad faith ‘bugs that think are offensive’ debate guy from starship troopers. He even wears a bow tie!
He does jaq off pretty constantly.
Short for Just Asking Questions. Where people ask loaded questions that act as a veneer to their actual statements. If you want to accuse them of the fact they are talking shit, they’ll say they’re “just skeptical” and “asking questions”
Just asking questions here, but do you think a wolverine would beat a mechabadger?
yes, I’ve seen it
that wasnt my intention. It was simply a phrase I hadn’t heard
that wasn’t my intention
Ironically, by saying that you’re just doing The Thing again
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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
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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?
We have even better solutions for them!
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
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)
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
Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.
Thats demonstrably false. I used to work for a merch company on the Google account and 20k custom printed Google t-shirts to give away at some event is a once every one or two months kind of order.
Ok but did they spin up their own shirt printing company in another country using one third of their investment money to print them or did they just pay a shirt printing service that already existed at a bulk discount rate?
Exactly. Even Google, who have piles and piles of cash just sitting around and could easily afford it, don’t move into the printing business to save a few bucks. They just contract some company who offer that kind of thing as a service to arrange it for them. The company I worked for don’t even print the t-shirts, they just arrange the printing via a range of companies who do offer such a service. Everyone in between takes a little cut and Google still get their t-shirts at like £5 each.
Google love a t-shirt. Sold more t-shirts to Google than any other client by a mile and a half.
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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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lol, go fuck yourself
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Quoting your previous post:
This is actual teenager behavior.
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I think the looking back fondly at… that comes from the part that we were actual, edgy teenagers back then and we enjoyed an uncontrolled space to be edgy in.
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we don’t care
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what a riveting point to make as your body is converted to chocolate chips
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The only thing I thought was an error on the CEO’s part (not regarding his views, just the way he handled himself) was the long followup email when the blog author said he wasn’t interested in debating with him. That email should have been a blog post of its own if it was worth writing in the first place, imo.
About his views, though: I’m turned off by his lack of regard for user-supplied details as PII. For me to use a search engine that requires an account, and therefore associates all of my searches with me directly, I would need to be supremely confident that my information is in good hands. Otherwise, how am I better off than using any other search engine on the internet without an account?
I’m glad I read through this post, Kagi has been on my radar but I hadn’t looked into it enough to decide if I might have any interest. Seems like the answer is, at least for now: no.
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Actually, that email exchange isn’t as combative as I expected.
I’m not going to de-anonymize my search history, so Kagi isn’t a thing for me, but he doesn’t seem as unhinged as some of these other techbros.
Actually, that email exchange isn’t as combative as I expected.
i suppose the CEO completely barreling forward past multiple attempts to refuse conversation while NOT screaming slurs at the person they’re attempting to lecture, is, in some sense, strictly better than the alternative
The bar hasn’t been so high in a while, christ that’s sad.
That’s a really fucking low bar. Remember to bring plenty of rope, emergency o2, and extra lights, should you go seeking it.
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I’ve never had anothee CEO mansplain his company to me
🤣
Slayed me.
I haven’t paid Kagi much attention up to this point, so I’m coming in cold to this. But gawd Vlad (makes himself) sound like a huge dork.
I love it. It screams xkcd-386 energy and he keeps digging
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
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
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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.
Can I sincerely ask what we’re supposed to use instead?
Kagi has given me the best search experience ive had in at least a decade, I’m not going back to the enshittification engine, and everything else is just bing in fancy wrapping paper. Is there something else like Kagi? Is there something like DDG or Searx that arent just slightly better bing?
Feel entirely free to use Kagi, just remember that it’s run by an idiot and could blow up at any moment.
Apologies, my question wasn’t rhetorical, I was genuinely looking for suggestions. I don’t want to use kagi if this is who is running it… BUT all the alternatives that I’m personally aware of are not options for replacement.
basically the whole area is gallopping enshittification. Until this blowup, I had seriously been considering Kagi too.
Guess it’s time to spin up a local search indexer…
Also looking for answers. I’ve been a Kagi convert for 5 months now and it has absolutely saved me time and effort.
I was looking at Perplexity but it isn’t exactly the same.
You may want to have a look at this list for possible alternatives
https://search.marginalia.nu/ is the only actually good search engine.
ok but for real… it’s not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results with search.marginalia.nu than any other search engine. It’s the only search engine that I find actively fun to just browse around on recreationally.
it’s not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results
Dunno if this is just poorly phrased or… Finding actual answers to queries is the only job of a search engine, what does “interesting” mean here?
You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.
For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012…2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014…2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008…2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).
It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects
I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.
I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed
There are a couple, though the quality varies. Mojeek and marginalia seem to be good alternatives personally
thanks a lot for shouting us out, Marginalia is also impressive (basically a one-person project etc.), the random button is delightful
I can’t remember the names of the projects, but there are actually some self hosted search engines that I keep meaning to get around to actually installing on “Ullr”
I knew something was fucky about that cultish service.
Yeah I had a weirdass email exchange with that same guy that pushed me away from Kagi forever. It was one of those “borderline technically honest but still blatantly dodging and obfuscating” type situations.
I shared a screenshot once, but got nothing but defense for the guys dodgy behavior, so I’ve been quiet about it, so this feels pretty validating that my gut feelings were right.
I think a lot of people get cultish about it because they’re paying a subscription for it, so they have to believe it’s good.
yeah, they’ve fostered an audience of unhinged stans
huh. the modlog is wild. my commiserations.
this thread has been an excellent honeypot for some of the worst people on Lemmy, and TechTakes definitely needed some cleaning up now that our threads keep hitting all
it’s very funny to see how those posters react to the idea that their fucking garbage takes in defense of an asshole CEO aren’t welcome here, and that we have a minimum standard they just aren’t meeting. there’s this weird concept in a lot of folks’ heads from shareholder-oriented social media like Reddit that every community is for them and has to suffer their garbage, but that thankfully isn’t the case here.
it’s also hugely amusing that the default Lemmy behaviour is mod-removed comments get removed from their home instance too
proposal to change the mod button to be a mini icon of a nuke
for maximum points, a small animation of a nuke from orbit
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.
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
It’s very similar to the feeling you get when you read a very middle-quality novel, innit?
I resemble that remark
Well the article says they have 16 (half are only half time) employees working between at least 5 projects, so it looks pretty possible, and most of the smaller engines are made by one or two people
