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)
Im not sure what JAQing is.
I appreciate your response thanks
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”
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
Just asking questions here, but do you think a wolverine would beat a mechabadger?
yes, I’ve seen it
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow’s post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.
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.
Isn’t the DDG guy an asshole as well though?
But you don’t pay him.
He’s not getting paid?
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
Removed
I’m just trying to fit in
