note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone’s best interests
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
JAQing
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions first hit (on google ;) ) which has a good explanation.
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”
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
yyyyeaahhhhh
You sound like a immature, troubled soul. Were you by any chance a reddit mod before?
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
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?
We have even better solutions for them!
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.
You may want to have a look at this list for possible alternatives
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”
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…
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
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.
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)
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.
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
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
(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
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
It’s very similar to the feeling you get when you read a very middle-quality novel, innit?
I resemble that remark
I’ll take my ban for saying that Lori seems like they have a bit of stick up their ass and that the CEO of Kagi seems to react how most people who are offended act.
Not very professional for a CEO to directly react that way to someone, for sure.
Refusing to discuss in fear of being cornered sounds childish to me, especially as a reply to a first message! If your arguments are strong and reasonable, there is absolutely nothing wrong in discussing a subject.
Looking at this, it even sounds great that he would be willing to discuss with users.
I dont understand the hostility really What do you want them to do instead? Just cave in to every request anyone may have?
So in reading the comments from Lori there is a pretty good reason why the initial offer for a call was rejected, this was left out in the main body of the post. Their point was if a private conversation takes place, especially over a call where information isn’t recorded, then the CEO could claim whatever they want took place during that conversation.
Here is the quote, you can find it in the third comment from the top:
“1) If there’s one thing I know about online interactions, it’s not to let someone take you to Crime Scene Number Two. Having a private debate with Vlad about this would mean no witnesses and no accountability, meaning he could claim anything about the discussion. Even moreso when done through a call instead of text.”
So I do agree that it seems a bit hostile for a first response but it does seem to come from experience with these situations. You could give the CEO the benefit of the doubt and say that wasn’t his intentions, but if I was in Lori’s shoes I would have reacted the same way and not given the benefit of the doubt.
It sounds like CEO and OP are both a bit sus. Stay clear of both equally.
ah yes, both sides, the most worthwhile take
You’ve proven to be extremely hostile in this thread. I don’t know which account here is the author but it seems someone here has the power to ban dissidents. Please ban me so I don’t have to see this shit anymore.
why don’t you just remove yourself by not posting here in the first place? good god
we sure will miss out on all 6 of their posts. and of course one of them’s a bad take on AI, in case there was any doubt
“dissidents” dear fuck get over yourself
RISE, COMRADES, AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF…checks notes…ANY MODERATION WHATSOEVER
(e: adding /s, because otherwise this is going to become a fucking magnet for more dipshits)
no no, let them come. the ban button’s still working
I swear I knew these fuckers were dodgy when I saw how UX designed their website was. A better search engine would sell itself even if it looked like craigslist.
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
This post has been a real honeypot, hasn’t it?
(Can we try mixing the honey with a little borax so they bring it back to the nest, like you can do for ants?)
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!
First time this community came up on my feed and it’ll be the last time I read it, as I’m filtering it out. Seems like a couple permanently-online perpetual victims looking for attention. Here’s a tip, kids: getting emailed by someone who wants to refute your assertions is not abnormal. In the real world, people will try to defend themselves when you make allegations about them or their work. Receiving an unsolicited email is not harassment and it does not cross any boundaries.
Burying your head in the sand and yelling “you can’t argue with me because I’m not listening” is how a toddler interacts with their world.
Agreed
oh cool I finally get to tell someone named spez to fuck himself
good fucking riddance
why do people think it’s a sick burn to write “I saw you strangers talking to each other on the other side of the room and I had to come over here to tell you I don’t like you and I *won’t* hang out with you!”
fucking right? like it’s so important to come here and scream a barely changed variant of “I disagree that the ceo is acting unhinged because reason not given” and demand a Very Serious Debate with us
like fuck me, I’ll take a post defending the ceo if it’s not all bad faith debatebro shit and low effort garbage. if it’s a bad point not made maliciously I’ll just downvote it. there’s also a fair few folks (including some of our regulars) who use kagi enough they can’t dump it because there’s no good alternative. that’s fine! this isn’t a fucking purity test, but this is a honeypot for posters we don’t want here. this instance and its communities will never choose growth over quality.
also, if any of these fuckers are going to come at a queer person for sharing a tech opinion they don’t personally like, they’d best have something much stronger than “no I think lori’s the unhinged one” cause we’ve seen this game played before
We all use impure shit, there is no ethical yadda under yadda. I might always have to use Windows. David’s on Twitter. Probably more than half the sub uses Chrome. Every time a North American gets a package in a cardboard box they’re funding one of America’s shittiest GOP megadonors. But ain’t nobody in here defending Musk or Pichai or Uihlein or Nadella like the weird nerds meme.
It’s like the classic comic “we should improve society somewhat!” “And yet you participate in society!”
“you claim to be a socialist and yet you have the money required to survive in a capitalist society, what a hypocrite”
actually, i don’t think possessing the ability to send email entitles you to “”“debate”“” with anyone who publishes material disagreeing with you or the way your company runs, and i’m pretty sure responding with a (polite) “fuck off” is a perfectly reasonable approach to the kinds of people who believe they have an inalienable right to argue with you
I think you might have just made it clear for me why the worst debatelords on the internet are rallying around this asshole. he’s just them but with the perceived prestige of being the CEO of a very momentarily successful internet company
He missed the opportunity of just replying unsubscribe or signing the CEO up for cat facts.
I read the whole transcript and I came to conclusion that the author is , to put it gently, bad faith.
Of course if you’re going to give negative opinion on the product made by a single man he is going to want to talk with you. The opposite would be strange, and denying its right to answer is disrespectful and childish.
Doesn’t mean you have to apologize or concede anything, but giving the man a quick and sincere talk about it is just basic level of dignity.
The OP of that thread seems like the only one in the wrong here. The founder of the company they were criticizing reached out to them directly to clarify some misunderstandings and they instantly took a curt, defensive attitude in their replies. Replying to every email someone sends and rage baiting them doesn’t exactly read: “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
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.
lol, go fuck yourself
You’re really easily offended and you seem to blow everything out of proportion.
we don’t care
apparently you do care enough to reply
what a riveting point to make as your body is converted to chocolate chips
100% agree. The “don’t want to be cornered into a call” sounds more like OP is afraid of being proved wrong. The CEO was very generous in addressing their concerns personally, OP was the one that took that as an attack.
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 mean, I think the harassment is unwarranted and clearly the CEO thinks he’s too important to be ignored. But the content of the email itself seems to make sense to me. Am I missing something?
I’m with you on this, it seems he reached out, then just addressed the points raised in the blog? It feels like doing it this way is better than writing a shit-post blog rebuttal? The blogger then reposted their emails as well without asking permission, which, depending on jurisdiction might be questionable.
I feel this whole post/scenario has been elevated to nothing from nothing.
thanks for your star rating!
