note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone’s best interests
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?
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.
I call that doing a “Tucker Carlson.”
He does jaq off pretty constantly.
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!
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
We have even better solutions for them!
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
You sound like a immature, troubled soul. Were you by any chance a reddit mod before?
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
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
(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.
Omg so much tech jargon in this comment
welcome to TechTakes!
no, welcome wasn’t the right word now was it
maybe this is something you’re looking for idk https://github.com/StractOrg/stract they have their own index and their own crawler
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
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.
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
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”
Agreed
oh cool I finally get to tell someone named spez to fuck himself
This seems like a totally even keeled response though?
If a CEO emails some random unsatisfied user out of the blue with strong “no one must ever be unhappy” energy and they reply with:
I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject
Then the only even keeled response is silence.
You’re wrong. And I’m not interested in any more replies from you on this subject.
Look at me. I am the CEO now.
REEEEEEEEEE don’t respond!!!
Please go be a gamer discord entrant elsewhere
Just making a point.
I’m not interested in any further replies from you on this matter.
weird, we’re not interested in any further replies from you at all. fuck along now
I agree, the user comes off far more unhinged than the CEO. See you in the sin bin.
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.
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.
It seems like he was rude to email you specifically when you told him not to, but the rest is just standard CEO behaviour.
It seems like he had answers/responses to a lot of what you said so I’m still kind of with him (though guardedly). Mainly due to lack of a better option; I do think paid search is the way forward.
Probably what he should have done is a response blog-post that we could have also discussed publically, and at our own leisure.
Reading your article I get why he would have got defensive (regardless of if he’s covering his ass or has genuine counter-arguments).
are you aware that David isn’t Lori?
The post desc is in the first person. People use different usernames for things too.
Does it change the validity of what I said?
admittedly, no: it’s still all just as unhinged ridiculous invalid derpery as it was before you missed the simple rhetorical device of post title phrasing including “we”
yeah so just to be clear: you missed that the title of this thread is barely modified from a dril quote and spent so little time reading the linked article that you missed it wasn’t written by David Gerard?
your original post was just barely not bannable because “CEOs are just like this” is a shitty but valid take. now it’s obvious you didn’t put even a minimal amount of effort into your post.
aaaahem Pixelated Duck quote
oh fuck! im not owned! im not owned!!
🌽
I miss twitter
no, it continues to fail the pointless dipshit bar we apply locally
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.
I’m just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it’s basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.
I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don’t want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn’t use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don’t use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it’s more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.
We need open search. Like Wikipedia for search, or something.
I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven’t checked them all out myself yet.
are you able to let us know what you use Mojeek for? Just interested in where we slot in
Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet
Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.
It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let’s me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn’t rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you’ll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.
With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.
Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I’ve shared this with the wider team.
This being said, if you have things that you’d like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there’s a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏
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
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”
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
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.
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…
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.
I am coming from cold on this, I knew kagi existed, It was on my bucket list to do research before even considering any trial, well kagi is not for me since I will never make an account to search web.
That being said, I read through both the blog and the email chain, and I was still so confused on whose side to take i read through OP’s other articles and comments and oh my god. Only thing i concluded is Vlad may have crossed boundaries in terms of emailing someone against their wishes, but the email chain wasn’t enough for me conclude he is narcisst, OP however is definitely pot calling the kettle black.
oh cool there’s also anti-trans shit in your recent post history, cause of course there is
nice try but we know the contents of lori’s blog and posts elsewhere and if you’ve got an issue with a queer person posting their takes on tech and being queer, you can fuck on off of TechTakes
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) people 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 Making 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…
wat
Yeah this is a big overreaction to someone defending their life’s work. I see nothing wrong here. The writer’s immediate and thorough disinterest in discussion doesn’t make the owner wrong to explain, and to call it mansplaining when you say you won’t even read it?
Repeated messaging or communication when the person has been asked multiple times to stop communicating is harassment, they aren’t on some public channel where he’s explaining to the masses, he’s just harassing someone who’s asked him multiple times to stop.
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.
Maybe it’ll stop being evangelized so heavily in every single search engine thread now, honestly just manipulative behavior from the CEO
We can only hope. I like the idea, the execution is just increasingly becoming shite.
Not immediately, I guess. But it’s sad to see that good things don’t just happen themselves
I don’t want to enagage with you on this while I keep engaging with you.
If the CEO respected peoples boundaries, all communication from him should have stopped right then, meaning there would be nothing to “keep engaging” with. It’s a massive red flag for both him and you.
Of course if they respected peoples boundaries they wouldn’t have been tracking them down and emailing them in the first place, but at least that’s a grey area.
I don’t know if “no, I’m not interested” counts as engagement…
Right, that’d be like counting a verbal rejection as a date lmao
