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 wonder why that coincidence keeps happening over and over
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
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I’m just trying to fit in
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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.
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Look at me. I am the CEO now.
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Please go be a gamer discord entrant elsewhere
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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.
I’d say he’s a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.
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this sorta shit is why the pinned comment. bye now.
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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
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 …
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…
Dare I say… womp womp?
wat
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…
I found that while Doctorow post weird like an ad in the form of a post.
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.
@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.
I will check out self hosting searxng
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.
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 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.
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are you aware that David isn’t Lori?
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no, it continues to fail the pointless dipshit bar we apply locally
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
i was impressed enough with kagi’s by-default deranking/filtering of seo garbage that i got a year’s subscription a while back. good to know that this is what that money went to. suppose i’ll ride out the subscription (assuming they don’t start injecting ai garbage into search before then) and then find some other alternative
switching topics, but i do find it weird how the Brave integration stuff (which i also only found out about after i got the subscription) hadn’t… bothered me as much? to be exceptionally clear, fuck Brandon Eich and Brave – the planet deserves fewer bigots, crypto grifters, and covid conspiracists – but i can’t put my finger on why Kagi paying to consume Brave’s search API’s just doesn’t cause as much friction with me. honestly it could be the fact that when i pay for Kagi it doesn’t feel like i’m bankrolling Eich and his ads-as-a-service grift, whereas the money for my subscription is definitely paying for Vlad to
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yeah that’s great thanks good to hear you just couldn’t see the “stop emailing me”
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.
That’s a really fucking low bar. Remember to bring plenty of rope, emergency o2, and extra lights, should you go seeking it.
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.
(I’m aware this is just a copy paste of another comment i made on parent level, but that was me fat fingering where to reply, I meant initially to reply to this comment, but ended up replying to OP, anyway I’m gonna keep both)
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.
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.
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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
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
I don’t use Kagi. Frankly, I hadn’t heard of them before this, but I’m not sure what classifies this as unhinged narcissism. I don’t know if there’s more to see but what I saw was an email trying to address concerns with the product.
No “apologist” stuff here, I’m just not sure why this would be classified as unhinged narcissism. Can someone explain? Genuinely would like to know.
oh hey, you’re also an apologist for the bigot Brendan Eich so thanks for making it easy to determine that this stupid bullshit is a pattern for you
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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
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.
yyyyeaahhhhh
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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?
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
It sounds like CEO and OP are both a bit sus. Stay clear of both equally.
ah yes, both sides, the most worthwhile take
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“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
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
