More websites should do that. Bring back more fun throbbers! (yes, that is actually what they are called)

Received? GrapheneOS are the authors of their software, they don’t receive.

That’s how this language is commonly used. “Received” is just in place of what you’d more commonly hear as “gets.”

So for example, “Gmail gets new feature that allows users to X” Gmail didn’t receive it from somewhere else, but Gmail got a new feature.

GrapheneOS “receiving” an experimental build is linguistically identical to saying “GrapheneOS gets new update that does X”

I agree the article is pretty badly done, but that part I think is fairly normal. Heard that used by all sorts of outlets.

Valued at $700m, would sell for less than that probably but still, I doubt the employees could scrounge up hundreds of millions of dollars, even with loans, let alone from their own pockets.

Just after you wake up, for about 30-60 minutes, you’re in a state known as sleep inertia. The CDC recommends not doing critical tasks during this period, but that could just be because it affects performance. They do also say that bright light can more quickly restore performance, which a phone screen most certainly is.

So, let’s look into it a bit more. Granted, I can’t find anything more than a couple psychologists saying this, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems like it mostly does come down to you priming your brain for distraction, as was initially stated. You have the least amount of built-up fatigue when you wake up, but if you go on the app that is designed to take as much time and attention of yours as possible, then you are giving away your least-fatigued time of the day to social media, before you do anything productive.

The more things you do in a day, the more fatigued your brain gets, and the harder it is to actually get other things done afterward. On top of that, it can also just be a behavioral thing. If you repeatedly get on your phone every time after you wake up, you are telling your brain “waking up = get on phone,” and not something like “waking up = get out of bed and brush teeth” or “waking up = get breakfast.”

This can build a dependency over time, which then leads you to, as previously mentioned, taking the time you are least mentally fatigued, fatiguing your brain with high-speed flows of information, and only then actually expending the remainder of your energy on everything else you need to do.

I’m tempted to hope that this is going to be better overall, as having one company highly focused on making memory for specifically AI datacenters will probably be a bit more efficient than every memory company doing both at the same time, meaning the other companies could theoretically focus more on consumer markets…

But I think we all know the reality is that they’ll probably just end up convincing other businesses to do the same, RAM prices will inflate even higher, memory costs for AI datacenters will multiply as well, but the infinite money pit of AI investment will just lead to the chips being bought regardless.

That’s the greatest thing about this. I’ve tried multiple times to set up Waydroid and it never worked properly, and had a ton of issues with my system for reasons I still can’t figure out.

If there’s one thing Valve’s incredibly good at, it’s providing easy to use services. Proton is damn easy to set up, and once it is, you can run all sorts of shit you would otherwise have a hard time running.

I have a feeling Lepton will be very similar, and that’s what makes it so cool compared to regular 'ol Waydroid.

I forgot about Highlights! Loved that shit growing up.

It can often still have better range, even within an apartment building, since 2.4GHz will penetrates walls easier.

However, interference can be different, because 5Ghz has more channels, and many devices still primarily operate on 2.4GHz instead of 5GHz, meaning 5GHz can be interfered with less than 2.4GHz.

At the end of the day, it will depend on your environment, as interference can be a big factor, but regardless, you’ll almost always find you have better, consistent signal range with 2.4GHz than 5GHz, because it’s just that much better at penetrating solid objects, irrespective of interference.

For real. It feels like any time anybody has anything good, some company finds a way to screw it up, sometimes without even benefiting themselves in the end. I’m tired of this bs.

I could eat a party size bag of these things and still be craving more.

Good ass snack.

potentially possible
necessarily required

That’s a better photo of it than their own marketing photos 😂

Glad you could confirm its identity!

Doesn’t even register in WHOIS searches anymore for me. Apparently Namecheap will sell it to you for $2.98.

They also literally just released SlopStop as a community-based filtering mechanism that’ll downrank AI slop, with the CEO saying “We believe AI slop is an existential threat to an internet that should belong to humans. This is the first step towards our ultimate goal: to kill AI slop so you never see it again.”

Apparently they’ll be using this to train something that can identify AI slop better based on the database of user-reported sites, and they’ll be making the database open.

Their AI integration philosophy feels incredibly reasonable to me with how out of the way it is, how it properly cites its sources and shows how much of the answer each one influenced, and how the search results are often so good it doesn’t even feel like you need the AI model, and this just sweetens the deal.

I can understand having issues with Kagi, they’re a company, after all, but their stance and actions feel very good thus far.

That concern I can get.

While I don’t think Mozilla is currently doing anything I’d say is super objectionable, or really Facebook-like, they could certainly move more that direction in the future, and then I’d have a problem with it.

I don’t have a problem with ads as a method of funding something, as long as you can either disable/block them, or pay to have them removed, but I think they should be a last resort, not a primary source of revenue, lest Firefox turn into a browser that just crams ads in every single spot it can until the browsing experience is garbage.

Yes, that’s the thing:

Facebook doesn’t “sell” your information either.

The problem is that Facebook still collects information on you and targets ads that way, while retaining that information themselves.

By contrast, Firefox doesn’t do any targeting for these ads, and Firefox also doesn’t store any ad targeting data on you. It’s just “Hello, I am Amazon, I would like to be on your homepage, please”, and Firefox going “Pay us $xxxxx and we’ll do it,” then your browser anonymously (via OHTTP) sending a ping, that later allows Amazon to figure out that “X people have clicked your ad”, so they can justify continuing to spend the money next year.

Yes, Amazon doesn’t get your info, but neither does Mozilla. Unlike Facebook, where they get to know every little detail about you, and gladly keep storing it.

They’re selling “someone, somewhere clicked your ad”. That’s it. No other data about you is ever sent.

You seem to be pretty hell-bent on defending Mozilla here. You work for them or something?

Nope. (though for transparency, I have briefly talked to someone who does currently work for them) I just want my browser to continue being funded, and if they can do something that is extremely privacy-preserving that doesn’t rely on Google (who gives them the majority of their money) for revenue, then I will be in favor of that existing as an option, and I won’t justify acting as though “ping that says someone somewhere clicked this ad” is the same as “we have received money in exchange for giving up your browsing history”

They started out more idealistic, but then they realized that things are expensive and there’s money to be made, so they sold out a little. It happens.

Which is unfortunate. I wish they didn’t have to do things like this, because at the end of the day, ads are still ads. I just think that it’s silly to say that they are selling your information, when the information being sold is in no way identifying, which is why I think I’m coming off as defensive here. (sorry for that, I’m bad at doing tone in replies online)

The alternative is just Mozilla paywalling features, heavily pushing other in-house ones like their VPN (which is just Mullvad but more expensive), or having to be more dependent on Google, and I don’t want that. This just feels incredibly reasonable to me in comparison.

There’s a lot of issues with that analysis.

Oh and they own a t-shirt factory

The linked article literally states that they partnered with a small print shop, not that they own it. It says they bought warehouse space to store and fulfill orders. Now granted, yes, spending that much money on T-shirts can be a bad idea financially, but they do act as marketing because they get people talking, even if the brand name isn’t on the shirt. This recoups the cost over time.

Kagi also heavily relies on organic marketing, so it makes total sense.

First of all, as a project, Kagi stretches itself way too thin. “Kagi” isn’t just Kagi Search, it’s also a whole slew of AI tools, a Mac-only web browser called Orion, and right now they are planning on launching an email service as well.

The AI tools are easily deployed and based on standard open-source tooling. Not that hard to maintain, yet their AI integrations are genuinely much better than the competition, which draws in a lot of people who pay for their higher-priced plan just for heavy AI users.

Orion is a fork, with minimal additional bloat. Again, not terribly hard to maintain.

None of these projects are particularly profitable, so it’s not a case of one subsidizing the other

Their entire business model is based around a subscription. No individual service is “profitable,” it’s just “part of what you get for your subscription.”

and when they announced Kagi Email even their most dedicated userbase (aka the types who hang around in a discord for a search engine) seemed largely disinterested.

Granted, though the hardest part for this is just making a frontend, which they’ve already done. There are many free and open source backends for hosting email services. They haven’t promoted it heavily, and my assumption is because they’re keeping it more on the down-low until they fix bugs, build out more features, and are sure it’s something they can more heavily advertise.

Kagi was not paying sales tax for two years and they finally have to pay up. They just…didn’t do it. Didn’t think it was important? I have no idea why. Their reactions made it sound like they owed previous taxes, not that they just now had to pay them. They genuinely made it sound like they only just now realized they needed to figure out sales tax. It’s a baffling thing to me and it meant a change in prices for users that some people were not thrilled with.

And they later explained it’s because there’s a threshold of buyers you have to pass before paying sales tax, and they did not know if they would ever pass that mark, and later had to scramble due to new user growth to make that happen.

Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they’re often wrong

The vast majority of my answers from Kagi’s AI were right, when other search engines were all wrong. (yes, I did actually check real sources to confirm) This is just a strawman of reality. Kagi even shows you what % of the LLM’s response was derived from which source, whereas others leave you in the dark.

But the developers of Kagi fully believe that this is what search engines should be, a bunch of AI tools so that you don’t even need to read primary sources anymore.

Oh, is that why Kagi said in the post also linked by the author of that post: “Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately. They have a significant risk of generating incorrect information or fabricating details”, “AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it”, and “AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)”

I’m not gonna keep going through every single thing point-by-point here since that’d take forever, but a lot of this is basically just taking minor issues, like the CEO posting about hopeful uses of AI, or talking about completely normal expectations to have of privacy when you trust a company with information, then blowing it out of proportion and acting as though this is a death blow for the service.

The author of the post quite literally talks about how “Kagi’s dedication to privacy falls apart for me”, saying they don’t seem to actually care about user privacy… when just a few months later, they released Privacy Pass, which allows you to cryptographically prove you have a membership without revealing your identity, and to continue using Kagi that way. Not really something someone who doesn’t care about privacy would do.

Overall, this just reads to me as:

1. They could be doing bad financially because of these decisions I didn’t like them doing
2. Okay so they said they were profitable currently even after all that but now they’re doing too many things (which could all bring in new users that would pay them)
3. Okay so people are paying for and using the things but there’s no way they could possibly use AI in any good way
4. I’ve now ignored anybody saying the tools are actually better than others or are working well, but just in case you’re not convinced, they don’t care about privacy!
5. I know they explained the ways in which companies are going to get data on you and there is going to be a degree of trust when using a service that requires things like payment information but I still think they don’t actually care about privacy!

I’m not saying all the points are completely false or don’t mean anything, but a lot of this really does feel like just taking something relatively small (giving out a bunch of T-shirts during a time the company is primarily trying to grow its user count via organic marketing), acting as though it’s both the current and permanent future position of the entire company and will also lead to the worst possible outcome, then moving on to another thing, and doing that until there’s nothing left to complain about.

Kagi can have its own problems, but a lot of these just aren’t it.

As a person using Kagi myself:

1. The search results are the best I’ve ever had. period, full stop.
2. The AI models are commonly correct, good at citing sources, out of the way till you ask for them, and feel secondary to the search experience
3. The cost is more than reasonable
4. Regular small updates with new tools have been incredibly nice to have (such as the Kagi news feed, which is great at sourcing good news from a variety of sources, or the Universal Summarizer, which is great at providing alternative, more natural sounding and accurate translations compared to Google Translate or DeepL)

I haven’t really had any complaints, and contrasting it with this guy’s post, it just reads like someone complaining about something they’ve never even used. Yes, you can complain about something you haven’t yourself used, but the entire post is just “here’s anything even minor that I think could be an issue if it were taken to the extremes”

“Selling personal data” and “selling ads that we can tell if they are clicked by an anonymous user” are completely different, in my eyes at least.

“Selling personal data” sounds like someone taking your personally identifiable information and giving it to someone for money. What they’re doing isn’t that, so they’re not “selling personal data”

They’re selling ad views, not your information.

Not in all cases.

As an example, Firefox has the option of sponsored results, which send anonymized technical data when a link is clicked, essentially just saying “hey, this got an ad click, add it to the total.” It doesn’t send info about you, your identity, or your other browsing habits.

This counts as a “sale” even though no actual identifying information about you was exchanged. They mention this in the paragraphs I attached, when they talk about data sent via OHTTP.

I don’t think any reasonable person would consider a packet being sent saying “some unknown user, somewhere in the world clicked your sponsored post” as “selling your personal information”, but that’s how the CCPA could be used to classify it, so to avoid getting in legal trouble, Firefox can’t technically say that they “never sell your data”, even if that’s the extent of it.