• David Gerard@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone’s best interests

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      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)

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    I was about to jump off DuckDuckGo as its also going down, was going to go for kagi, in very much reconsidering that now… But then what?

    Running your own personal search engine might be a bit much to chew off for most people, but is there a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to, perhaps?

        • self@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          you’re right

          the other poster was most likely trying to stir up shit given we’re on a federated network (see also their other post), but I have been obsessed with the idea of a federated search engine this weekend

          it’s definitely a worthwhile idea, but anything that does federated indexing will have to deal with moderation and abuse prevention first. those are hard problems in ordinary federated networks, but search engines specifically are targets of hostile SEO and spam in ways that few other systems are. those aren’t insurmountable problems though — just ones that need to be solved before federation is practical.

          • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            I dunno. Google is currently overwhelmed by SEO optimized crap (at least I guess so, I stopped using it years ago because of that) and I think a federated system where members have different prioritizations would make SEO optimization very very hard to abuse.

            • self@awful.systems
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              7 months ago

              I hope so! this is something I’d like to implement, once I’ve got some free deployment resources and time.

    • self@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to

      I’d love to contribute to something like this. it might even make for a good replacement for lemmy’s awful built-in search

  • V0ldek@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      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

  • Steve@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • miguel bracamontes@infosec.pub
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    7 months ago

    vlad should’ve stopped at the first time lori told him to stop, definitely, but this whole thing just turned into something else.

    and, what surprises me the most, is this attitude of “either you are completely defending lori or else you are a transphobe, queer hater, dehumanizing piece of shit”. my opinion goes, not to defend the actual piece of shit ceo, but to defend our opinions against anyone, and lori failed to do so. lori’s attitude comes closer to throwing a stone and hiding the hand, even though i agree with lori’s point.

    by no means the poster is forced to debate, i recognize that. and if lori did not want to, perfectly fine. respectable. but the action (and public posts) are still subject to criticism; like mine, that goes against the fact that saying something controversial and then proceeding to be shocked like “omg, how odd, is people being critical of what i said? outrageous!” is funny.

    and the mod banning and removing what he feels are apologist crap is the cherry on top. authoritarian vibes all around.

  • inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • noride@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    I’d say he’s a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.

    • Bipta@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      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?

      • Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org
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        7 months ago

        Repeated messaging or communication when the person has been asked multiple times to stop communicating is harassment, they aren’t on some public channel, it’s a direct message

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          7 months ago

          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.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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            7 months ago

            I’d like to think so, but I think you’re being unduly generous here and actually they’re just entitled shitheads

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      7 months ago

      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 …

      • lad@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        AI obsession

        To be fair, of all the problems with that CEO, this one I fail to see

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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          7 months ago

          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.

          • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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            7 months ago

            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…

  • Halosheep@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • mommykink@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.”

    • random8847@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • dragnet@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      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.

  • ebu@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    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 reply-guy into bloggers’ inboxes who are critical of the way Kagi operates correct misunderstandings about Kagi.