this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (12 children)

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

[–] Anticorp 62 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Everyone who disagrees with me will be removed from the conversation.

Great discussion format you have there. Don't worry about banning me, I'll see myself out.

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[–] breadsmasher 61 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Can I ask a sincere question? whats a tech sociopath apologist, could you demonstrate an example?

Again, im sincerely genuinely asking

[–] [email protected] 58 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 42 points 7 months ago (22 children)

(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)

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[–] cosmicrookie 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No reason following this community when you can't have an opinion. Feels like Reddit? I'm out.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 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

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 7 months ago (1 children)
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[–] herescunty 53 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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?

[–] herescunty 19 points 7 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 7 months ago

they did in fact reach at least 20,000 users, and to celebrate they set up a business entity in Germany (they are currently US based), in order to start a tiny little t-shirt printing company. And their goal was to print 20,000 t-shirts to give out, FOR FREE, to their first 20,000 users (with users paying only shipping costs). But I cannot stress enough, they did not just spend money on 20,000 tshirts to give out, they set up a whole new business entity in Germany to run their own t-shirt printing operation, with its own building and warehouse and employee(s? I get the sense it's one guy but I don't know). And this cost them 1/3 of their $670k funding round. One, fucking, third. For t-shirts. Did I mention that the t-shirts don't even have the Kagi name on them? Just the Kagi dog mascot

0% interest rate behavior

[–] [email protected] 41 points 7 months ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I KNOW RIGHT

they just got THE BEST word of mouth

and then Vlad just ...

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[–] ikidd 36 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] inb4_FoundTheVegan 32 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] MetaCubed 29 points 7 months ago (11 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Feel entirely free to use Kagi, just remember that it's run by an idiot and could blow up at any moment.

[–] MetaCubed 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

basically the whole area is gallopping enshittification. Until this blowup, I had seriously been considering Kagi too.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

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 ...

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (11 children)

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.

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[–] SpaceNoodle 21 points 7 months ago

I knew something was fucky about that cultish service.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

He missed the opportunity of just replying unsubscribe or signing the CEO up for cat facts.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (4 children)

That he called the blog post 'an incredible amount of research' is quite odd. Either it is a failed attempt at sucking up, or a sign Vlad has a very bad idea of what research is.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

It's incredible because the blogger based their beliefs off of evidence and reality instead of markov chains and hallucinations.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (8 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'll be honest, I wanted to like Kagi because Google has become so useless. But I've not had any better success finding things on it than Google.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (13 children)

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?

Edit: and before anyone ironically says "Google that yourself", I already searched and found a lot of blog posts, GitHub projects, but nothing concrete, no "that's the one!" Project that is and open source and federated...

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Wait whats this about AI? Can anyone explain? I just started the free trial because i was tired of shitty google results, are they literally doing the same thing now?

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