AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

New one seems fine to me, haven’t had any issues with it, haven’t been privy to any malicious behavior or past actions that the developers might have done, so personally I find it pretty trustworthy.

it was never as simple as “pick file, send file”.

Not really what Syncthing’s for. Localsend is definitely much better suited for that. (though there is the option on the unofficial Syncthing Android app to use the Android share feature to “save to Syncthing”, then pick which folder you want Syncthing to save it to before syncing it to whatever devices that folder is synced with, though again, not really made for that as a core feature, Localsend is better for that)

Syncthing is more for if you just want a folder on one device to be replicated to another device. For example, my Camera folder on my phone syncs to my PC so I always have a second copy of all my photos by default.

This company is known for this. To clarify, I mean known for making deliberately inflammatory ads, then showing them as obtrusively or carelessly as possible, because it gets people to post about it.

The only reason their company got popular in the first place was when they put these ads everywhere to piss people off and generate engagement.

https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-clickbait-stop-hiring-humans-marketing-campaign-made-artisan-go-viral

“The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait”

This guerrilla marketing approach, combined with traditional media coverage and tactics, led to significant success. Artisan saw a remarkable +197% growth in brand search traffic, quickly establishing itself as the most well-known AI employee creator.

Exactly. AI slop is just that. Slop.

If it’s just an AI doing something useful, we don’t call it slop, we just call it AI.

When Google’s AlphaFold predicted the folding of over 200 million protein structures, and won a nobel prize for it, I don’t think anyone would call all the research using it to make cures to diseases slop.

On the plus side, this kills the SEO market.

IMO this doesn’t kill the SEO market, it just brings it in-house, just like Google has tried to do with all kinds of other things. If you’ve ever seen the little dropdown question options in Google’s search results page that give you the answer right from the website without you having to visit it, you know what I’m talking about.

Just like the dropdowns, which simply take the website and use it as a way for Google to show you the answer rather than the site itself, this doesn’t kill the market for SEO, it just allows Google to decide how to “optimize” the results from their search engine to you, rather than the site itself, and earn more of a profit from it as a result.

The primary source being cited by most of the articles is U.S. Gov Analytics, (or the less reliable Statcounter, which I wouldn’t rely on.) U.S. Gov Analytics currently places it at around 4.7% over the last 30 days, 4.4% this calendar year, and 5.6% the last calendar year. It was about 6%-ish when most articles were written about the 6% number for the first time.

Steam, so basically just gamers and not regular desktop users, has it more around 2.3%.

This is something we’re gonna see a lot more of, and I don’t mean specifically “LLMs doing privacy violations”, though that’ll probably be a lot of it.

LLMs are really good at taking unstructured data (e.g. all your social media posts, usernames, aliases, writing style, hints about your location, time of activity, etc) and turning it into structured data. (e.g. name=this, city=that, political preference=them, etc). Why do you think most early uses of LLMs that were quickly deployed were just article summarizer tools? Unstructured data (articles) > Structured data (bullet points)

This is really good for surveillance, because it means they can take all your activity and condense it down into something that’s easier to parse and correlate. Other tools have existed to do this for a long time, (mostly in the hands of intelligence agencies) but this just makes it more accessible and easy to use, and adds some complexity to how it can operate.

I think we’re gonna see a lot more use of LLMs for things like this. Taking something unstructured, and making it structured, because hallucinations and things like that are a lot less common when the task is just reorganizing existing information, rather than coming up with something new. (though of course, hallucinations will never go away, and are still gonna be pretty prevalent)

That could be deanonymizing your accounts, or it could just be things like looking through all your files to sort them into better predefined categories, or things like what Mozilla does with their tab groups where you can have it suggest other tabs that would fit into that group, and a local model figures out which tabs belong in which topic (with pretty good accuracy in my experience.)

Unfortunately, companies have very little interest in making your life easier by doing things like sorting your files for you, because they already are quite disinterested in making their systems easy to use if it doesn’t directly generate a profit (cough cough- Microslop), and have a much larger interest in doing things like tracking you to sell you some new crap.

Exactly. You can get away without using the terminal on a lot of linux distros in the same way you can get away without using CMD on Windows… until one very specific thing breaks and suddenly it’s time to run sfc /scannow for the millionth time.

Not all of those videos are fully AI-generated, at least not entirely. (voices and video itself are real, script is AI-generated) They are still slop content, though.

From what I can tell, most of the voices are real (you can hear changes in microphone types & background noises, reverb, natural stuttering, accent changes, proper tone, etc on many of them) but a lot of the scripts seem AI-generated, along with the actual face in the thumbnail, even when the voice is real.

Most of the videos are being generated by a semi-large media generating organization who just pumps out algorithmically optimized videos. I did see a few, mostly from smaller creators, that were entirely AI-voiced as well, though.

I think most of them were just copying the thumbnail design because it got clicks. Not uncommon on YouTube unfortunately.

For anyone curious, the videos are basically just them scrolling through the websites of each, while reading off a paragraph or two of general information about what each is that has that sort of AI-generated tone and order to it.

The video creation process is literally as simple as:

1. Ask ChatGPT “write me a script for a short video talking about what Actual Budget is vs. Firefly III”
2. Record yourself auto-scrolling slowly through the Actual Budget website, then the same for the Firefly III website
3. Record a voiceover of you just reading word-for-word the script from ChatGPT
4. Slap them on top of each other
5. Clone the thumbnail from the other channels that got the most clicks, just like everyone else is doing, so now all of your videos look the same.

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.

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”

Kagi has a great little feed you can use to randomly explore smallweb blogs. I’d recommend it!

https://kagi.com/smallweb/

As an example, here’s this site dedicated to cataloguing the different variations of Disney park trash cans!
https://www.magicaltrash.com/

I have a feeling it’ll simply grow more in popularity, since stable release will probably make a lot more people feel more comfortable recommending it to people, myself included.

Right now, I don’t treat it as if it’s a backup in any way due to its beta nature, and I hope that can change.

I don’t think a lot of these people understand what it means for them to be a public servant. This is not a job where you put your interests first. You are quite literally a servant to your constituents, and your entire purpose during your term is to serve their wishes, to carry out the will of the people. The amount of people that will get elected into a role like that, then be shocked when the people that elected them ask them to do things for them is baffling to me.

The fuel rates are currently about $0.22/gallon, and are going up to $1.06/gallon over 5 years, but even that wouldn’t put them on par with commercial flights (they pay 0.6% of the fees, but use 7% of resources, $1.06 divided by $0.22 gets you 4.81x the current 0.6%, which is still 2.9% of the fees, while using 7% of FAA resources.)

So even with the current fuel rate increases, private jets would still be paying less than half of what they end up using.

• Tickets for flights are taxed at 7.5% to pay for the FAA
• Average flight with many passengers pays over $2,300 per flight
• Private jets don’t have tickets to be taxed, are only taxed on fuel
• Private jets pay an average of about $60 in FAA fees
• Private jets take up about 7% of the FAA’s resources, but only make up a fraction of a percent of the revenue
• Thus when you pay the FAA fees on your economy class ticket, you’re subsidizing operating the FAA for private jet flights, that don’t pay enough to cover their costs.

I know. I also know not everyone likes installing extensions in their browser because they can be a security risk, and they can even change your browser fingerprint (which makes your browser more trackable), compared to bookmarklets, which do not.

I do the same thing here. I even use a bookmarklet that converts a current tab in reddit.com to an old.reddit.com link.

(code if anyone’s interested) javascript:(function() { var currentUrl = window.location.href; var newUrl = currentUrl.replace(/^https:\/\/www\.reddit\.com/, 'https://old.reddit.com/'); window.location.href = newUrl; })();

Don’t forget racist, too!

They don’t delete your content, they just redact your username and disassociate each individual comment from your larger profile so nobody could, for example, click on the deleted user who posted a comment in r/abc and see they also posted a particular comment in r/xyz.

The reason tools like Redact (many of them all use this same name lol) have taken off in popularity is because they delete, or redact the contents of your posts before you delete the account, thus making even that vestigial data worthless.