ahkurtz

I started subscribing in like October and haven't been searching much since the new year cause I've been really busy. I think I have also noticed this quality degradation, and also the results taking much longer. I'm not gonna say it's useless but I understand. So I can dislike it for that reason with you.

As far as politics... for a lot of people not relying on a single particular global megacorp (who tend to extend the soft-power of a given state or economic bloc) for access to information is a semi-political choice. There is very much an inescapable concern of "who chooses what I get to see and what are their incentives" that can't really be reduced to "I don't care about politics". It cannot be separated from politics, which is why people have such strong feelings about it. I'm not sure that's what people really mean though, I think they talk past each other a lot on this topic. No disrespect meant to you and I appreciate your comments.

I really like the idea that they'd hedge and not give any single index overwhelming leverage over what Kagi users are fed, and conveniently for me (who does care a bit about the who of the thing) if they stick to that approach it should provide more diversity of contemporaneous political messaging... so it can also please the (I think somewhat tedious) "no politics" crowd at the same time. So that seems good?

Tradeoffs maybe, and give them some more time to figure it out, incorporate more indices?

As a pretty new subscriber, can you tell me a bit more about this? Using bing under the hood is part of what eventually made me leave DDG. And I'm not particularly excited about using brave services.

When what this change made and what does it do?

What's your self-hosted choice of the moment?

Isn't there something really perfect about people working on a language model either not trying or outright failing to use that language model to tell them if their project name already exists?

On their github they reference a related project called "HuggingFace" so you know the sky's the limit with the names in this field, could have been called anything else really.

I don't understand why people don't instantly recognize this as an evolution in the cat and mouse game of "is this search result actually an ad". You can't inspect the production model, you can't inspect the inputs, and when this is the only tool you have left to find information, it's over for you. And for many things is society.

It's been a long time since most ads served were necessary to have a successful business (try to imagine/remember a world without ad platforms or appropriate regulations against their excess). It's just that if anything could be an ad, like say your TV or your toilet, then a non-ad product has to compete with people loss-leading to monetize their ad/surveillance surface. And then everything becomes filled with ads.

A lot of words to say: "cutting short term spend to bolster the stock price for investors who are worried about the USD peg"

Prisoner's dilemma is solved and not a dilemma with repeat rounds (aka trust and relationships). Like the real world. This fits well with the fact that cooperation works, and is why civilization exists.

It's complicated. Yes, Apple is creating an advertising monopoly for themselves (obviously only for folks within their ecosystem). No I don't like that personally.

Are they replicating the no-rules surveillance systems of the existing ad market? I have no evidence for that. I've been looking but I haven't seen it.

Saying "the only reason" Apple is countering Google and Facebook here is ad revenue completely ignores what horribly dishonest and harmful stewards of the ads ecosystem these two companies have been. Both companies have knowingly broken the rules of every platform they exist on (not just Apple platform) to work around device permissions to scoop up personal data they have been EXPLICITLY told by the user not to take. Google just had to pay several hundred million dollars for lying to customers about data capture opt-in. Facebook has settled many times as well, and has repeatedly used private APIs and exploits to gather contact info and messaging data. They have also shown no principle whatsoever about who can use that data and for what purpose. Facebook goes so far as to claim in public hearings (and in court) they don't even know how much data they gather or where it is or who can access it.

As tracking grows its access to more devices and more personal data, and as ads appear on more and more surfaces (Google and FB stated goal is every surface btw), the negative effects of this abusive behavior have become visible after decades of relative invisibility to consumers. "Why is my music app giving me podcasts about pregnancy while I'm in the car?", "Amazon shopping (which my partner can see) is showing pregnancy test promotions", etc. And still invisible, down the rabbit hole, very harmful uses of this information for individuals, businesses, and entire geopolitical regimes. I used the pregnancy example for a very pointed reason if you have been following tech concerns in USA related to political rights.

When you push the idea that Apple's product moves are just as bad as our current status quo, I cannot agree. I think you will be proven wrong about Apple's endgame (for at least the next decade, all corporate cultures change). At the very least we can be happy for a time spiting the existing tracking monopoly - who have been hurting us for a long time with no challenge. They are losing a ton of money. May it continue.

I am hopeful seeing an existential threat to healthy society being trimmed down, even if the people doing the cutting (Apple) refuse to pull it out at the root.

You have posted many times in the thread saying the same thing, but slightly moderated because you got flagged.

You said elsewhere "things change" regarding labor force quality. They do. Asian labor across the board, but especially in China, has been rapidly increasing in cost while for example USA labor is stagnant in overall cost. Apple is medium-term going to be priced out of China just by labor costs. It is actually smart in a real-politik sense (and a business sense you deny) for labor sourcing to start looking a lot more broadly at different countries on a cost basis. USA is rich in some measures, but in terms of purchasing power and compensation of much of working class, it no longer is.

As for the quality of USA workers you've commented on a lot, I'll give you there is a serious decline in education. Saying they are slow or lazy shows you don't know anything about USA. The vast majority of the country is working itself to death and the life expectancy is cratering. As sad and reprehensible as it is, from the kind of logic you're using, a desperate and broken workforce is a GREAT business opportunity.

There is something beyond "American Exceptionalism" and "Asian Exceptionalism" and I think you really need to find it.

Apple Music is their biggest competitor and they are very close in terms of userbase size. Apple Music is also (along with Tidal) one of the top places people go when they leave Spotify (for the various good reasons one might leave Spotify). Not much business point in trying to go after Google. The 30% cut IS a big deal but that's not the primary reason.

As for why so many companies target Apple's level of control over their ecosystem (even if they don't directly compete on a service) ... well ... there's the whole data privacy and anti-ad-tracking thing they have been doing. Nearly all SaaS businesses are also ad or surveillance businesses either primarily or on the side. Most of the press and legal challenges mounted against Apple are attempting to remove Apple's policy-level control over what is deployed on devices.

There is so much more than just the 30% cut.

No, they didn't buy GitHub to shut Atom down. But they did create VSCode to cut off GitHub's growing expansion of their business through Atom. They could have just extended Atom with Azure plugins etc, but instead they essentially forked it and poured tons of resources and hundreds of developers into it. That effort helped suppress the valuation of GitHub, so that they could buy it for cheaper (or at all?).

The revenue generating upsell for VSCode is already here and it IS GitHub Codespaces. They are going to add features you can't live without based off code synthesis (sky's really the limit here) and gate those off saying it can't run locally because it's too resource intensive. They'll charge you (or your company) by the second for all usage.

It would be much harder or impossible for them to do this if Atom and an independent GitHub had been further entrenching in this space for the last decade.

Many of the biggest developer tooling projects big corp are building now existentially threaten smaller developers and apps, by design.

Don't give Microsoft a pass here.

Producing more value than you are compensated for ... hmmm what does that sound like? You could say it sounds like the human condition. Which employees in the pyramid do you think have the worst scalar here?

Maybe people have read it but don't think renaming "ideas" and "empathy" to "emotional contagion" is particularly groundbreaking or constructive.

This description is not reassuring in any way.

There are a lot of both old and recent reasons to believe both of these examples have extremely terrible judgment.

For me, in this case, the specific arguments are exactly what matters. If your company claims a solid economic rationale they should provide one. I'm not sure how it's possible you've had this policy this long and can't come out swinging on this topic. Claiming fairness vaguely is not enough to gain goodwill. It's easy to assume greed and desire for control over employees in this remuneration policy, and I'm quite happy to make that argument if your company needs that feedback. You probably don't want people like me in your company, because I am annoying, but I do have a lot of diverse experience and an abiding concern for the health of my company and coworkers. If this policy doesn't reflect a deep level of antipathy about contributors (currently) high wages, and if the company would reverse this policy in considerance, people like me would be in the door tomorrow - thousands of us. You recently hired someone I love and deeply respect professionally, so I hope your company plans to take good care of them. They deserve it, and you do to. Everyone deserves it, especially if they can make it in the door in this new economy. I'm arguing for you too, you personally, if you can see that. End "brain-drain" in USA (and its associated economic spheres).