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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I think we overuse dunning kruger. “useful” is very contextual. I would agree that for many people it would take some specific and dare I say unusual circumstances where learning another language is particularly useful to them. There’s some use in that you get a bit of a puzzle to overcome, you can potentially eventually get good enough to consume content in this other language (though one thing LLMs are pretty good at is translation), maybe you get a more direct exposure to Dovstoyestky (sp?). Cool and all, but probably not going to get them a better job or help them with most life tasks.





  • It also ignored casual gamers. Like I think little phone games are now the biggest market. Honestly I think gamer is such a blanket term it doesn’t have a lot of meaning anymore. I am pretty sure just by how widely digital gaming is now, how many players are like under 10 years old etc like they could NOT be gamergate people.







  • Personally, if I was worried enough about various tracking, I’d want to use the configs with known vetted third party FLOSS apps vs their own built app. For instance, one of the concerns with SurfShark in those sites is the app isn’t vetted and has some custom analytics. Using openVPN plus configs kills app level analytics.

    IDK how much I ought to or should not trust any VPN provider, but for what I need, SurfShark has been great and pretty cheap, though for other reasons I’m a bit disappointed no port forwarding. I would use other tech than commercial VPNs for “deep” privacy.


  • I’m not even sure I’d call the mass deportation in the US Ethnic Clensing. Part of the problem is it targets minorities, but not one specific minority, and the extent it targets minorities under cover of law is targeting non-citizens. Now, I think the whole thing is horrible, and bad policy. But it seems different to me from openly taking a specific group that are citizens and deporting them en masse.

    Now - it’s made worse by the wink and nod the US sort of used for decades and never actually made good / modern immigration policy.

    I think it’s possible to be someone who’s for mass deportation of people not legally in a country and not be someone who supports genocide OR ethnic clensing. It can actually be a simple “rule of law” sort of position. I don’t think MAGA is that sort of person, or at least many seem to be perfectly happy with ethnic clensing as an idea, but I also don’t think they’re actually happy to stop at non-citizens. It’s just they haven’t gotten through the “illegals” yet.

    Maybe a good thread the needle would be if you’re in the country for 10 years (or some amount of time) without getting deported, a “statute of limitations” has then expired and you’re now a citizen. I’m sure that wouldn’t pass many people’s politics, but it would to my mind hold that if the government didn’t care for that long, you can’t be that much of an actual problem, and shouldn’t be kicked out anymore because you’ve also likely integrated into communities etc.



  • I’ve been using it for a while, and I think as @ProfessorYakkington said, it depends on what you’re using it for. I use it for work, and have work pay for it. In this case, I don’t need absolute privacy, I need a contractual data guarantee, and their public TOS is (more than) sufficient for what I need for basic search.

    It’s hard to imagine a functional business relationship in most realms where the company you’re doing business with has 0 knowledge of who you are, especially on the Internet. To provide search results kind of requires “knowing”, at least for a second, what you’re searching for. I think Kagi has a more private model for tailoring the results than traditional search. Instead of hidden filter bubbles, Kagi has transparent “lenses” you can choose to apply or not. The most useful one to me is the “forums” one, which refocuses on actual forums for results, like technet, askubuntu etc…

    Not having to fight off ads, and having a pretty obvious method for them to make money(i.e. you pay them for service) is all to the good IMHO. The results seem to be on par with StartPage, with one difference. The forums lens is better at finding “real answers” for tech questions than StartPage which often finds the same “SPAM” results Google does. This is unsurprising as StartPage is anonymized Google. This may or may not be a good thing. If you’re OK with ads or ad-blocking(you should be) - why pay for Kagi when you can use StartPage for free? The main reasons are to support a different search model, to get the lenses -especially forum focused, and for their GPT like results with citations.