#indieweb 2024-04-15
2024-04-15 UTC
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[Al_Abut] I do track my standing hours but haven’t correlated it that level of detail. The general pattern is that talking meetings are great for standing and so I at least start those in standing desk mode. Those are easy though because they have a little bit of the fun brainstormy “walk and talk” feeling from in-person work. It’s the solo work that’s hard to break the sitting pattern.
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# redblobgames I haven't tracked but it seems like I can think better when I'm sitting :(
# [Al_Abut] Agreed on sitting being more naturally conducive to creativity. The flip side is that it’s so easy to get so lost in thought that I need the reminder to stand as a break, which helps jog the memory and keep the juices flowing.
# [Al_Abut] Voice memos are a good tool sometimes, that’s helped with breaking out of the sitting rut and think through an idea while doing something mindless like cleaning dishes or walking the dogs.
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Unencrypted connections do mean injection" https://seirdy.one/notes/2024/04/15/unencrypted-connections-do-mean-injection/
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# [Ros] 🤔 Curious: has anyone tried https://kagi.com/?
# [Ros] Cory Doctorow was https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#linkdump: _I hadn’t even heard of Kagi…I tried it. It was magic. No, seriously. All those things Google couldn’t find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again._
# [Ros] It’s a paid-for search engine so I was wondering if anyone has tried it, or if anyone see’s anything that I would be unintentionally be signing up for by using it, that I might not want to sign up for if I wasn’t so blind and green?
# tyil Kagi looks interesting, but 10 bucks a month isn't cheap for search
# tyil It seems proprietary too, no reference to any source code, so you'll just have to trust them they are true to their privacy policy, and don't change course to increase their profits down the line
# tyil They're based in the USA, which does not have a track record for companies that respect paying users, nor a government that lets this kind of meta-data just sit untapped
# tyil They're also joining the "AI" bandwagon which could imply they are indeed just looking for profits, no matter the costs
# tyil Their other production-ready product is a browser which only works on Apple devices, again not something that puts them in a better light
# tyil According to their FAQ you'll also need to use Discord if you want support, so privacy doesn't seem _that_ important in the end
# [Al_Abut] All those things are true, but it’s also a small shop where you can get to know the developer. Scale matters.
# tyil Being a small shop doesn't excuse you from those things imo
# tyil If you say you value privacy and then lure people into proprietary environments, you're simply showcasing your values aren't held that highly
# tyil Regardless of how big your company is
# tyil Scale matters, but principles matter more, especially if you're in the privacy business
# tyil Stop having needs for information, and you won't ever have to search for it!
# [Al_Abut] Ha! Very true @to2ds. Wikipedia for info + feed readers for diversion = a refreshingly throwback browsing pattern for me in the last 6 months or so.
# [Joe_Crawford] Frustrating is the case of "ello" which had a great manifesto, but one bought, turned slowly then fast, to shit. And no, small size developer is no guarantee. Ultimately it's a hard business to get into, search. Like social media. People assume it should be there, assume it should be free, and assume it should do a good job. That's table stakes. And no corporate entity short of a nonprofit can possibly hope to do all those things.
# [Joe_Crawford] _but /one/once/ bought_
# [Al_Abut] [Ros] here’s Kagi’s privacy page, seems pretty solid:
# [Al_Abut] https://kagi.com/privacy
# [Ros] ☝ Thank god for the Indie Web! These are all points I appreciate to know to look for (on all sides). I love my NetNewsWire feed, but every once in a while I got to google how to make my washing machine go and wade through a vom slush of SEO-opped crap trying to sell me a radiator.
# [Al_Abut] One thing to note about Kagi that makes it unique is exactly what you pointed out earlier - it’s paid directly by users. The business model matters too, so their incentive is to serve the customers, which are the actual search results users, and not advertisers or other shady actors.
# tyil Every companies incentive is to serve the customers, according to their PR department
# [Ros] “Your call is very important to us”, bleeping for 2 hours straight
# [Al_Abut] Yeah but a “free” search engines customers aren’t the people actually using it, it’s the advertisers. Remember when duckduckgo was a privacy darling? Then the bills came due and now they’re serving supposedly “trusted ads” through Microsoft. Ew.
# tyil And their privacy policy reads positively, I do agree there, but as I said before, you'll just have to trust it is completely true and accurate, and will remain that way forever (or at least for as long as you are a paying customer)
# [Al_Abut] Yep, all solid points
# tyil Nobody here can properly verify if it is, and the things they do seem worrying enough to me to at least consider the option it is not
# tyil If it were free software and we could just browse it ourselves to verify how it works and what exactly it stores, that would be a big improvement
# tyil That would also mean that _if_ they are found out to fuck up, anyone else can take their code and start a competitor that does a better job
# [Ros] I feel like more often than not we have to expect enshittification, and be delighted when it doesn’t happen. Mayke Kagi is good now (like Airbnb was in the very first days), but must keep eyes open expecting it takes a very special company to avoid this.
# [Ros] Though I agree, $10/month is a lot…
# [Ros] But I guess it matters what we decide to value if we don’t want to tolerate vom slush search results
# tyil It's not a price I'm willing to pay to get locked into a proprietary platform which needs additional proprietary, privacy-harming platforms such as Discord to get support
# tyil But I do agree that regular big search engines are awful, especially now that AI is fucking up everything even more
# [Ros] I’ve just finished Jay’s book about The History of the Internet, and reminiscing about how it all started, and the original intentions, and how Google used to be, and then thinking about where I suspect these AI bros are excited to push things (robots do jobs 🤑 ) could make me cry
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# [Al_Abut] Glad you liked it! Thanks to [Ros] for bringing it up, it’s good we have choices.
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# [contact898] I've been using kagi exclusively for a few months and I love it. really justifies the price for me (but then again the price is not a significant dent in my budget)
# [contact898] I also use searchmysite often enough , then move to kagi if there were no satisfying results
# [contact898] I really need to write an article about kagi, it's been in my ideas folder since I switched. maybe in may
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# [Al_Abut] Yeah, I’d love to hear it too. I’ve only used it a little bit and would be curious to hear a longer term review from a more regular user.
# [contact898] yep
# [contact898] to me kagi has all the upsides of duckduckgo, and also good results (where DDG never gave me what I wanted, ESPECIALLY for queries or results in French)
# [Al_Abut] I’m still a DDG user and am falling out of love with it. I don’t know if it’s gotten worse? I used it for years without having to fall back to other search engines, now I feel like it’s barely good enough most of the time.
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# tyil I use searxng.tyil.nl
# [Al_Abut] Oh wow, you roll your own? That’s so badass.
# [Al_Abut] That’s like Neo level skills.
# tyil Its just a docker image running on my k3s cluster :p
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# tyil Its a public instance, anyone can use it, as I understand not everybody has the means or the desire to self-host such a project, similar for my invidious instance
# tyil By being a meta-search engine it also still suffers if the indexed engines have poor results
# tyil But in my experience its a step up from relying on a single popular search engine
# tyil I host other stuff for friends/family as well, I find hosting stuff to be a fun hobby and it improves the lives of people I care about, I have a 15U rack at home with very significant resources for this purpose
# tyil My ISP still grants me static IP assignments, and does not block any port so I can host anything I want, but an ISP with static IP is also not cheaply available to everyone these days
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# [Al_Abut] @tyil++ for a very cool project. Just gave the search a spin and it worked like a charm!
# tyil <3
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[jeremycherfas] Darn. My inability to search Mastodon is a pain because in the last couple of days I read a thread there about how the developer - Vlad? - is not the kind of person one might want him to be. Put me off even trying Kagi.
# tyil [jeremycherfas]: You can try searching here https://aspublic.org/
# [Al_Abut] [jeremycherfas] oh no! That sucks. Can you share the thread?
# [snarfed] I tried http://aspublic.org the other day, it seems broken
# tyil It is definitely not stable
# [jeremycherfas] Didn’t work for me. The original post was by a woman whose name seemed vaguely familiar but I’m afraid I just didn’t register the details.
# [jeremycherfas] I remember she talked about how the dev never wanted to discuss anything publicly, only privately, and had a habit of badgering people who disagree with any of his views.
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[aciccarello] I thought that was exactly the kind of thing the mastodon community would shut down
# [jeremycherfas] I only saw it because someone, possibly Tim Chambers, boosted it. Could have been Tim Bray. I don’t know how to find that sort of thing, but I’ll try.
# [Al_Abut] Ok, found a link to the thread. She makes good points in her blog posts but he seems reasonable in the emails. Not sure it counts as badgering, IMO.
# [Al_Abut] Read to me more like one of those “if it’s not open source then I’m prone to hate anything else” type of hit pieces.
# [Al_Abut] Yet at the same time being prone to the whims of a single developer can also create disconcerting whiplash.
# [Al_Abut] I wonder what good examples of small businesses run with indieweb values are? I’ve been noodling on this more and more this year…
# [snarfed] http://micro.blog is an obvious one
# [snarfed] indieweb values are also obviously different and more specific than the usual "big tech evil" or "closed source evil" cliches. https://indieweb.org/principles
# [jeremycherfas] [Al_Abut]++
# Loqi [indienews] New post: "Front End Study Hall" https://artlung.com/blog/2024/04/15/front-end-study-hall/
# Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "Kagi" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "Kagi is ____", a sentence describing the term)
# Loqi Ello was a microblogging silo similar to Twitter or Tumblr which shut down 2023-07-18 https://indieweb.org/Ello
# Loqi T2 was a social media silo that was an attempt to “build another Twitter” that was announced, launched, raised 1.1m from angels, then partially rebranded as “Pebble” at https://pebble.is (no relation to the watch) a month before it shut down, all in less than a year https://indieweb.org/T2
# [Al_Abut] [Joe_Crawford]++ looking forward to your popup on html/css!
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# [Ros] ↩️ Me too on DDG. I recently realised I still felt like I was on Google when searching which is why Doctorow’s enthusiasm that the search was “pristine” got my attention
# [jeremycherfas] I don’t know enough to opine more generally on the Kagi drama.
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# [aciccarello] What kind of links pages are you liking?
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[qubyte] I’ve been trialling Kagi for a couple of weeks (apparently I don’t use search all that often, I thought I’d have used up the allowance more quickly). I like it _but_ I’m guarded about it. They need to be around a bit longer and not do anything too weird to earn my trust. The only major (practical) downside is that I use Safari at home, and it’s not on the list of search engines you can choose from, so you have to install their extensio
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# [Ros] ↩️ oh heck yeah! Cool tip!
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# catgirlin.space kagi uses the same bangs as ddg (and has new ones i think)
# [Al_Abut] Omfg that worked in my iPhone’s stock safari browser url bar. Amazing tip!
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