As somebody that’s a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.

While I’d say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it’s also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.

Of course, that’s because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don’t even use your general location to prioritize results. It’s an interesting balancing act and I’m not quite sure they’ve hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I’m happy with the overall experience currently.

Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.

And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

While I’d highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.

The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.

The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.

Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan’s previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.

Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it’s important that we know who’s making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.

Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication

Heavily depends, IMO.

Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.

It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.

I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.

He came to suck years later.

At the time he was considerably farther to the left than the rest of the field short of Dennis Kucinich. Opposition to the Iraq war was central to his campaign when half the party was still trying to justify it. He wanted to push universal healthcare before that was a common position within the party. He was on the cutting edge of promoting gay rights and was extremely popular in the gay community when that community didn’t have the voice it does now. His stint as DNC chair built real party infrastructure and helped set the stage for Obama’s 2008 run.

The country – and the Democratic Party – were considerably more conservative 20 years ago and he definitely helped push things toward where we are now.

That said, he’s absolutely said and done some things in recent year that make it pretty clear he’s not the progressive vanguard he was back then. He’s stood still, and arguably regressed, while the country kept moving. It’s unfortunate. But I think it’s also a mistake to dismiss him outright; he was a pretty important figure in getting the party to where it is now.

In a vacuum, sure, but it also completely tracks with Sam Altman’s behavior outside of OpenAI.

Employees at previous companies he’s run had expressed very similar concerns about Altman acting in dishonest and manipulative ways. At his most high profile gig before OpenAi, Paul Graham flew from London to San Francisco to personally (and quietly) fire him from Y Combinator because Altman had gone off the reservation there too. The guy has a track record of doing exactly the kind of thing Toner is claiming.

What we know publicly strongly suggests Altman is a serial manipulator. I’m inclined to believe Toner on the basis that it fits with what we otherwise know about the man. From what I can tell, the board wasn’t wrong; they lost because Altman’s core skill is being a power broker and he went nuclear when the board tried to do their job.

I’m not currently, but I do know that HA has made specific pushes to improve voice-control over the past year. Should be numerous blog posts on their website about it.

Spoliation can be grounds for the judge to give the jury adverse inference instructions. i.e., the jury is allowed to assume that whatever was info was destroyed would have been damaging to the defendant’s case.

It’s why I’ve avoided anything smarthome tied to any particular vendor.

My endpoint devices are almost entirely Zwave or Zigbee/Matter based. I started out with a SmartThings hub but migrated it all to Home Assistant last year. HA has honestly had easier integrations than SmartThings did and supports almost anything under the sun.

I don’t have to worry about suddenly losing control of my devices and the only ‘subscription’ associated with it all is $15/year for a domain name to make setting up remote access easier. This approach requires a little more research, but it opens up the ability to mix and match devices however you’d like. Absolutely zero regrets.

It is. And the price of ESUs goes up each year that a product is EOL.

But he determined the direction and scope of Democratic policy almost in its entirety

I wouldn’t agree with this.

In terms of the progressive wing pushing the agenda under Biden, Liz Warren has had far more direct impact.

Warren was rather famously successful in landing allies into key positions in banking, education, and labor regulatory agencies. These are the sort of moves that are less flashy, but have played a large part in why we’ve seen things like debt cancellation pushes and a resurgence in antitrust action since Biden took office.

The PT Cruiser was more or less a Dodge Neon with a funny looking body shell on top, meaning engineering cost to bring it to market was pretty minimal.

The Cybertruck is… pretty much the opposite of that. Tesla has spent literally years trying to get the thing to market meaning it’s failure will be far more painful than PT Cruiser sales tapering off was for Chrysler.

I generally remap to swap caps lock with left control. Having control on the home row makes Ctrl shortcuts way less of a contortion act.

Useful in general but especially so on laptop keyboards.

You’re being downvoted but you’re right. Right wing groups have been calling for a constitutional convention for years because they know they’d have outsized influence on it.

A constitutional convention isn’t “let’s tackle this narrow issue,” it puts everything on the table. It’d be a disaster with the current makeup of the states.