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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Sure. I’m referring to the ones that run big ad campaigns, like Nord and Mullvad. They tend to overstate how a VPN can protect you, sometimes in ways that barely make sense. There is no epidemic of criminals stealing personal credit card information over insecure wi-fi, for example. The ads play into ignorance and fear.

    That said, yeah, I’d rather be on a VPN when on a public wi-fi network. But I’m not really worried about someone sniffing my encrypted HTTPS traffic (which is pretty much everything nowadays; Firefox by default won’t even load unencrypted web sites).


  • Some VPNs allow multi-hopping, similar to Tor. I couldn’t give you an exhaustive list but most popular ones support this. Mullvad and Proton do, for example. There are also strategies to add noise into VPN traffic.

    This is not a silver bullet, of course. Tor has similar problems as you describe if an adversary has visibility into enough nodes. As always, this comes down to your threat model.

    On the one hand, I find the advertising of VPNs outright dishonest. On the other hand, I would trust any reputable VPN provider much more than I trust my ISP or cell carrier.



  • Never liked him, but I acknowledge that he had some effective economic policies during his time as mayor. He was at least competent and sane. He went completely off the rails a long time ago, though.

    He’s often credited with cleaning up Times Square, which was known for prostitution back in the 80s. But honestly, he reaped what his predecessors sowed to a large degree.

    He used 9/11 like his personal sword and shield. He was lucky to be in a prominent position related the biggest and least controversial issue in America. I don’t imagine he ever would have been on the national stage otherwise. He was pretty much at the natural end of his career before then.

    NYC has a history of conservative mayors, which seems a bit odd since we’re so solidly liberal in federal elections. It sure doesn’t help when we get a Democrat as infantile and corrupt as our current mayor, Eric Adams. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Eric_Adams



  • Absolutely this. Phones are the primary device for Gen Z. Phone use doesn’t develop tech skills because there’s barely anything you can do with the phones. This is particularly true with iOS, but still applies to Android.

    Even as an IT administrator, there’s hardly anything I can do when troubleshooting phone problems. Oh, push notifications aren’t going through? Well, there are no useful logs or anything for me to look at, so…cool. It makes me crazy how little visibility I have into anything on iPhones or iPads. And nobody manages “Android” in general; at best they manage like two specific models of one specific brand (usually Samsung or Google). It’s impossible to manage arbitrary Android phones because there’s so little standardization and so little control over the software in the general case.




  • DuckDuckGo is an easy first step. It’s free, publicly available, and familiar to anyone who is used to Google. Results are sourced largely from Bing, so there is second-hand rot, but IMHO there was a tipping point in 2023 where DDG’s results became generally more useful than Google’s or Bing’s. (That’s my personal experience; YMMV.) And they’re not putting half-assed AI implementations front and center (though they have some experimental features you can play with if you want).

    If you want something AI-driven, Perplexity.ai is pretty good. Bing Chat is worth looking at, but last I checked it was still too hallucinatory to use for general search, and the UI is awful.

    I’ve been using Kagi for a while now and I find its quick summaries (which are not displayed by default for web searches) much, much better than this. For example, here’s what Kagi’s “quick answer” feature gives me with this search term:

    Room for improvement, sure, but it’s not hallucinating anything, and it cites its sources. That’s the bare minimum anyone should tolerate, and yet most of the stuff out there falls wayyyyy short.




  • hersh@literature.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy I Lost Faith in Kagi
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    8 months ago

    I’ve been using Kagi for a while, so I’ll post a few quick thoughts I had after reading the article, linked blog, and mastodon thread.

    The one thing in the blog post I strongly disagree with is her statement that the summarizer is “the same old AI bullshit”. I think they just assumed that without actually testing it. The summarizer is fantastic, and is a great example of the right way to use LLMs. Its output comes entirely from the URL or file you specify. It does not hallucinate. You can ask it follow-up questions about the document, and again, its replies are limited in scope to what’s actually in that document. If you ask it something out of scope it’ll tell you that it can’t find that information in the document. This is great because it’s using the LLM for what LLMs are actually good for — complex language parsing — and not for what they’re bad for, like reasoning or information storage/retrieval. It’s actually quite difficult to misuse the summarizer. It’s straightforward and effective. This is Kagi’s killer feature, IMO.

    I can’t speak as highly of its search-integrated AI features like FastGPT. They mostly take information from the contents of the first few search results, but they also seem to “fill in the blanks” more than I’d like. Sometimes it gives me information that is simply not in the sources that it cites. It’s not as bad as using ChatGPT (which hallucinates all day every day, and if it ever tries to cite source is hallucinates those, too) but it needs improvement.

    That said, Kagi doesn’t shove the AI down your throat like you might think reading the blog post. These are separate features that need to be explicitly activated. Plain searches don’t return results from the LLMs. If you want that, you need to explicitly go to the assistant or trigger the “quick answer” feature on the search results page. EDIT: I just realized that this is not totally true as of a few weeks ago, when they added a feature to automatically trigger the “quick answer” blurb for search queries ending in a question mark. Perhaps that’s why Lori felt like it was over-emphasized.

    Anyway, back to the summarizer, here is an example of it in action. I gave it the URL of the Mastodon post. I think this is an excellent result. I also asked it an unrelated followup question so you can see that it limits itself to the information in the URL. It will not make shit up!

    The summarizer lets me download conversations in markdown form, so I’ll just paste it right in here so you can see.

    Exploring https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

    Assistant:
    Key points:

    • The author wrote a blog post criticizing the search engine Kagi, which then prompted the CEO of Kagi, Vlad, to email the author directly to argue against the criticism. [1]
    • The author woke up to an email from Vlad, the CEO of Kagi, who was upset about the blog post the author had written. [1]
    • The author decided to publicly share the email exchange with Vlad, as they felt it was important for people to see his unhinged behavior. [1]
    • The author refused to engage in a private debate with Vlad, as they did not want to be taken “to Crime Scene Number Two” without any accountability. [1]
    • The author believes Vlad is unable to accept criticism or disagreement, and that it “eats him alive” when someone doesn’t agree with him or his company. [1]
    • The author states that no other search engine CEO has emailed them directly to “mansplain their company” in this manner. [1]
    • The author sees Vlad’s behavior as “petty and sad” and believes he has no understanding of boundaries. [1]
    • Other users in the thread share similar experiences of Vlad’s inability to accept criticism and his tendency to simply restate his own opinions rather than address counterpoints. [1]
    • The author and others characterize Vlad’s behavior as that of a narcissist who cannot tolerate disagreement. [1]
    • The author and others are amazed by Vlad’s decision to set up a separate company in another country just to print and give away t-shirts, rather than focus on improving Kagi’s core search functionality.

    [1] lori (@lori@hackers.town)

    Query:
    What’s the capital of North Dakota?

    Assistant:
    The knowledge provided does not contain any information about the capital of North Dakota. The context is focused on an email exchange between the author and the CEO of Kagi search engine regarding criticism of the company.