Also worth mentioning: you might still need to add the “most recent visit” column under the View menu. And if you dare to actually load any of those pages, they’ll move all the way to the top, and will not remain in their original location. It’s really annoying.

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

Whisper is open source. GPT-2 was, too.

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.

I posted some of my experience with Kagi’s LLM features a few months ago here: https://literature.cafe/comment/6674957 . TL;DR: the summarizer and document discussion is fantastic, because it does not hallucinate. The search integration is as good as anyone else’s, but still nothing to write home about.

The Kagi assistant isn’t new, by the way; I’ve been using it for almost a year now. It’s now out of beta and has an improved UI, but the core functionality seems mostly the same.

As far as actual search goes, I don’t find it especially useful. It’s better than Bing Chat or whatever they call it now because it hallucinates less, but the core concept still needs work. It basically takes a few search results and feeds them into the LLM for a summary. That’s not useless, but it’s certainly not a game-changer. I typically want to check its references anyway, so it doesn’t really save me time in practice.

Kagi’s search is primarily not LLM-based and I still find the results and features to be worth the price, after being increasingly frustrated with Google’s decay in recent years. I subscribed to the “Ultimate” Kagi plan specifically because I wanted access to all the premium language models, since subscribing to either ChatGPT or Claude would cost about the same as Kagi, while Kagi gives me access to both (plus Mistral and Gemini). So if you’re interested in playing around with the latest premium models, I still think Kagi’s Ultimate plan is a good deal.

That said, I’ve been disappointed with the development of LLMs this year across the board, and I’m not convinced any of them are worth the money at this point. This isn’t so much a problem with Kagi as it is with all the LLM vendors. The models have gotten significantly worse for my use cases compared to last year, and I don’t quite understand why; I guess they are optimizing for benchmarks that simply don’t align with my needs. I had great success getting zsh or Python one-liners last year, for example, whereas now it always seems to give me wrong or incomplete answers.

My biggest piece of advice when dealing with any LLM-based tools, including Kagi’s, is: don’t use it for anything you’re not able to validate and correct on your own. It’s just a time-saver, not a substitute for your own skills and knowledge.

btrfs’s RAID features are not production-ready, and at this point I doubt they ever will be. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Implemented_but_not_recommended_for_production_use

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Btrfs-Warning-RAID5-RAID6

ZFS is definitely more robust.

Is this legit? This is the first time I’ve heard of human neurons used for such a purpose. Kind of surprised that’s legal. Instinctively, I feel like a “human brain organoid” is close enough to a human that you cannot wave away the potential for consciousness so easily. At what point does something like this deserve human rights?

I notice that the paper is published in Frontiers, the same journal that let the notorious AI-generated giant-rat-testicles image get published. They are not highly regarded in general.

Thanks! I didn’t see that. Relevant bit for convenience:

we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests that includes not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models as well as deleting all information received within 30 days.

Pretty standard stuff for such services in my experience.

I’m not entirely clear on which (anti-)features are only in the browser vs in the web site as well. It sounds like they are steering people toward their commercial partners like Binance across the board.

Personally I find the cryptocurrency stuff off-putting in general. Not trying to push my opinion on you though. If you don’t object to any of that stuff, then as far as I know Brave is fine for you.

Short answer: inserting affiliate links into results, and weird cryptocurrency stuff. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology

I don’t know if that’s “worse than Microsoft” because that’s a real high bar. But it’s different anyway.

If you click the Chat button on a DDG search page, it says:

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is a private AI-powered chat service that currently supports OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Anthropic’s Claude chat models.

So at minimum they are sharing data with one additional third party, either OpenAI or Anthropic depending on which model you choose.

OpenAI and Anthropic have similar terms and conditions for enterprise customers. They are not completely transparent and any given enterprise could have their own custom license terms, but my understanding is that they generally will not store queries or use them for training purposes. You’d better seek clarification from DDG. I was not able to find information on this in DDG’s privacy policy.

Obviously, this is not legal advice, and I do not speak for any of these companies. This is just my understanding based on the last time I looked over the OpenAI and Anthropic privacy policies, which was a few 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.

Because it’s not the same class of device. The PS Portal is very niche. It’s a $200 device that basically just runs the PS Remote Play app.

I’ve used PS Remote Play on my phone and laptop, and it’s just not good in the cases I actually want to use it: when traveling away from home. Even with a good Internet connection it’s only “okay”. It’s utterly useless when in transit (trains, places, etc.), and 99% useless in any public place (e.g. cafe or library WiFi).

These are all cases where the Switch, Deck, and similar devices excel. The PS Portal addresses a much smaller market.

Oh yes, definitely. I think this is why Mozilla has not made this the default behavior in Firefox; there will always be the risk of false-positives breaking copied links, so it’s important that people know that there’s some kind of mutation happening.

ClearURLs uses a JSON file with site-specific regex patterns and rules. In theory I could customize this for myself, or better yet submit a pull request on their GitHub. If I have time I’ll look into it.

Personally, I have found this feature to be too limited. I still use the ClearURLs extension, which is more effective in my experience.

However, neither one is a silver bullet. Here’s an example I just took from Amazon (I blocked out some values with X’s):

Original URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H/ref=XXXX?qid=XXXXXXXXXX&refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1&s=sporting-goods&sr=XXX

Using Firefox’s “copy link without site tracking” feature:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H/ref=XXXX?qid=XXXXXXXXXX&refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1&s=sporting-goods

Using ClearURLs:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H?refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1

The ideal, canonical URL, which no tools I’m familiar with will reliably generate:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C353845H

Longer but still fully de-personalized URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H

If anybody knows a better solution that works with a wide variety of sites, please share!

Not sure if you’re referring to the graphics or to the shitty bench design. If the latter…it’s a real thing. :(

They’re called “leaning benches” or “lean bars”. This bench design is sort of “futuristic” in the sense that adoption has only recently started taking off around the world. They are a user-hostile design made specifically to prevent people (specifically homeless people) from lying down, sleeping, or otherwise, y’know, using it as a goddamn bench. Because removing the ability for anyone to sit down is apparently, in the eyes of authorities, a small price to pay to make homeless people’s lives that much harder.

The Wikipedia article for “Leaning bench” redirects to hostile architecture, where you can read more about this and similar efforts, if you are in the mood to be enraged at the sheer malice of bureaucrats.

I’ve seen them in several cities across America. NYC starting rolling them out within the past decade and you’ll see them in any recently renovated station. See https://www.nydailynews.com/2017/09/11/subway-riders-slam-brooklyn-stations-new-leaning-bars-as-incredibly-unwelcoming/ (scroll through the image slideshow to see the new).

Not sure if the image embed will work here but I’ll try:

Correct. This is also why Apple switched to zsh as the default shell over bash. They still ship Bash 3.2 in macOS, because from 4.0 on, Bash started using GPLv3 instead of GPLv2.

I’m not against the idea of creating proprietary software out of open-source software, if the license allows that. However, I am always against this practice of “closing the door behind you”.

Apple: builds their entire software ecosystem on free, open-source foundations.

Also Apple: better have a million euros if you want to even start distributing software.

The best use case for an external app store is free open-source software, like we have on the Android side with F-Droid. Apple stopped that before it even started. Jeez.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be too confident in Facebook’s implementation, and I certainly don’t believe that their interests are aligned with their users’.

That said, it seems like we’re reaching a turning point for big tech, where having access to private user data becomes more of a liability than an asset. Having access to the data means that they will be required by law to provide that data to governments in various circumstances. They might have other legal obligations in how they handle, store, and process that data. All of this comes with costs in terms of person-hours and infrastructure. Google specifically cited this is a reason they are moving Android location history on-device; they don’t want to deal with law enforcement constantly asking them to spy on people. It’s not because they give a shit about user privacy; it’s because they’re tired of providing law enforcement with free labor.

I suspect it also helps them comply with some of the recent privacy protection laws in the EU, though I’m not 100% sure on that. Again, this is a liability issue for them, not a user-privacy issue.

Also, how much valuable information were they getting from private messages in the first place? Considering how much people willingly put out in the open, and how much can be inferred simply by the metadata they still have access to (e.g. the social graph), it seems likely that the actual message data was largely redundant or superfluous. Facebook is certainly in position to measure this objectively.

The social graph is powerful, and if you really care about privacy, you need to worry about it. If you’re a journalist, whistleblower, or political dissident, you absolutely do not want Facebook (and by extension governments) to know who you talk you or when. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know what you’re saying; the association alone is enough to blow your cover.

The metadata problem is common to a lot of platforms. Even Signal cannot use E2EE for metadata; they need to know who you’re communicating with in order to deliver your messages to them. Signal doesn’t retain that metadata, but ultimately you need to take their word on that.

Any Safari extensions installed that might be interfering with this behavior? That’s the best I can figure.