I read the post, hence my points. I am not really looking for answers, because I don’t have questions, I had observations. You on the other hand seem to have your whole opinion formed on this inaccurate post, and I would expect someone in your position to look for more perspectives, when you clearly are not. You seem instead on a crusade against the company (good for you), and even if all the post was true, because they spent too much on t-shirts, invested too much in AI products (that I repeat, are opt-in)? Because they don’t comply with a technicality of GDPR? Lol Ok, more power to you.

Also, what I mean by a subscription is that I cancel it and I am done. I didn’t invest in it in any shape or form, what I paid I consumed already, there is no feeling of wasting previous investment in a running subscription.

Judging from your attitude, your lack of content, your very annoying “homie”, your inability to address any point against the content of the article, I am guessing either you are the author and you are butthurt that is not taken as gospel, or you just have ulterior motives and you are here just to stir shit (instead of “spreading awareness”). Either way, I have already invested too much time writing responses to your silly comments. I will show you how good I am in avoiding the sunk cost fallacy and block you, despite the time invested in the conversation.

Cya

I answered with more stuff in other comments, but you didn’t address any of that anyway.

I personally have no brand faith, I am a happy customer and the moment the company doesn’t adhere to my principles I will dump it. There is no sunk cost as it’s a running subscription (you keep mentioning this, so I though I will say it).

That said, if I see someone claiming they have a “blase” approach to privacy or they don’t care about it, I will point out that this is complete bullshit. Using the missing “download my data” feature to support this claim is outright pathetic.

To be even more precise, as a socialist I don’t like many of Vlad’s ideas that tend towards libertarianism. That said, the company has a good amount of worker ownership, it operates on principles I currently respect and that are miles higher than the standard tech company. I am absolutely in favour of supporting positive business in a field where companies are disgusting on average, and in cases evil.

Now, if you have anything else than childish arguments I am happy to discuss them. I have pointed to a number of inaccuracies in the article, there are outdated data (like the number of employees) and subjective views from the author. You are posting this article everywhere like it’s some kind of holy grail of gotchas, when it’s not. There are some good points (financial reporting exists, is not 100% transparent - which is not due, the amount spent for the t-shirts was IMHO not a great idea, etc.), but the fundamental points against the company are shacky at best. As I said elsewhere, all the shpiel about AI etc. is fully addressed in kagi own site where they clearly explain what they mean, for example. The features are actually pretty nice, even for someone like me who is not a fan of LLMs, and the results are quite accurate (the post author claims they are almost always wrong) from my experience.

BTW my searches are unlimited :)

They don’t own the T-shirt factory. It is a simple sentence, they used a small Serbian (I think) company. The business entity is to import goods.

It’s a formal difference but shows how sloppy that post is.

So, again, sorry for trying to point out that the CEO of Kagi does NOT care about privacy, GDPR, or transparency!

Privacy != anonymity. They satisfy the most important aspects of the GDRP, like data and scope minimization, clear explanation of what data they collect and why, a fantastic privacy policy. They don’t let you download a file with your email address in it, woah.

That article is quite dense with inaccurate information (e.g. they own a T-shirt factory), and a lot of guesses. There is no need to listen to a random guy idea about kagi’s AI approach when they have that documented on their site.

Also, the “blase attitude to privacy” is because of a technicality of GDPR? (Not having the ability to download a file with your email address) I am a big fan of GDPR, and their privacy policy is the best I have seen (I read the pp of every product I use and I often choose products also based on it), so really I don’t care about the technical compliance to GDPR (I am not an auditor), but the substantial compliance.

All-in-all, the article raises some good points, but it is a very random opinion from a random person without any particular competencies in the matter. I would take it for what it is tbh

EDIT: To add a few more:

• They achieved profitability (BTW, 2 years of operation and being profitable with 30k users, they really don’t know what they are doing /s)
• Their price changed twice. It was raised once, and the change was reverted later on, with unlimited searches. For me that is a great sign, especially considering the transparency of telling exactly how much each search costs for them.

Source: see https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi (published ~1 month after the linked post).

An article full of inaccuracies, but the most interesting bit is, all these conversations are possible because they clearly explain their views, which are publicly available on their website (for example, the philosophy behind the use of AI - which BTW is opt-in).

How is that an example of being opaque is beyond me.

FWIW, the default “programming” lens works quite well in Kagi, you can also create your own lens if you have a set of websites from which you routinely search info, and there are tons of bangs already (which can also be mapped to lenses BTW). In addition, you can downrank AI/SEO stuff when you find it (it is downranked by default in kagi), so that over time your results are quite clean.

As someone from Rome, I feel you. Pickpocketing is somewhat an issue. In more than 20 years living in the city (before I moved) I never suffered from it, but it’s very common among tourists (especially in the underground and certain bus lines). It sucks and often police does nothing because by the time they catch the people (if they do), everything is gone anyway.

That said, beside pickpocketing Rome is very safe (or at least most of the places where a tourist would go, except maybe the surroundings of Termini station).

For too long it told men they can treat women however they want

This is demonstrably false, as we have certain narratives that are literally millennia old (latin literature) about courtship, romantic gestures, protection and all the other stuff usually associated with how men should treat women. Usually this is some form of protection/care for a lower/weaker being, but it is absolutely a way society has been telling men how to tell women for centuries.

I would say that what you said applies not to feminism in general (who historically had strong links to class struggle and anticapitalism), but to a part of the modern status quo feminism which is focused purely on individuals and has been absorbed by the ruling class (e.g., once the CEO is a woman, the goal is reached). This is not a representation of feminism in general though, and I would say the same can apply to many other movements as well (e.g., ambientalism, antiracism, etc.) that (in part) lost their revolutionary nature and are left fighting for small changes within the status quo.

I think that in fact in at least some cases the lack of respect (or general ability to live a relationship with a man in a mutually loving way) is exactly due to that education. At the end of the day the flipside of the “subservient” attitude is that the man in the relationship is represented as a provider, with all the gender stereotypes that come with it: lack of emotions, self-reliance and of course the expectation for him to be a provider. I would say that most of the examples of bad relationships in this thread boil down to exactly these dynamics.

Also we are not anymore in the 1950, so that education today mostly happens implicitly, but it also gets mixed up with a lot of other messages from the wider society.

I personally also disagree about the fact that men are not taught how to fit in their gender role. I think they are, since very little, symmetrically to how women are too and possibly even more explicitly: you need to protect women (incl. sacrificing because that’s what heroes do), the whole courtship thing, the fact that as a man you are responsible to provide for others, that there are certain activities that are manly, etc… Essentially is the exact same problem: gender stereotypes and sexism go both ways and impact both genders, although in different ways.

Yes, you could run it in LAN only. You could access it via VPN only.

Obviously this adds friction in addition to security, but if that’s fine with you, you can.

Thanks for the head’s up!

I think the point was that humans come from Africa (as in, as a species).

Fair enough, the bar is indeed even lower.

I wouldn’t call it cultured. I have been in meetings with people sticking fingers in the mouth to put/remove snys, or put the used ones back in the box, it was quite disgusting…

You miss the point, and the point is that Italians are stereotyped as ignorant who only think about food. This has nothing to do with Italian food itself.

I think it simply comes from the bad english of italian people who immigrated to the US. Plenty of them were from South, but the stereotypical speech is simply a consequence of Italians pronouncing words as they are written (given Italian works like that). Neapolitan dialect is actually very contracted, so the opposite of elongated vocals as the stereotype goes.

Italian pub…? Anyway, I am Italian, I know what people sound like. Thanks for the tip though

So you know that this is a stereotype hopefully, and that people don’t actually talk like super mario, right?