I'm tired of Kagi's founder standing in the way of his own product by espousing unfounded libertarian ideas and calling them "unbiased" and "apolitical." Please, Vlad, shut up and log off, from Discord and forums as well as from LLM hype. That's going nowhere with the exact kind of people who will pay for high-quality searching. (And have your assistant change your passwords.)

https://medium.com/@cdelbert/search-startup-kagi-wants-to-humanize-the-web-using-artificial-intelligence-c78cbdca3a7e

I liked Kagi, but this is why I gave up on it.

RE: https://dosgame.club/users/aetataureate/statuses/112209440079663509

@alpha I will never understand the belief that group decisions about limited resources can be apolitical.

I probably am willing to Voltaire myself into supporting platforming of more vile people than most of my friends, but that’s both political & an opinion I’m acting on. I must own it, and its consequences.

@josephholsten It’s only a factor for my evaluation, but Kagi didn’t meet the utility + cost bar for continuing to use it. So far, that’s generally been the case for most platforms tied to vile people. (Though I don’t think Kagi’s founder is really all that vile on the grand spectrum of things, the utility wasn’t that much of difference-maker and the cost wasn’t insignificant for what it offered, so not a terribly hard decision to stop my subscription.)

@alpha I find I’m much more willing to move that bar for folks I respect. I’m probably not getting full value from my Fluent Forever subscription, but I believe in the approach and the people.

Though I find I’m moving away from subscription/rentals to full purchases. It’s not related to the fact that 37signals first convinced me the value of subscription software, and my growing out of alignment with their principals.

@josephholsten Honestly, what I should probably do is sponsor more of the OSS projects that I do get good use out of.

@alpha I use so many, it’s daunting to imagine supporting them all. Sure I can support helix editor and Firefox, but who’s paying for unbound, sqlite, libxml, and the infinite other lib & tool dependencies? It’s easier to pretend I’m not in their debt.

But truly, I suspect only a handful of people on major distro release eng teams could tell me everything I rely on.