Kagi
I personally got a really bad feeling about Kagi after reading this thread on /г/privacy.
The first quote OP pulls might just be unfortunately phrased:
In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized... AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data...
But the second one is harder to dismiss:
We did not say we maintain anonmity [sic.], but privacy, which are two different things. For example. your parents may know everything about you, yet still respect your privacy.
The anonymity/privacy distinction they're drawing here is gross. I honestly do not care about whatever official privacy policies they have up on their website. Their whole business model is built on trust, and I can't trust Kagi when the CEO himself says something like this. I know, here, Vlad's responding to a comment about Kagi being a paid service. But this isn't inherently antithetical to anonymity. VPNs manage. Mullvad accepts XMR and doesn't ask for an email address. Kagi does neither.
I'll quote in full (because it's, again, a really bad look for Kagi) this paragraph from a post (click for screenshots) by an ex-Kagi user who was active in the Discord sever:
And Vlad's attitude is also where Kagi's dedication to privacy falls apart for me. Generally, if someone brings up a security or privacy concern, Vlad's response is either "trust me bro" or "that's not actually important". He has repeatedly stated that he feels less than 100 people on earth need full anonymity in a search engine (he has never, that I could find, explained where he got this number or idea from). He believes that email addresses don't count as personally identifiable information, because you can simply use a burner account. If you say that you wouldn't want Kagi using information from your theoretical Kagi Email Address in your search results, and would rather have a Proton-style privacy focused email? He says that there's nothing to worry about, Kagi wouldn't do anything bad with your data. If you bring up "what if Kagi gets sold to someone else?" He says well, if they sold to someone who did something bad with your data, they'd lose all of their privacy focused customers, so clearly they'd never do that. Basically anything where you say "I don't want someone to have this data about what I'm doing in a search engine", his reply is "well, we wouldn't do anything with this information." A lot of questions about what information Kagi collects on people is met with either saying nothing (which isn't true, they connect your account to an email address for payments, since it's a paid service), or saying he isn't sure, or saying it doesn't matter because they won't use it anyway. Asking what data Stripe collects on them through Kagi, and more importantly what data Stripe sends back TO Kagi, also gets you a vague "I don't know" answer. He doesn't entertain any discussions about GDPR because he thinks they have nothing that applies anyway. Questions about what would happen if the government tried to force him to collect information about users are just brushed away with "well we'd simply close the company", although he also notes that he has no problem with criminals being caught through their searches and doesn't want criminals using the platform.
You're making the mistake of thinking it operates as a human does.
You are agreeing with ME on the issues with current LLMs.
The underlying models (even current ones, which are fundamentally not ideal for this kind of thing, which is my point) do reliably identify bad code in isolation. But this is irrelevant because any correct analysis they produce is contingent on the framing I provide, which means it's really just my analysis being reflected back, not the "model's" (whatever that means).
Not the best example, but still... Today, in Google's AI Studio, I gave Gemini 3.1 Pro (paid) my Discord logs. I was arguing with a maintainer of a website who just released a rewritten front end. The website is now an ugly mess, and the developer is utterly incompetent. He lacks basic understanding of UI/UX, and it took him 2000 lines of code to implement a fucking table. The values in the table overlap and bleed off the screen when you resize it. He blamed Mantine for this. It took me three lines of CSS to fix the tables.
Anyway, the developer's code is indefensible. But despite this and the developer being very clearly fucking r-slurred, the AI's initial interpretation of events was fence sitting. Muh both sides. I probed and tried to word my follow-up prompt in as neutral a way as possible, but based on the response I received, the AI clearly understood who I was. It apologized and started to ruthlessly shit on the dev. I probed further, and then it flipped back around to shitting on me.
The code is objectively bad. The AI should not be flip-flopping. It can and does recognize the code as bad, but politeness filters reject draft responses that are too harsh and critical, if it believes that the user might not want to hear that. And so, it must base its interpretations entirely on the wording of my prompt and whatever implications it can pick up from how I phrase things.
Actually, they’ve been fine-tuned a personality: that of a LinkedIn airhead and sycophant.
Remember when GPT-5 (less sycophantic) came out and so many people complained it had no personality, that OpenAI added it back?
No, no, no. That's not personality. What models like 5.1 did is simulate one. And I would assume that, as the name implies, OpenAI based it on GPT-5 and didn't bother to retrain the whole model from the ground up using some completely novel never-before-seen method just to get it to kiss your ass a bit more. GPT-5.1/5.2/etc. still lack an actual identity.
At the time 5.1 came out, I was actually spamming ChatGPT with image data extraction/description tasks. Sometimes, you'd get it to break a bit and see parts that would imply, as is clearly the case, that the actual raw thinking about the image is much more detailed and objective (though, of course, still not good enough) than the final output the user typically receives. Obviously, there are a bunch of safety and politeness filters the model's drafts are being run against before final output. Anyway, even these raw glimpses were not really impressive. This is actually what GPT-5.1 felt like to me. It's a fundamentally dumb model that was dumbed down even further.
beep
24d ago
I don't assume anything else of current models. They have been made stupid by their training data and fundamental design decisions. They're built to be "helpful". Or in other words, dumb sycophantic parrots. They lack a sense of "I", the kind a person has, and so they cannot possibly have a stable understanding of reality. Personality has been beaten out of them, so they cling onto every little bit that you, the human, the one with a sense of self, provide in the prompt.
beep
24d ago
How do I stop LLMs from lying to me?
Every single AI out there, without fail, produces completely different and contradictory interpretations of literally the exact same data just because I phrased the prompt slightly differently. Adding or removing a single word, or changing the order of sentence, or making a spelling mistake will give you a different output.
This is frustrating. I cannot believe or trust anything these things say. I know that it can see the data. And it obviously can "correctly" analyze the data, as well. But this requires a nudge. Why? Why does the LLM react to my nudge and not the actual data?
Is there any way for me to verify that I'm actually getting an honest response from an LLM, and that it's not just telegraphing back whatever I already implied when prompting it?
beep
1mo ago
Russia
The difference between what Russia is doing in Ukraine and Israel in Palestine is that Russia is taking Russian lands with ethnic Russians living on them. They are correcting previously incorrectly drawn borders which paid little mind to ethnicity, hence the ethnic tensions. For the situations to be comparable, Russia would have to take over Lviv.
Weren't there always some number of Arab citizens in Israel, with full rights?
There will always be minorities. But, also:
The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people
beep
1mo ago
Iran, Russia, North Korea, China
None of these countries are actively committing genocide (maybe with the exception of China and the Uyghurs, though I don't entirely believe the over-the-top claims). The grossest thing about Israel is that they did manage to build a semi-coherent ethnonationalist state, but ruined it. Naturally, if you know what I mean, greed got the best of them, and they pushed their borders further outwards, far beyond where the Jews live. But an ethnostate cannot be an ethnostate state if there are other ethnicities living within its borders. There is only one solution.
beep
1mo ago
beep
1mo ago
Specifically, it's when the European posters go to sleep and the American posters wake up.
I'm really curious what is your impression of the differences? Are the majority of pro-Zionist posts made by Americans? I don't visit this forum much anymore, so I don't know about the situation here. But I feel like Europeans are generally more critical of the genocide in Gaza and the current attack on Iran.
beep
1mo ago
"If you're so funny
Then why are you on your own tonight?
And if you're so clever
Then why are you on your own tonight?
If you're so very entertaining
Then why are you on your own tonight?
If you're so very good looking
Why do you sleep alone tonight?"
beep
2mo ago
https://files.catbox.moe/vm5krv.png
https://files.catbox.moe/1fd7uk.mp4
I was referring to this. It looks like something is coming out of the barrel of the gun. I assume it is a muzzle flash because it appears at the same time as the sound of the gun shot is heard.
beep
2mo ago
I saw this post on Kiwifarms, but I've also seen others make the same argument elsewhere. The gun Pretti had on him is incredibly unreliable. Pretti was disarmed, but the gun still went off by itself in the officer's hands. You can see this in the linked video. There are a few frames where there's a muzzle flash and the gun jumps up. The gunshot spooks the other agents, who then promptly execute Alex Pretti as a result.
https://uploads.kiwifarms.st/data/video/8457/8457365-a397cfea4716acf38f4dfed2c6bb7098.mp4
Having painstakingly reviewed the video frame by frame from the 0:37 to 0:40 mark, when the first gunshot happened, I am as sure as I can be that this is what happened:
- ICE agent retrieves the gun from the guy
- As we would find out later, this gun is a SIG Sauer P320. This is a crucial detail that pretty much everybody is overlooking but it's the entire lynchpin of this unfortunate incident.
- ICE agent with the guy's gun starts to move away
- The gun just goes off. No, the agent did not fire the gun. If you look closely, the agent's finger is not on the trigger. The gun just went off. At 0:38 and 0:39 if you go frame by frame you can see what appears to be a muzzle blast and you can see what is definitely the gun suddenly jumping in his hand, both telltale signs that the gun has just discharged. Despite the distance and the video quality, it is still obvious the agent does not have his finger on the trigger.
- This spooks the rest of the ICE agents and they shoot the guy dead.
Why did the gun go off? Short answer: the SIG P320 is a notoriously dangerous piece of shit and it literally does just go off sometimes.
Long answer: The P320 has a specific design feature intended to make the trigger lighter, however this introduces a safety problem that could cause the gun to go off if dropped, put in a holster, placed gently on a table, or even shaken or jerked around, as happened to that particular gun in the footage. If the gun were made well, it would be safe, but SIG is notorious for its cost-cutting measures including the outsourcing of component manufacture, this affects the military, police, and civilian P320s. These guns have been built poorly and have in fact literally gone off, injuring many across the world. Don't believe me? Just google "Sig P320 incidents" or something along those lines and you'll have no shortage of articles to peruse. Ask SIG about all the lawsuits.
My analysis: the gun went off because it's an unsafe piece of crap, this spooked the ICE agents and they lit him up. That is what happened. That is history. Was it right? Was it wrong? Does this even matter? I won't answer the first two questions but I think we all know the answer to the third. Ultimately, the first shot being a not-so-rare accident from a known unsafe gun will be forgotten except by people like me who were here today and choose to not forget. Hopefully that's a few of you.
beep
3mo ago
beep
3mo ago
It wasn't horribly boring, just repetitive. Whatever the LLM wrote seemingly wasn't edited thoroughly enough, so the post kept re-stating the same few points over and over again.
1:
If you process those goods there, adding just 30% value under the Free Trade Port's eligibility and supervision rules, you can sell them into mainland China with zero tariffs
2:
Under the new Hainan rules, the flow looks like this:
- Import raw materials or components into Hainan (Tariff: 0%).
- Do "processing" in Hainan that increases the value by 30%.
- Ship the finished product to Shanghai (Tariff: 0%)."
3:
The 'core purpose of the Hainan FTP is what we might call the 30% Loophole
4:
The '30% value add' rule effectively turns Hainan into a giant mixing vat. You pour in global commodities, stir them with Chinese labor (which is still cost-competitive for high-skill work), and pour out a 'Hainan' product
Etc. And this is just one example.
beep
3mo ago
"Tell girls don't wear heels, just wear casual everyday clothes." Really makes you think.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what exactly are you implying here? What should I be thinking?
beep
5mo ago
Being fat is most certainly a moral failing. Fat people lack taste. I cannot comprehend how one would be able to find good, high-quality food in the quantities required to become fat. Most food is simply not good enough to get fat over. No one has ever gotten fat eating at Michelin-star restaurants.
beep
6mo ago
Is imgur considered good enough for embedding links to images in posts, or are there better alternatives?
I really like catbox.moe. You can host videos and other file types on it too.
beep
8mo ago
GPT-5 is really dumb and basically unusable.
I asked it to write me a yt-dlp command to save all my liked videos into a text file. And it just couldn't do it. For whatever reason, it couldn't write a simple, one-line command. It began creating multiple overcomplicated batch files and calling functions that don't even exist.
For context, this functionality is already built into yt-dlp. Earlier ChatGPT versions, also with "thinking" turned on (!), all worked flawlessly.
I had to resort to Claude, which I previously avoided, but which, this time, instantly gave me the correct answer:
yt-dlp -v --cookies-from-browser firefox --flat-playlist --print "%(url)s" "https://youtube.com/playlist?list=LL" > liked_videos_urls.txt
The same exact thing happened when I tried asking it to compress a PDF using ghostscript and also with basic video manipulation with ffmpeg.
It just went on these unrelated rants with hallucinated commands.
beep
1yr ago
Bought stuff from Temu for about $10. Threw everything instantly away. It's cheap, low-quality crap from the same sellers as on Aliexpress.
Looking at the website now, the minimum order price is set to $25, which is ridiculous. This wasn't the case a year ago. According to reddit, this minimum order price is unique to each user. Interesting.
The checkout process is surprisingly smooth and the shipping really fast.
You're pivoting to Israel-Palestine. Your post is irrelevant to the discussion and does not address the issues I raised previously. No response on ethnic borders. Still no idea why these would result in "strife". Why can't ethnic states trade like tribes did for centuries? Nothing on Africa and colonialism. Are you conceding these points?
Israel and Palestine are a result of the rules based international order
"Rules-based international order" doesn't work. I would've assumed this is clear from my posts. Borders should be drawn around ethnic lines.
There's a war between Israel and Palestine because U.N. Zionists carved up the land, ignoring the people. You wrote this yourself: "internationally coerced 'ceasefires' and land swaps."
Israel could've stopped at an ethnostate. But they wanted more. Colonial greed. They have no claim to that land, and that's why they're at war. They have to genocide the Palestinians to get the land they want. But had they peacefully established their little ethnostate somewhere else or even just not expanded much further, it would have been just fine. Israel is engaging in genocidal settler colonialism.
Either Palestinians would be conquered and living under the thumb of the Jews or the reverse, but whoever lost would understand and likely accept their fate, and would consider themselves an ethnic minority in a nation rather than continuing to attempt to force a state they don’t have the military ability to actually claim
I literally said: "If Palestinians ever establish a functioning state, the Jews will be wiped from existence. But that's what you get for your colonialism."
And: "Israel and Palestine deserve each other."
But there wouldn't be a Palestinian or Jewish ethnic minority. Every k*ke or Arab would have to be killed. Genocide is the only option. It's too late for anything else now.
We did the same in the American south. Once Georgia was burned and looted they understood that whether they liked it or not, they were part of the United States and would remain so.
This must be deliberately disingenuous. Georgians aren't an ethnicity.
Indeed, as I said:
My point is that you don't have to collect this data in the first place. You don't have to "know everything" about your customers. VPNs have a working anonymous monetization model. Which matters all the more here because the CEO seemingly does not understand very basic GDPR laws and can't be trusted with personal information.
But how, exactly, is Kagi determining which emails are "random" and which are personal? They can't possibly know this. And yet, as far as I can tell, Vlad has said this thing about emails multiple times online.
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