I’ll say that (pre-)2016 OkCupid still was able to work like a charm without paying for anything. The idealized purpose of dating apps is, or was, to have you find the right partner that you might not otherwise would have found and you might have settled for a partner that you’re ultimately only okay with, because they’re the least-bad option in your area. These apps and websites provide a place where everyone has the expectation that they want to get romantic with each other (opposed to randomly messaging people on their website / social media profile) and also the wide range of the internet, connecting people that would have never met otherwise.

My story of 2016 OkCupid: I had freshly signed up for a week or two and my now-wife just returned from a long hiatus for only a day or so before we found each other with a 99% (at one, short, point even 100%) match But I recognise that even back then it was almost “are you sure you’re not being paid to advertise OkCupid?”-levels of coincidence

deleted by creator

Wow that casts a healthy dose of doubt on the entire study. Thank you for pointing it all out so thoroughly!

I can bring in friends who used to work on this architectural project called “The Death Star”

Yes, although I would prefer to update the phrase to “My boss makes ten dollars, I make a dime…” to more accurately reflect today’s reality.

Good point I haven’t thought about. I have a Fairphone 4 and that is pretty much on the brink of what’s still okay/comfortable to use one-handed. (I also looked up the FP6 dimensions, dreading the size increase, but I just found that it’s actually slightly smaller than my current phone, yay)

I want to believe it’s that others have the same problem as me that holding the phone to their ear+cheek makes that face-part real moist after a minute or two. And I choose to believe the speakerphone-speakers just never realised they could slightly tilt/lift the phone away from their skin and still hear perfectly fine.

But I fear that @its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org might be correct on this topic and it’s simply a case of media/influencers portraying phone conversations that way for better filmability.

I know that CEOs are out of touch with reality, but come on, even they don’t get new TVs this frequently. But the projected target audience also can’t be megalomaniac billionaires because, even though they might switch TVs with every few showers, they just buy the stuff outright instead of going through the hassle of subscription services, no? I genuinely fail to see a use-case for this. Maybe as a sort of paid trial/test period to see if you really need that 2000€ TV?

I think it’s time to showcase Grok’s abilities to put Pentagon officials into transparent bikinis. I can’t imagine management would keep using a tool that uploads non-consensual NSFW images of them straight to the comment section.

I can’t quite remember when or why I ever first visited that site. My brain wants to tell me it was in the years leading up to my Abitur when I got myself a pair of combat boots and wanted to be more quirky with the lacing than what they initially had. Either way, Ian’s site really is the best and I’m never wearing shoes without using his Secure Knot or at least the fast knot (for the few laces that hold together that way or just aren’t long enough for the secure one). When the site eventually goes down, I’ll be so sad.

If you’re tech-savvy enough for it, please consider setting up an Immich library for your photos. That way, they won’t ever need to leave your home while still providing surprisingly powerful face recognition and photo search by context.

Many FOSS projects may not have completely obvious donation schemes, let alone ubiquitous and automatable schemes, for starters.

Slightly related to the topic, this weirdly also applies to bigger players. I wanted to buy a Nebula lifetime membership, wrote to support and basically went “just gimme Nebula’s bank details and I’ll order a direct banking transaction” and there was just no way, not even roundabout, for them to take my 300€ other than by me getting a credit card and paying via credit card.

I’m sure they have good reasons why they probably legally can’t just give me their bank adress (or whatever the American equivalent to IBAN is), but it’s very frustrating to be restricted like this in how I can give people money.

Thanks for that link, I read through that and absolutely love it! I already downranked sites I found to be AI-written on a personal basis, but this could be much more powerful. From what I understand, there’ll be human review of every AI report, so the potential to abuse the system is also relatively low (if the Kagi team does their due diligence)

Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they’re often wrong

You briefly mentioned in your user-experience-list that the AI answers are only there when you want them to be, but I just want to emphasise it, since to me it makes a world of difference in comparison with other Search Engines like Google. You only receive an AI answer if you press a specific “Gimme AI answer”-button (which is very unobtrusive) or add a question mark at the end of your search query!

I rarely jump to the defense of some company, but I only know of this one lori-person who tried to lay out reasons why Kagi is bad and, as you showed very well, @AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social, most of their reasoning/arguments aren’t really all that good when you look at them in more detail. And when they just plain refused to take an interview with the lead of Kagi, by burying their head in the sand and going “I don’t care if you want to clear up misunderstandings, I don’t want to talk to you!”, it kind of sealed this person as not being a trustworthy source of criticism and more of “I’m mad that a new company is doing something different than other companies in the same sector”

I’ve been using Kagi for about 3/4 of a year now and I will certainly renew my annual payment to them. Of course it’s not a magic bullet without any flaws at all, but currently it does the things it offers much better than any competitor I could find and all they want is around 10€ per month. They won’t spam you with advertisement nor will they suck up your (arguably infinitely more valuable) private info to sell to the highest bidder. For now, Kagi has been doing and still is doing more good than most other tech companies.

I would love for it to be different, but they’re mostly right.

The hardcore shareholders, who probably have shares in more than one company and for sure only see these companies for their monetary value and nothing more, would not care if the company’s creative work featured AI giveaways like twelve-fingered people occasionally and inconsistent storylines, if it would mean they could save on all their artists salary by paying only for one AI subscription.

Yes, you can still tell (mostly) when something’s made by AI, but the fact is that we already do see creatives being replaced with AI, leaving them free to do dishes and laundry instead of the other way around. The Coca Cola AI ads are one prominent example. Executives and shareholders don’t care about their product being inferior if it means it saves them even 20% in expenses. And we both know that replacing all your creative team (often even just one or two) with AI is a bigger saving on “Creative expenses” than just 20%. We know that because we can literally look up salaries vs subscription price for stuff like Sora and Veo3.

Yet, contrary to what I perceive as your main argument here, we don’t see widespread adoption of AI in all kinds of companies to do the tedious labor. That seems to still be done often either by traditional methods, because LLMs and generative AI is just not good at repairing a leak in toilets or checking for damages in a factory or welding or even just pushing a button to announce break-time.

Edit: spellings

I think it’s more simple than you assume. From my limited experience (many stranger’s anecdotes and my team recently being fired literally because “the other (very different) production location is able to do it without a dedicated Quality Management team”) most employers / company chiefs just want to make more money or, at least, increase the perceived value so that being bought out becomes realistic and leaves them with more money. They don’t actually care if their product works well or efficient, as long as number go up. Maybe the original company founder does but how many companies are still there that have the founder for long-term in key decision making and without shareholders who kinda hold the real power and couldn’t care less if the company cleaned up oceans or burned children because to them it’s just one combination of letters that make them money?

As @lvxferre@mander.xyz suggested, the top management might not even understand that AI won’t help, so they think it will make a short- (savings due to firings) and long-term (increased efficiency or otherwise better product) profit. And those that are very informed about AI understand, at the very least, that they can increase short-term profits by firing employees (thus saving on needing to pay salaries to pesky humans) under the guise of increasing efficiency.

So to top management it’s just a decision of “do I want more money now and in the future?” or “do I want more money now and maybe also trick idiots into buying us out before it goes belly-up?”

Lastly, I think you might ascribe more self-reflection ability to middle management than they have. I want to believe that most of them truly think they are a crucial part of making the company work, so they don’t even see that replacing humans with AI would make them obsolete and thus prone for firing.

Unfortunately the main accusation - that Meta systematically downloaded porn to use for AI training data - might actually be false if they aren’t lying about only having downloaded around 22 vids per year. Seems way too little data for a training set to me. Nonetheless they shouldn’t get away with downloading files they didn’t have permission for.

Agree and yes! I happily pay around 100€ annually. Comes with quite a few good perks

• unlimited access to probably one of the best search engines (for search-engine-literate folk it’s not necessarily that you’ll magically find better websites, but the quantity of garbage-/AI-websites will just be heavily reduced and you won’t have the problem that the first three or so links will be ads/sponsorships; it makes searching just feel nicer)
• customisable search (for example, I can generally rank search results for pinterest lower or outright block them to not even have them show up in the first place and instead boost results from beehaw)
• customisable and privacy-respecting AI bots only if you want to use them (from what I could find out, the AI bots always start every new conversation with a blank slate of you, no matter how much you’ve used Kagi or the LLMs before)
• Kagi Small Web, which is an initiative to basically push the “alive internet theory” by highlighting small blogs and personal websites of a whole range of people
• Kagi Universal Summariser, which is an AI summariser that works very well on just about any text you give it and, for the articles and papers I threw at it, doesn’t tend to hallucinate stuff

Thank you, it indeed was wrong. Apparently when I set the link to be translate.kagi.com it tried to send me to beehaw.com/translate.kagi.com Weird but I fixed it now.

And yeah, the options are very neat! I don’t have a captcha though, but that may be because I’m a paying subscriber to Kagi and thus logged in?

To me, the go-to answer used to be DeepL, but more recently it’s Kagi Translate. It’s really accurate for languages I do speak (English to German and vice versa) and allows for recorded speech, although that seems to be reliant on clear talking (my first try of “Hello, what’s going on?” was recorded as “Yo, what’s going on?”)