We have this property in our universe where simple things with simple rules can create infinitely complex things and behaviours. A molecule of water can’t be wet, but water can. A single ant can’t really do anything by himself, but a colony with simple pheromone exchange mechanisms can assign jobs, regulate population, create huge anthills with vents, specialty rooms and highways.
Nothing within a cell is "alive", it’s just atoms and molecules, but the cell itself is. One cell cannot experience things, think, love, have hopes and dreams, or want to watch Netflix all day, but a human can.
The fact that lots of tiny useless things governed by really simple rules can create this complexity in this world is breathtakingly beautiful.
Not sure why, just that I was in a building when one was being performed and it stunk up the whole place to the point I almost went home because I was going to vomit. My boss put out a bowl of liquid that neutralized the odor, thank god.
Wear loose cotton clothes (long-sleeved if stepping out in the hot sun)
Keep yourself hydrated.
Avoid soft/ aerated drinks/ soda & coffee as they'll dehydrate you. Stick to cool water, ice chips, fresh lemonade made with water, fresh fruit juices, melons, spinach-cucumber-onion-tomato salads, yoghurt,
Eat light.
Stick to well-ventilated rooms with good air-circulation (fans help)
Cold water showers to cool down
Sweating is good. It'll cool you down. This is also why Indians eat spicy food and drink hot tea even in hottest summer. Get sweaty then take a quick cold-water rinse.
If you have to step outside in the hot sun, umbrella, hats, caps etc are your friends.
Wet towel on the back of the neck for a quick cool down.
ETA: When it gets so hot that we lose our appetite, then our go-to meal is to mix up cooled cooked rice with unsweetened yoghurt and a pinch of salt. its variously called yoghurt rice/ curd rice/ thayir saadam / dahi bhaath / dahi chaawal . This is an easy to make & easy to diges meal that is guaranteed to cool a person down.
thayir = dahi = curd = yoghurt
saada = bhaath = chaawal = cooked rice
I’d make one exception: cotton wants to hold water. Evaporative cooling needs water to evaporate. There are synthetic materials that will hold much less water, so they’ll weigh less from sweat and evaporate more quickly, providing a tiny bit more cooling. Plus many have protection from the sun reducing the amount of sunscreen that has to be worn.
There are a line of shirts known as “fishing shirts” that are made to be big, and they have vents to encourage air to circulate inside them. They work great.
No, I don’t have to accept a digital photo of your license as ID. No, your birth certificate is not proof of identity; it doesn’t have your picture.
But the absolute worst one: Not only is this a beat-up photocopy of a foreign ID card with no photo; it also clearly states that you are 19 and even if I accepted this document as valid identification, which I can’t, I still could not legally serve you alcohol.
They are good for life. If they had a photo, the image would become outdated and therefore they’d likely need an expiration date. I don’t want to periodically pay to renew something else.
Exactly. But before they can issue it the photograph needs to be submitted electronically and allow a 3 week processing time prior to birth, with a passport style photo…
The foreigner in question almost certainly did not know the age was 21. This happened to me in the US. Sitting with my mum and sister in the hotel bar, having a quiet beer. Then I get asked for my ID and it all gets very confusing. “But I’m 18, what’s the problem?”
Very few states allow it, and none of them in public. It’s only ever allowed in a private residence (usually the residence of your parent/guardian) while under the direct supervision of your parent/guardian. Even then it can become a crime if somehow the law gets involved and they feel like pressing charges.
During my very brief stint as a security guard at a casino I ran into that last part way more than I ever would have expected. It is astounding how many people do not understand that the laws from their home country do not apply in the country they are visiting.
Lmao I work for a bank and people try to pass off so many random documents as valid ID. In fact, it’s becoming harder to even depend on physical IDs considering how good and ubiquitous fakes are getting
I dislike this one quite a bit. I'm a good planner, but we're all human, and can forget sometimes. This quote is just an excuse to feel better about not helping someone out, and not in a healthy I'm-setting-boundaries manner.
I think there’s a difference between being a shitty person and being unwilling to help and being repeatedly used because you’ve helped out a couple of times before and now people end up leveraging your kindness. I personally subscribe to the line of thinking in the comment you replied to after giving the person I’m working with the benefit of the doubt that it’s a justified emergency a couple of times. I have a list of people at work now that I’ll still assist but I don’t jump at the opportunity as quickly because everything is an emergency to them and I think that’s just as shitty as not helping someone.
Just to clarify, I phrase it a bit differently: Not “piss-poor planning” but rather “a lack of planning” since it sounds less aggressive.
I think there’s a difference between being a shitty person and being unwilling to help and being repeatedly used because you’ve helped out a couple of times before and now people end up leveraging your kindness.
Unfortunately the older I have gotten, I have found that this applies zero to the world of corporate and upper management when dealing with their endless ‘emergencies’ due to fuckups of planning.
Also, throw sales management into that above lot. They tend to be the worst when it comes to any sort of concept of planning or prioritizing or, well, anything.
Edit: edit just to clarify what I meant was shit tends to roll downhill in a major way and you either have to do it or else.
Creating a class of prison slaves who have no right to vote with no possibility of upward mobility is a feature, not a bug. Add to that the difficulty of obtaining affordable healthcare/tying it to a job, gutting education, making child labor legal, making abortion illegal, etc., etc., and that plan becomes pretty obvious.
It’s a recipe for creating monsters similar to how intervention in the middle east created those terrorists and their symbiotic relationship with the military industrial complex. That plan is so ridiculously evil and doomed to fail that I can’t help but think there’s some second order effect that they’re going for here.
The monsters aren't the ones being created, the monsters are the ones creating those circumstances to begin with.
I know you didn't mean anything by it, but that shift in focus is really important to point out, because those same people rely on you and me to see the poor people who's lives they destroyed as the problem, instead of whose who really are.
None of that changes the fact that it is the system that creates that kind of behaviour by encouraging and rewarding selfishness, greed, hate, and doing whatever it takes to "succeed".
I'm not denying that there are horrible people out there (I've been victim to a few personally), or that they shouldn't be held responsible for individual actions if they harm others (they should), but in almost all cases you can't blame them for turning out that way (again, not excusing any harm they go on to cause to others) when you look at the circumstances they need to exist in. Circumstances designed by a handful of people reaping unfathomable benefits.
So I'd much sooner point my finger at those who are actually to blame, instead of at those who are the fucked up products of their system, because one of those not only creates infinitely more damage than the other, but also it's only that same group that have the power to do anything to stop it.
Definitely. So many searches lately will return results that only partially match the search terms. What’s even the point of searching if you’re just going to show a bunch of unrelated results?
Even exact matches with quotes don’t seem to be as useful these days. Google tries to be helpful by matching on what it thinks I want instead of what I actually want. That plus the ads and all the other junk
They’re not trying to be helpful, they’re trying to guide you towards a product or towards content they control that they think you will be more engaged with. They also give results that will lead to more searches, and therefore more ad exposure for their business.
Plus, I used to set my new tab page to Google, but God, it’s so bad. There’s always some stupid image for some stupid anniversary like Mary F. Dinklehorn becoming the first trans-gay-librarian in Antarctica or something (not that I’m against any of that) I just want to get some work done and not be distracted by Google desperately clinging to power.
I’m using Chrome and added an extension called Empty New Tab Page that makes Chrome open to a blank page. I had to do that because the Google home page got to be so annoying. Also removing the need to fetch content makes the browser and new tabs open faster.
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of your doing your search: they got paid for the results that they delivered, and for the ad traffic of you having received it! Don't you see why this is best for them you? /s
I actually prefer Google for shopping. Just turn off your adblocker, search for a particular item you want to buy and bam your first 3 to 4 pages are retailers pushing the product with their prices listed (with a touch of scam websites that I presume pay for advertising). Anything else I add ‘Reddit’ or just watch a few YouTube videos depending on what kind of answers I’m looking for
The problem is that a version of this advice can be very helpful. As someone who has suffered from ongoing mental health issues and also work in an industry where I regularly support people with mental health issues, one piece of advice I often give is to identify what traumas are you unnecessarily holding on to, which are contributing to your depression/anxiety etc.
When you can let go of some of the more mundane stresses in your life, you have more energy to tackle the real issues you’re facing. Of course this is much easier said than done and has to be used as part of a more wholeistic approach, but sometimes the advice to just learn to let it go is very good advice.
Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that intricacy and so just repeat the surface level comment which is far from helpful. And this in turn also leads to a push back in the other direction where people who could genuinely benefit from letting go of some of their stress refuse to do so because they have spent so long being told that’s all there is to it.
There’s heaps of psychology research into therapeutic approaches and all that stuff out there if you’re willing to essentially do a degree on the topic, but personally I like to keep things as simple as possible so anyone can start applying it straight away.
I usually start with the picture story book The Huge Bag of Worries by Virginia Ironside (there’s a read along of it on youtube) to frame the conversation. It helps to set up the idea that the “worries” are real and are having an effect on the individual. Also that many people struggle to know how to deal with them and end up giving bad advice, often because they are carrying their own bag of worries. I also at this point remind them that we are unlikely to get rid off all the problems, eg I can’t cure your depression or rebuild your brain to make it neuro-typical, but we can make it so they are the only things in your bag making it a lot easier to carry.
Then I’ll talk about a Catastrophe Scale. This is where we take a worry and rank it on a scale out of 10 of how bad is it really. 1 is a minor problem that will go away on it’s own, and 10 is an extreme issue that will have a permanent impact on your life. Like in the book, many problems stop being an issue once you realize they are only a 1 or 2 on the scale. This is the “just get over it” point. Other’s need some attention but can easily be solved or passed on to someone else in your support network to handle, but once you’ve spent that small amount of energy, it’s gone. This is the where we see the value of another piece of despised advice, “stop worrying and just do it” or “have you tried going for a walk outside today”. Once again, often spouted advice by people who think of it as the only thing needed without understanding how it fits into a complete treatment plan.
Finally that just leaves the real problems, the ones that are less easy to deal with. But without having to carry the weight of the whole bag of worries, we now have a capacity to take those worries to therapy or a doctor to medicate etc, and just generally do the more difficult and complex work that’s needed.
I don’t even think it’s going into the lungs especially with non smokers. If you try to inhale smoke as a non smoker you’ll most likely cough your lungs out. I assume they suck the smoke into their cheeks and blow it out from there.
It looks kind of dumb though if I’m being honest. You can easily tell if someone didn’t inhale and instead just kept it in their mouth. Doesn’t look as complete. For acting, I’d consider this an issue.
Almost everything looks dumb on tv if you know what to look for. Almost everything related to guns, computers, or driving looks ridiculous and fake. It doesn’t stop them from doing it, nor does it stop people from enjoying the entertainment.
No idea what you’re talking about, I just picked up a new Charger with the F&F package (25 speed manual, factory installed 5000 shot of nitrous) and it seems perfectly realistic
I think once there is enough info on lemmy it’ll just get to the point where the searches will bring up the information you need.
I feel like if I’m searching on Google I want it to take me to the most relevant source of information even if that still is reddit. It won’t always be. But it is still right now.
Nothing wrong with competition, it’ll give better search results.
I think voting based on quality of content (and NOT whether you agree with it) is the best approach for healthy discussions. If somebody is a low effort troll, then for sure downvote (and maybe even consider reporting).
OTOH, if somebody makes a well written and thoughtful post about why Totoro is the best Ghibli movie ever, and meanwhile you think Totoro is not even in their top 3, then I would still recommend NOT downvoting 😃
I see downvoting of comments for stuff that does not require mods, but is still people being assholes or something not belonging. I don’t vote enough on submissions to have an opinion there :D
I’ve upvoted comments that I disagreed with, but were well written an contributed to a good discussion. I only downvote for very low quality, spam or hateful comments.
The problem is that there’s no way to enforce this in practice. All of these conversations about voting culture, with examples and pontificating always just come off as “everyone who drives slower than me is a grandpa, everyone who drives faster than me is a lunatic.”
Downvotes will always be an “I disagree” button no matter what anyone wants or thinks.
Hmm, that is a good point. I really wish Beehaw would refederate with SJW so we could benefit from their activity and experience more. I don’t agree with every decision they make but they certainly have insightful takes at times
Eh I still like downvotes and find myself just not enjoying beehaw as much without them. I mostly just don’t get the moral panic over having a disagree button more than anything.
Moral panic? What? It’s about healthy community dialogue and slightly how downvotes impacts the psyche.
If someone tells you why they dislike something you like, you’re not doing anyone a favor by downvoting it.
You are ignoring how trolls operate in reality though. THey explicitly use “just having an opinion” as cover for shitting up a forum. Look up “sealioning.”
But again, this is my opinion. People are far too concerned about the downvote button. And the fact that the above, completely respectful but seemingly controversial opinion already has downvotes kind of proves my point.
It would be useful if people actually used it to burrow trolls, sealions and irrelevant comments as intended, but as I’ve seen people can’t be trusted with that because as you say: It becomes a “disagree” instead, that targets everything that people disagree with. It gets inane on political topics where useless comments for the right tribe gets immensely upvoted. “Covfefe” Yes, very informative. There could be alternate vote for agreement, funny, or troll mark.
Most people on Lemmy right now are not using them in that way. As we grow, misuse of downvotes will almost certainly become more common, but right now people are self-policing their behavior for the most part
Those of us on kbin can see who up/downvotes. I've noticed, anecdotally, that once this became more wildly known, there have been fewer downvotes that mean "I disagree", with them mostly being used on troll posts or obviously bigoted posts.
I’m also wary of potential downsides though. I think in smaller communities it could be a problem because people might start fights with each other when they check who downvoted them. But I’m not sure, at least now we have a good test environment on kbin, and so far it seems to be beneficial based on what you’re saying.
I think it's overall good. A vote is no longer an anonymous action-- it's personal, just like leaving a comment supporting or disagreeing would be. While I don't think it would ever be appropriate to harass a person because they up/down voted something, I do think people should have to make the mental calculation about whether they're willing to have any specific up or down vote available for anyone to see.
Totally agree. I’m just trying to brainstorm possible issues that may crop up in the future. Many times, the solution to a problem simply introduces a different problem.
Although as I’m considering it, the ease of making alts on this platform mitigates any potential issues, because the whole thing can be sidestepped by downvoting with an alt.
Overall, probably couldn’t hurt to bring that functionality to Lemmy and see how it goes.
I think it's done more good than harm and don't want to see them anonymized again... but I do have to say I've found myself withholding a downvote that I think was completely justifiable and deserved because I didn't want to be the first and only one and get shit for it.
I guarantee it won’t be long before communities begin using this information.
Remember on Reddit how many subs would prematurely ban any accounts that participated in subs they disliked? That was entirely driven by the users, not the platform. Imagine if they had your voting information too.
I predict we’ll start seeing throwaway accounts for voting, to disassociate your voting records from your posting persona.
Had a guy tell me he was going to sue me, personally not the store, and financially ruin me because I told him to put on a mask in like April 2020. He didnt do either. I’m sure anyone who worked with the public during that time has some story lol.
I still can’t wrap my head around why certain political factions latched onto not wearing a mask as a political rallying cry. Like…why do you want to kill the people you need to vote for you? I can’t understand.
Honestly I think some of this stuff is a way to filter out people with critical thinking skills the same way scam emails are often deliberately spelled wrong to filter out people who wouldn’t have fallen for the scam to begin with.
Caring about other people is leftist and woke, and no god fearing american patriot would ever give a fuck about another person, ever! Thats communism! /s
Masks are annoying and a hassle and everyone hates them.
But you also hate democrats and every major or minor inconvenience in your life is always their fault.
Since wearing a mask is something one might choose or not choose to do, it is therefore a choice issue and therefore a freedom issue, which is guaranteed to you by the constitution. And hence it’s a political issue.
Funnily enough, I think watching “The Last of Us” made me understand what these people were afraid of.
Personally, my mind doesn’t go in that direction when I see the government doing something, but I guess for some people that is their first thought. They think that when you’re temporarily not allowed to congregate in public, it’s a slippery slope into a permanent lockdown state.
Making a loooot of assumptions here. Like that conservatives know how to think for themselves, or that right wing fanatics have any understanding of how reality works.
Have you ever seen that movie Don’t Look up? It’s a great watch. Even in the face of a planet destroying comet heading for earth, the conservative were all “You know what, I’m FOR all the jobs the comet will provide! Don’t look up! Don’t look up!”
Not really. They were told by their talking heads that they should be against masks but that doesn’t make sense. The powerful people need the votes right? We haven’t descended fully into fascism yet, just mostly…so why would they push that narrative knowing it would kill people who would vote for them? Was it a calculated risk to attempt to kill more of the other guys? I’m just confused about how that worked in their minds, and why they wouldn’t have looked for some other narrative that wouldn’t endanger their voters so much. I get that they don’t care about the people who cast the votes, but they do care about the votes.
They thought that cities, which lean heavily blue, would be more affected. This was the case at first, until we got a handle on things, particularly vaccines. Then their strategy backfired and killed more reds.
In order to consolidate power the Trump allies multiple factions of right wing nut jobs. I one of which is the anti-vax group. Most of the covid knee-jerk reaction was to appease this group. The leaders need to keep the loyalty of the groups, so when a pet issue of a group comes up in the main public discourse the sub-group demands the leaders act, the leaders then tell the rest of their followers what to think and do.
My guess is it was part of a two-pronged election strategy. First, make COVID denial part of the GOP’s political platform, so that they’re more likely to be performatively reckless, including waiting on line in crowded polling places where no one is masked (which goes further to scare people away that were actually taking COVID seriously), while people taking precautions like voting by mail or by voting early when it’s less crowded would be disproportionately likely to vote Democratic.
Then, pass unreasonable regulations like “mail-in and early votes can’t be counted until all votes cast on Election Day are counted”, while pressuring election workers to post results as early as possible, skewing votes in their favor, or, failing that, point to the fact that the votes against them were counted later as evidence of fraud.
point to the fact that the votes against them were counted later as evidence of fraud.
It was stated in some documents or something that were released that this was the plan. I don’t know about the entire anti-mask plan, but they absolutely knew early/mail-in would skew Democrat, because it usually does and covid made it worse, so they knew they could sell the narrative that the sudden increase in Democrat vote averages must be cheating somehow. I don’t know how Fox News still exists after they sold this lie. Hopefully the people who fell for it eventually realize how wrong it was. It’s going to keep being true (probably not the the same level without covid though), so they’ll either belief every election is fucked or that they were manipulated.
First off, Reddit (and Lemmy) is not a good place to learn about logical arguments and debate. The whole voting system is designed to filter popular opinions to the top and bury things that people dont like. If you sound authoritative and match your argument to the tone and biases of the community, your statements go to the top. If you get defensive or your answer doesn’t match the subreddit you get dog piled with down votes. If there are any topics you are genuinely an expert in just go hang out in the appropriate subreddit and watch all the complete bullshit, half truths and personal opinions that get recycled over and over as gospel truth.
I’ve noticed this when I used to lurk in subreddits related to what I’m most knowledgeable about. So much misinformation getting upvoted because it’s said confidently
This is why critical thinking is such an essential skill. So many people out there are convinced about things with bullshit arguments, just because the person talking is charismatic/confident or popular and influential.
Note: Critically thinking doesn't mean denying everyone and everything and holding controversial beliefs in order to feel smarter than others, it often starts with admitting your very own mistakes first. Just like with other's arguments you should be applying the same checks to your own thinking and notice your own fallacies to correct them.
I HAVE seen people turn around discussions when they have evidence of being more in the know than the established flow of Karma. Hell, I’ve seen it happen with people who only managed to produce complex evidence hours in and that I myself had commented in disbelief they could be right.
But it’s a rare occurrence even among discussions that do have a person who’s such. Often, post scores pre-dispose the new people coming in into choosing who to agree and disagree on, and even the actual expert who objectively “wins the fight” will continue to get downvotes just because the other downvotes were there. This often leads to the whole “Highschool America is asleep, it’s okay to post X” mentality you’d see in some communities.
Personally, I think that scoring systems have a useful place. Even downvotes. Sorting things is useful. But I see no reason to actually show the numbers. If scores were hidden, we’d have no more and no less benefits. But that stuff is instance-admin policy and I don’t really feel like fighting for it. Right now, Lemmy isn’t having enough issues like that that I’m bothered, and I don’t know if it’ll ever grow to the point it will.
lemmy and reddit are great places to learn about debate, but their systems are not set upnto foster genuine debate. if you want to see real debate, with threats, strawmen, logical fallacies, trolls and street rules you’re in the right place.
OP is just asking for some help taking the wool away from over their eyes so they can see the truth behind the strawmen, anecdotes, fallacies and misdirection.
For my job and work. I use Kagi. Its not free, but the search returns are very good, you can filter domains out from your returns, it supports custom “bangs” ala duck duck go and theres no tracking of queries. There are also specific filters for things like programming, or recipes for cooking etc. Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer. They are trying to establish a sustainable model to run on that allows for privacy.
I find it quite refreshing. It isnt free and I generally hate subscription stuff, but this is easily one I dont mind as it pays dividends often when searching for work.
i’m also a Kagi user/fan. it looks good, is fast, doesn’t have ads, & the results appear to be better than i get using other engines. the lenses are also nice.
Hey, thanks for the recommendation. I had no idea a service like this existed. I’ve been frustrated with all of the search engines for years now. I just signed up. Hopefully it turns out to be rad.
I wouldn’t mind $5 if that tier didn’t also cap the number of searches to 250. I’d burn through that super quick, and $25 for unlimited is way too much IMO.
The tiers have changed over time. Originally $10 was 700, not its 1000.
I use search A LOT for work. I also have it on my phones etc because I dont feel like swapping engines all that often.
I find it giving me more acurate results quicker, without ads.
The only other subscription services I use are mostly Netflix for kids and family. I avoid them at most costs. But this one allows me to do my job a bit more efficiently and its privacy focused.
Where do you think is a reasonable price? Search is something most folks use daily, multiple times per day. If the quality of results is good, that seems like a small price to pay. Netflix is pushing 20 a month, and many other streaming services are in the 10—15 range.
Wow. I don’t mind paying for stuff if it’s good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.
The free trial with a 100 searches makes it pretty easy to figure out how much you actually search online and if you’re not a power user, that 300 searches plan is pretty OK. If you work in tech, that 10$ plan is definitely enough - in searching pretty much constantly and never got above the 800 searches the 10$ plan used to offer (now that plan has 1000 searches in it).
Those prices don’t seem super horrible, but I don’t see any reason to trust that this company isn’t mining and selling my data in addition to collecting my money.
Not sure where you are, but there’s practically no place in the US you get a lunch for that. In flat terms it’s quite cheep. It’s only expensive relative to free.
And when you think about it, your search service really is your internet. It shapes your whole internet experience. If that’s not worth $5/month to make sure it’s good and not polluted with ads, I don’t know what to tell you.
I felt similarly about this, but upon reflecting, if the searches actually worked and didn’t ‘come in groups of 5’ due to SEO trash, it probably works out?
Haven’t tried it myself yet, but I have been finding myself in increasing frustration with Google and degenerate article sausage factories…
I felt similarly about this, but upon reflecting, if the searches actually worked and didn’t ‘come in groups of 5’ due to SEO trash, it probably works out?
Haven’t tried it myself yet, but I have been finding myself in increasing frustration with Google and degenerate article sausage factories…
The problem here is so many people are used to tech running at a loss on the books and/subsiding operating costs by selling customer data and analytics.
The reality is running tech companies is hard and expensive. The money here goes straight back into development. It’s just out of beta since march, and they have increased their quotas since I have been a customer.
But people are spoiled by free where you aren’t a customer. You are the product. If you are cool with that it’s fine. This isn’t the product for you.
For me, I like the idea and the searches are better than DDG/bing and startpage/google. So it’s worth the cost personally. I would rather pay that than say…Amazon prime where I’m both the customer and the product.
It’s not a paywall on information. What you’re paying for is a better search engine and better privacy. People have to be paid to provide you with that and, if you don’t want to pay them with cash, you can go and pay another search engine with your time and data.
Ah, the old paywall with extra steps. So let’s take that further… In the future google has devolved even more than it has now. So it’s just basically a misinformational mess riddled with ads. I guess to have access to reliable and non-predatory links/info you gotta now have the money for it. How much money will of course increase as any company gets established of course further pushing lower income people out.
And don’t even pretend this is far stretched. People struggling to get by get boned by shit like this all the time.
It’s too abusable. I don’t like it at all. I also don’t like the idea of the government having full control of the internet/information either. I don’t know what the solution is but locking information behind money, even if it’s in a roundabout way, is not a good solution.
I mean yes I agree with all your points. But I stand by the assertion that it’s too expensive. I could handle $5/month, perhaps, but 300 searches is waaaay too few. That’s 10 per day. I did 10 searches this morning before I got out of bed.
For unlimited searches it’s twice the cost of a streaming service. Yet it has negligible bandwidth costs, and significantly less storage cost, probably less development cost. Sure a small user base too, but at that price they’re really going to struggle to grow it!
But the problem is that this is what it costs for a search that doesn’t sell your data or advertise to you. Search is expensive.
Fortunately you do get into the habit of just searching sites directly, like wikipedia, MDN, archwiki, etc., rather than using up your general purpose searches.
It’s this, or sell your data to Google for free searches.
And maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just not sustainable for searched to be paid, but Kagi is really transparent about their pricing. It’s just expensive unless it’s subsidized by ads or data collection.
They phrased it weirdly, but Bangs (same before that for free when I was a DDG user for years) are a killer feature. I don’t need the indirection if I know where I’m searching for something. !caniuse, !mdn, !imdb, whatever. I’d not use a search engine without bangs again, and if Kagi didn’t support all the DDG bangs, I’d never have even tested them.
At $10 it’s 1000 unique searches. I search a ton and have it on my phone etc. haven’t exceeded the limit. I am at 600 searches right now, with a renewal due on the 24th.
They are writing a search engine from scratch. They don’t just randomize bing or google searches. So I think you may be underestimating the operating and especially development costs, probably hosting costs too.
But to each his own. Also those streaming services you mention. They don’t really turn a profit, and definitely don’t on subscriptions.
I think my point is for me and in my specific use case, I actually search less.
For example if I am debugging a process or working through some setup, I will often have to iterate through a series of searches with tweaks in DDg and sometimes even google. Using tweaks like site:some site.com, quoted portions of queries to reduce useless returns etc.
Kagi, again for me, had helped reduce that. I can’t often find a very quality source in the first query or two.
So the limit wasnt hugely a problem. I was actually VERY concerned like you because above 10 dollars is pretty steep. I initially signed up at 10, set limits not to exceed 15 and figured I would cancel and either submit a request at work for an annual or just ditch it.
Luckily two things happened that retained me. The first I already mentioned. The second was they bumped the quota to 1000.
Again I may still jsut see if I can get work to pay it out. But at 10 bucks it’s digestible, for me, for the value add. I also do no filtering. Just search whatever random shit I think of n the shitter in addition to curated work searches.
I’m not trying to sway you. Idgaf if you use it or not. Just trying to help provide useful information because for me, it was more “ehhh let’s see how it works out”
Finally, I have reached out to Vlad about suggestions and even corrections on things, both in the product and ancillaries (like their documentation). He’s responded each time and even corrected some of the issues. Which is really nice.
I could actually see myself paying for the $25/mo option and leveraging that into a “free” alt-google that slurps up all your data for me to monitize however I can. Be sure to keep an eye out for it! :D
Arguments like this would only be relevant if a subscription service’s cost decreased globally as enrollment milestones were reached by their user population. Economies of scale kick in and you’re not paying the same account… But we never see those sub cost decreases for some strange reason?
Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer.
This is a fallacy. Just because you’re paying doesn’t mean you’re the customer. Whoever pays the most money is the customer; everyone else is the product and is merely paying for the privilege of being the product. Examples: Microsoft Windows, most Android phones, cable TV.
I’m also a kagi user and share the same feelings about it. Definitely worth it. Specially since I know my search data is not used to bias search results or sell ads on the search results.
Having to pay for a limited number of searches really takes away a lot of freedom. I would really have to think about my search query and be upset if it didn’t give me the results I was looking for. I would need unlimited searches just for my peace of mind. And I’m definitely not paying more then a couple of dollars for it. Might sound cheap but I really really hate subscription services.
They have quota controls as well. A soft limit that will send you alerts when you hit them and you pay 1.5 cents per search and a hard limit that will stop searches from being run.
Personally I went to a tier that I dont exceed (10/month). I ahve considered going to the annual subscription which is also unlimited but the same as the 25/month, just discounted a bit. I could probably write that one off for work too, definately could with taxes.
My God, 5$ for unlimited searches would have been expensive, but you only get 300! This thing would have to literally read my mind, and even then I don’t think it would be worth it
You should go see the github for lemmy-ui. There is feature request to add the weight of the community into account so we don’t only see the most popular post from the biggest communities. github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues
That’d be great. Currently 90% of my feed is /c/memes and while I do find them entertaining, I also miss a ton of posts from smaller communities related to my hobbies that I would engage with more.
Yeah, I had to leave memes because it was my whole feed. I feel like one of lemmy’s biggest potential selling points would be a scriptable feed. There are some small communities I want to see every post in, and other huge ones that I only want to see maybe the top 5 from.
I haven’t looked at the PR, but if it’s really that simple, that doesn’t seem like the full solution. I don’t particularly want a sub with 10 users popping up on the front page after 3 upvotes just because it got to the top of that sub. Sub weight, as mentioned in the top comment here, should probably be taken in to account.
Doesn’t stop them from showing up via All and Local, which is what I want to do without having the completely block these communities. Just my preference.
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