"Smart" may as well be synonymous with "unpredictable". I don't need my computer to be smart. I need it to be predictable, consistent, and undemanding.
I've been using Kagi for a while, so I'll post a few quick thoughts I had after reading the article, linked blog, and mastodon thread.
The one thing in the blog post I strongly disagree with is her statement that the summarizer is "the same old AI bullshit". I think they just assumed that without actually testing it. The summarizer is fantastic, and is a great example of the right way to use LLMs. Its output comes entirely from the URL or file you specify. It does not hallucinate. You can ask it follow-up questions about the document, and again, its replies are limited in scope to what's actually in that document. If you ask it something out of scope it'll tell you that it can't find that information in the document. This is great because it's using the LLM for what LLMs are actually good for — complex language parsing — and not for what they're bad for, like reasoning or information storage/retrieval. It's actually quite difficult to misuse the summarizer. It's straightforward and effective. This is Kagi's killer feature, IMO.
I can't speak as highly of its search-integrated AI features like FastGPT. They mostly take information from the contents of the first few search results, but they also seem to "fill in the blanks" more than I'd like. Sometimes it gives me information that is simply not in the sources that it cites. It's not as bad as using ChatGPT (which hallucinates all day every day, and if it ever tries to cite source is hallucinates those, too) but it needs improvement.
That said, Kagi doesn't shove the AI down your throat like you might think reading the blog post. These are separate features that need to be explicitly activated. Plain searches don't return results from the LLMs. If you want that, you need to explicitly go to the assistant or trigger the "quick answer" feature on the search results page. EDIT: I just realized that this is not totally true as of a few weeks ago, when they added a feature to automatically trigger the "quick answer" blurb for search queries ending in a question mark. Perhaps that's why Lori felt like it was over-emphasized.
Anyway, back to the summarizer, here is an example of it in action. I gave it the URL of the Mastodon post. I think this is an excellent result. I also asked it an unrelated followup question so you can see that it limits itself to the information in the URL. It will not make shit up!
The summarizer lets me download conversations in markdown form, so I'll just paste it right in here so you can see.
Exploring https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
Assistant:
Key points:
Query:
What's the capital of North Dakota?
Assistant:
The knowledge provided does not contain any information about the capital of North Dakota. The context is focused on an email exchange between the author and the CEO of Kagi search engine regarding criticism of the company.
Personally, I have found this feature to be too limited. I still use the ClearURLs extension, which is more effective in my experience.
However, neither one is a silver bullet. Here's an example I just took from Amazon (I blocked out some values with X's):
Original URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H/ref=XXXX?qid=XXXXXXXXXX&refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1&s=sporting-goods&sr=XXX
Using Firefox's "copy link without site tracking" feature:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H/ref=XXXX?qid=XXXXXXXXXX&refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1&s=sporting-goods
Using ClearURLs:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H?refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1
The ideal, canonical URL, which no tools I'm familiar with will reliably generate:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C353845H
Longer but still fully de-personalized URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H
If anybody knows a better solution that works with a wide variety of sites, please share!
Apple: builds their entire software ecosystem on free, open-source foundations.
Also Apple: better have a million euros if you want to even start distributing software.
The best use case for an external app store is free open-source software, like we have on the Android side with F-Droid. Apple stopped that before it even started. Jeez.
Firefox syncs across devices as well, if you sign up for a Firefox account and enable sync. This works for bookmarks, logins, history, and you can even access remote tabs if you want. It's also easy to send a single page from one device to another.
On desktop, Firefox has an import feature that will pull your bookmarks and logins m other browsers (like Chrome) into your Firefox profile.
Even if you're neck-deep in Google services, Chrome doesn't do anything special.
A non-smartphone, that is, a cell phone like the ones that today’s parents had when we were young and with which we made calls and sent text messages, was enough for us, and it did not cause addiction.
That's not the way I remember it. Texting addiction was a thing. That's how Twitter became popular; it was basically a way to broadcast SMS to friends at first.
I guess it's a matter of degrees.
Ad-based services are the real problem here, I think. You don't hear people complaining about Wikipedia addiction.
All the time. Not always by choice!
A lot of my work involves writing scripts for systems I do not control, using as light a touch as is realistically possible. I know for a fact Python is NOT installed on many of my targets, and it doesn't make sense to push out a whole Python environment of my own for something as trivial as string manipulation.
awk is super powerful, but IMHO not powerful enough to justify its complexity, relative to other languages. If you have the freedom to use Python, then I suggest using that for anything advanced. Python skills will serve you better in a wider variety of use cases.
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.
I don't think he was ever a billionaire, though he's certainly done quite well for himself. Since leaving Apple, he has founded several new companies and projects, focusing a lot on education and philanthropy. He was also involved in founding the EFF.
He's an engineer first and foremost, and several of his projects never achieved mainstream success, partly for being, IMHO, ahead of their time -- for example, a programmable universal remote in the 80s, and a GPS-based item tracker in the early 2000s.
As far as I know, he has never been involved in any notable scandals.
"no functional impact"? We clearly have very different ideas about the function of a display.
It's always something with Google, isn't it?
Has anyone else been able to reproduce this? I just tried and was not able to.
OP, is it possible these people were in group chats you were part of?
Nothing the linked blog post suggests Microsoft was "blindsided". Where did the Axios article get that "one minute" bit from?
Something like for-jay-yo.
From https://forgejo.org/faq/ :