As somebody that’s a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.

While I’d say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it’s also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.

Of course, that’s because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don’t even use your general location to prioritize results. It’s an interesting balancing act and I’m not quite sure they’ve hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I’m happy with the overall experience currently.

Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.

And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

While I’d highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.

The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.

The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.

Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan’s previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.

Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it’s important that we know who’s making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.

Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication

Heavily depends, IMO.

Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.

It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.

I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.

80%+ of severe injury and death on a bicycle is caused by motor vehicles, or complications of motor vehicle involvement.

Which would mean ~1 in 5 have absolutely nothing to do with a motor vehicle. That’s significant.

There is considerable evidence that everyone wearing a helmet in a car would save vastly more lives and prevent severe head injury

Then that should be an easy [citation needed] for you because my searches are coming up blank for actual studies. Lots of assertions of it, but I’m not finding anything in terms of actual data.

It’s very easy, on the other hand, to find comprehensive meta analyses on the efficacy of helmet use.

It’s also worth noting that the introduction makes a point of calling out another common online assertion that you repeated – that helmets make people engage in more risk-taking behavior – as false:

There has already been an extensive peer-reviewed literature review conducted by Esmaeilikia et al.5, which found little to no support for increased risk-taking when cyclists use helmets and if anything, they cycled with more caution.

I don’t feel those people should be called stupid for their choice.

I don’t think they’re stupid. I think they’re bad at risk analysis. That’s a pretty inherent feature of humans. It’s the reason I want to see actual data.

A helmet is only needed if you intend to spend significant time in traffic.

The worst wreck I’ve ever had on a bike was without a single car in sight. Pinch flat while carrying speed through a steep downhill curve. I split an expensive MIPS helmet in two and still hit hard enough that I had a minor concussion, road rash up one side of my body, and cracked the face of a week old watch just to pour salt in the (metaphorical) wound. I mostly landed on my head and that helmet is the reason I didn’t have drastically more severe head injuries.

Helmets aren’t just for traffic.

He came to suck years later.

At the time he was considerably farther to the left than the rest of the field short of Dennis Kucinich. Opposition to the Iraq war was central to his campaign when half the party was still trying to justify it. He wanted to push universal healthcare before that was a common position within the party. He was on the cutting edge of promoting gay rights and was extremely popular in the gay community when that community didn’t have the voice it does now. His stint as DNC chair built real party infrastructure and helped set the stage for Obama’s 2008 run.

The country – and the Democratic Party – were considerably more conservative 20 years ago and he definitely helped push things toward where we are now.

That said, he’s absolutely said and done some things in recent year that make it pretty clear he’s not the progressive vanguard he was back then. He’s stood still, and arguably regressed, while the country kept moving. It’s unfortunate. But I think it’s also a mistake to dismiss him outright; he was a pretty important figure in getting the party to where it is now.

This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.

It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.

In a vacuum, sure, but it also completely tracks with Sam Altman’s behavior outside of OpenAI.

Employees at previous companies he’s run had expressed very similar concerns about Altman acting in dishonest and manipulative ways. At his most high profile gig before OpenAi, Paul Graham flew from London to San Francisco to personally (and quietly) fire him from Y Combinator because Altman had gone off the reservation there too. The guy has a track record of doing exactly the kind of thing Toner is claiming.

What we know publicly strongly suggests Altman is a serial manipulator. I’m inclined to believe Toner on the basis that it fits with what we otherwise know about the man. From what I can tell, the board wasn’t wrong; they lost because Altman’s core skill is being a power broker and he went nuclear when the board tried to do their job.

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, typical retail price for a game was $50.

That’s equivalent to about $85 today.

The vast majority of the games I buy today are well under $50.

Like how Ferrari cars are designed for 20 year olds but only 80 year olds can afford to buy them.

I mean, making the comparison to motorsports just emphasizes how cheap gaming is as a hobby.

Autocross is as entry level as you can get and a typical ~$50 entry fee gets you maybe 10 minutes of seat time and it’s typical to need to drive 2-3 hours each way for an event. That’s before you start adding in things like the fact that a $1500 set of tires will last you a season or two at most, suspension and brake upgrades easily running a couple of thousand dollars, etc.

Start dipping into actual track time and fees jump to more like $250-750 plus around that much again for track insurance per event. And the upgrades needed for the car to hold up on track are even more expensive still. And this is all ignoring the purchase price of the car and potentially needing to trailer a dedicated track car.

I’ve almost certainly spent far less on PC gaming in the last 5 years combined than I have on motorsports in the past 3 months. I’m on the upper end of spending for most gamers and a dabbler at best when it comes to the cars.

The insanity of the GPU market since covid has put some upward pressure on things but A. the proliferation of great indie titles means you can get incredible value without breaking bank on the highest end equipment and B. even then, the money I spent literally tonight ordering just brake pads and rotors would buy you a 4070 all day long. And I went cheaper than I could have.

Gaming dollars go a long, long way. It’s a hobby that was affordable even when I was younger and broke. It’s still relatively affordable compared to many, many other hobbies.

Would think it depends on the terms.

If seized Russian assets are used as collateral, then I’d think a potential default by Ukraine would just result in the Russian funds being claimed.

I’m not currently, but I do know that HA has made specific pushes to improve voice-control over the past year. Should be numerous blog posts on their website about it.

Spoliation can be grounds for the judge to give the jury adverse inference instructions. i.e., the jury is allowed to assume that whatever was info was destroyed would have been damaging to the defendant’s case.

It’s why I’ve avoided anything smarthome tied to any particular vendor.

My endpoint devices are almost entirely Zwave or Zigbee/Matter based. I started out with a SmartThings hub but migrated it all to Home Assistant last year. HA has honestly had easier integrations than SmartThings did and supports almost anything under the sun.

I don’t have to worry about suddenly losing control of my devices and the only ‘subscription’ associated with it all is $15/year for a domain name to make setting up remote access easier. This approach requires a little more research, but it opens up the ability to mix and match devices however you’d like. Absolutely zero regrets.

Free Stars is being made by the original creators of the series, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford. They had nothing to do with SC3 or Origins.

The reason why it’s not using the Star Control name is because the IP ownership around the whole thing is messy. The short version is that Paul and Fred owned the rights to the universe, but Atari owned the rights to the Star Control name.

When Atari went bankrupt, Stardock bought the name. They thought they’d bough the universe. This resulted in Stardock spending the next couple of years trying trying to use the courts to bully Paul and Fred into turning over the rights to them and generally being dickheads.

This finally ended in a settlement and work on Free Stars has been happening quietly for the last couple of years.

It’s a shame that the game systems are so polarizing because it legitimately has some of the best written characters I’ve seen in any game ever.

From the article:

Carmakers like Tesla which rely heavily on new tech will have to decide if NCAP’s five-star rating is worth reversing its interior design. Tesla’s latest Model 3 has force-touch buttons to activate the turn signal instead of the usual toggle — the kind of change the safety body is hoping to end.

Call them whatever you want, they’re literally one of the things NCAP is identifying as a problem and considering in their safety ratings.

Putting it on the wheel purely to be different is a bad design no matter what you call it. You’ve turned a critical control into a tiny moving target. People having trouble locating them and have to take their eyes off the road is a common complaint about these things.

And, FWIW, I absolutely consider a capacitive sensor distinct from a physical button. An arbitrary flat spot on the steering wheel is substantially more difficult to locate and identify by feel. Especially when your hands are moving around the wheel while doing highly uncommon things like, I don’t know, steering.

Newer Teslas don’t have a turn signal stalk. They’ve put the turn signals on capacitive touch elements on the steering wheel because of course they have.

Kurt Cobain has been dead longer than Kurt Cobain was alive at this point.