Imagine how much more they could've just paid employees.

When a firm outright admits to bypassing or trying to bypass measures taken to keep them out, you think that would be a slam dunk case of unauthorized access under the CFAA with felony enhancements.

Don't worry, the new strategy is to string a company along with talks of a buyout, then when their cash runs out and they declare bankruptcy, to buy all the assets on fire sale.

I use Kagi because the truth is all other corporate alternatives at this point are unusable swill.

That said, I do not like the company and disagree with their choices in many aspects.

For one, while they don't force you to use AI features, there isn't a way to explicitly turn them off for your account, there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.

They still don't run their own index, instead complacent to just pay the other search providers. Additionally, if you're trying to escape Google... Kagi runs on Google Cloud Services.

There's more complaints, and I'm sure others will chime in, but that's my take.

No thanks, people hop from centralized platform to centralized platform thinking things will be different.

Consolidated power, especially when fully captured by market forces, will always enshitify, the only out is federation.

It's not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.

The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing sites is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental working model of human societies since prehistory.

I've been using Kagi for the last year+.

Personally, I wish they'd tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they're limited by their existing index providers, I wish they'd run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

::: spoiler TW: Self harm Also not a huge fan of the company and a lot of it's ardent customers, who heavily protested a suicide prevention popup if you used it to searched for how to kill yourself. :::

Reddit is becoming such a shit hole anyway, the site barely functions on mobile browser now, half the time it has API errors or fails to load.

There's often a tacit acknowledgment to the poor quality of AI output, but that they do not care, the strategy is to flood the zone with so much garbage as to make it irrelevant. It's a grift-conomy mindset, the focus is on "velocity" and "productivity" to the detriment of all else.

Can just use avif instead, it holds an AV1 stream and acts like gifs/images do WRT looping — also very broad support (more than AV1 in WebM containers).

Demonstration:

Edit: switched to an example with simpler decode requirements.

And it ended up posting significantly faster speeds in dense areas where they actually deploy the technology. My phone has hit 4Gb/s on it.

Art is people making stuff, without the people... it's just stuff.

The amount of stupid AI scraping behavior I see even on my small websites is ridiculous, they'll endlessly pound identical pages as fast as possible over an entire week, apparently not even checking if the contents changed. Probably some vibe coded shit that barely functions.

We also typically think of these individuals as mature adults with some understanding of the world and social skills — but a lot of the people getting pulled in are kids and teenagers, which are particularly vulnerable for exactly the reason you elucidated.

Same.

I was sure the emotional manipulation tactic would be extremely effective. Guess it was a little too blatant, even for the general public.

Uh, Java is specifically supported by IBM in the Power and Z ISA, and they have both their own distribution, and guides for writing Java programs for mainframes in particular.

This shouldn't be a surprise, because after Cobol, Java is the most enterprise language that has ever enterprised.

But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you...

Probably not. I just ran into a dude who suggested using LLMs to fix misplaced braces in source code.

One of the biggest appeals of CloudFlare (aside from DDoS protection) is they don't charge absurd^[unless you're big enough they think they can shake you down] prices for bandwidth egress. AWS, et al have honestly predatory bandwidth pricing, they could be 1/5 and still profitable.

So given the choice of paying $30 in AWS egress that could balloon to hundreds, or a flat $20/mo, it's not hard to see why so many people choose CloudFlare.

The Belgian traffic? Almost entirely from a single residential IP — one box that sent over 156,000 login attempts, more than the entire country of Germany. It just sat there, hammering echo "\x6F\x6B" over and over, every single second, for weeks. Relentless.

Had a funny similar thing, there's some weird person/people that randomly probe and attack a specific game's community hosted dedicated servers; and one week this specific IP address out of Virginia was just hammering one of mine, with what amounts to a specific byte sequence, then an incrementing number of the packet (until it wrapped around). Then it stopped. Weird shit.

They're working on the IPv6 part right now, just don't ask when it'll be done.