For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi.
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What I found was _not_ a thoughtful, careful response. What I found was the founder of Kagi saying:
“Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more.”
Reconsider your partnership with Brave - Kagi Feedback
Brave, as you know, is led by Brendan Eich. s homophobia is so disgusting that he was forced to resign as the leader...
(kagifeedback.org)
Well shit. That is the reddest of red flags.
4/
@inthehands Fuck's sake. I was going to try Kagi, too.
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ADDENDUM 2/2: A search engine is going to face some of the toughest ethical problems a tech company can face. And they’ll face most of those problems ••out of public sight••.
I’m interested in the people, their thought process, their temperament. How do they engage with ethical questions? Perfection is impossible, but will they at least •try•? Do they have the capacity to try? Do they even give a shit?
Or do they actively •refuse• to give a shit and call that a virtue? Apparently so for Kagi.
@inthehands I think that similar to what you say re: humans = politics, one should always look at integrity and reputation of honesty and good-doings, or whatever, with humans. People all have good and bad days, but it's the trend that matters.
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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@inthehands @MissConstrue
If you want a usable search engine you gotta use something, Google and MSFT are way more horrible than Brave.
Other options are search engines which just use Google and MSFT as whitelables.There are some open source projects out there which are trying to work out decentralized web searching, so they don't need massive infrastructure, but it will be a couple years that they are comparable and useful.
@azad @inthehands @MissConstrue
I’ve been liking Qwant -
Search is a wasteland right now. Alas. And there are no good choices.
But look, if I’m going to •pay• a company money for search, it needs to be a company run by ethically mature people. If and when Kagi is run by such people, maybe I’ll give that paid plan another go. For now, well, maybe these childish people will blunder their way to maturity and maybe they’ll just blunder, but either way, they won’t be doing it on my dime.
/end
@inthehands, Ecosia is pretty good and has been my default search engine for a while now:
https://www.ecosia.org/ -
I mean, at •best• that’s what I hear. At worst, I suspect that Kagi’s leadership is sympathetic to (or fully in bed with) the right-wing politics of Brave, and is using a claim of being apolitical as cover for their own politics. That would be par for the course when somebody gives this sort of “I’m staying out of politics” excuse for their politically charged actions.
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@inthehands This.
I mean, who else is talking about ethically based criticism of political choices as "politics" to begin with?That's at the doge-man Musk level of fascist bootlicking.
It's this cancerous idea that political choices are sacrosanct, no matter what : that in a "democracy" (in name only) people must never be faulted for their political leanings, no matter how vile the actions their "political" overlords plan or perpetrate.
It's a falsehood. A liberalist foible of the highest order, like that fake Voltaire quote by Evelyn Beatrice Hall.
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Kagi recently started using some services provided by Brave, a company run by immensely objectionable people. Kagi community members rightly raised concerns about this.
I was curious to see Kagi’s response. This is a tricky question that requires a thoughtful, careful response. Their response would be telling: not just about the question of Brave, but about their general ethical outlook.
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@inthehands > Kagi […] ethical outlook
no such thing for a privacy-washing slopcorpo
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@toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands huh? Are you implying that he's Russian or in the KGB? He's Serbian. What does the KGB or Russian oligarchs have to do with this? You're going to need to cite some sources
@unlambda @toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands I remember Prelovac very well, we were both engaged on a project back in '98-'99. Great programmer, I read his code. At that moment I already had almost a decade of experience in debating against Milosevic. Prelovac made me understand that there can exist people with deep thought that can be extremely reactionary. He was a pro-Milosevic zealot 25+ yrs ago, never met him since.
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Paul Cantrell (@inthehands@hachyderm.io)
What I found was _not_ a thoughtful, careful response. What I found was the founder of Kagi saying: “Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more.” https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave/5 Well shit. That is the reddest of red flags. 4/
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
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Tech always seems angry that *any* minority is using their shit @Thebratdragon @inthehands
@WeirdWriter @Thebratdragon @inthehands well some of us are equally angry that we have few alternatives to using their shit.
Actually they are not angry that we have to use their shit, remember we are part of the product, along with all the other sheeple, for whom they have equal contempt.
They just want us to do so passively, silently, be good consumers, watch or listen to the adverts, and not let our opposing voices be heard. -
@unlambda @toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands I remember Prelovac very well, we were both engaged on a project back in '98-'99. Great programmer, I read his code. At that moment I already had almost a decade of experience in debating against Milosevic. Prelovac made me understand that there can exist people with deep thought that can be extremely reactionary. He was a pro-Milosevic zealot 25+ yrs ago, never met him since.
@andrija @unlambda @toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands This is problematic for me because at the moment, Brave Search is the "least bad" search engine for me, but NoGrok is now required to filter out the SpaceX troll's disinformation slop machine.
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@WeirdWriter @Thebratdragon @inthehands well some of us are equally angry that we have few alternatives to using their shit.
Actually they are not angry that we have to use their shit, remember we are part of the product, along with all the other sheeple, for whom they have equal contempt.
They just want us to do so passively, silently, be good consumers, watch or listen to the adverts, and not let our opposing voices be heard.@marjolica @Thebratdragon @inthehands You have a point there!
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@andrija @unlambda @toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands This is problematic for me because at the moment, Brave Search is the "least bad" search engine for me, but NoGrok is now required to filter out the SpaceX troll's disinformation slop machine.
@bms48 @andrija @unlambda @toolbear @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online @inthehands Fwiw Brave is run by a homophobe who has a history of wanting to take away civil rights from people and fueled by money from Peter Thiel.
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@andrija @unlambda @toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands This is problematic for me because at the moment, Brave Search is the "least bad" search engine for me, but NoGrok is now required to filter out the SpaceX troll's disinformation slop machine.
@bms48 @andrija @unlambda @toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands
Qwant seems good for search -
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