Comment on Google Calendar removes Pride Month and Black History Month

• SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Much like the current hullabaloo about the head of ProtonMail being suspect because of his support of Trump, there’s a ton of shady shit about Kagi, too. They’re Venture Capital funded. What’s the deal with the T-shirt company? Why did they lie stupidly about stuff like “we don’t do paid advertising… oh wait whoops now we do.”

  Further, the CEO of Kagi just has that techbro attitude of “You are required to listen to what I have to say.”

  mastodon.social/…/112258758788834454

  Discussions with Vlad are him telling you his side and expecting you to accept it as the truth and not keep arguing. His goal isn’t to discuss, it’s to keep talking at you until you agree or go away. HE thinks he discusses with people, but he talks AT people. So I don’t feel bad making a blog post and forcing him to be talked at for once (which I never even expected him or that many other people to see it, I’m trying to figure out how many hits I even got rn to see how bad he Streissand’d this).

  But yeah I knew that already, and that’s why I didn’t engage with him. I know what a Vlad conversation is and I wasn’t willing to be lectured by the CEO of a company I criticized on my tiny personal blog. Thats an insane proposition. And it’s really not even irony–I suspected this is exactly what would happen. I knew that arguing with Vlad would only benefit his own ego, but I knew that bluntly repeating “I will not discuss this with you quit emailing me” will just prove what I already knew, that he does not care what people say (and probably barely reads what they say given that he linked me the same post I already read twice) and that he will do whatever he’s driven to do no matter what. The only options were he quits emailing me (great!) or he digs himself in deeper and deeper (great??? idk but it proves a point)

  Seriously, his behavior is unhinged.

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  • SabinStargem@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Aside from political leanings of services like Protonmail and Kagi, I look at one key thing: where they are headquartered. Kagi is in California, while Protonmail is in Switzerland. IMO, this means that if a civil war breaks out, they are less likely to poison or remove their service.

    It is all about whether the workers and leadership are within reach of the law, be it official or the jungle.

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  • kat@orbi.camp ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Ah, so Duckduckgo leadership is still the only one in thr clear?

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    • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Find a searx / searxng instance or run one yourself! Depending on corporate software will continue to be a cat and mouse game.

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    • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah, I definitely haven’t seen as much sketchy stuff about their leadership, that’s for sure. It’s really hard to find a trustworthy group doing this kind of thing, partially because of the sheer amount of money needed to get such a thing off the ground to begin with… which usually ends up meaning VC money, which ends up meaning shady decisions to be able to pay it back.

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      • kat@orbi.camp ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Well, appreciate the headsup. The battle is always staying informed.

        While at it, any alternatives to ProtonMail?

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    • KnightontheSun@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I have had reasonable experiences with startpage as a search engine.

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• floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Kagi includes search results from the big search engines, which would mean Google and Bing. So while they do some of their own crawling to improve the results, some of your money will still be going to Google and Microsoft. It’s still a step in a better direction though. I don’t know whether Kagi has any plans to become more independent in future.

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  • walden@sub.wetshaving.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    help.kagi.com/kagi/…/search-sources.html

    I tried finding API pricing for Google but it’s probably buried somewhere. They make it sound “free” but with usage limits, which surely Kagi exceeds? Either way, it’s probably on a “per-call” basis, and Google gets a lot less money that way compared to crapping out money driven search results.

    “Our unique algorithms down-rank pages with a lot of ads and trackers (which we have found correlate with a decrease in content quality) and promote content from independent, ad-free sources and personal websites.”

    I’m sure it’s not perfect, but my experience with Kagi has been very very good. With DuckDuckGo I’d often have to revert to Google to find what I was looking for, but not with Kagi.

    I pay for Kagi, so my opinion might be clouded by confirmation bias.

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  • kat@orbi.camp ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Ah, does Duckduckgo not do that too anymore? I thought there wasn’t a fully independent search engine.

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    • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I can’t think of a fully independent one.

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    • KnightontheSun@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      DDG uses Bing primarily.

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• SabinStargem@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You can also use Kagi’s video search AI to vet the political alignment of a video before watching. I don’t want to waste my time on facist-leaning content, be it political or economic.

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