[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Entirely orthogonal to the discussion. These countries are wealthy and do have lots of suburban and rural areas where families are likely to have one or multiple cars.

That doesn't in any way contradict the fact that many people in Copenhagen and Stockholm cycle daily, regardless of the season. And in case you haven't been: there's regularly rain and/or snow.

I don't understand where this idea comes from that spending 15 minutes outside when it's barely freezing is some kind of superhuman feat. Like, bruh, it's chilly, put on a coat and get over it.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

... What exactly do you think the economic situation is in Copenhagen or Stockholm?

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah so my point stands, you need a car. Have you seen an Ami in person? It's a glorified electric scooter. Think of the tiniest car you've ever seen in your life and make it 3x smaller. No way I'm driving that on a US road with trucks overtaking me at 90 km/h, and I say that as an habitual cyclist and motorcycle rider.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

If you're in North America, I'm sorry but that's just not relevant because North Americans decided the only transportation one is allowed to get is a car and the Ami doesn't sell there because it's not a car.

If you're in a North-American style suburb elsewhere in the world, then yeah I get it it sucks. But the Ami isn't even a pragmatic solution there, because such suburbs tend to be surrounded with roads with 70+ kph speed limits which is much faster than the Ami can even go so you won't be safe there either. If you can't get a car and can't ride a bike or use public transit, the only pragmatic solution is to not live in a car-dependent suburban hellscape.

The Ami is designed for inner city driving where 45 km/h keeps up with the flow of traffic. But where you can comfortably drive an AMI at 45 km/h without holding up traffic, you can also ride a bicycle at 30 km/h, or walk, and there's probably public transit unless you live in an unusually terrible city (and I say that as someone who lives in a well below-average city).

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Uh, yeah, no. Copenhagen and Stockholm are cycling capitals. SE Asia literally gets a monsoon and everyone still rides a motorcycle.

"It's wet/cold outside" is nothing more than a paltry excuse. There's a whole NJB video on the subject if you want.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Then get a small car like a VW Up. It will be cheaper, will be more practical in literally every way, and will have a lot more range. It's also not limited to 45 km/h, which you will quickly find is painful on the kinds of semi-rural roads that separate your hypothetical village from the city.

With a 75 km announced range and no fast charging (!) your best bet for a weekend getaway is to use the Ami to get to the nearest train station. Hell, if you can't charge at work it might even struggle to get you back home.

The Ami is simply a terrible value proposition if it's your only mode of transportation. And if it's your secondary mode of transportation, then its carbon footprint skyrockets as all the lithium that makes up its battery will hardly be used over its lifetime.

One can always make up a scenario where someone, somewhere, somehow has the exact situation to justify such a purchase, but it is very niche. What Citroen really tries to market it as is a "city car", which is anything but a green concept but also the only way a 45 km/h car with 75 km of range actually makes sense.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago

They're cute but very niche. They're very expensive for what they are, those weird plastic folding windows are not fully waterproof, and the ami generally inferior to a scooter in every way except safety kinda. It's not like it can carry more than a large grocery bag anyway.

Owning that car really tells a complete story: "I am a 16/17 yo suburbanite so I can't get my license yet, daddy/mommy is tired of driving me to school, my wealthy parents won't let me ride a moped because it's too dangerous, and riding a bicycle or the bus isn't even an option for someone of my social standing".

Unsurprisingly, it's not been selling particularly well. Which is a good thing, because what cities need is more micromobility solutions not cars cosplaying as micromobility.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 30 points 4 days ago

Ma'am, that is a 33 cl mixture of gas station sludge. It has no syrup, leaves, or apple juice. It is an amalgamation of the industrial output of several laboratories, distilled, mixed, powdered, re-liquefied, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy water chalice. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence. The fact that this terrible liquid exists proves that God is either impotent to alter His universe or ignorant to the horrors taking place in his kingdom. This prism of water is more than gas station sludge. It is a physical declaration of mankind's contempt for the natural order. It is hubris manifest.
We also have a higher glucose variety if you would prefer that.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 149 points 1 week ago

I was there Gandalf...

Before that date their algorithm was soft-locked to around 5k upvotes. If a post was extremely, massively popular it would climb to maybe a bit over 10k but that was insane. There was clearly a logarithmic scaling effect that kicked in after a few thousand upvotes. Not entirely sure why, perhaps to prevent the super-popular stuff from ballooning in some kind of horrible feedback loop.

The change was to uncap the vote counts. One day posts just kept climbing well beyond the 5k mark. Now what they also did was recalculate old posts in order not to fuck up the /top rankings. Kinda. Took a while and I'm not sure they got to every post.

I don't know or care if reddit does vote manipulation, but this ain't proof and I don't see how it is unbelievable that a website with tens of millions MOA would occasionally have a post with 100k+ upvotes.

323

Hi!

Kagi had a rough couple months on the PR side, and a comment from another Lemmy user arguing that they aren't using Google's index set me off... because I had just read a couple weeks ago on their own websites that they primarily use Google's search index.

Lo and behold, that user was "right": No mention of Google whatsoever on Kagi's Search Sources page. If that's all you had to go off of, you'd be excused for thinking they are only using their internal index to power their web search since that's what they now strongly imply. The only "reference" to external indexes is this nebulous sentence:

Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information [...]

... Unless one goes to check that pesky Wayback Machine. Here is the same page from March 2024, which I will copy/paste here for posterity:

Search Sources

You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client that connects to various indexes and sources, including ours, to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure, and privacy-respecting search experience, all happening automatically and in a split-second for you.

External

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.

For example, when you search for images in Kagi, we use 7 different sources of information (including non-typical sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia Commons), trying to surface the very best image results for your query. The same is also the case for Kagi's Video/News/Podcasts results.

Internal

But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API.

We do not stop there and we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative which platforms content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high quality content written without the motive of financial gain, gives Kagi's search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.


Of course, running an index is crazy expensive. By their own admission, Teclis is narrowly focused on "non-commercial websites and 'small web' discussions". Mojeek indexes nowhere near enough things to meaningfully compete with Google, and Yandex specializes in the Russosphere. Bing (Google's only meaningful direct indexing competitor) is not named so I assume they don't use it. So it's not a leap to say that Google powers most of English-speaking web searches, just like Bing powers almost all search alternatives such as DDG.

I don't personally mind that they use Google as an index (it makes the most sense and it's still the highest-quality one out there IMO, and Kagi can't compete with Google's sheer capital on the indexing front). But I do mind a lot that they aren't being transparent about it anymore. This is very shady and misleading, which is a shame because Kagi otherwise provides a valuable and higher quality service than Google's free search does.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 81 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.

æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn't quite know how to export excel sheets though so you'd better build a robust validator. No, we don't know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he's on vacation for the next 8 months.

The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won't be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don't want the webpage to freeze.

And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 75 points 10 months ago

That's a Japan thing and a legislative failure.

What normally happens in most countries is the law would say something vague like "digital means or devices such as floppy disks or equivalent".
Then the Executive makes and maintains the rules of application of that law according to the Hierarchy of Norms (things probably are organized differently in Common Law countries so I don't know the English term but the principle is the same), which dictates in more detail how the law is to be applied ("please use a web form, or a USB keys for legacy processes").

Sometimes the executive lags behind a bit but typically it's just a ministry making decisions within the margin of the law, so it's not too bad.

64
[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 195 points 1 year ago

Linus Media Group CEO Terren Tong also responded via email, saying he was “shocked at the allegations and the company described” in Reeve’s posts. He went on to note that “as part of this process, beyond an internal review we will also be hiring an outside investigator to look into the allegations and will commit to publish the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this.”

Finally, someone in this shit fest of a management structure realized that having the owners of the company investigate themselves isn't the smartest idea here.

I will be interested to see how much power the new CEO really has over operations, or if Linus predictably has got such a founder's syndrome that he tries to "fix" the problems himself (which he can't, of course, since he clearly doesn't believe he has a workplace culture issue in the first place).

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azertyfun

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