That is correct, and it his also correct that most of the spam we receive comes from outside the EU.

It is a bit hard to evaluate the potential when you need to top up and do a captcha just for evaluation purposes. The barrier of entry is quite high.

To be clear, you don't need to top up (only click the link or try a search) _and_ do the captcha. You can _either_ top up for a month, _or_ do the proof-of-work captcha (should just be clicking a checkbox and giving it a few seconds).

The reason for the higher barrier of entry is bots/abuse. Up until a few weeks ago we didn't even have the captcha option. Without any kind of identification, it's impossible to prevent automated/bot signups, and they can abuse the system to oblivion.

I understand that's not ideal, though I hope it still makes sense!

You may want to clarify that in your FAQ, which states this in the very first entry:

> Unfortunately, due to the fact it's too costly to properly avoid bots and other automated tools from abusing our service, we don't offer a free trial.

Argh, stale docs! Thanks for the notice, I'll push that fix in the next update later today (currently in the middle of adding an optional date filter).

I'm not making a freaking account before I can even run a single search.

As far as I can tell, Kagi also requires you to create an account before you can try it out. You can of course disagree with that practice, but it is not like Uruky is requiring something far out of the ordinary.

To create an account you only need to click a link (so the account number can be randomly generated for you), not provide any information. I understand if that's not good enough for you, though.

When I started working in software I took a job in a city different than mine, so I had to go there to live alone, and the job was by myself in a room with no windows. Most lonely 2 years of my life.

On the other hand, I wasn't working in software but after I moved country, I managed to get my foot into the industry, and it opened up my social life like nothing else, as finally I had people around me who also like software development, something I never experienced for ~18 years or so until I did a drastic move.

This is my life. I drive to the office 5 days per week to sit in a tiny windowless room. I have meetings with Europe in the morning and meetings with India in the evening. The rare time I need to talk to someone in the US, they are in a different building so we talk through Teams.

I rejected a job like that early in my career.

I was a linux user for some time in my youth, then corporate appeared and with that the locked windows Thinkpads, the MacOS's and such. I am finally back in Linux at home and I find it so amazing, and all my video games work too!

One can only dream!

Here in Spain you see a lot of BYD, considerable amount for Europe. But when I was in Uruguay that was a shock, almost all cabs, all electric cars, and some buses are BYD.

The thing that surprised me the last time I was in Uruguay (2022) was riding an ICE BYD. I had only ever seen electric BYDs.

Wikipedia informs me that they stopped making ICE vehicles in 2022.

There is a significant amount of BYD buses here in Spain, I don't live in Madrid but I go every now and then and I noticed a fair amount of electric BYD.

Also this is anecdotal, but I live in a small province capital (<100k citizens) and the urban planning councilor told me most likely most of the new buses we're getting next year will be electric and they'll probably be either BYD or eCitaros.

Sometimes I marvel at how nice it would be to have such a narrow view of the world and other's perspectives and contexts. Life would be so much easier!

Ironically, your comment seems to perfectly reflect the viewpoint you're criticizing.

In my humble opinion, the parent of my comment seems to paint a picture that is quite drastic. I see why many people would have Chrome installed and I do not think something like that should be impose on to anyone.

The only viable future-proof solution to this hellscape is what you mention, local models and/or corporate models for work.

Damn! That is so dystopic to me. The future of businesses determined by the will of some customer support interpretations of bogus rules. Ain't that a bit black mirroresque?

This is how Apple's app approval process works as well :)

You get rejected, you can just increment the version number and resubmit. It will get assigned to a different person and maybe pass this time.

I worked at a job where we had to maintain an app for Apple's platform. We would make some minor bugfix based on user feedback and submit the app. They would come back with a denial that was based on changes or features introduced years ago. We would go tweak that specific feature in some way, resubmit and it would pass.

> The future of businesses determined by the will of some customer support interpretations of bogus rules.

That's the present. The future will be trying to cajole an LLM into interpretation of bogus rules. Not sure if that's better or worse.

It's also possible/likely they're using discrimination. It's cheaper to avoid lawsuits and PR disasters by ensuring they respond faster to minority customers. That and/or Vietnamese customers tend to have higher spend/conversion, so Google gives them better service. Or her husband's Google account had some kind of score based on previous spend/statistical probability that determined he deserved better service.

I think there is zero chance these companies aren't using LLMs to sort out the "desirable" customers from the undesirables. Google in particular knows almost everything about us.

We're in Vietnam. I'm the minority here, as a European.

Some people, by some other people's measures are never minorities.

Thanks to cumulative technical progress what used to be the domain of state actors has now trickled down to big business (on some level this is a joke, but also I'm dead serious). Someday it will trickle down to the bakery.

Open to whom? AFAIK some nationalities can cross freely.