Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.
My ongoing concern with Kagi is they always seem to be focused on sidequests like their Orion browser and their LLM-powered Translate tool. Maybe that's interesting for some people, but I can't help but feel like I just want a damn search engine than works.
Yeah, that's the thing for me: filtering out the SEO crap that Google happily serves up.
Google's actual search results are a waste of time visiting, both for the mindless CEO content and the ad-laden, analytics-happy, javascript-heavy websites.
So I tend to use the AI overview. But plugging myself into the all-seeing corporate oracle, that grew on all the web's content, and now seeks to supplant it seems unseemly.
It's just sad that kagi will likely only be a fringe thing, and google will continue to promote these foul, foul, mindless websites and then supplant them with its AI.
I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.
Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.
That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.
If the chauffeurs' power came from the inability for the driven to maintain and drive their cars, and that power was reduced when cars become more reliable and understandable, then I'm not sure how that is applied to modern developments: computer and software are as complex as ever, and we're understanding them less and less in favour of letting the computers themselves understand themselves. Are we not then creating a new chauffeur problem, and this time those who control the LLMs and the infrastructure for the LLMs hold the power after we intentionally cede it?
How is it different from relying on the internet, when most people don’t know what a routing table is, let alone how to manage one? Or from relying on word processors that the average user could never write themselves?
Civilization has always been about upwards abstraction, with a small number of specialists understanding the lower levels that everything’s built on. From sewer systems to cobol in banking, it’s always been this way.
I think the reason we see these reactions on e.g. HN is that we are the class of people going from “we understand the pinnacle of tech” to “we need to rely on opaque tech to do our jobs” and it’s kind of scary and personal because of the change.
Yes, exactly. As compared to 70 years ago, when cars came with a manual on how to adjust the spark gap, and buyers were expected to do so.
It turns out most people don't want to be under the hoods of their cars, so cars are optimized for that, and the few people who do want to do that maintenance (me included) are no longer the target market.
Meanwhile, everyone else can think about other things.
I guess by practising the lower level things less and less we become less able to understand and maintain them, whereas any profession that required continued practice kept you sharp enough to learn things like networking.
Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.
My grandmother was impressed by the (female) movie stars who had chauffeurs. As a consequence she refused to drive (or even have a driving license) for the remainder of her life. She was focused on "status" and "class". She lived to age 98.
> Many early cars used a hand crank to start the motor. If you don't do it correctly, it was possible to break your arm.
I daily drove for years a motorbike with a kickstart (and also rode MX bike with a kickstart but these were 2-strokes and the kickstart on 2-strokes wasn't that violent). Still have a scar from one kickstart gone wrong on a rainy day (my foot slipped and the crank violently went back up and damaged my leg).
It's almost as if proving you are technically competent is the new problem.
You can prove that you are a mechanic and driver, since the car obviously works and gets from A to B.
Now anyone can call themselves an expert because AI makes it easy.
As engineers we know that understanding fundamentals of these complex systems is essential but the average person only sees that Bob built an app for the back office and it seems to work. At best they understand that tech is complex and maybe there's a security flaw in his app.
Ultimately shiny things win, people don't want to hear that anything is hard and they will generally take a risk until something fails rather than pontificate on the best way to do it (unless of course they are in architecture, compliance or security in which case they will complain but leadership will already be showing off the cool new thing)
The main thing it's removing is the skills you gain through actual practice, and replacing those with the demand that you subscribe to OpenAI etc to do your job.
But, moreover, the demand your company subscribes. But not your company anymore, because you'll probably be replaced by one engineer (and an AI subscription) who's now trying to do your job and about four or five other jobs.
And this one engineer will become more and more reliant on AI companies, AI companies that'll go for the throat once they've hollowed out all the skills that used to exist in the engineering market.
Still a thing with some of the Finnish banks, as I've recently learned. In my bank it costs ~20€ - unless you can't physically use a smartphone, in which case it's free. But you kinda have to know that it exists.
I think it's either. With Nordea, it's seemingly based on whether you are already using the mobile ID app or not.
They also have a different "Talk Device" that is specifically meant for people with disabilities and such, which is supposedly free to get once (80€ for replacements), but the page doesn't specify who can order it.
Barclays use both the physical hardware code generator in the UK as well as a virtual version in the app. The Bank staff also use the same physical hardware in the branch so I guess it will stay around for a while.
I use my bank's card reader to authenticate in the hopes that it will signal a need to keep supporting it. But the vast, vast majority of people just use a banking app so I fear it's a lot cause.
In Spain at least you can. I know 4 or 5 banks that let you auth via SMS, coordinates card, etc. If yours doesn't, I suggest that you complain. Some colleagues had to call theirs and insist that the bank's application didn't work on their phones. Reluctantly at first, they eventually changed their method to SMS.
The interesting thing about SMS is this isn't always usable while traveling.
For example my phone provider has really overpriced international fees ($10 / day) so instead I use an eSIM which usually only comes with data. That means I lose the ability to use text messages or phone calls for any form of verification. A number of banks and other sites also block Google Voice / VoIP numbers.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If my bank wants me to run proprietary shitware, they can supply me with their proprietary secure processor to run it on, and we're good.
Also the bank card is really part of the bank system. It doesn't do anything else, and it has to interoperate exactly as they want it to. While I may feel the right to hack on it, I'd do so entirely at my own risk. It's probably better that I don't mess with it as long as it fulfils its purpose. I can use my own device for my own stuff.
I feel the same way about ISP modems (not routers). As long as I get an Ethernet port and the modem isn't doing anything untoward, I don't see any problem with letting the ISP's network termination equipment exist inside my house. Some people think there should be a right to hand off the connection as DSL or fiber and buy your own modem, and I think you should be allowed to do that at your own risk, but I don't think the ISP should have to support it. Particularly with PON fiber or CATV, it's actually a bit dangerous to let the customer use random modems as it's a shared medium with half your street and you wouldn't want to jam them.
Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even practicing the skills we learnt. Intelligence is only going to decrease.
When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities.
Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
But displacing individual ability is a feature, not a bug.
How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations?
Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture.
And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them.
Yeah I think a worrying thought is that it has to be that way. A big conundrum for technologically advanced societies is that technology gives us so much power that if people are anything but weak and helpless, they become so dangerous it makes society unfeasible.
Somehow we need to contend with killdozers, school shooters, anthrax mailers, and so on being much more capable than anything even a particularly yoked antiquity nerd like Plato ever could be.
Honestly curious why you're being downvoted, but I think about this all the time. We always focus on the positives of any new technology and the negatives are either invisible (till later) or glossed over.
Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot:
Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..
It makes me so angry that an entire branch of "science" gets to just take data and go "I dunno man, maybe kids are just dumber". There's so much of this in social science. Take some measurable thing, and then just wildly speculate about the cause of it in an entirely untestable way, and then test that theory in ways that absolutely do not justify the conclusions. At the very least, the whole field should get a lesson in how to communicate the certainty of their theories and conclusions. You've got some guys hanging around couching their uncertainty when they're banging sub atomic particles together at the speed of light and then you've got some social science bro being like "If you move that checkbox on that form to the bottom it'll be way more effective, trust me bro I've hacked how people think".
If people are handing off the coding to AI more and more then they'll be less skilled at spotting potential bugs in the first place. AI, course of, could be run to find potential bugs in the AI-coded features before commit. But then you're getting further and further towards a world where code, and code that runs infrastructure, is incomprehensible. We'll have to start sacrificing the first-born to the silicon in the hopes of a good build for code that controls your electrical sub-station.
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