macallik @ macallik @kbin.social

Posts

4

Comments

190

Joined

2 yr. ago

I think the article appears biased because searxng appears to offer the same functionality as Kagi, in spite of being free, yet Kagi is shown to be the best in class for some reason? Also it doesn't touch on the critique that kagi having a login potentially aggregates all of your searches into one account that is stored by one company.

I use NewPipe and what has helped me the most is not having to deal w/ the recommendation algorithm.

I reset my subscriptions to only be the most relevant feeds from YouTube and then I only check the subscription page. I've consciously curated the feed to be more productive and I'm much less likely to get distracted when watching videos

Currently @ jfk. Good luck to those waiting

Good to see her bouncing back and standing strong after the media dragged her through the mud a month or two ago when one of her cases was thrown out

My 4a 5G screen cracked beyond usage three weeks ago. I thought about it & ended up buying a used 4a 5G for $100 on swappa. I get too much usage via the earphone jack and don't see any new features that warrant an upgrade.

Gonna keep it until the first update skips me and then root & flash it w/ Pixel Experience

Anyone backed by Peter Thiel is guilty by association at this point.

Same. It completely ignores exact phrase match so you can't drill down with the most important aspects of a query. Ecosia was the same way IIRC, so it might be related to people using Bing data as a 3rd party perhaps

During the urine test:

"Duncan stated that she was not aware of the pouch/container in her shorts until after she was providing her second sample," police wrote in their affidavit. "Duncan stated that she does not know how or when the pouch/container got into her shorts that day. Duncan stated that there may be another one of them at her residence but that they were not purchased by her, but by someone she knows who probably uses them to pass drug screens."

I laughed

bad bot

Wayback Machine ftw. Here is August 2023:

The only piece of personal information we collect is the IP address your internet connection runs over at a given moment. Why? We need to protect ourselves against “spammers”, meaning ad fraud and bots trying to up-rank certain search results. Your IP address is anonymised after one week or less. For example, 192.168.152.223 becomes 192.168.XXX.XXX.

We still use Microsoft Bing to deliver search results, but using them through Ecosia is very different from searching on Bing directly. At Microsoft or Google, you are likely to have personal IDs which track you across all of their services: email, calendar, video platform, gaming, video conferencing, maps, locations, location history, and so on.

We don’t sell any data to anyone and we don’t buy any data either.

We are interested in the performance of our social media advertising, as well as answering your search results. We would like to know if users stay with us once they have seen our ads and installed us. This helps us run the right advertising campaigns on the right platforms. We never let those platforms know your search terms, though. We only share whether you are still searching with us or not. We only do so with your consent and you can remove that consent at any time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230729030327/https://www.ecosia.org/privacy

Was struggling through an attempted self-install of SearXNG. So far so good, w/ this one, thanks for sharing

Wooof. I've started using Brave for less then 24 hours and I'm already jumping ship. Anyone backed by Peter Thiel is an immediate 'no' for me.

I'll have to try Whoogle or SearXNG but search engines seem to regularly block my queries so that I only get random results from wikimedia. Maybe I can resolve the issues w/ self-hosting? Otherwise, I might just try to redirect most of my questions to open-source LLMs

The questionable privacy policy doesn't negate the actual work being done. I'm no longer using them, but calling it tree NFTs is misguided

https://youtu.be/pPgvDMeiJY?si=pmeBAG7HDXhmAOgV&t=73

Very pessimistic take. I highly doubt they are planting trees that are unlikely to be sustained.

I am not blaming them as much as I am reevaluating the level of privacy I'm sacrificing given the additional context in their updated statement

1. 'Their' privacy policy now roughly equates to "We don't really do anything but you should read the privacy policy of Microsoft (and optionally Google)." It feels less like an alternative search engine and more like a middle-man that still passes the data along. Speaking of which:
2. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but they are touting 'non-personalized results and ads' as if that's the privacy end goal, when it's really just the side-effect of companies not having data on you. Based on their updated policy, they are giving the illusion of privacy via 'non-personalized results' while capturing/sharing searches, behaviors & IP address that I'm guessing can easily be deanonymized @ Microsoft.

Maybe I'm misreading something? It reads like the same experience of using Bing without the marginal benefit of a personalized experience.

I think it's a catch-22 because I'd imagine a sizeable cohort of their pro-environment demographic is likely pro-privacy/anti-'corporations knowing everything about you', and so while the increase in usefulness in data can increase their charitable donations, it will rub lots of users the wrong way.

I used it as my primary browser on my laptop/desktop. I supported the cause and through my usage I planted +150 trees, but the trade-off is steepening so I'm going to have to jump ship.

I'll be pivoting to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, and use Brave for more nuanced/specific results.

Redirector did it for me. The I found out about libredirect and started using alternative front ends for everything. from there I switched over to Linux and that's all she wrote

Thanks for the heads up

Some random ones I created over the last week or so:

alias clipboard='xclip -selection clipboard' # Allows me to pipe output directly to my keyboard. good for pwd for example.

Function allows me to get tldr and cheat responses to commands quickly
function cht() {
curl cheat.sh/$1
}

Easy calculator so that I can do math w/o launching a specific app
function calc() {
echo "scale=3; $@" | bc
}

I think part of the reason is that because phones are now in the 'matured' part of the marketing cycle. There's a smaller and smaller noticeable difference in performance between a $200 phone and a $1000 phone, and so companies need to compete on smaller and smaller profit margins, and against very inexpensive import brands.