Maybe it's time to admit that the techie community has a pretty bad moral compass and that we're not good stewards of the world's knowledge. We turn lofty ideals into amoral money-making schemes whenever we can. I'm not sure that the EFF's role in this is all that positive. They come from a good place, but they ultimately aid a morally bankrupt industry. I don't want archive.org to retain a copy of everyone's online footprint because I know it be used the same way it always is: to make money off other people's labor and to and erode privacy.

Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.

We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.

And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.

Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with the service you purchased.

There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.

But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.

In 1961, in his early 20s. You get ~80 years on this planet to make mistakes and have views that some other people will dislike. If these are the worst things we can accuse him of, while acknowledging all his charitable work, I'd say he fared OK compared to many other role models we have.

Meanwhile, the main category of people who have consistently gotten rich off the "crypto revolution" were various scammers and pump-and-dumpers who have since moved on to meme stocks, AI content farming, and so on.

But I wouldn't use crypto as a benchmark because AI has more substance. We can debate if it's going to change the world, but you can build some new types of businesses and services if you have near-perfect natural language comprehension on the cheap.

Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?

I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.

I think this is a sensible compromise. It gives parents more control than before without relying on shady third-party software or without turning every platform into a cop. Yeah, it also aligns with Meta's interests, but so what?

The age attestation solutions pursued by the EU are far more invasive in this respect, even though they notionally protect identity. They mean that the "default" internet experience is going to be nerfed until you can present a cryptographic proof that you're worthy.

It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want to have a personal feed of stories from interesting people, 50 is probably enough to give you some interesting daily reading. But if you want to build a "small web" search lens, you absolutely need to cover. For example, Kagi is billing a "small web" search filter, but it excludes a lot of the small web because they only allow actively-maintained blogs and only a subset of them.

I don't think it's Kagi's fault, but I guess it's depressing in a way. A lot of "small web" bloggers dream of being a part of the "big web", and when they get a cheat button, they have no second thoughts about mashing it.

1) The requirement that it needs to be a blog. There's plenty of small-web sites of people who obsess over really wonderful and wacky stuff (e.g., https://www.fleacircus.co.uk/History.htm) but don't qualify here.

2) The requirement that it needs to be updated regularly. Same as above - I get that infrequently updated websites don't generate a "daily morning" feed, but admitting them wouldn't harm in any way.

3) Blanket ban on Substack-like platforms while allowing Blogspot, Wordpress.com, YouTube, etc. Bloggers follow trends, so you're effectively excluding a significant proportion of personal blogs created in the last six years, including the stuff that isn't monetized or behind interstitials. The outcomes are pretty weird: for example, noahpinionblog.blogspot.com is on your list, but noahpinion.blog is apparently no longer small web.

For example, I have several non-commercial, personal websites that I think anyone would agree are "small web", but each of them fails the Kagi inclusion criteria for a different reason. One is not a blog, another is a blog but with the wrong cadence of posts, etc.

The question is how do you take it to a million? There probably are at least that many good personal and non-commercial websites out there, but if you open it up, you invite spam & slop.

I don't think they do that. Instead, "usefulness" is mostly synonymous with commercial intent: searching for often means "I want to buy ".

Even for non-commercial queries, I think the sad reality is that most people subconsciously prefer LLM-generated or content-farmed stuff too. It looks more professional, has nice images (never mind that they're stock photos or AI-generated), etc. Your average student looking for an explanation of why the sky is blue is more interested in a TikTok-style short than some white-on-black or black-on-gray webpage that gives them 1990s vibes.

TL;DR: I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. It might be not what a small minority on HN wants.

Ah, the classic, forever-untestable "it's just around the corner" hypothesis.

I've lived through multiple "it's gonna be over in 12-18 months" arguments since November 2022. It's a truism for any technology to say that it's going to get better over time. But if you're convinced that "AI has already won", why not make a specific prediction? What jobs are going to be obsolete by when?