I'm a happy paying customer. Kagi is the first non-Google search engine I've used where I don't feel the need to constantly cross-check the results with Google.
For all the people gawking at the expense of the free t-shirts: AFAICT those of us who are receiving them are paying customers; it's not like the money is coming right off of the top of their venture funds.
Honestly I think the whole "we are a startup search engine company who decided to spend the time to set up a production chain for t-shirts" is a worse use of resources than the actual money spent.
We are only humans, and we have a mountain to climb. Setting a base camp to pause and reflect on what we already achieved makes climbing that mountain more, not less, likely. Besides, there is no rush. We might as well enjoy the journey.
The shirts probably won't fit people that well. It just seems like a waste of time/money that nobody will really see value in (I'm a paying customer btw). But if it's more for "you" than the customer then that is a better way to frame it.
Just gonna add my voice to the chorus of folks singing the praises of Framework's laptops. I have used the 13 for the last few years, and I'm planning to upgrade to a 16 soon. As a long-time Linux user, it's been my favorite laptop by far. A great machine, and a zero-compromise experience from a hardware support PoV. In fact, when you consider Framework's standard-setting level of user serviceability, it makes other laptops seem like a pretty major compromise.
One of the motivations to unionize is to ensure that access to labor is mediated by the laborers collectively. This often manifests negotiations between leadership and the union over topics like the one under discussion.
I take their words as a call out to the aspirational future where the union gives employees a voice in the discussion about these kinds of hiring and firing decisions.
I don't necessarily disagree with your comment, but you don't seem to address the chief virtue claimed by this product's marketing material:
> Free up your screen for content
> Content First
> Maximize your screen space for apps and content while you create with Clicks.
> Clicks on. Screen size up.
> Make more space for apps and content by moving the keyboard off your screen.
I have had the experience of the software keyboard making my screen feel claustrophobic from time to time. It has never been bad enough that I would consider reaching for something like Clicks, but it's certainly a problem I would rather never encounter if I had the choice.
Firefox is the web browser equivalent a dying language. It will be a tragic loss for the culture of the web for Firefox to fade away. But, there are powerful macro forces pushing us to that outcome. "Switch, please," calls to action are a noble but insufficient countermeasure.
Maybe not dying (yet) but it is technologically behind with a lot of things by now. This is annoying if you want to try out new web platform features. Sometimes, there isn't even a signal from Mozilla while Google marks a feature as stable.
Average people probably don't care about the latest features but Google pushes Chrome very aggressively, so they end up using it anyway.
What annoys me the most, however, is that several things simply don't work in Firefox and the associated report is over a decade old, so with close to zero chances of ever getting addressed. Copying the content of a canvas element as an image to the clipboard is one of these things. In Chrome, this takes a right and a left click. Firefox didn't have such a basic feature last time I checked. There used to be a workaround, opening a blob URL in a new tab and then copy that, but this got broken later, I believe by a stricter security policy.
Firefox is essentially the browser equivalent of Fairphone. It's the most ethical option but it inconveniences you left, right, and center.
I can't comment on the Fairphone 5 specifically but some of the issues reported by the community sound similar to the two predecessors. My personal experience with two Fairphone 4 phones running Android 13 isn't great. Apps sporadically stop reacting to taps and auto-rotate in combination with standby somehow locks up the phone, usually with a black screen. The picture quality isn't good, the stock camera app misses half of the button presses and there's a 2-4 second delay until it actually takes a picture.
You'll have to ask them. I left Chrome in an exasperated huff several years ago.
The browser ecosystem as we know it is in a tenuous state. It is unhealthy for the web that Chromium has become so dominant. It is a symptom of this imbalance that users line up to defend Apple's choice to lock out other browser engines from iOS. This kind of popular user sentiment would have been unthinkable to me in the era when Firefox first rose up to fight back against the IE singularity. Yet, here we are.
Very tangential, but: the last time I looked into this (many years ago) the only full rules for Pai Sho I could find on the internet were improvised by fans. Can you share any more about the construction of your version? Is it still playable online somewhere?
I have the set of rules we built, and the "dumbed down" version of the rules that had to be presented to the world. The source code lives in a zip file somewhere and I may be able to dig that out.
We've really done one over on ourselves by adopting the mental model that only a vertically integrated corp can deliver privacy and security to users. This rigid tendency towards homogeneity is bound to suffer a tragic systemic failure before too long.
It would be healthier to assume multi-polarity and lean into it.
> We've really done one over on ourselves by adopting the mental model that only a vertically integrated corp can deliver privacy and security to users. This rigid tendency towards homogeneity is bound to suffer a tragic systemic failure before too long.
Look no further than the other news that came out this week re: government spying via push notifications. (https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...) Consumers rationally trust the few big companies which are incentive-aligned to protect their data and government then goes after those few big companies. I thought this was particularly galling:
> In a statement, Apple said that Wyden's letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.
> "In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."
I suspect there's more where that came from. The only reason we learned of this, is because the cat was let out of the bag, and Apple was able to talk about it (gag order).
People might want to think about how AirTags and Find My Phone work...
> We've really done one over on ourselves by adopting the mental model that only a vertically integrated corp can deliver privacy and security to users.
Who is saying that? Certainly nobody anywhere in this HN thread. It is, however, fair to say that the only guarantor of privacy and security is a network of trust. There are plenty of examples where trust is partially decentralised, the most notable being the system of certificates used for establishing trust in HTTP over TLS.
That is not even remotely similar to the claim you made. Nowhere in that sentence is the claim that privacy and security cannot exist without a vertically integrated corporation.
All they're saying is that the existence of third party software compromises Apple's ability to make blanket statements about the security and privacy of this one specific platform. An unofficial third party client breaks an established network of trust — which is an objective fact. If you doubt this, then you really should use this Chromium fork I just developed. Use it to log into your internet banking. Don't be scared. There's nothing to worry about. See, there's a lock symbol in the address bar and everything.
Sure, but also recognize: web browsers constitute a mature, multi-polar ecosystem; we do not clutch pearls when a user chooses Firefox, or Safari, or Chrome (or myriad others) to transact on the web.
Can a bad actor slap a green lock on an insecure browser clone and harm users? Certainly. And yet, in a survey of the systemic threats to security and privacy on the open web, such attacks are relegated to the margins.
Apple encourages a popular narrative that centralization and control beget trust, and from there may enable privacy and security. Look no further than the comments on this HN post to see the narrative echoed!
It's fair to point out that it's not literally what Gruber wrote, but readers will fill in the negative space around his uncritically apologetic commentary. To state the implied message: trust in Apple's way, and remember that third parties (who are not accountable to Apple) will ultimately deprive you of privacy and security!
Having a system where trust is embodied in a single entity is one valid solution. It's also not the only solution and I haven't heard anyone claim that it is.
That is technically a remark I agree with, but you're skipping past the actual point of my comment: it may be a valid strategy on its face but it is fragile and makes users vulnerable to systemic exploitation.
The web browser ecosystem has its own (different) problems, but iMessage lacks requisite variety to back up its particular claims to privacy and security (see that Reuters article for a preview).
I skipped past that because that wasn't what I had expressed disagreement about. Though now you elucidate further I'll say I fundamentally disagree with your "actual point" as expressed. While I agree that systems of distributed trust are fundamentally healthier, they are an order of magnitude harder, and rely upon educating users. And some percentage of users will always be impervious to education — see the continued prevalence of phishing scams for example.
A system which relies upon trusting fewer entities is inherently less fragile and less vulnerable to exploitation. It's true that systems can be designed which rely on users trusting a large number of entities, and can sometimes result in a more educated user base, but they're much harder to implement and much, much, much, much rarer in the real world.
I think the difference here is whether we're considering the plausibility that there aren't any security violations versus the overall frequency and severity. Centralization significantly increases the chance that all the systems involved will be safe; that's what makes it so useful for individual organizations, where centralizing their operations wouldn't attract significantly more bad actors to try breaking their security than decentralizing.
But if we have centralization on the scale of a society, then anyone interested in any of the groups using that centralized source of secure data storage/transfer will be drawn to look for the flaws in that source. And there are always flaws, either technical, legal (as with the government spying mentioned elsewhere in the comments), or otherwise. And once any group manages to infiltrate that one source, they get access to everything dependent on it.
Sure, decentralized security is harder to get together, meaning we have an initially-high violation rate that decreases over time (though this can be supplemented by security-conscious users taking their own steps to protect their data).
But centralized security at sufficiently large scales essentially guarantees a breach impacting everyone within its domain; and the kind of trust that would be required to sustain such centralization also anti-correlates with users independently adding additional layers of security to their systems.
This seems like a much greater risk than just accepting that users who are "impervious to education" will be vulnerable to certain social-side exploits, while everyone else will be reasonably safe.
I don't remember anyone "clutching pearls" over https by default? Do you have any suggested references where I can find those? I do recall people really complaining that anything at all was allowed to be http, even sites that most people would consider "unimportant".
There were a lot of complaints that websites which never had to bother with certificates before now had to set one up (and pay for one). Though that's now largely solved by Lets Encrypt.
> All they're saying is that the existence of third party software compromises Apple's ability to make blanket statements about the security and privacy of this one specific platform.
We’ve also got examples of Apple making misleading statements about the security and privacy of their platform, as a result of government gag orders.
That recent disclosure makes me suspect that every vector that they do not disclose explicitly as being private, is very much not private. To that end, the platform is clearly neither private nor secure if you value privacy from the government.
…so I’m not particularly concerned about third party software being a cause for concern anymore.
> An unofficial third party client breaks an established network of trust
I think this is key. The problem is the security of iMessage as a protocol is dependent on trust between client (implementations). Which is actually not that great from a security perspective.
I don’t mean that there are necessarily vulnerabilities in the protocol (there very well may be), but that the protocol is not something that Apple is willing to depend upon to uphold their desired security guarantees.
This is the premise that a mature incumbent will usually fail to respond fast enough to disruptive innovations by an upstart because their organization is optimized to continue providing existing customers sustaining improvements to the products they are already paying for.
This is the premise that cross-functional coordination difficulty grows superlinearly as the organization scales.
The relative influence of these phenomena is a matter of debate. And, there may be other factors at play.
But, the mix of needing to respond (against organizational incentives) to a disruptive innovation while also trying to align long-established factions, product teams and PAs - many with a motivation to have an outsized influence over the new effort - within the organization presents a Herculean challenge.
The claim that game culture has become sexually repressive doesn't pass the smell test for me.
In 2023 I can play mainstream "AAA" games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3. These games have non-trivial systems designed to gamify human sexual behavior, including such features as "configure your genitalia" during character creation and choose-your-own-adventure-style romantic coupling complete with nudity, intercourse and full voice acting. I would guess that these games would have been banned or classified as pornography for being too sexually explicit if they were released when I was growing up (90s kid).
If anything, the trend I've noticed over time is a reduction in the conspicuous objectification of women in mainstream game titles. But even still: there seems to be an ever-longer-tail of borderline-pornographic content entering mass-market outlets like Steam.
All of this just to say: I don't think "sexually repressed" is how I would describe the relationship people have with games in 2023. Then again, I never found Lara Croft's outsized, rectangular bosom to add much to the story.
You may have a specific idea of what it means to be "sexually repressive" that doesn't match what I mean when I say it. Porn games on steam and horniness still existing doesn't literally conflict with people having sexually repressive social attitudes.
Of course, I am not asking for a return to the pathetic days of Lara Crofts' chest. I get that this is one of the most iconic things people think of, but it's neither appealing to me nor something I think was "good". I think if developers want to do that sort of thing because they want to, well, go for it, but it's probably going to come off as stupid.
In order to understand what I'm talking about, I think you'd have to directly confront the perception of media as seen through the lens of younger people on TikTok and Twitter. Personally, I have abandoned social media of any kind (unless you count traditional forums like this, and a few chats), but the way things were trending with regards to how people treated things could not be described as anything but regressive, full-stop.
And also, there's a bit more nuance to the situation than just sexualization itself. I think to illustrate the kind of distinction I'm talking about, I'll just link to someone who writes better than I do.
(This is of course, not about video games. However, I do personally believe that this is in fact a general trend, and not specific to video games or movies.)
There is a thread that I think I may agree with here - something along the lines of the regression towards the acceptable sexual mean in mass media - but you specifically called out a trend where "people have become regressive about sexuality in video games", stating:
> a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance
To the contrary, I find that there is more sex - including a greater variety in the expression of human sexuality - in mainstream video game titles than I can ever remember there being in my lifetime. Surely a lot of people are paying money for these video games, or else they would not be produced.
> Surely a lot of people are paying money for these video games, or else they would not be produced.
Absolutely. It is important for me to be clear that I do not believe video games are significantly less sexual overall.
I do think, however, that people's treatment of sexuality in media is dramatically different, and the amount of criticism and scrutiny that it receives outpaces most other social issues these days. This has led to at least a little bit of a chilling effect, as if you're a game developer, or anyone else producing media, you probably feel the pressure to be a lot more careful about exactly how you handle sexuality, as things have gotten a lot more cutthroat overall. That's not to say every consequence of this has been unilaterally bad, but I do personally believe that this leads to things that overall feel less authentic in a lot of cases. Personally, I like to see people's personal creative visions, uncompromised by concerns of how it will be perceived.
But socially and in media coverage, I do see what I personally would consider regressive. It feels like socially, the safest thing you can do is merely tolerate the existence of sexual content, and outwardly enjoying it can earn you some scrutiny. For example, A good amount of the NoFap crowd paints pretty much anyone who enjoys pornographic content as being pornsick. In addition to just them, there is a serious amount of scrutiny regarding the nature of sexual content, and there is a lot of pressure to be careful about how you openly enjoy things; the safest place to be is to merely tolerate sexuality rather than embrace it. If you do embrace it, you can count on it being scrutinized. If something you enjoy is considered problematic, such as a relationship with a power dynamic issue, it will be scrutinized-it doesn't matter that there's media like Game of Thrones filled to the brim with incest and other such content. (In fact, Game of Thrones has become almost cliche to bring up, not unlike Grand Theft Auto with regards to video game violence.)
I can see why my position seems startlingly inaccurate from some perspectives. That said, I do think there is something regressive going on, even if describing it as "puritanical" is perhaps a misstep, as it is clearly a lot more nuanced than that.
I understand where you are coming from. I think we agree that there is something dysfunctional about mass media and its relationship with those who consume it in 2023. But, we probably disagree about the nature of that dysfunction.
My favorite thing to point at to illustrate my own take is the utter corporate sterility of Meta's "Horizon" social vision compared to the untamed (and often sexually-charged) landscape of spaces like Second Life and VRChat. There is a clear mismatch here: open-ended channels show us the forms of creative expression that the human psyche is drawn towards when given a blank canvas. Meanwhile, Meta reduces creativity down to something that the corporate hegemony considers "brand safe." You can be whatever you want to be on Meta's platform, so long as it is an anatomically correct human who aligns with a handful of well-defined social archetypes (all vetted by committee to be a representative cross-section of the diversity of humanity dontchaknow).
Even if I don't agree with your specific claims, this at least seems to rhyme with some what you're observing here.
Shameless plug: if you are interested in viewing and/or embedding glTF or USDZ files on the web, I worked on an HTML element for that called <model-viewer>
Model viewer is a nice tool! I was paid to make some assets for a model viewer website, but I couldn't get any of my model's colors to show correctly. Once I realized that AO was used as direct exposure value, it was smooth sailing ahead.
Most of the time I can't control what light my models are shown in, so it was great to have some control of how it was presented.
For all the people gawking at the expense of the free t-shirts: AFAICT those of us who are receiving them are paying customers; it's not like the money is coming right off of the top of their venture funds.