I’ve been suspicious of and disconcerted by the amount of AI-related news coming out of Kagi. I unapologetically hate the current AI craze and am turned off whenever I see it appear in one of the products I use.
I’ve also already stopped using Kagi on mobile, because they made the experience of editing the search field terrible with some JS. In particular moving the text cursor in the search field in Kagi on mobile Safari is an exercise in frustration that’s not replicated by any other text field in any other search engine, website or anything at all on iOS.
This confirmation about their core focus being LLM stuff seals the deal for me and I’m cancelling my subscription. I fully agree with this sentiment from TFA:
> They just don't want to admit to being an AI company anymore. Frankly, it's not something I want to pay them to keep developing. It's something I want less of out in the world.
As a native Polish speaker I prefer English in many ways. One of the complaints about English listed in TFA is that the words are shorter than in Slavic languages. That’s actually one of my favourite things about English: words evolve to be shorter the more they’re used. This makes the language as it’s used more lean, more practical.
In comparison, in Polish the most trivial things often have elaborate names. Ironically, one of the words that irks me in that department is borrowed from English (or French more likely): the plural form of “photographer”. In English the singular form is in my opinion on the verge between comfortable and uncomfortable to use when used a lot. In English however the plural form has the same number of syllables as the singular form, so it’s still relatively comfortable. In Polish on thr other hand the plural form adds two full syllables (fotograf (3) -> fotografowie (5)), which pushes it over the edge into the land of unwieldy when used frequently. In this case I think Polish should invent its own word that is more consistent with names for other artistic professions, is shorter and leaner: “fotarz” after “malarz” (painter), with cases and all other grammatical quirks made analogous to those of “malarz”. And then the plural form adds just 1 syllable (ending up with 3): “fotarze”.
It omits some characters from its output. It also mangles some others through octal escape codes or other such stuff. Depending on flags it will also not handle filenames with spaces or newlines properly. ls output is meant for human consumption, not parsing.
Shouldn’t deflation cause people to want to spend less? Spending deflating money is throwing out an appreciating asset. Japan used to suffer from long-term deflation and I’ve heard people there were generally frugal in reaction to that. Vice versa, holding on to money during inflation makes you just lose money, since tomorrow you won't be able to afford the things you can afford today.
What do you mean by that? Did Finland change location over time?
Also, two Eastern European countries that I have first-hand knowledge of: Poland and Estonia are much more digitised and efficient at those things than Germany (and, from what GP wrote, it seems Finland as well?).
The same processes that led to Eastern Europe in 80-90s ending up as a nightmare where everything took ages to be handled happened to Finland with the same outcome. Bad algorithms basically. Maybe PL/EST still remember how bad it was back then and make sure they are running better algorithms, whereas Finland has no clue how bad it can get due to a lack of experience?
I don't know why does everyone on HN think that Estonia is Eastern Europe when it is actually Northern Europe (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe). All of the Baltic countries are Northern.
A subset of Northern Europe is in Eastern Europe. They’re not disjoint. In particular all Baltic countries are in Eastern Europe (as is visible on the map in the article you linked to (CIA World Factbook)) Eastern Europe has been historically defined by the Iron Curtain. Other definitions are fairly arbitrarily just trying to put a line somewhere on the map without regard for history and its effects on culture and politics.
The popularisation of the concept of Central Europe stems from some people being ashamed of being from Eastern Europe and feeling inferior to Western Europe. Eastern Europe is defined by the Iron Curtain whose effects are still visible today, while Central Europe is a category created purely by selecting a region on the map without regard for political or cultural factors, just to push Eastern Europe further East and exclude some countries from it. It’s fairly arbitrary. I don’t see Eastern Europe as inferior and am not ashamed of being from a part of it, so I see no point in using an arbitrary term like Central Europe.
Mitteleuropa is an old concept, much older than the Iron Curtain. For example, the old boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire catch quite a lot of it. I've been told that places like Slovenia are pretty different from places like Serbia, and similarly for western vs. eastern Ukraine.
In the case of Poland though only a tiny fraction of it was captured by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The largest portion was captured by Russia. Second largest by German Empire. I have great-grandparents from each of those.
Moreover prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain the term Central Europe wasn’t used much. After that though some people like Milan Kundera started popularising it much more out of sense of inferiority.
East and West used to be be not only a geographical distinction, but also political one.
Estonia belonged to the East, even though not voluntarily.
They actively left the Eastern block when they had the chance (like most of the others, so the block is no block anymore), but the terminology lives on, especially used by people who did not suffer from it.
A couple of years I went to a technical event. The event T-shirts were red. Someone from an "Eastern" country felt very negative about that: "We had communism, I will never wear a red T-shirt."
Those in the "West" who don't have the history of suffering don't have any strong feelings about those old things. Many of those who suffered (either personally or at least in stories from their parents) can be rather sensitive about such "mistakes".
To me it's just about what was taught in schools to me, and what I can find on my own. If you Wikipedia Estonia, it says right in the opening paragraph that it is Northern Europe. It's also what was taught to me in schools. Admittedly, being born in '92, I am a first-generation free Estonian and never experienced the soviet union so I don't have any strong feelings of East or the color red, but it is true that Eastern Europe is often talked with the vain of ex-soviet block countries that are corrupt and stuck in time, which is simply not the case with Estonia and I feel just minimizes the work we've done since.
Honestly I blame Ohmyzsh for zsh's reputation of having inscrutable configuration and being bloated or sometimes slow. Those configuration frameworks make people helpless when they need to debug their config or make it do something new that doesn’t have a ready-made stackoverflow answer or a plugin. And for comparatively little benefit.
I also blame the bad zsh docs. I'm trying to write a zsh completion script for a CLI I wrote and I'm intimidated by the lack of examples in the official docs. I'm forced to turn to 3rd party examples and they have differences between them
Not when you called templated functions and were greeted with compile-time template stack traces. Or you called overloaded functions and were presented with 50 alternatives you might have meant. The language is inherently unfriendly to user-friendly error messages.
In my opinion, the complexity of the interactions between C++'s {preprocessor, overload resolution, template resolution, operator overloading, and implicit casting} can make it really hard to know the meaning of a code snippet you're looking at.
If people use these features only in a very limited, disciplined manner it can be okay.
But on projects where they don't, by golly it's a mess.
(I suppose it's possible to write a horrible mess in any language, so maybe it's unfair for me to pick on C++.)
I’m talking about C++. You wrote that Clang already had friendly error messages. While they were less unfriendly than GCC, calling them friendly is a stretch.
Rust having traits instead of templates is a big ergonomic improvement in that area.
Funnily enough, trait bounds are still a big pain in the neck to provide good diagnostics for because of the amount of things that need to be tracked that are cross cutting across stages of the compiler that under normal operation don't need to talk to each other. They got better in 2018, as async/await put them even more front and center and focused some attention on them, and a lot of work for keeping additional metadata around was added since then (search the codebase for enum ObligationCauseCode if you're curious) to improve them. Now with the new "next" trait solver they have a chance to get even better.
It still easier than providing good diagnostics for template errors though :) (althought I'm convinced that if addressing those errors was high priority, common cases of template instantiations could be modeled internally in the same way as traits purely for diagnostics and materially improve the situation — I understand why it hasn't happened, it is hard and not obviously important).
> As far as we're concerned, not being copyleft was a bug that was exploited by Redis Ltd
Disclaimer: I don’t have anything against the relicensing to LGPL. I think it’s your right and I root for you.
That said, correct me if I’m wrong, but, as far as I understand, what Redis Ltd did, they could do regardless of the license. Copyleft wouldn’t have stopped them, given the CLA.
Moreover I wouldn’t call that exploitation. To people outside of Redis Ltd who don’t want to be Redis Ltd customers this move is indistinguishable from them just closing down business and stopping development of Redis. Would that be exploitation? Are they obliged to provide free work on Redis indefinitely? They can’t retroactively change the licence of previous versions of Redis, so they can’t actually take anything away. The existence of the 2 forks is proof of that.
>That said, correct me if I’m wrong, but, as far as I understand, what Redis Ltd did, they could do regardless of the license. Copyleft wouldn’t have stopped them, given the CLA.
Redis never had a CLA and Redis Ltd does not hold the copyright for the work, it's held in aggregate by all contributors. Redis Ltd did use a CLA for their products surrounding Redis, like RedisJSON, but Redis itself did not use a CLA.
>To people outside of Redis Ltd who don’t want to be Redis Ltd customers this move is indistinguishable from them just closing down business and stopping development of Redis.
Redis Ltd was only ever responsible for about 20% of the development of Redis. If they wanted to shut down operations in good faith they would just hand it over to the other 80% to manage. Instead they used their trademark to try and do a hostile takeover of the IP.
I’ve also already stopped using Kagi on mobile, because they made the experience of editing the search field terrible with some JS. In particular moving the text cursor in the search field in Kagi on mobile Safari is an exercise in frustration that’s not replicated by any other text field in any other search engine, website or anything at all on iOS.
This confirmation about their core focus being LLM stuff seals the deal for me and I’m cancelling my subscription. I fully agree with this sentiment from TFA:
> They just don't want to admit to being an AI company anymore. Frankly, it's not something I want to pay them to keep developing. It's something I want less of out in the world.