I'm still using & paying for Kagi, but I have noticed a sudden drop in search results quality in the last month or two. Unfortunately I didn't take note of the specific searches, but I jumped over to Brave Search and everything I was looking for was right on the top, instead of down around page 2 of Kagi.
There's more blatantly obvious spam results seeping into Kagi as well, though at least I can block those domains when I come across them. A few of them were hacked websites, notably government websites in South Asia that had been thoroughly compromised.
Nope, I don't think so? I'm going through my settings now, and I have Safe Search and Image Safe Search both enabled. Which makes it even more surprising that it was returning hacked government sites mentioning porn in the search snippet.
(Just found what you meant by Verbatim search - nope, I would have always had Personalized turned on instead. Seeing those results would be the first time I even encountered those domains, so I didn't know to block the domain until then. Since the domain is still in my blocklist, I can confirm it was a government website in Mumbai. I don't have any reason to be visiting Indian government sites.)
I'm not saying every Kagi search is infected with hacked results, it's only common at times when I'm really researching something and need to get to a second page of results.
I also note that some Warez sites rank highly in Kagi too. Knowing that Kagi's customer base is largely from HN, that's less surprising to me, and I'm thankful that I can block those domains from my own personal results.
Thunderbird is good, but I'll also suggest Postbox for people looking for alternatives. It's a commercial fork of Thunderbird (so about as "native" as Thunderbird is), but I find Postbox has a nicer UI, and at the time I switched its local email search was significantly faster. Layout is customizable, you're not restricted to the design (or theme) in their screenshots:
https://www.postbox-inc.com/
It has some support for Thunderbird plugins. I use a self-modified version of h.ogi's Priority Switcher to bring back the user-editable priority column that Eudora used to have. (I don't understand how people can process their mail without sorting it by Priority....)
Won't be for everyone - it's not open source, not free and there's no Linux version (yet?). Personally I'm happy to pay for a professional / premium email client experience, since it's so mission-critical to my work.
I'm also a Postbox user and quite happy so far but I don't know if I would recommend it. Development seems to have stopped and Thunderbird is making good progress on the redesign.
I suspect Linchpin / Godin has "borrowed" the idea of Resistance from Steven Pressfield's excellent book The War Of Art from 2002. That book is aimed at writers, but applies to anyone creative.
Friendly "don't make my mistake" suggestion - skip the nomadz.app. I tried building exactly that over a decade ago. I have seen many others build it over the years. There's even someone else on HN who made something very similar (but with grander vision), and independently came up with exactly the same name I did! Cool people though. I believe they got VC funding for it, launched on web & iOS, but it still didn't survive beyond 2 years.
It's an itch many of us have, but there might just be better ways to solve it. Instead of searching for places with the best WiFi & Power, just bring your own mobile hotspot & external phone battery, and even a portable laptop battery if you really need power (eg Hyper made a 100W airplane-friendly battery that can drive a laptop & recharge it twice over & even supported Apple's proprietary MagSafe connections). You still need to find the cafes & when they're open, but that's largely solved by Google Maps or asking on Nomad List. (Also worth asking, why isn't this a feature built-in to Nomad List?!)
I don't want to dissuade you from launching, it's already hard enough to stay positive about projects (and this is a thread about Fear Of Shipping after all!) Maybe you can succeed where others haven't! But maybe talking about a project openly is useful, because then others can find the holes in the plan before you expend too much effort, and you can be more quantitative about fixing those holes or discovering that it's an unprofitable idea.
> And I have one more with a wasted battery that I intend to replace.
I wish Rebble would offer a paid mail-in service to replace the batteries, to have someone trusted & reliable do the work. I'm down to about 2-days battery life on my Time Steel. I do have a replacement Time Steel that I bought on eBay, but I'd love to get this one fixed.
I love Rebble, but I wish they did more to round out the service. I'm really surprised they don't have their own web store for new-old stock & certified-Rebble refurbished Pebbles. A Discord channel really doesn't cut it, at least not for me (even eBay is a better experience).
We'd love to offer something like that, but there's all kind of considerations around liability with repairs. Plus we're entirely run by volunteers, and watch repairs take a lot of time.
That being said, a store for refurbed Pebbles might be doable, but it would be a big time and cost overhead.
That's fair - I hadn't realized Rebble were volunteers. I'd hoped the subscriber money might stretch to also compensating people involved. I certainly wouldn't expect volunteers to be working on repairs out of the goodness of their hearts.
I guess my dream is for Rebble to be like a cross between Framework & iFixIt - somewhere you can buy all your spare parts (and accessories?), maybe find repair guides... and then to continue the Pebble mission by making new models that can run Pebble software on modern designs. I guess it's just a dream. But if there's only about 2k of us Rebble subscribers, I'm proud to be one of those 2k!
Totally agree. I’ve been looking into replacement and it’s not something I’m comfortable doing on my own.
One tip: put your Pebble in airplane mode each night. For me, it extends my battery life substantially. I mapped long-hold left button to toggle this setting, for ease of use.
Which features don't work? I'm still wearing a Pebble Time Steel every day with Rebble Services and not encountering problems.
Okay, I guess Apple integration doesn't work anymore, but that's an Apple problem. If Apple allowed sideloading & half of the things you can do on Android, Pebble would still work there. I used to be an iPhone owner (I was one of those queue-on-day-one types that got a standing ovation from the Apple employees as you walked out of the Apple Store), but I am so glad I switched to Android.
Funny that you say that, I did the exact opposite. Was quite an Android fanatic until I switched to iPhone and noticed how greatly everything was integrated. Next to the integration of my AirPods and Watch the apps on the iPhone are generally of better quality than my experiences on Android. Everything just feels a lot more native and faster. Probably caused by the fact that Apple is just a lot more stricter in what it allows developers to do + the fact that Android runs on literally thousands of different screen sizes, where there are only a couple of screen sizes that a developer has to take into account on the i(Pad)OS side.
So I guess they are actually planning to pay Stephen King after all, if he stays Twitter Blue. (Presumably his share of the money would be more than $8/month.)
How they distribute the money will be key. Would it be based on generic follower counts & likes & engagement - which will surely drive massive waves of spambot activity - or will each user's $8/month be distributed to the accounts they follow, almost Patreon or Flattr style? That might actually be interesting.
Consider the ransomware case - while all the files are being encrypted on your work machine, those encrypted versions are also syncing across live and overwriting your "backups". Or if it synchronizes deletes, accidentally deleting the file on your work machine also deletes the file from your "backup" once sync has completed.
File versioning / version history would help, if you have sufficient disk space for all the versions. But you can be more confident in the backup integrity if it is taken offline once completed - eg cloning a drive to an external drive, and then unplugging that external drive and putting it in storage until needed.
There is very little software that is ransom-safe. People talk of cloud object locking, but that's not worth anything if they just cancel the account with the vendor or go into the config and turn that lock off. For the versioning you mention, wouldn't it be possible to just cancel whatever storage you use for these versions? After how long do you delete the data then, can't an attacker encrypt all files that you haven't touched in a year (so you don't notice right away) and wait for all the old backups to be gone, then hold all your old pictures and tax documents you might still need etc. for ransom?
A pi is actually a great solution because it's quiet and tiny, so you can place it at a friend's place and use physical access whenever you need to work on it. No need for the backed-up (potentially ransomed) system to have any access to it, ever, beyond the append-only encryption/authentication key for adding new backup data.
Would you consider a Pi 400, the model with the C64-like keyboard? They still seem to be available, and seem ideal for the daily computer use-case. Though I guess the difference between 4GB & 8GB RAM is significant.
I'm not so sure. Here's Steve Jobs' 10 minute keynote address when introducing iAd, so we know exactly what he said about why advertising should be directly built-in to iOS:
"We have 185,000 apps on the App Store, created by tremendous developers. A lot of those apps are free, and a lo... the rest of them are really reasonably priced. We've got apps for free, for 99c, for $1.99, and we like that! Users like that! But these developers have to find a way to make some money. And we'd like to help them. Now, what some of the developers are starting to do is to put advertising into their apps. And, for lack of a more elegant way to say it, we think most of this mobile advertising really sucks. We thought we might be able to make some contributions. So that's what this is all about, it's all about helping our developers make some money through advertising so they can keep their free apps free."
... "The average iPhone user spends a little over 30 minutes every day using apps. Over 30 minutes every day, using apps on their phone. Now, if we said we want to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that would be 10 ads per device per day. 10 ads within 30 minutes, it's about the same as a television show. We're going to soon have 100,000,000 devices. That's 1 Billion ad opportunities per day in the iPhone community!"
There's more blatantly obvious spam results seeping into Kagi as well, though at least I can block those domains when I come across them. A few of them were hacked websites, notably government websites in South Asia that had been thoroughly compromised.