I did pay briefly for Kagi, but ultimately just didn't see the benefit over DDG. Google seems to be too far gone to be useful, but DDG still consistently finds what I need. Other than that, the main issue I have with Kagi from a business perspective is it will always be extremely niche. Even among "tech" people, the idea of paying for a search engine will always be a single digit percentage of the overall market.
I view Fastmail in a similar manner, but the difference with them is they have a real business market for those wanting an alternative to Google or Microsoft.
Yeah, I signed up for the free Kagi trial because of all the praise on here, and I think I've used it... twice? It felt exactly like DDG and Google. I think I just don't use search engines very often.
I gave up at "You give up human readable files". While I recognize in some cases these recommendations may make sense/CSV may not be ideal, the idea of a CSV _export_ is generally that it could need to be reviewed by a human.
The religious "trust" scale would likely look largely the same. While "deeply religious" may have been the reality for the US at one point, I think it would be hard to argue that with each generation we don't move a little further away from that. As someone who was previously "deeply religious" and am now "non-religious", I still wrestle with whether that's a good thing or not.
The politicization of religion could be argued to be a detriment to the country and also to religion.
The partisan side of politics (as apposed to the policy and persuation sides) has a way of undermining or sidelining the virtues, and the ability to operate with nuance, for any movement that over-identifies with either party.
Virtually any organization can promote a sense of place and belonging in people, facilitate communities, encourage cooperation, etc. Only one type of organization does it by arranging very serious lectures about things that didn't happen.
I did this back in 2012 after using Android and iPhone for the previous 4-5 years and despite really finding it a good experience, even then it was becoming difficult to live without maps and a camera. I've been thinking about it again, though, and the one thing I've tried to find is a decent keyboard phone for texting. I don't mind going without a browser, etc. on my phone, but I do find communication via text to be valuable and I don't want to go back to T9 or a phone keypad to try to do it.
Same story for a lot of people: Smartphones are indispensable because of like 5 utilities, that come attached to like 50 more things that clamor for your time and attention.
Super useful:
- Maps / Travel
- Messaging/Calling
- Camera / Gallery
- Search / information lookup
- Banking
- Authentication
But then there's:
- Ads everywhere
- Notifications clamoring for attention, even from the useful apps.
- 10 flavors of social media (which has to include HN, even if it's less intrusive than most).
It's like the utility and connections it gives you are bait. I seldom feel at rest, never fully trusting an app on my phone to want to give me the best experience possible.
I think I just got unlucky trying Miniflux when there happened to be a bug that prevents the sync frequency from being respected. Once that’s fixed I plan to give it another try.
I've found restic + rclone to be extremely stable and reliable for this same sort of differential backup. I backup to Backblaze B2 and have also used Google Drive with success, even for 1TB+ of data.
I agree. restic with it's simple ability to mount (using fusefs) a backup so you can just copy out the file(s) you need, is so wonderful. A single binary that you just download and can SCP around the place to any device etc.
It's fantastic to have so many great open source backup solutions. I investigated many and settled on restic. It still brings me joy to actually use it, it's so simple and hassle free.
Kopia supports zstd compression, I found it to be within +10% to -5% of the size of my Borg repo.
It also has extensive support for ignoring stuff and it works very well.
I still use Borg because its policy of expiring older snapshots is more useful for me, but Kopia is extremely solid and I would use it any day if I didn't care that it doesn't actually keep one monthly backup for the last 3 months as Borg does (it decides which older snapshots to keep with another algorithm; it's documented on their website).
Sarah and Duck is a great show. We watched it all the time when my 11 year old was 5-6 and my now 5 year old has grown to love it as well. Agreed on the description - the instrumental music is relaxing and the mix between realism and complete fantasy (like when they go underwater or inside the ball machine) is a lot of fun.
So let's say you're running a Linux distro and you install a browser. That browser then overwrites files elsewhere on the system making it nearly impossible to eradicate.
That's benign? Sounds more like a cancer to me.
Though, I do agree that Microsoft has steadily returned to being somehow even more gross post Windows 7. I've refused to upgrade to Windows 11 on my gaming PC. Never thought I'd be one of those people, but Microsoft's overall trend of gathering data and peddling their own sub-part solutions with blatant disregard for users is just not something I can support.
If it gets to a point where Windows 10 no longer supports the games I want to run, I'll revisit then whether they've come to their senses, but all of the recent news seems to indicate that won't be the case, so chances are I'll just give up on PC gaming entirely.
They've skated by with this sort of completely insensitive handling of customers for years and my (completely anecdotal) recent experience is that less technical people are starting to take note. I have friends who have never cared about investing their entire digital lives in Google who are suddenly asking about de-Googling. I hope it prompts a change, but in the meantime I never recommend to friends or family they put anything solely in Google they can't afford to lose.
I've started moving towards this sort of thing for my daily work using Logseq's journal feature. I add small snippets of detail about conversations and findings I have during the workday to a daily note. I've found it really helpful for the searchability aspect.
The challenge I face with anything written is keeping up with the notebook and a pen, though I do like the idea.
I view Fastmail in a similar manner, but the difference with them is they have a real business market for those wanting an alternative to Google or Microsoft.