Kagi,paid, gives me the same vibes as when I was beta testing google.
Agreed. It works well but I wouldn't "trust" it per se, especially over a long timeline.
tbh I've only used someone's promotional invite code to try it for free and haven't paid for it since that code expired, but if I weren't too poor to pay for search I'd consider it.
Strictly for search, Kagi is the best unshitted search engine I've used but it costs money.
Otherwise I tend to use duckduckgo, yandex, searx and the internet archive, depending on what I'm looking for. They're all shit in one way or another except the archive.
I think when you use one of those words that refers to an unbalanced power dynamic it can make people feel a variety of ways you don't necessarily intend.
I'm thinking in particular about a guy I worked with who might have felt it highlighted our age difference, or that he inferred I saw his behavior as domineering and "bossy," or he might have been labor-pilled cuz if we all hate the bosses, it's not a very endearing term to use.
Then advocate for a ban (or effective regulation) on social media! Instead you're tacitly consenting to (and normalising) a massive increase in domestic and commercial surveillance infrastructure just so those shit websites continue to have access to fuck up the majority of the population.
Do you think adults just magically teleport past identity verification?
Kids can just not go on those sites moving forward but adults will continue to use them and have their identities on every platform they use indexed at a handful of commercial identity verification services. The government will also have easy access to those databases. In return the rest of us get: ?????????
You don't get the value of direct social interaction and community participation vs sitting unseen and unheard watching "the adults" have conversations amongst themselves?
Exactly! Just look at how many leaks have come out of the big tech firms identifying their own complicity in harming vulnerable users, where they made the explicit corporate decision to bury the reports / terminate the inquiries / continue business as usual, because it would reduce shareholder value to do otherwise.
If we had anything left of the regulatory state we could change the financial pressures and incentives on these companies to make effective self regulation the most profitable route, but instead we get nu-panopticon 3.0.
Presumably because you've accepted the premise that this change is about protecting children and that it is a good solution to achieve that.
This whole (global) effort has been designed to make you feel like it's a good idea. It's not even a good solution to the problem, let alone addressing a problem that necessarily needs solving at all.
The infrastructure is already in place for KYC financial operations. I had some fuckass site try to get me to use a biometric ID middleware service just to get some crypto so I could cop drugs and that ID middleware was one of the 20 or so platforms that participated in the age verification tech trial for this social media shit.
Someone on reddit posted a screenshot from bluesky which was requiring them to confirm their identity with either: gov dox, credit card info or biometric face scan. So I suppose at least on some social platforms the "insert verification genitals to continue" crap is already implemented.
Lukewarm prediction: robot slaves remotely puppetted by human slaves so we can all feel smug and comfy about how far we've progressed since the bad old days.
Extremely dope designs.