As somebody that’s a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.

While I’d say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it’s also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.

Of course, that’s because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don’t even use your general location to prioritize results. It’s an interesting balancing act and I’m not quite sure they’ve hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I’m happy with the overall experience currently.

Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.

And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

While I’d highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.

The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.

The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.

Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan’s previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.

Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it’s important that we know who’s making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72 may be his most important work in terms of political insight. It’s almost stunning how on point his criticisms of the relationships between politicians and the media 50 years ago are and continue to ring true. I feel like it’s a pretty important book for anyone with interest in American politics.

Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication

Heavily depends, IMO.

Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.

It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.

I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.

This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.

It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.

You can also just spend $10 on a domain name with a registrar that offers dynamic DNS. Offhand, both Namecheap and Cloudflare do. I have no idea what my public IP address is because my router just updates it automatically for me. Plenty of DDNS desktop clients around if your router can’t for whatever reason.

One thing this overlooks is that the rigid mounted bed of the V2 causes thermal expansion issues. There’s a lot of really bad lore that gets repeated in the community re: bed heater power because the V2 tends to want to taco the bed if it’s heated too quickly.

The WhoppingOrchard kinematic mounts are a solid option for addressing the issue.

The Trident is the overall better design with a higher performance ceiling.

Flying gantries are a solution forever in search of a problem. They can work okay and they’re fine at the speeds that were common when the V2 was first designed, but there’s a reason why the community has converged on fixed gantry designs. They’re neat to watch operate but they don’t offer any practical advantage. The V2 tends to be relatively slow by modern standards, especially in terms of accel.

The Trident isn’t without flaws but it’s a perfectly fine starting point and the huge community does mean that most of the bigger design issues either already have a usermod or somebody working on cooking something up.