I’ve been using Kagi search for a while, and had no real complaints, as the search does what I’ve always expected it to do. For a while I completely ignored Kagi assistant because why the fuck would I want a slower and verbose version of a search that already worked fine?
In the past few months though, I’ve been heavily using the assistant set to use deepseek to assist with putting together a Minecraft 26.2 mod pack. It’s saved me so much time and frustration it’s unreal. Turns out there are certain things that are complex enough that regular search really isn’t all that great for.
For example, I can now do things like ask if there’s a mod that allows torch placement from the hotbar while holding something else, via middle click, compatible with Minecraft Java 26.2 neoforge, as the one I previously used is stuck on 1.21.1. And instead of spending 2-3 hours trying a bunch of keywords and combing through poorly named and documented mods, I can quickly get fairly reasonable confirmation that this doesn’t exist, along with some alternatives.
I can also hand it a GitHub source and asking it what needs to get changed to update a mod to newer versions, giving me an idea if doing so will get within my extremely limited coding capability. A real game changer is basically asking it for a tutorial, like what’s involved with fixing a model from an outdated resource pack for a recent version and having it work with Fresh Animations. This would previously have required many days of painful and frustrating searching.
I can also ask it for basic scripts, rather than spending time hoping to find something someone else already made. Such as taking ratings from my navidrome database, and writing them into tags in the related songs. Just the other day I asked it for a violentmonkey script that can take a Reddit comment with a video, and give me a url that yt-dlp can handle as is without having to dig through a bunch of nonsense manually. I would have never have had the expertise or time to learn to implement these things myself.
Of course, one must keep in mind that the knowledge the llm has has a time cutoff, but I’m frankly have so much of a better time than before.
I can now see myself using the next update of Claude to generate mods (the current version does not have much knowledge of Minecraft 26.2) with features I want. While I’m reasonably competent technically, actual coding is beyond me, and is far beyond my free time to learn.
While AI doesn’t replace my use of classic search wholesale, it does take a set of problems I was trying to poorly solve with classic search, and actually gives me what I want.
GEOS and the like was a bit before my time, I mostly know about geoworks because back in the 2003 while in high school, I played a lot of "Wyvern" (https://web.archive.org/web/20030212212420/http://www.caboch...), an online 2d rpg game primarily made by Steve Yegge. There seemed to be significant contributions from other GeoWorks related people early on and I had noticed the name come up from time to time.
Here's some GEOS/GeoWorks related internet archaeology you may find interesting
>I went to the University of Washington and [then] I got hired by this company called Geoworks, doing assembly-language programming, and I did it for five years. To us, the Geoworkers, we wrote a whole operating system, the libraries, drivers, apps, you know: a desktop operating system in assembly. 8086 assembly! It wasn't even good assembly! We had four registers! [Plus the] si [register] if you counted, you know, if you counted 386, right? It was horrible.
>I mean, actually we kind of liked it. It was Object-Oriented Assembly. It's amazing what you can talk yourself into liking, which is the real irony of all this. And to us, C++ was the ultimate in Roman decadence. I mean, it was equivalent to going and vomiting so you could eat more. They had IF! We had jump CX zero! Right? They had "Objects". Well we did too, but I mean they had syntax for it, right? I mean it was all just such weeniness. And we knew that we could outperform any compiler out there because at the time, we could!
>So what happened? Well, they went bankrupt. Why? Now I'm probably disagreeing – I know for a fact that I'm disagreeing with every Geoworker out there. I'm the only one that holds this belief. But it's because we wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good tools, world class tools: trust me, you need 'em. But at some point, man...
>The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right?
>This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.
>Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!
France is spiraling into a debt whirlpool needing to use debt to pay off debt, basically having no good way to resolve the issue without a lot of pain (“austerity”). Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
What’s more fun is that while france is teetering on the brink, it’s hardly alone, and it’s collapse will tip the dominoes.
Austerity is what got France in this mess in the first place + the Euro.
This movie has already happened in Greece.
Greece's former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on the European economic policy during the Euro crisis:
"When I met Christine Lagarde for the first time — she was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the time, before she moved over to the presidency of the European Central Bank — she astounded me, because she was extremely sympathetic to my analysis of what had gone wrong and why the austerity programs could not work.
She said, “Of course, Yanis, they cannot work — you’re right.” She actually criticized me from a position to the left of my own thinking because she said that I was being too modest and too moderate in what I was demanding on behalf of my people.
However, she then added immediately, “But Yanis, you have to understand that we have put a lot of political capital into this program, and your career and mine both depend on going along with it.” "
On the Euro: “Look, we created the euro in a terrible way. The architecture was as if we had designed it in order to fail. It was clear from the very beginning. Think about it. We created a central bank for twenty countries. The central bank didn’t have a treasury, and there were twenty treasuries that didn’t have a central bank.”
Which was predicted by some economists from day one.
One economist wrote, before the first Euro even circulated: "The euro will lead to too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany, too many vacation houses in Spain [1], the default of Spain on its public debt and then the default of Greece on its public debt".
When Greece, not Spain, defaulted on its public debt, that same economist: "I was only wrong about the order of defaults of Greece and Spain".
The Euro, he predicted, would be one of the shortest lived currency in the history of currencies.
His name is Charles Gave and he's gotta be 80 y/o old now. Of course people are going to hate on him and spill all their hatred on him because he's neither a communism nor a socialist.
And then idiots are going to say that "euro is great because I can travel and pay in the same currency everywhere". As if they're own little convenience warranted the disaster that we're heading into because ideologues, not economists, decided to force a currency down the throat of most european citizens.
[1] btw there are many protests in Spain now because "costs of rents are too high" (yeah, no shit: there's a gigantic number of empty houses and apartment in Spain belonging to foreigners, who only come a few weeks per year).
California has some fiscal problems but if any state hits a crisis point it will probably be Illinois first. US states don't issue their own currency and have limited ability to take on debt so even if California is forced to raise taxes and default on obligations that probably won't trigger a broader systemic collapse.
> Any politician with enough foresight to do what needs to be done gets removed, so those that remain are selected for their thick foreheads.
I probably should have quoted this part too. I was replying to the whole comment about the changing winds of politics. The economics is just one of the symptoms.
If we don't separate fascism and populist oversimplification from issues and attempt to bridge both sides then the cycle will just repeat.
As evidenced by the fact that Trump achieved basically nothing and has plunged us into the worst case scenario on behalf of Israel and probably Russia - and yet the proposed solutions in Europe are: AfD, FN, Reform - all Zionist and Russian cucks who don't have an answer but know how to point at problems.
I see a few politicians like Bernie _genuinely_ attempt to talk to the other side, _genuinely_ admit that yes some mass migration is used for wage suppression and thats bad. We frame all our political issues in ways that do not engage the other side (both sides guilty of this) and then we wonder why populists sweep.
It’s difficult to say, because there are plenty of fairly horrible examples where an entire nation gets trapped in a culture that actively masters over generations how to punish honesty and reward corruption. Russia being an example.
I doubt very much you have any backing for this statement...
In the micro level, Russians look to be lovely trusting people to each other. My source is an Instagram story of a guy pretending not to speak Russian, talking to drunk Russians on the street in English, and they're not agressive but they try to solve his problem. Yeah, great source, but I doubt it's much worse than yours.
I mean I can see the "I think your judgement is bad" could be seen as a personal insult (even though it is genuinely meant as an assessment of reality), but "multiple"?
So do you believe that it's acceptable for your comments here to be laced with insults throughout, as long as they aren't intentionally and specifically targeted at the author of the comment you're replying to? Because I definitely don't think it's appropriate behavior to be denigrating an entire Linux distro and anyone whose values align with the purpose of that distro as merely participating in a meme.
Yes, I do believe that nixOS (especially nixOS 5 years ago) was not to be taken seriously.
It was (and is) a never-ending drama faucet, because most people are in it for the identity and not for the utility. Or rather the utility primarily is the identity granted by using it.
I can’t speak for him, but I regularly reword replies after a minute of consideration or if I manage to think to myself “is this as kind as I intend to be to others” during it’s formation.
In the past few months though, I’ve been heavily using the assistant set to use deepseek to assist with putting together a Minecraft 26.2 mod pack. It’s saved me so much time and frustration it’s unreal. Turns out there are certain things that are complex enough that regular search really isn’t all that great for.
For example, I can now do things like ask if there’s a mod that allows torch placement from the hotbar while holding something else, via middle click, compatible with Minecraft Java 26.2 neoforge, as the one I previously used is stuck on 1.21.1. And instead of spending 2-3 hours trying a bunch of keywords and combing through poorly named and documented mods, I can quickly get fairly reasonable confirmation that this doesn’t exist, along with some alternatives.
I can also hand it a GitHub source and asking it what needs to get changed to update a mod to newer versions, giving me an idea if doing so will get within my extremely limited coding capability. A real game changer is basically asking it for a tutorial, like what’s involved with fixing a model from an outdated resource pack for a recent version and having it work with Fresh Animations. This would previously have required many days of painful and frustrating searching.
I can also ask it for basic scripts, rather than spending time hoping to find something someone else already made. Such as taking ratings from my navidrome database, and writing them into tags in the related songs. Just the other day I asked it for a violentmonkey script that can take a Reddit comment with a video, and give me a url that yt-dlp can handle as is without having to dig through a bunch of nonsense manually. I would have never have had the expertise or time to learn to implement these things myself.
Of course, one must keep in mind that the knowledge the llm has has a time cutoff, but I’m frankly have so much of a better time than before.
I can now see myself using the next update of Claude to generate mods (the current version does not have much knowledge of Minecraft 26.2) with features I want. While I’m reasonably competent technically, actual coding is beyond me, and is far beyond my free time to learn.
While AI doesn’t replace my use of classic search wholesale, it does take a set of problems I was trying to poorly solve with classic search, and actually gives me what I want.
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