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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Philip K. Dick wrote a short story (“Autofac”) in which autonomous, self-replicating factories continue to operate and produce goods long after a global war has wiped out most of humanity, and they eat up all remaining resources on earth in doing so. I worry that there’s a system in which a few extremely rich people can continue thriving without involvement of most of humanity, and that they’re (knowingly or unknowingly) moving society in that direction. Who needs the commoners when AI and algorithms can simulate them.

    IIUC the calculation of GDP doesn’t factor in whether the produced goods serve a human need - the system can in theory continue to optimize for ever-increasing GDP while every human on earth starves to death.





  • tias@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    Kagi has good search results and they are presented well. It also has some useful features like forbidding certain sites and prioritizing others. I like that by paying I’m the customer and not the product. And their “small web” initiative is commendable.

    That said, I’ve been a customer for nine months on an annual subscription, and I will not be renewing. The first reason is that I find them just too expensive for what they do. The second is that, even being that expensive, they’re not breaking even. That undermines my trust in their future as a search engine and makes me less interested in paying a little extra for a good cause.


  • It’s wild that they are not breaking even with these prices. I’ve had an annual subscription since January and made nearly 5000 searches. Extrapolating to a year, I will have been paying about $0.17 per search. If that would go to the electricity bill then it corresponds to about 1 kWh of energy per search, enough to run a 50-watt laptop PC for 20 hours.