For me, and probably a lot of other people who moved from other search engines, long-term viability of Kagi is important - heck, that's the reason I've decided it's worth paying some money for search.
Given that, I'd expect them to be very frugal with their spendings. Burning money on T-shirts, on another Browser, AI "improvements", Kagi Email (wtf? first time I've heard of it) show that they have incredibly startupy mindset, and will end up like every other company that takes VC money - bloated, money focused and deaf to their community.
Every entrepreneur obsesses about some competitor or some business model.
You can see various baubles glint in Vlad's eye.
If you are a collection of 10x devs, you can afford to make multiple bets and test for traction. You can sample the Brave waters, or try to head off Proton claiming ownership of privacy first, or get in front of perplexity and phind. Arguably, only products you've shipped can tell you the truth about product market fit.
Which is to say, I don't think these "let 1000 flowers bloom" experiments are a bad thing... so long as the core product has no appearance of inattention and never goes backwards in usability or quality while "net promotion" is still part of the growth plan.
I don't think this is an accurate take. The DMA is about businesses and their relationships with consumers, so any regulation has to be targeted to that.
The argument is that Apple not allowing businesses to use a protocol on par with iMessage is the issue here.
Any sufficiently advanced networked computer will have the potential for spam or malicious users. iMessage already sees this without being an open protocol; it's deeply-integrated nature makes it a prime vector for malware and 0-click spyware. Adversaries like NSO Group actively exploit this.
The goal isn't a more locked-down phone, it's transparent communications infrastructure that inherently resists attackers. Anything else is an imperfect solution that relies on trust more than mechanical security. If Apple wants to lead the way on that, they should do the world a favor and propose their own open SMS encryption standard. As it stands, their 'ours is better but we wont show you' approach is about as obvious as security theater gets.
Some people enjoy the internet of old, where you had to put some effort into finding venues for collaborating.
There is nothing wrong with some places prioritizing building communities over algorithmical reach of the larger platforms.
"The people" are fine with lowering age of retirement, and in general not that interested in rising enough new people to sustain economy and social policies of their countries.
Granted, immigration policies in most of the western countries has been a disaster, but those did not arrive out of nowhere.
It would be great to see discussions and planning on how to shape policies, but this would only hopefully change the reception of immigrants, and not the fact that they're there to stay.
Immigration is to keep the wages down. Also, third world immigration is preferred because those immigrants are more tolerant of crap wages, crap working conditions and crap existence lifestyle than domestic workers.
If the elites really wanted more people they could increase the incentives for domestics to have children.
Immigrants are indeed more willing to do the jobs that domestic workers are no longer interested in doing, but their effect on wages is minimal, mostly affecting lower class, mostly other immigrants.
It's unclear if there is anything that can be done to incentivise people to have more children, to the extent that it makes a difference on the macro level. And this is kind of moot point anyway, most western countries that deal with lack of labor force don't have time to wait for children, if their citizens want to keep their level of support.
It's always been like this in GPU space - all reviews have always mentioned number of compute units (be it SMS or "cuda cores"), and the total available for the given architecture is also known. A lot can be told about relative performance of two cards based on that, so this information is useful not only to the investors.
AFAIK it's been like that in CPU space too - e.g. that 6-core CPUs are actually 8-core CPUs with 2 cores deactivated, either because of defects or because they needed more 6-core CPUs?
It's always like that in consumer semiconductors. Intel has something like 3 to 5 actual silicon variants per generation that covers all dozen or two SKUs.
But this seems like a perfectly valid argument to have. I hate that I currently have at least 5 different "usb-like" cable types in my household: usbc to usbc, usbc to lightning, usba to usbc, usba to lightning, usba to microusb, and I probably still have some mini USB cables in some boxes.
I'd really hope that if something new is proposed it will be only once every player have decided to put their weight behind it to propose and push for a change.
At that point, you can probably just pay by credit card: If your aim is to frustrate invasive ad trackers and profilers on the web (and you assume that Mullvad isn't outright colluding with these), that should be good enough to break any links.
On the other hand, if you don't trust Mullvad's assertion that they delete the link between accounts and credit card payment records after 40 days [1], what makes you think you can trust them to not keep a record of individual scratch cards sold on Amazon, which Amazon can then correlate to an order ID and by extension account and shipping address?
At a higher level, if somebody can convince Mullvad to collude in that manner, they can likely also just ask them to outright hand over your traffic flows and connection data.
How would they do that? Those are shipped directly from Amazon, and don't have any external markings that could be used to link specific card to amazon account. Unless the idea is that vouchers arrive at amazon in some additional packaging and then are repackaged after linking voucher to the account.
By the end of the day I agree, if you have any "real" reason for using VPN you pretty much have to implicitly trust your provider to not keep any traffic flows and connections that could correlate traffic to your IP, but not even sending money in envelope saves your from that.
If your worried about anything in a 40 day window the credit card <-> account_id is a liability
Amazon doesn’t know the redemption code on the gift card. So Amazon knows that you purchased a Mullvad gift card, but can’t associate the transaction with a Mullvad account. Likewise Mullvad knows service was paid for with a gift card (possibly that the gift card is from a lot sold on Amazon). But they do not know which Amazon transaction the card is associated with.
Unless your behavior and the behavior of others deanonymizes the Amazon purchase <-> redemption your account should be indistinguishable from any other that purchased a Mullvad gift card from Amazon in that window of time.
If you care about privacy, then Amazon is the last company I would buy from. From personal experience, I would be far more concerned about what Amazon does with your data than Mullvad.
Given that NATO is a defensive alliance, I don't see how such a rule would make much sense. Can you spell that rule out, and link to the official document?
NATO members states, as members of the OSCE, are expected to adhere to the OSCE's Code of Conduct on Politico-Military Aspects of Security.
The 3rd aspect of the document says, quote:
3. They remain convinced that security is indivisible and that the security of each of them is inseparably linked to the security of all others. *They will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States. They will pursue their own security interests in conformity with the common effort to strengthen security and stability in the CSCE area and beyond.*
My god... All the EU states and all NATO states also participate in the OSCE.
Is there no world in your head where someone other than Russia does something wrong?
I live in the US for 10+ years and give zero shits about Russian / US / Ukrainian propaganda. There are rules and I'm not seeing "good" (according to conventional wisdom) countries following these rules. But who cares, right? The United States is like the biggest, most powerful country in the whole world, hands down. And if you think we're living in a unipolar kind of world, what you're saying is that we're the only major player on the global stage. And what that means? With all that crazy amount of power we've got, we can pretty much go out and do all sorts of wild and reckless stuff, and the crazy part is, it doesn't come back to bite us in any. major. way.
There is an argument going around saying that the way Putin's been acting kinda shows that it was a smart move to try and get NATO to grow eastward and bring in countries like Ukraine and Georgia. But, what's really interesting is that before the Ukrainian crisis happened, the US didn't have any reason to believe that Putin was acting all aggressive. And there's nothing showing that the US was considering making NATO bigger just to keep the Russians in check. We just didn't see Russia as being all pushy and aggressive. But then, when the Ukrainian crisis kicked off on February 22 2014, that's when the US changed its mind. That's when the US decided, "Hey, Russia is being aggressive". And the US started thinking Russia wanted to make itself bigger, like a "greater Russia" or something. This change in perception occurred post facto.
1: https://datablocks.dev/blogs/news/white-label-vs-recertified...