No <3

wow what a sick drum solo, the card trick at the end really sold it for me

My vote is for Le Guin-style moon anarchy à la The Dispossessed

The closest English has is phrasal verbs like “I turned the light off” or "I went to pick the kids up. Generally verb+particle = new verb. Sometimes you can put a noun between the verb and particle but not always (I looked the toys for vs. I looked for the toys)

These are not just verbs plus postpositions as “I turned the light” and “I went to pick the kids” have entirely different meanings.

Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well

Glad to see many apps I already use here! Just to add ones I haven’t seen mentioned:

• Lichess - the best chess
• Paseo - simple step counter
• Wikipedia - duh
• Gmaps WV - for when other maps fail
• Openreads - amazing and underloved books / reading tracker
• SherpaTTS - offline text to speech
• Whisper+ - offline speech to text
• FairEmail - email client
• Fcitx5 - Chinese keyboard
• AnkiDroid - Anki flashcards

Good to know, I haven’t done anything yet of course but will look at the relevant regulations at some point. Thanks!

Just to answer the “why?” question and offer one data point, as someone with a university gmail account that I obviously can’t change myself this is a welcome update.

I kind of prefer the separation at the moment but it’s good to know I can simplify things in the future if I choose to.

noai.duckduckgo.com is the best drop-in replacement for a free pre-AI search engine.

kagi.com is great if you can justify paying for it.

I’ve used both for a long time and have never missed Google, especially in its current state.

Maps is just a web app at the moment but there are apps for iOS and Android supposedly in the works: https://kagi.com/maps/

Kagi Translate is a web app and has apps available. You can do quick translations for free but the better models and features like document translation are behind the paywall: https://translate.kagi.com/

As for other features theres a list in the user guide. Mainly search, summarize, news, translate, maps and assistant. All in various stages of development, you can read more here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/

Thanks, you are definitely not alone there. I hope they make an offering like this soon as there is clearly demand for it.

Been using kagi for 4 months and just renewed as a paid subscriber. Just want to mention things I haven’t seen mentioned yet but this is not an exhaustive list:

– you can get a discount through kagi specials. I think I paid for a year of Ente ($40 bucks or so) and got three months of Kagi free. Maybe the other way around through Ente but they have other partners as well

– the AI is a problem for many which is understandable. I have found its implementation sane and opt-in only. The addition of AI did not affect the cost of the subscription (they get their cut from a 20% increase over the API cost apparently). A recent Kagi Feedback thread suggests they will be restructuring subscriptions into pure search and pure AI at some point along with a combined plan in the future though TBD. They’ve kind of backed themselves in a corner as it seems like half the userbase wants nothing to do with AI and the other half sees its removal as a feature previously added at no extra cost being removed and thus a value loss to their sub. They’ve said in the past their search is FAR more expensive than AI (which is why it was added for free) but that seems to contradict some of their recent statements about the restructuring.

– Kagi Translate is great, obviously LLM based but machine translation is kind of what LLMs are for and it is an easy replacement for google translate

– Kagi Maps is rolling out slowly and should have apps at some point which would be a huge win for leaving gmaps

– I have actually found their universal summarizer pretty nice for getting a preview of articles or YouTube videos, seems like it can also crawl behind pay walls

– I will sometimes mindlessly scroll the Small Web index which is a very cool little project offered for free

– they have a no log policy on search but allow you to take it a step farther via privacy pass which allows you to log in via an anonymous token if you want to ensure your account it not tied to a specific search (I am no cyber security expert but I’ve read its a legit implementation)

In summary, Kagi sometimes gets a chronic case of startup brain and I get the uneasiness around some of their incorporation of AI. At the same time I have found basically all of their tools useful to some degree and I easily get 10 dollars of value out of the sub a month.

I hate it when the money to store my balls and the payment for the lawsuit I settled with myself derails my 70 billion in funding for an unaccountable secret police force

As long as the villain is still an extreme close up of George Lopez’s disembodied head I’m in

On a side note but related, https://github.com/kmille/freetar is a private front-end for Ultimate Guitar that’s amazing. Free public instance at freetar.de.

Never went back to UG after finding this, so much better than navigating their awful website.

Why not both??

I switched to Infomaniak when I first started seriously migrating away from gmail. I found it a really clean and almost too good to be true, email is fundamentally un-private and IK seemed like a great balance. Also all their apps were open source and on fdroid! Wow!

I was disappointed to see them take a stance against Swiss encryption law, which ultimately made me stick with Proton (also not perfect, but who specifically took the opposite side of this proposal). This issue seemed to be at the core of what I expected from a privacy focused email provider.

What really made me upset was that when I then tried to leave Infomaniak I found that they lock email forwarding behind a paywall (something not even Google does). It actually became very difficult to leave the small number of services I had migrated over to, and I still have my ikmail in my client by necessity.

This is definitely a positive change. I want to take them seriously and more competition in the relatively private non-American email space is good. But I am still hesitant to reccomend or embrace them. Would be curious to hear anyone else’s thoughts?

Gogoro a moped/scooter company in Taiwan has these. Little stations all over the country where you can swap your battery out, it was pretty amazing.

This is what I did with my Pixel 7 and I third it! As long as you go through a well-established refurbisher there is little risk and the phone will often come with a warranty/30 day return window. If you are US-based I used backmarket.com, where a P7 is currently $183 and a P8 is $298. Reasonable price, no money goes to Google directly, and I have been very happy with GrapheneOS.

I recently bought an XP Pen Magic Note Pad that I’ve been pretty happy with. It’s sort of a hybrid tablet/notetaker that’s going for a jack of all trades master of none vibe while still having an overall good writing experience and I think it succeeds at that

Pros:

• bought for $200 refurbished on an eBay sale directly from XP Pen (I think it’s $300 or so resfurbished normally)
• runs an OS based on Android 14 so full play/aurora/F-Droid access easily
• comes with a good pen, small folio case and notetaking app based on Jnotes
• screen is matte with a slightly textured feel. Can switch between a full color, paper color and grayscale display mode with a single button. 90hz, palm rejection while writing is very good.

Cons

• Came out this year but a little worried about continued OS support being a niche item
• built in notetaking app is great except for the handwriting recognition. I bought Nebo for that which is a one time license of $8 which isn’t bad at all and their handwriting recognition is like dark magic it’s amazing
• not a true e-ink, so battery life is more like a standard tablet. I’m usually getting 2-3 days of use wheras e-inks will give you weeks
• not a true paper-like writing experience but better than an iPad out of the box
• overall it’s a mostly fine android tablet with a few tweaks aimed at the note-taking market

All in all I do really enjoy it, and for $200 including a pen, case and software it was hard to pass up. I’ve locked it down a bit but you’re not going to get a totally degoogled experience. At $300 I would still consider it but probably wouldn’t buy new. Let me know if you have any other questions!