- input_shI can't think of many situations where that would be particularly valuable, considering it favours recent plays and the cutoff date is already almost half a year old.
- There is no arrest in that story?
- > Books enter the public domain.
...and then they get re-packaged with DRM on Amazon's store, mostly because people uploading public domain books on Amazon have no idea what they're doing.
> Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.
You can read DRM-free stuff on a Kindle already, so that's not particularly relevant here.
> The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad.
When every big publisher is doing it, it is the norm. That doesn't mean there doesn't exist any book publisher which doesn't do this, but the vast, vast majority of the books actually sold today contain DRM. We don't have to like that norm, but pretending it isn't one is just denying reality.
- https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/
Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?
- None of those are products, those are companies that offers 100s of products.
The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really).
Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.
- > Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi
...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.
For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.
- > TU/e and ICT cooperative SURF are also looking for replacements for Microsoft and Google. However, a fully-fledged European alternative is not yet available...
The only possible alternative to the entirety of Microsoft/Google is a European monopoly that is similar in scale. Indeed, such a monopoly does not exist (nor should it). People go to Microsoft and Google because they're already spending money on one product of theirs and there happens to be this completely different product of theirs which you also need as a business user. Sooner or later you end up using 20 completely different products that are "well-integrated" because at no point did you look for an alternative to any of those use cases.
Your job is not to go from 100% reliance on Google/Microsoft to 0% reliance, that'll never happen. Your job is to look at their offerings in isolation and reduce your reliance one product at a time. And yes, paying for 20 products from 20 companies is gonna cost you more when each of them needs to be profitable separately, only monopolies can afford to offer some product at a permanent loss.
- > But who can audit the reporting?
The same people that audit your taxes, roughly with the same consequences for lying. Except the IRS is far more likely to send unannounced auditors to NGOs than they are to send them to for-profit companies or individuals. It's more of a hassle to get/retain tax-free status than it is to simply pay your taxes like everyone else (as it should be).
> Is that it?
Let me guess: you haven't clicked on "view filing", which leads to a roughly 20-pages-long document.
- Yes, it's called Form 990 and it is a requirement to publish it on a yearly basis to retain non-profit status. You can search for any US-registered NGO here for example: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/
To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.
- > surely you'd have to trick Google into visiting the /search? url in order to get it indexed
That's trivially easy. Imagine a spammer creating some random page which links to your website with that made up query parameter. Once Google indexes their page and sees the link to your page, Google's search console complains to you as the victim that this page doesn't exist. You as in the victim have no insight into where Google even found that non-existent path.
> Since these are very low quality results surely one of Google's 10000 engineers can tweak this away.
You're assuming there's still people at Google who are tasked with improving actual search results and not just the AI overview at the top. I have my doubts Google still has such people.
- Or, and this is gonna sound crazy, I know, it's not because it used to be novel and cool but because young people feel less safe to come out now that the trans panic has done its thing and the current administration has spent an inconceivable amount of money, time and attention painting this marginalised community in a bad light at every perceivable opportunity to do so?
- Because it's the TV yelling at you something along the lines of "Hey look, we replaced the creativity of dozens of people with this shitty result from a prompt, your job is next."
The fact that it's so bad that it obviously doesn't adhere to any sort of quality standards we expect from humans is just adding an insult to injury. It tells people "AI doesn't even need to be better at your job than you to replace you."
- You're falling for a marketing trick.
What that type of section usually means is "there's someone from Microsoft that signed up for our service using his work account", sometimes it means "there's some tiny team within Microsoft that uses our product", but it very rarely (if ever) means "the entire company is completely reliant on our product".
- And in the sentence above that, they're "saving" 15 million in Microsoft licenses. So either they've paid 24 million to Microsoft this year, in which case their next year's expenses are dropping by over 60%, or it's the same pot of money, in which case their yearly bill dropped by 40%.
I get that 9 million sounds like a lot, but it's much, much lower than what they would've paid to Microsoft anyways. And those 9 million are advertised as a "one-off investment", while their contract with Microsoft was perpetual.
- I hate when switches like these get advertised first and foremost as some huge cost-cutting measure, further solidifying open source ecosystem as some cheap knock-offs of their commercial alternatives.
How about instead you donate the same amount of money you would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would benefit.
- Really? IMO it went about as well as I expected given the audience.
- I think this might be a you problem because both Medium and Substack allowed randoms on the Internet to post from day 1. There aren't any requirements, anyone can do it.
- How do you know?
Please link it if you have found it, because as far as I understand this story, the directive was sent out as an internal memo and therefore neither you or me can simply read it. Plus the Reuters story you've linked also has an almost-identical paragraph:
> The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
- I don't know how any of that has anything to do with what I explained to you. Two completely separate topics, I'm not here to indulge your every gripe you have with news.