So does US one in Palestine. So does UAE, and many more. It’s not a matter of “everyone bad” is the fact that legitimately if the criteria is no paying anybody in a country that is involved in killing people, or that uses services from such a country, you reach everyone. And in this case it would be not using kagi directly as a US company.

The war in Ukraine is much closer to me, but if we are talking principles I need to understand that a person from Lebanon or Palestine, or other places might have different perspective and they would demand that “we don’t do business to X” has a different “X”. So to accommodate most or all of these perspectives, you need to necessarily include more countries, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not the only active war at the moment.

Actually they have no VC in the traditional sense! They did private investment rounds, and I think they raised like 400k from like 60 investors or something. The actual numbers might be off, but I remember looking into this and it was lime 10/20k per investor on average, basically retail amounts.

“Oh no, a person who didn’t demonstrate any quality worth of respect so far is calling me names”. Spare the effort, insults only work when someone values your opinion. You clearly demonstrated not being able to even argue your opinion.

Now I will block you and go earn my salary lobbying in other threads /s

There are a ton of imports that are not (yet) sanctioned, and therefore tons of companies that did not divest.

As I mentioned, when possible or equivalent I absolutely support the choice. In this case, there are conflicting benefits and everyone can do their choices based on the way they value the different benefits.

This obviously can’t be an absolute moral argument, otherwise residing in US or Russia (or UAE, or China and many many more countries) would be immoral ipso facto, and same for buying any product made by any company in those countries. The globalized world makes this basically impossible.

Anyway, I feel we are going in circles now, so I will close it here.

“You can’t call me buddy” - proceeds to call “homeboy”.

I explained my reasons, if you disagree or you decided not to read them it is your problem. Keep your compassion for those who need it.

I will give you more data points. I live in Estonia, and just now Estonia is disconnecting the power grid to Russia. It means that just by turning on my light, I might give (have given) some money to an actual Russian company. Let alone knowing which companies use Russian gas or other resources etc.

There are choices that personally make sense, I refused a job at a Yandex spinoff - israeli-russian company, for example. In this case the amount of money is so small, so indirect, that I personally accept the fact of giving money to Yandex - of which a small portion I assume ends in taxes and a portion of that ends up in weapons that will be used to kill Ukrainians is nothing different from buying a product that I am unaware was produced by a company which uses some Russian import. However, using kagi I can at least positively contribute to other aspects that for me are important in the world, like for example the protection of privacy. For this, I even accept to give money to Google and Microsoft, despite they are companies that made incalculable damages to society, and also pay (little) taxes and work directly with the US military, which means some money also ends up in weapons that are used to kill Palestinians (today).

Now, everyone has their own moral scale, so I completely understand if for someone this is unacceptable. That said, their technical reason why they don’t have an easy way for people to choose search backend is reasonable, and if we go to the point where they shouldn’t use X for moral reasons than they wouldn’t be able to use yandex, bing, google, brave (and maybe something else). In fact, using Kagi itself means paying taxes in US.

So to me their current approach is the only reasonable outcome. If for someone the tiny amount of indirect money is worse than the benefit (not personal, but collective) of fostering a healthy tech company, boost privacy etc. then they can reasonably make the decision to not pay for the service. Painting not doing so as “supporting Russia” though is disingenuous IMHO (I am saying in general).

Funny note, my wife also uses and loves Kagi, and not because she doesn’t care about the work or her family (who thankfully is in a safe-ish area).

Let me explain it to you:

• first comment with meta-statements about down votes (I didn’t downvote, but still shows the tone)
• one comment in: “how many figures you get”
• two comments in: “I feel like I am talking with a secret operative”.

Now, you might think everyone is stupid, but it doesn’t take that much that all these statements are passive aggressive and they are a way to insinuate your interlocutor is arguing in bad faith or for ulterior motives.

so much energy into something you don’t have a monetary interest in

I don’t agree. First because it’s little effort, if any. I am right now taking a dump and tapping on my phone. Second, by the same logic your commitment would show also financial incentive? So are you paid by Google to smear competitors?

I instead think that we are simply commenting on stuff that we are interested in. I want kagi to succeed, of course, and I do because it’s a great product but much more importantly because I want their business model to succeed. I want more and more companies adopting it and stop thinking that fucking over users is the only way to make money. From this perspective, sure, I am invested because I want a healthy tech industry which works for humans and their rights.

Not that I have to justify anything anyway.

BTW, if you start every conversation with the mindset that “everyone who disagrees with me must be paid by whom I am accusing”, I hardly think you can consider yourself fair. As I said, using your own logic I need to assume you work for Google or Microsoft and are paid by them to smear competitors.

She doesn’t, but that’s my whole point: it’s a personal perspective. If you ask a person from Palestine, Vietnam, many places in South America, Yemen, Iraq, etc. their gripes would be different from my own, which as an Italian are different already from my wife’s etc.

So which moral claims do you accommodate? The obvious answer is everyone’s, by allowing each user to choose where indirectly give money. However this is apparently technically hard, so either you shut down or you simply decide that you can’t accommodate any, and make good in other areas (I.e. through privacy-preserving services).

I am repeating data points they shared during the community event.

BTW buddy, you can cool it with the passive-aggressiveness. Not everyone on the internet is out to get you.

The info about them breaking even at 25k was shared in the discord channel (which I very rarely look). The rest are stats that are published on their website and as I said shared during the yearly community event.

I work in tech, and I would be blind to not acknowledge that a company which:

• is profitable/breaks even after few years of operation
• does that with 25k users
• doesn’t have a marketing budget (used to, now they might have a ridiculously small one).

Might be a healthy business, different from 99% of tech companies that generally bleed money even with millions of users.

You seem completely sure of the opposite, whatever, don’t use their service lol

My wife is Ukrainian. I will leave it at that.

I have also a colleague from Afghanistan, for example, guess what their opinion is (and the list could be long, I just happen to have a colleague from there).

I remember Yandex being brought up during the Brave debacle, and I don’t remember them claiming anything of the sort. I think they simply stated the position that choosing search providers based on moral claims would simply lead to them being able to use only the niche search providers.

Are you referring to using Yandex?

I think they did explain that implementing turn off and on of specific engines per user is a complete rewrite of their querying system, so it is an expensive and complex change.

Removing yandex is OTOH not a great move as results in Russian language often come from there. Also morally I would generally agree, but then - especially now - you could argue about “giving money to US companies”, and that means they need to shut down, they can’t use bing, google, yandex.

You said “if your product is not interesting enough for users to use”.

The product has to be useful, and the user growth for a obviously premium service I think is a good testimony of that.

Have you considered that they might be a healthy business that doesn’t bleed money (like most tech companies) and therefore doesn’t need to rely on trapping users in subscriptions hoping they won’t use the product?

Also what’s with the passive aggressive tone? We are talking about a search engine, chill.

The user growth has been bigger than usual in the last months, they have live stats. Not to say they were breaking even at around 25k users, they now have 38k.

Also their product shouldn’t be interesting, should be invisible. It’s a search engine, not a toy.

If you really want to see malice, I would say it’s more of a marketing move because very very few users will not make any search at all in a month. And those users have indeed no cost for them. Giving them credit still means you are getting the money eventually.

No, I can read sentences in context, and I learned that the world has 3 dismensions quite early. Maybe it was because I lived in a country with a public school system that works (more or less).

Anyway, a cult is a cult, and I feel I have nothing to gain from this interaction. Cya.

Expressing support for a specific person picked, in a specific and narrow context = being OK with etc…? Also, it’s not his country either (like is not mine). As an external observer does it mean that if Trump will do anything (anything at all) that I agree with, even for the broken clock theory, I need to lobotomize myself and not say it, otherwise I am OK with a rapist insurrectionist grifter felon etc. etc.?

the CEO of a company I use for emails expressed a questionable opinion on antitrust issue

it’s not deal breaker for me

absolutely disgusting

If this is absolutely disgusting for you, I guess you have really, really, really high standards, that probably nobody can meet.

They did, they even worked together in the past.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/m7psmzx/

Quote for those who don’t want to reddit.

Yes, big fan of Lina Khan, I worked with her in 2020 on the House report on antitrust (the House was controlled by Democrats back then). I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but certain events in 2022 made it very clear that further progress on antitrust was unlikely under Democratic leadership. You can read more about the backstory here: https://time.com/6243256/schumer-kills-antitrust-big-tech-bills/

Edit: I see someone else already posted it. I will leave it here even if it’s a duplicate for future self-shame.

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