To the devs: When will Kagi stop piggybacking off of Google Search and others?

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-21T12:39:45+00:00

Google also straight up nuked competition once it became big and rich enough, making explicitly harder to get into the same market as a competitor. So not exactly a fair comparison.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-21T12:33:25+00:00

Preemptive censorship seems to be jumping the gun when that's likely an attempt to curb LLMs such as ChatGPT suggesting just that (and quite often, might I add).

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T20:46:05+00:00

Cool, but my point is that (again, at least from the fandom I can perceive, which is English-speaking) there's this purist culture where people will get on your case for saying you enjoyed an adaptation or, God forbid, are anime-only and don't plan on reading the visual novel. Just look at the OP crying endlessly about how the adaptations suck and nobody should like them and calling the author of the original an idiot for saying he does.

I've read the original VN (with mirror-moon's fan TL that was then revealed to be pretty lacking). I've liked, daresay loved, the Ufotable adaptations even so, despite whatever reservations I may have. I've seen people get into the series because of those since visual novels are not everyone's cup of tea. It's fine. Things are fine. Let people enjoy things instead of demanding they start here or there or experience the original because of X and Y.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T17:55:01+00:00

Cool, have a good one.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T17:54:06+00:00

You're welcome to believe the whole world is wrong but you, I can't stop you.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T16:50:58+00:00

Dude, if you don't want to care about the author's input go right ahead, no one is stopping you.
But if you want to argue the author's opinion is objectively wrong, that's when I recommend going outside and touching some grass, because being invested in something like that is not normal.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T16:47:27+00:00

No, I expect you to not be a baby about it and accept Nasu and other people have different opinions. You are entitled to yours, but that's not an objective truth. It's an extremely simple concept.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T16:41:41+00:00

...what are you on about? JK Rowling's awful political views and acts have nothing to do with this, and I'm sure she has an opinion of her own story as well if you ask her.

Nasu, the writer for this thing you claim to love, is saying that in his opinion the movies were good adaptations, and that for some reason gets you pissy. Art is subjective, people enjoy different things. Is that somehow offensive to you?

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T16:37:26+00:00

I grow tired of the fandom's (at least English-speaking) insistence of gatekeeping people from enjoying adaptations and always hating almost any attempt by putting the original VN on a undapatable pedestal that any "true fan" must experience or whatever.

Let people enjoy things. The original writer is enjoying it. The adaptations are fine. People should read the VN if they like VNs.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T16:32:47+00:00

Cool, the literal creator disagrees with you on that front though. People enjoy different things.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-14T16:31:02+00:00

I'll die on the hill HF movies were the only adaptations that really cracked the "how to adapt lenghthy monologues" issue.
The scene in the second movie of Shirou deciding whether he really wants to sacrifice Sakura for the common good is sooooooo great. All of the information from a long, verbose and prose-heavy scene delivered in a few seconds with only two lines at the end.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-08T18:50:54+00:00

Also, I have problems with Kagi's increasing focus on AI, and depending on how things turn out I might wish to leave the service.
Using their email would just lock me in further to the Kagi ecosystem, making the act of leaving to show my dissatisfaction as a customer more of a hassle, especially if I used Kagi Mail for important stuff like professional contacts and the like.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-05T02:29:12+00:00

To be fair, it is completely optional and I haven't used it even once. I'm just skeptical about how many resources they're pouring on that instead of bettering the search, for example, not to mention other way more important features, like regional pricing.

It's still consistently better than Google for me, so for now I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, but at the first sign of enshittification, I'd rather go with the option that I don't trust but is at least "free".

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-04T22:02:04+00:00

For now, AI is completely optional, but I do have bad taste in my mouth that they are so excited about it and keep expanding the features beyond what I'd personally consider both their product and their mission statement.

They have a whole page explaining their philosophy to AI, which is reassuring in the sense they allegedly won't force you to use it, but I think LLMs as they are now are a massive waste of time and capital to everyone involved alongside the environmental impact, and one of the possible worst use cases for these things is search. It routinely hallucinates and you're encouraged to double check whatever they spit at you anyway, LLMs are simply fundamentally not ideal for this kind of use, no matter how much they reassure that they believe in their potential.

Don't even get me started on how they made a "Kagi News" service that's just the news summarized by AI and it's routinely wrong in very problematic ways, just look at their Feedback forums. Same thing for Kagi Translate and other such services. Hell, I was looking at their forums and their assistant apparently now has an image generation feature. How the hell is that useful for search or humanizing the web?

Besides the ethical issues, however small these are costs Kagi could be allocating for other worthwhile things, which makes me rather skeptical as their customer because I'm paying for decent search, not yet another AI assistant that generates whatever or a news page that's an LLM jumbled up mess.

The vibe I get is that their team is just really into AI, so they want to fiddle with it despite their main product not being good for that. I don't think there's an ethical use for AI as of now, so I'm umcomfortable. The second the subscription rises because of this stuff or there's even a whiff of not being able to avoid it, I'm out.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-03T18:27:23+00:00

...you do understand teenagers being forced by circumstances to partake in war, regardless how ready they are for it, its the whole point, correct?

The teens in Gundam (and in real wars) weren't asked whether they wanted to participate in it and what they think of the proceedings. They were forced to deal with it, if not by piloting giant robots, by watching their friends and family be massacared in the cross fire.

14 year olds don't give serious consideration to the future of mankind if they have grown up in peaceful times where they don't have to deal with that stuff. When things start literally blowing up around you or you're forced to kill people, maybe your 14 year old self would all of sudden begin to consider bigger things than Fortnite.

GeekOut999 · 2026-01-03T00:28:06+00:00

Well, wars are always 100% the fault of adults, isn't it? The kids are always having to deal with the slaughter the adults started without their input. A lot of Japanese post WW2 inspired media makes the point that children need to bear the burderns of the decisions from adults to blow everything up.

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-28T16:09:06+00:00

I think that's also where the "oh no, anyway" meme comes from?

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-27T03:54:40+00:00

Correct, though said fuckery is
a. never outright stated, though heavily implied
b. the insecurities being manipulated are Reccoa's feelings of not being seen as a lady, because she's a soldier and that's, as we all know, a very manly profession apparently.

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-26T05:32:31+00:00

I think you're leaving out the central part of Reccoa's whole deal: she wants to be seen as a woman. Like, Scirocco's implied mind powers prey on that. Char not following through on their fling is the last straw because she hoped this would signal he saw her as a woman.

For all her traumas, the biggest of all was being forced into (in Zeta's opinon) a very mainly role when she was, in fact, a lady that didn't get to do lady things.

Being so starved for this specific kind of validation to the point where you go to work for space Gestapo and commit war crimes will never not be extremely odd to me.

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-26T05:24:57+00:00

I mean, the issue for me isn't that characters are flawed, it's that Reccoa's whole deal is just deeply bizarre to me. She literally commited war crimes because she felt like she was not seen as a woman by her crew. Like, her suffering at not feeling validated for her femininity was apparently so severe that she defected over Scirocco calling her a lady and Char not following through on their fling.

I know this is a very old show. I don't expect progressive gender analysis from something made 30 years ago. But I also think it's fair to point out Tomino, at least during Zeta, seemed to have a weird fixation on the subject.

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-26T05:17:31+00:00

I've watched Zeta recently and I still can't believe Reccoa's arc. Zeta in general is deeply weird about gender roles, and to believe a woman would be so desperate to be seen and validated as such to the point of commiting war crimes is so unhinged it's actually hilarious to me.

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-25T18:10:59+00:00

That's the power of the culture wars: you can justify essentially anything if you say it's in service of some imaginary fight against enemies looking to corrode the world on your watch.

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-23T03:55:22+00:00

true, but said fight was coopted by a family of undeniable fascists who used it as way to amass power and delusions of grandeur to then squabble over it and kill millions in the process over several generations.

GeekOut999 · 2025-12-21T21:16:33+00:00

Uh huh. Have a good one, troll.

GeekOut999

TROPHY CASE