Sounds like Vlad did a pretty sane, human thing reaching out and offering to discuss.
The authors replies seem pretty rude (or at least somewhat aggressive / dismissive). Kagi is Vlads baby and I could imagine he would care and try to explain when he thinks someone has the wrong idea. However to the author - it’s just another service he doesn’t use anymore.
You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a lecture.
The author's response is perfectly calibrated to drive someone up the wall. Sling some mud and then hide behind "help, I'm being cornered."
Imagine doing this in the offline world. How well would this kind of behavior go over with people at the grocery store, do you think? Why is it acceptable online to behave like this?
One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications - because you really can't just "close off" the discussion to one way.
Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.
This feels very similar to the trope on X, where someone makes an inflammatory or stupid comment, people angrily respond calling them stupid, and the original person then claims they're being harassed/were just joking, and ultimately neither side actually communicates. The people who like the original poster continue on believing that they were being harassed, and people who thought they were being stupid continue on believing they're being stupid.
I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.
Perhaps we live in different worlds, but there's a world of distanced between unhinged and roughly 3 emails to someone who wrote a peice targeted specifically at your business.
If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.
Tldr: you can't just spread a very negative opinion about someones hard work and then plug your ears shut for any kind of non-symathetic interaction.
In my eyes this rationale would make sense if there was no backstory to this. If there was no preceeding blogpost, I'd consider Vlads messages pure spam.
But the context here is different: The author wrote a very critical, and clearly opinionated blogpost. There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
Now the author seems to want to avoid responsibility, while Vlads attempt to react to a public hit piece with a respectful conversation was honestly the best way to handle this.
Um, no. In general, if you tell someone to stop messaging you, they get to send one more message to react to that and tie up the conversation. "OK. You still haven't addressed points A, B, and C, so I still disagree. Let's wrap it up here then." That's perfectly reasonable and polite.
Vlad's message to "discuss" reads more like a sealion-ey 'let me explain to you why you are wrong, you just don't understand why you are wrong, I am very smart and not wrong' than an honest admission that Vlad was wrong and is interested in being humble and learning from someone else.
Vlad is not discussing, he is lecturing. The author of the blog post seems right. Vlad defends his position "lol email is not PII" repeatedly, despite being obviously and completely wrong. He has no understanding that it doesn't matter that a user could enter fake information.
His business collects email addresses, which is a process. Under GDPR, this process must be documented, users must be given their data on request (even if it just contains an email address, but usually it also contains the signup date for example as a proof for their data processing consent) and users must be informed about their rights to correct or delete such data.
He comes off totally as the "trust me bro" guy with zero respect for a different perspective and doesn't seem to be interested in changing his (objectively wrong) opinion. It is almost laughable, because "is email PII" has been discussed a million times since the introduction of the GDPR that you must've lived under a rock to dismiss it like Vlad did.
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to
argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that.
And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
Why even reply to an email when you intent to ignore it?
>Yes, hello so called prince of Nigeria. I have no interest in a discussion about the intricate court politics of Nigeria or its Byzantine inheritance rules. As you can see from my blog post it is entirely unlikely you would ever gain the throne even with my $2,000 wire transfer.
The only thing I take away from that is I'm very happy I don't know either of them and am never likely to.
^ The parent link leads to an email chain between the CEO and the blogger in which the blogger says "go away I do not want to talk to you" several times and receives a chain of emails back. Text version:
Read them yourself, but to me they look like the emails of a persistent salesman. They were remarkable only in that they provide more excuses than concrete responses.
I find this quote funny and on some another level of disconnect about what they are competing with:
> Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.
For a couple of my university years I had nothing but free Google t-shirts. They were throwing so much of this crap around that my closet was halfway to 20k. I only lamented they never gave away Google trousers or briefs.
They have a fair shot at competing with Google on quality of search and they should focus on that. If they think they can complete on AI, email or swag - good luck, and I hope you have a good money printer.
Jesus I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are.
Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how utterly disgusted they are because you dared talk to them.
Have these people forgot about how strangers in real life behave and communicate?
At the risk of sounding grumpy, a big difference between the tech community today and in the Usenet days is that the Usenet crowd's interpersonal skills weren't two standard deviations to the left of the mean at your local Target.
> I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are.
Yes, my impression as well. (I have never used Kagi but have considered trying it.)
Among the other things, the blog author approvingly put up a screenshot with someone insisting on seeing the entire world through their own political views and demanding others do so as well. ("Actually, the word 'politics' means 'everything', and also I'm right and everyone else is wrong.") As the meme goes, they need to touch grass.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but the author of this post sounds insufferable based on their email responses and fediverse thread. They post a public email on their public website (I assume for people to reach out to them) and then gets mad when someone does so?
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to
argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
If they don’t want to talk, just don’t respond.
The author also cross posted their blog to multiple social media platforms, which I assume means they wanted it to get attention. But then when the CEO does see it and offers some explanations they get mad that the CEO “vomited out” a reply that they didn’t want? I’m sorry, but the CEO of Kagi definitely sounds like the reasonable one here, thanks for linking this thread.
While I do not agree on Vlads interpretation of PII and GDPR at all, that whole conversation was so incredibly mishandled by the author of this blog post.
I understand not wanting to engage in a conversation about a product you don't care about, but after collecting so much information and writing a lengthy blog post about it, that is a different story.
In my eyes, the author wrote a hit piece largely based on personal grudges, and then wanted to avoid any kind of responsibility.
And from my point of view, a lot of the financial stuff "makes sense". This is a small startup, probably with little business experience, and it shows. But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes?
Honestly what he says makes sense in his "rebuttal", except for the part where he continues emailing after being told to stop.
I actually stumbled across the AI stuff being turned off by default yesterday when I got curious and was poking around the feature request forum. It was explicitly because a lot of people hate it for moral/ethical reasons. A lot of the comments in the replies are specifically about the AI stuff in spite of it being disabled by default.
Thanks for that. After reading both, I'm fine with Kagi and somewhat more annoyed by the author.
Perhaps Vlad is a little excessively enthusiastic and protective of his baby. But then you don't do something frankly crazy like start a new search engine from scratch in 2023 without being a little bit off. If we actually want a viable alternative to the advertising-funded search monopolies, we've got to be tolerant of some personality quirks.
And perhaps the T-shirt gambit is a poor use of limited resources. But have any of the startups that ended up making it big not make a few poor investments on the way up? I'll forgive it.
Meanwhile, Vlad's response does spell out several ways in which this lori exaggerated or misinterpreted things. Which of course are not acknowledged or responded to at all, despite lori's self-important tone. If you want to take your ball and go home because somebody doesn't take your concerns seriously, well you can, but don't expect me to follow you.
IMO, Vlad would have been better-off making his response his own blog post somewhere rather than an e-mail exchange. But eh, at least it's out there.
The author sounds unhinged. Also, their email address is kobld@proton.me, and Protonmail easily lets you block email addresses or entire domains. The author comes off as an attention-seeking baby.
Yikes. The lack of emotional and social maturity in the tech industry will never cease to impress me. Vlad is coming off as a big narcissist and the OP as disingenuous. If you don't want someone to email you, just block or ignore them and move on. Don't publish your private conversations for the terminally online peanut gallery.
Sounds like Vlad did a pretty sane, human thing reaching out and offering to discuss.
The authors replies seem pretty rude (or at least somewhat aggressive / dismissive). Kagi is Vlads baby and I could imagine he would care and try to explain when he thinks someone has the wrong idea. However to the author - it’s just another service he doesn’t use anymore.
You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a lecture.
Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.
The author's response is perfectly calibrated to drive someone up the wall. Sling some mud and then hide behind "help, I'm being cornered."
Imagine doing this in the offline world. How well would this kind of behavior go over with people at the grocery store, do you think? Why is it acceptable online to behave like this?
3 replies →
One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications - because you really can't just "close off" the discussion to one way.
Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.
4 replies →
This feels very similar to the trope on X, where someone makes an inflammatory or stupid comment, people angrily respond calling them stupid, and the original person then claims they're being harassed/were just joking, and ultimately neither side actually communicates. The people who like the original poster continue on believing that they were being harassed, and people who thought they were being stupid continue on believing they're being stupid.
I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.
1 reply →
Perhaps we live in different worlds, but there's a world of distanced between unhinged and roughly 3 emails to someone who wrote a peice targeted specifically at your business.
If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.
6 replies →
So does the author. But then I also don’t care about the author and don’t pay them for my search engine :/
Tldr: you can't just spread a very negative opinion about someones hard work and then plug your ears shut for any kind of non-symathetic interaction.
In my eyes this rationale would make sense if there was no backstory to this. If there was no preceeding blogpost, I'd consider Vlads messages pure spam.
But the context here is different: The author wrote a very critical, and clearly opinionated blogpost. There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
Now the author seems to want to avoid responsibility, while Vlads attempt to react to a public hit piece with a respectful conversation was honestly the best way to handle this.
5 replies →
Um, no. In general, if you tell someone to stop messaging you, they get to send one more message to react to that and tie up the conversation. "OK. You still haven't addressed points A, B, and C, so I still disagree. Let's wrap it up here then." That's perfectly reasonable and polite.
This post suggests the author has tried this already, has had these discussions and has reached the natural end of that process.
I've also had a similar discussion with Vlad on comments here, he definitely doesn't try to view things from other people's perspectives.
I don't care if it's someone's baby. I'm the paying customer paying in both money and sensitive information I expected to be well protected.
Vlad's message to "discuss" reads more like a sealion-ey 'let me explain to you why you are wrong, you just don't understand why you are wrong, I am very smart and not wrong' than an honest admission that Vlad was wrong and is interested in being humble and learning from someone else.
Vlad is not discussing, he is lecturing. The author of the blog post seems right. Vlad defends his position "lol email is not PII" repeatedly, despite being obviously and completely wrong. He has no understanding that it doesn't matter that a user could enter fake information.
His business collects email addresses, which is a process. Under GDPR, this process must be documented, users must be given their data on request (even if it just contains an email address, but usually it also contains the signup date for example as a proof for their data processing consent) and users must be informed about their rights to correct or delete such data.
He comes off totally as the "trust me bro" guy with zero respect for a different perspective and doesn't seem to be interested in changing his (objectively wrong) opinion. It is almost laughable, because "is email PII" has been discussed a million times since the introduction of the GDPR that you must've lived under a rock to dismiss it like Vlad did.
he explicitly said in his email that "Personal emails are PII.", so how is that a defence of his previous position?
7 replies →
If someone mails you
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
replying with a 1100 word long email is a mood.
> replying with a 1100 word long email is a mood.
What mood?
Why even reply to an email when you intent to ignore it?
>Yes, hello so called prince of Nigeria. I have no interest in a discussion about the intricate court politics of Nigeria or its Byzantine inheritance rules. As you can see from my blog post it is entirely unlikely you would ever gain the throne even with my $2,000 wire transfer.
The only thing I take away from that is I'm very happy I don't know either of them and am never likely to.
^ The parent link leads to an email chain between the CEO and the blogger in which the blogger says "go away I do not want to talk to you" several times and receives a chain of emails back. Text version:
https://d-shoot.net/files/kagiemails.txt
Read them yourself, but to me they look like the emails of a persistent salesman. They were remarkable only in that they provide more excuses than concrete responses.
I find this quote funny and on some another level of disconnect about what they are competing with:
> Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free.
For a couple of my university years I had nothing but free Google t-shirts. They were throwing so much of this crap around that my closet was halfway to 20k. I only lamented they never gave away Google trousers or briefs.
They have a fair shot at competing with Google on quality of search and they should focus on that. If they think they can complete on AI, email or swag - good luck, and I hope you have a good money printer.
Jesus I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are.
Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how utterly disgusted they are because you dared talk to them.
Have these people forgot about how strangers in real life behave and communicate?
At the risk of sounding grumpy, a big difference between the tech community today and in the Usenet days is that the Usenet crowd's interpersonal skills weren't two standard deviations to the left of the mean at your local Target.
We reminisce about Usenet as this cesspool of human interaction, while everybody today is a pre-offended sociopath with an audience.
I miss talking with the average idiot from the 2000s internet.
2 replies →
> I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are.
Yes, my impression as well. (I have never used Kagi but have considered trying it.)
Among the other things, the blog author approvingly put up a screenshot with someone insisting on seeing the entire world through their own political views and demanding others do so as well. ("Actually, the word 'politics' means 'everything', and also I'm right and everyone else is wrong.") As the meme goes, they need to touch grass.
Yeah, I flagged this as the post feels completely unhinged to me, like the kind of ranting I used to get in emails from a schizophrenic friend.
[flagged]
I don’t have a horse in this race, but the author of this post sounds insufferable based on their email responses and fediverse thread. They post a public email on their public website (I assume for people to reach out to them) and then gets mad when someone does so?
> I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it.
If they don’t want to talk, just don’t respond.
The author also cross posted their blog to multiple social media platforms, which I assume means they wanted it to get attention. But then when the CEO does see it and offers some explanations they get mad that the CEO “vomited out” a reply that they didn’t want? I’m sorry, but the CEO of Kagi definitely sounds like the reasonable one here, thanks for linking this thread.
While I do not agree on Vlads interpretation of PII and GDPR at all, that whole conversation was so incredibly mishandled by the author of this blog post.
I understand not wanting to engage in a conversation about a product you don't care about, but after collecting so much information and writing a lengthy blog post about it, that is a different story. In my eyes, the author wrote a hit piece largely based on personal grudges, and then wanted to avoid any kind of responsibility.
And from my point of view, a lot of the financial stuff "makes sense". This is a small startup, probably with little business experience, and it shows. But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes?
> But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes?
Narcissism.
Honestly what he says makes sense in his "rebuttal", except for the part where he continues emailing after being told to stop.
I actually stumbled across the AI stuff being turned off by default yesterday when I got curious and was poking around the feature request forum. It was explicitly because a lot of people hate it for moral/ethical reasons. A lot of the comments in the replies are specifically about the AI stuff in spite of it being disabled by default.
Most of this seems fine for a startup?
Thanks for that. After reading both, I'm fine with Kagi and somewhat more annoyed by the author.
Perhaps Vlad is a little excessively enthusiastic and protective of his baby. But then you don't do something frankly crazy like start a new search engine from scratch in 2023 without being a little bit off. If we actually want a viable alternative to the advertising-funded search monopolies, we've got to be tolerant of some personality quirks.
And perhaps the T-shirt gambit is a poor use of limited resources. But have any of the startups that ended up making it big not make a few poor investments on the way up? I'll forgive it.
Meanwhile, Vlad's response does spell out several ways in which this lori exaggerated or misinterpreted things. Which of course are not acknowledged or responded to at all, despite lori's self-important tone. If you want to take your ball and go home because somebody doesn't take your concerns seriously, well you can, but don't expect me to follow you.
IMO, Vlad would have been better-off making his response his own blog post somewhere rather than an e-mail exchange. But eh, at least it's out there.
The author sounds unhinged. Also, their email address is kobld@proton.me, and Protonmail easily lets you block email addresses or entire domains. The author comes off as an attention-seeking baby.
Yikes. The lack of emotional and social maturity in the tech industry will never cease to impress me. Vlad is coming off as a big narcissist and the OP as disingenuous. If you don't want someone to email you, just block or ignore them and move on. Don't publish your private conversations for the terminally online peanut gallery.
I'm sorry, but the author sounds, unhinged?
Wow, strong Tommy Tallarico vibes there.
This definitely needs more eyeballs. What a gross person Vlad is being.