It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up.

To those who started using it recently, what are your thoughts?

What do you like and dislike about Kagi?

Do you think you will continue your subscription past the end of the trial?

Note: I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way besides being a happy customer myself. I’m asking this entirely out of curiosity.

Picture explanation:

https://i.horizon.pics/tWovRax4kh.jpg

When I view my subscriptions page on YouTube, half the "videos" are recordings of completed streams, often 2+ hours in length. I'm not interested in watching these. For me, they're just pollution in the feed.

Apparently, a lot of the channels I subscribe to, whose videos I enjoy watching, also stream on YouTube a lot.

Second Wind is probably the channel I'm most hung up about. I like their normal videos, and don't want to unsubscribe from their channel, but jesus they stream two or three times a day.

(Also, it's annoying that when I view a YouTube channel, I can visit their videos page or their streams page separately. Why can't I have this same separation on my own subscriptions page?)

(Also also, I already use an extension to hide shorts (among other things), but it unfortunately does not have a feature for hiding streams.)

Fancy bullet point summary:

• I want to hide recorded streams from my subscriptions page
  • I don't care as much about hiding active livestreams, because those don't pollute my subscriptions page nearly as much
• I do not want to unsubscribe from any of the channels I follow. That is not an option
• I'm willing to stop using youtube.com in favor of an alternative client (web, desktop, etc) if that client supports hiding recorded streams from actual videos
• I'm willing to install a browser extension that can solve this problem (but I can't find one for Firefox)

Ninja edit:

While writing up this topic, I actually found my own solution. The browser extension I mentioned earlier has an "advanced blocking" feature that takes a JavaScript function as input. The extension's GitHub page has an issue, with a comment, with some code to hide streamed videos on the subscriptions page.

However, that code didn't work when I tried it. Thankfully, I just needed to check for videoRenderer instead of gridVideoRenderer.

Here's the updated code:

(video, objectType) => {
    // Only videos on the Subscription page
    if ( objectType === "videoRenderer" ) {
        if ( video.hasOwnProperty("badges") && video.badges.includes("live") ) {
	    return true;
        }
        if ( video.hasOwnProperty("publishTimeText") && video.publishTimeText.indexOf("Streamed") != -1 ) {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

I have no idea what the consequences of checking against videoRenderer instead of gridVideoRenderer might be, and right now I'm too lazy to find out. This works well enough for now.

(The "consequence" might be that streams are hidden from the related/recommended videos in the sidebar of a video page? I actually hide that sidebar, so I wouldn't know. Oh, and they'll probably be hidden from a channel's streams feed.)

It isn't a perfect solution though. Streams that are "scheduled" still show up on the subscriptions page. However, I think channels can set streams and videos as scheduled? So blocking one without the other would be more complicated?

I welcome any feedback or improvements on the code.

Edit: I have sent my link to three different people and I am out. Assuming they sign up. However, a lot of people also have invite links that commented. I guess a system would be for the invite-giver to reply to the comment of the invite-receiver to keep track?

—-

I received a link during Thanksgiving that lets me invite several people to a free trial of Kagi.

I tried convincing friends to try it out but most of them were not even interested in a free trial to a paid search engine.

If any of you are interested, please let me know.

I'll give you my link in private and you can register yourself to the free trial.

Posting just in case people are on the same boat as me.

--

Also, I hope it's appropriate to start a topic on this?
Let me know if this is frowned upon.

I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well, start blogging again publicly. I have no desire to waste time on templates, look-and-feel, visual stuff, etc. I just want to write a bog-standard html file, and then publish it...I do value leveraging html elements that help with meta data (e.g. microformats, etc.), but don't care about how things look - and these elements that i value are all invisible to most users anyway. I would be fine with just crafting html by hand, deploying it via sftp or some boring deployment pipleine, and that's it. But, then, I started thinking: what about having an RSS/Atom feed? I used to consume content via an rss reader, but have not done so in years. But, I don't want to manually craft that feed file; nope, sorry. But, I've heard a comment or two from acquaintances that rss/atom feeds and syndication are really something that people - like my potential audience - might really desire. So, I should really consider having one. This means that either I have to craft several things manually (from the blog post itself, the list of archived posts, the feed file, etc.), or use a static site generator that will handle all this for me, etc. I don't want to get trapped down a rabbit hole where I am spending so much on the tooling, the scaffolding, twiddling with templates, or the publish process itself. I just want the minimal for writing and publishing, I want it to live on my domain name, and that's it. Am I crazy or extremely lazy for not wanting to generate an RSS/Atom feed file?

So, here's my ask of you all nice people: are feeds like RSS/Atom feeds even worth it? If so, does anyone have recommendations for a manual process where i can craft the blog post's html by hand, but somehow leverage a portion of a static site generator (or some minimal tool) to only automate the creation of the RSS/Atom feed file? Thanks in advfance for any constructive feedback!

P.S. - One thing that re-ignited my desire both to write more in public, and keep it alive with minimal fuss was my re-reading of Jeff Huang's excellent "This Page is Designed to Last" post: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

I've copied the full tweet below (it's from August, I missed this news somehow):

We've been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser , and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶

Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!

Why do we like Swift?

First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics.

Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.

The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.

Strong ties to Apple?

Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there's been a push for "swiftlang" to become more independent. (It's now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in "apple", for example).

Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.

What happens next?

We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!

No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don't know yet. I'm not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we'll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.

I'm super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞

Nitter link:

https://nitter.poast.org/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

Original post:

https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

Some of Kling's replies in that thread are also pretty interesting:

My general thoughts on Rust:
- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B
- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs
- Really impressive ecosystem
- Toxic community

In the end it came down to Swift vs Rust, and Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop.

The September monthly report for Ladybird released the day after I posted this. It provides basically the same information:

This Month in Ladybird September 2024

The section about Swift:

Successor language search progress

Over the past year, our core contributors have been exploring potential safe languages to complement or succeed C++. We evaluated several options, including Rust, Swift, Fil-C, and others. While some languages offered compelling features, many fell short in either C++ interoperability or providing the level of memory safety we needed.

After extensive testing and discussion, Swift emerged as the top choice among our core developers, thanks to the new Swift 6 interoperability features and its growing cross-platform support. As a result, we’ve decided to adopt Swift as our C++ successor language.

That said, this will be an incremental shift. The existing C++ codebase is deeply embedded in the project, and a complete rewrite would be impractical. Instead, we’ll be gradually introducing new components in Swift, carefully integrating them with our existing C++ code over time. Look forward to a dedicated blog post on the topic soon.

Early last year, there were some rather heady predictions within my company about the potential/future of decentralized autonomous organizations. (That a DAO would be running a real company, that a DAO would play an important role in an election somewhere, etc.) They have not come true. From my perspective, the same generally seems to be the case for nearly all Web3 components.

That led me to wonder, though - are DAOs still a thing? Is there quiet potential there and the hype machine has simply moved on to LLMs... or was hype all there ever was?

Have any of you seen any actual uses of a DAO? I would love to hear about it if so.

Hey there, I am asking for a friend who is interested in transitioning from their career of designing print ads (Photoshop and InDesign) to web design.

I would imagine they would need some courses on responsive design and Figma? But I'll let the people with experience talk if they're here.

Free is preferred but willing to pay if needed! And if you have links or specific online courses you really like and helped you, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!