milkywayflyinginsect's recent activity

  1. Comment on New EU-created Search Index in ~tech

    milkywayflyinginsect
    Link Parent
    Strange that our experiences with EUSP differ so much. I've been using it and I found it surprisingly good, close to Bing's level. Even searches in my native language (Lithuanian) have very decent...

    Strange that our experiences with EUSP differ so much. I've been using it and I found it surprisingly good, close to Bing's level. Even searches in my native language (Lithuanian) have very decent results. I'd say the only thing it kinda struggles with and where I use Serper is when I need to do specific site: searches (Bing is also not good with this, probably even worse).

    But yeah, it's a fact that you can use some private wrappers around Bing / Google and get just as good results for free. For now, I don't think Uruky adds THAT MUCH to the search experience where I can say I'm getting insane value for 5 eur / month, but at the same time I can't say that it's a bad deal. It's OK.

    Considering they started only a few months ago I think they're doing really well. I remember maybe 3 years ago I tried Kagi and I felt the same way. It was ok , but no way I would pay 10$ / month for what it was offering at that time. A year later they improved so much that I could easily see myself subscribing.

    I mainly pay for Uruky because I feel like european, big-tech independent search indexes are a good idea to support. The problem is they're kinda ... not so good (except EUSP). With Uruky I can use them but at the same time when needed go for Serper quickly. Even if you subscribe to Kagi, you can't choose the indexes you use. For all you know they may be routing 80% of your searches through Bing / Google / Yandex. Not the companies I want to support.

    Kagi is the best search engine there is but I also refuse to support them because of the whole Yandex fiasco. Seeing what Russians are doing to the world and just thinking of supporting a company that has financial ties to them is just not for me. They're also more expensive. But after Kagi I do really think Uruky is #2. But there's not much competition. I don't know why but there's lots of search engines that just don't do much outside of the bare basics, and a lot of them are google / bing wrappers or independent indexes that are sadly too weak to use on their own.

    3 votes

  2. Comment on New EU-created Search Index in ~tech

    milkywayflyinginsect
    Link Parent
    Within their AI chat they have a button (PLUS+) that takes you to camocopy.com, which is also an AI chat service by their (parent?) company. Also 100 PRO-model requests for 8 eur / month is just...

    Within their AI chat they have a button (PLUS+) that takes you to camocopy.com, which is also an AI chat service by their (parent?) company. Also 100 PRO-model requests for 8 eur / month is just not a great deal. (I know search is included but still)

    2 votes

  3. Comment on New EU-created Search Index in ~tech

    milkywayflyinginsect
    Link Parent
    I haven't heard of Waterfox Private Search. Their website doesn't even mention what indexes they use. But if they do use EUSP and Serper like you say then the results will be identical to what you...

    I haven't heard of Waterfox Private Search. Their website doesn't even mention what indexes they use. But if they do use EUSP and Serper like you say then the results will be identical to what you would get with Uruky.

    Uruky only pulls results from whatever the #1 index is in your order, unless they don't get enough results from it, in that case they will go for #2, #3 and so on. So if you put EUSP at #1 spot you will be getting it for 98% of the queries.
    Uruky also has a lot of other smaller, independent search indexes.

    Personally, EUSP as #1 and then falling back to Serper and a few other external search engines ( DDG + Brave) does the job for me. Probably the best thing I like about it is the fact that I can configure other external search engines as fallback and can access them with a mouse click. I can also switch indexes with a mouse click.

    I did this writeup about Uruky awhile back about all the things I like about it. Perhaps someone will find it interesting.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Why normal people aren’t using AI agents in ~tech

    milkywayflyinginsect
    Link Parent
    I don't use Reddit, but I came across this comment of a guy in ChatGPT subreddit that burned through most of his 20$ monthly limits in a single day because his agent worked for 8 hours. Made me...

    I don't use Reddit, but I came across this comment of a guy in ChatGPT subreddit that burned through most of his 20$ monthly limits in a single day because his agent worked for 8 hours.

    Made me cringe so hard. I'm guessing the subscription limits are pretty high, compared to what you would get by paying directly for the API.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on What we lost when we quit using crappy old web forums in ~tech

    milkywayflyinginsect
    Link Parent
    Don't feel bad. I'm a 2000s "kid" and even though not long ago I considered myself young, more and more things are reminding me the opposite these days. I still feel 18 inside :D The first forums...

    Don't feel bad. I'm a 2000s "kid" and even though not long ago I considered myself young, more and more things are reminding me the opposite these days. I still feel 18 inside :D

    The first forums I came across were gaming related (counter-strike, runescape ...) at around 2013-2014. I can't say for all of them, but phpBB rings a strong bell for me so at least some of them must have been that.

    When did Usenet stop being a thing, by the way? Late 90's like the article mentioned? And how did it differ from modern forums?

    5 votes

  6. Comment on What we lost when we quit using crappy old web forums in ~tech

    milkywayflyinginsect
    Link
    Was interesting to find out about USENET, an early forum-like system which, by my understanding, predated the modern world wide web and used it's own custom protocols. Also, I somehow missed the...

    Was interesting to find out about USENET, an early forum-like system which, by my understanding, predated the modern world wide web and used it's own custom protocols.

    Also, I somehow missed the fact that "Discourse" is open-source. Now it makes sense why so many open-source communities use it... and it's pretty good and has A LOT of features.

    14 votes

  8. Power consumption of LLM's

    ~tech Ask
    I haven't been closely following the releases of new models and the research papers that sometimes go along with them. So I was wondering: is power consumption ever seriously talked about by...

    I haven't been closely following the releases of new models and the research papers that sometimes go along with them. So I was wondering: is power consumption ever seriously talked about by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others? Do we get some specific numbers of how much power their models actually consume to produce 100 tokens? The cost of training some of these models? Or we're not yet at that stage yet and nobody cares and at best we can just get really rough estimates based on "trust me bro" tweets by their respective CEO's?

    Some time ago, I came across this post. GPT-OSS (2OB, 120B) are meager, yet energy efficient models and I was surprised that the power consumption is still larger than what I had estimated before.

    For 120B to generate a 1000 tokens (which is really not a lot) it would take up around 83 Wh of electricity. For context my PC consumes ~100Wh when idling. So it's almost equivalent as leaving my PC on for an hour. Considering that proprietary models are TRILLIONS of parameters and probably not as energy efficient the true power consumption of these models is concerning. Of course, these big data centers do a lot of things to maximize the efficiency that this "test" fails to do. But even if you half the energy consumption it's still significant given their size and their pervasiveness in handling everyday, trivial tasks.

    I haven't come across similar posts or studies for newer open source models, so if somebody has, please share.

    Also, I don't seem to fully understand how does context size fit into all of this. The larger the context size the more power it would take to produce those 100 tokens?

    26 votes

  15. Comment on Long-term experiences with Google search alternatives? in ~tech

    milkywayflyinginsect
    Link
    I try to point this out anywhere I see Kagi mentioned. Kagi is currently using Yandex as one of it's index providers thus supporting Russia. Around 2% of their expenses go every month to Yandex....

    I try to point this out anywhere I see Kagi mentioned. Kagi is currently using Yandex as one of it's index providers thus supporting Russia. Around 2% of their expenses go every month to Yandex.

    You can check the whole discussion on their discord or here :
    https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19

    For me it's completely unacceptable, I urge everyone else to not use their product as well. As an alternative I use Ecosia / Qwant / Duckduckgo and Perplexity for my AI needs.

    3 votes