The two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

My favorite compile error happened while I was taking a Haskell class.

ghc: panic! (the ‘impossible’ happened)

The issue is plainly stated, and it provides clear next steps to the developer.

I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.

I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.

You’re my new favorite person in this comment section.

Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?

I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.

The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.

I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.

For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.

There’s an interesting conversation to be had about making the Fediverse more user friendly at the cost of increased centralization and non-standard extensions. It’s really difficult to focus on the message you’re trying to convey when you have five other alarmist topics crammed into the post.

Mozilla’s conflict of interest taking money from one of the largest internet advertisers and browser manufacturers was widely discussed during their recent anti-trust trial. It’s not super constructive to flatten the whole conversation to Mammoth being “Google Funded”.

DEFCON-level fun ಠ_ಠ!

”We have blueberry, raspberry, ginseng, sleepy time, green tea, green tea with lemon, green tea with lemon and honey, liver disaster, ginger with honey, ginger without honey, vanilla almond, white truffel, blueberry chamomile, vanilla walnut, constant comment and… earl grey.”

There’s some honest to goodness swearing on the new streaming Star Trek shows. Their highest concentration is probably on Discovery. The dialog’s written a little differently on the show, and their go-to scene establishing shot on the bridge is three scientists giving very Star Trek comments, and a fourth person earnestly going, “Holy shit this is so cool / extremely dangerous.”

The other shows have a slightly more classic tone, but even Patrick Stewart got an f-bomb off in the third season of Picard. The shows mostly limit it to one-off expletives during firefights. They’re rare enough that you typically don’t even catch them when they come up. They definitely don’t have extended colorful metaphors like “cock-sucker” though. At that point they’ll reach for a sci-fi comment like the Trek film’s “pointy-eared bastard”.

Personally I like the joke someone made a while back about how swearing on Star Trek is a setting the captain gets to make on the universal translator. Picard’s a narc, and Pike’s the cool boss.

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Shout out to Lemmy letting you re-upload remodulate images on existing posts. This gets me every time.

“…how do you feel about Ethan Peck?”

Beware of the Dahar Master’s opera about big forehead ridges. He beats people up while he plays it!

His direction on Cause and Effect was hard to beat. It would be so easy to just reuse the same establishing takes as the time loop plays out, but instead he re-shot the scenes over and over with drastically different camera angles.

Sisko’s in the celestial temple because Bajorans happen to practice the one true space religion.

The story goes that Chief Engineer Argyle’s actor Biff Yeager was eager for a full time role on the show. It had been hinted at that he could become part of the main cast if fan response was positive. Yeager was apparently a bit too zealous asking friends and family to write in to the studio. They received a wave of support for the character before an episode featuring Argyle had ever aired, and his role was subsequently quietly written off of the show.

”You! The one who is moving now! Experience Bij!”

The man knows how to absolutely decimate a Starfleet vessel. I’m all for bringing him back if he’s just limited to 10 minutes of an unpowered ship tumbling in free fall towards a planet.

Strange New Worlds is much better modern Star Trek, but you can’t say JJ didn’t take advantage of the theatrical scale of things.

”Posters don’t deserve Nausicaan latinum!”