6 ms·

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770 https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

by Tomte 3y ago

smcleod 3y ago
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.
- WA 3y ago
  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.
  - eviks 3y ago
    he explicitly said in his email that "Personal emails are PII.", so how is that a defence of his previous position?
    - WA 3y ago
      I re-read again. You are right, he says "personal emails are PII" in this email. In the original post however he dismisses the whole GDPR data request process as "we don't need this, because you can provide fake data". Point is: if the business requests an email address, many people will provide their real email adress and your business needs to document this process under GDPR. I just checked. The signup form doesn't say "please give a FAKE email address", it just says "email address". If a user provides a real email address, Kagi must respond to GDPR Art. 15 requests by providing...that same email adress. Might sound silly, but usually, there is other data associated with this. Usually, at least the timestamp of the signup. If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on. Or, if the user signed up and later deleted the account, his email should explicitly NOT show up when asking for personal data. See, it is about documenting the process, whether the outcome is "here is your email address you just asked for" or "we don't have any data on you". And Vlad says that this process is irrelevant for Kagi, while it is not.
      - iamacyborg 3y ago
        >If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on. I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal. The whole PII convo seems incredibly asinine though, "PII" is not a thing in the GDPR. Personal data is[1], but that's not the same thing. If Kagi keep a record of searches performed by a user, that's something that a SAR should be used for, but the whole convo just misses the mark entirely. [^1]: See article 4.1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
        nicce 3y ago
        > I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal. That is odd because the user has right to get ALL the data they want that is stored about them in the service.
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
    - thisisjasononhn 3y ago
      Lori is a she, not a he.
      - eviks 3y ago
        Vlad is Vlad, not Lori.
    - nicce 3y ago
      It does not matter in this context, because it is still incorrect. > Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII. Company has no means to identify what is the difference between personal or random email. Everything can be and must be treated equally from privacy perspective.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  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.
- nebulous1 3y ago
  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.
  - magistr4te 3y ago
    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.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject. In fact, that is generally how most critical writing has worked, for centuries. If you're unhappy with the review of your restaurant in the paper, you _might_ be able to convince them to publish a short owner response, once, but they're certainly not going to engage in a dialogue about it.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        > You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject. That's the fundamental premise of telling people that they are sealioning. Not everyone agrees with it (I suspect age plays more a role than anything else). Your historical example doesn't really map very well to today, because control over the ability to put some text somewhere that others can read it is very, very different than it was historically. None of this excuses the Kagi CEO's failure to back off when asked/told to. They should just have used their own blog or equivalent to respond. Still, generalizing to a broad claim about raising an issue in public creating no future obligations seems somewhat wrong to me. You don't have to speak in public about anything at all. For me, your choice to do so creates some limited obligations towards future engagement (though I'm not sure quite where the limits lie).
- danpalmer 3y ago
  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.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  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.
fn-mote 3y ago
^ 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 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.
- fridek 3y ago
  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.
vaughnegut 3y ago
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?
llm_trw 3y ago
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.
catapart 3y ago
This definitely needs more eyeballs. What a gross person Vlad is being.
magistr4te 3y ago
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?
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  > But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes? Narcissism.
SiempreViernes 3y ago
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.
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  > replying with a 1100 word long email is a mood. What mood?
astura 3y ago
Wow, strong Tommy Tallarico vibes there.
_gabe_ 3y ago
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.
sph 3y ago
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?
- drcongo 3y ago
  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.
- t8sr 3y ago
  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.
  - sph 3y ago
    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.
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      Not a Usenet user, still an average idiot with an open inbox and a love for talking with random people. If you miss those days ping me via email, I’m always happy to meet new people.
      - sph 3y ago
        Fuck it, why not, you might be able to help me with something. I'll send you an email.
alephxyz 3y ago
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.
ufmace 3y ago
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.
neoromantique 3y ago
I'm sorry, but the author sounds, unhinged?
Gerlo 3y ago
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.

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770 https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

by Tomte 3y ago

Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770 https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

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.

WA 3y ago
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.
- eviks 3y ago
  he explicitly said in his email that "Personal emails are PII.", so how is that a defence of his previous position?
  - WA 3y ago
    I re-read again. You are right, he says "personal emails are PII" in this email. In the original post however he dismisses the whole GDPR data request process as "we don't need this, because you can provide fake data". Point is: if the business requests an email address, many people will provide their real email adress and your business needs to document this process under GDPR. I just checked. The signup form doesn't say "please give a FAKE email address", it just says "email address". If a user provides a real email address, Kagi must respond to GDPR Art. 15 requests by providing...that same email adress. Might sound silly, but usually, there is other data associated with this. Usually, at least the timestamp of the signup. If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on. Or, if the user signed up and later deleted the account, his email should explicitly NOT show up when asking for personal data. See, it is about documenting the process, whether the outcome is "here is your email address you just asked for" or "we don't have any data on you". And Vlad says that this process is irrelevant for Kagi, while it is not.
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
      >If a business is really GDPR compliant, it will offer a download option for stuff like user settings and so on. I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal. The whole PII convo seems incredibly asinine though, "PII" is not a thing in the GDPR. Personal data is[1], but that's not the same thing. If Kagi keep a record of searches performed by a user, that's something that a SAR should be used for, but the whole convo just misses the mark entirely. [^1]: See article 4.1 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
      - nicce 3y ago
        > I've made a bunch of SAR's, including pre-GDPR and I've never received one that contained my user settings, so that seems pretty normal. That is odd because the user has right to get ALL the data they want that is stored about them in the service.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
  - thisisjasononhn 3y ago
    Lori is a she, not a he.
    - eviks 3y ago
      Vlad is Vlad, not Lori.
  - nicce 3y ago
    It does not matter in this context, because it is still incorrect. > Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII. Company has no means to identify what is the difference between personal or random email. Everything can be and must be treated equally from privacy perspective.
HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
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.
nebulous1 3y ago
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.
- magistr4te 3y ago
  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.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject. In fact, that is generally how most critical writing has worked, for centuries. If you're unhappy with the review of your restaurant in the paper, you _might_ be able to convince them to publish a short owner response, once, but they're certainly not going to engage in a dialogue about it.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      > You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject. That's the fundamental premise of telling people that they are sealioning. Not everyone agrees with it (I suspect age plays more a role than anything else). Your historical example doesn't really map very well to today, because control over the ability to put some text somewhere that others can read it is very, very different than it was historically. None of this excuses the Kagi CEO's failure to back off when asked/told to. They should just have used their own blog or equivalent to respond. Still, generalizing to a broad claim about raising an issue in public creating no future obligations seems somewhat wrong to me. You don't have to speak in public about anything at all. For me, your choice to do so creates some limited obligations towards future engagement (though I'm not sure quite where the limits lie).
danpalmer 3y ago
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.
ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
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.

fn-mote 3y ago

^ 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 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.

fridek 3y ago
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.

vaughnegut 3y ago

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?

llm_trw 3y ago

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.

catapart 3y ago

This definitely needs more eyeballs. What a gross person Vlad is being.

magistr4te 3y ago

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?

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
> But why make it look like they are doing evil because of small, negligible mistakes? Narcissism.

SiempreViernes 3y ago

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.

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
> replying with a 1100 word long email is a mood. What mood?

astura 3y ago

Wow, strong Tommy Tallarico vibes there.

_gabe_ 3y ago

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.

sph 3y ago

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?

drcongo 3y ago
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.
t8sr 3y ago
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.
- sph 3y ago
  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.
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    Not a Usenet user, still an average idiot with an open inbox and a love for talking with random people. If you miss those days ping me via email, I’m always happy to meet new people.
    - sph 3y ago
      Fuck it, why not, you might be able to help me with something. I'll send you an email.

alephxyz 3y ago

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.

ufmace 3y ago

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.

neoromantique 3y ago

I'm sorry, but the author sounds, unhinged?

Gerlo 3y ago

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.