I used to recommend Kagi, but I can no longer do so. I found out that they pay money to Yandex, a Russian company, and when asked to stop, stubbornly stick to their choices, pretending one can be "apolitical".
I cannot morally support paying any money to Russian businesses, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, no more Kagi for me, and I would encourage you to reconsider as well.
This is the 100 year anniversary of humans having an idea of what the heck the sun and all the stars actually are. If you had asked a leading astronomer in 1925 what the sun was, they would say that it's basically the same as Earth, but very hot.
In Cecilia Payne's doctoral thesis she was the first to say, from spectral data, that the sun was overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.
It was later described as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
I wrote this just after trying to install aider. Where it tells you to use pip to install pipx to install aider. Which tells you to create a .venv. And then pipx fails because aider doesn't work with the system-installed python 3.13, only with python up to 3.12.
All this is complex and brittle, and much as we enjoy making fun of the npm crowd for their left-pad snafu, the Python world is in a bad state, too.
These days I just give up immediately when I see installation instructions like these:
"The project is managed with uv. First, run uv sync to install all dependencies. Then source .venv/bin/activate to activate the resulting venv."
I am not sure if the Python world realizes how much of a mess installing Python software is these days. Shipping Python software in Docker containers looks like the most viable option.
I do not understand what is going on in the US. How can the military be deployed on the streets of LA, given the Posse Comitatus Act?
I still remember the California fires of 2003, when the Marines at Camp Pendleton had to stay put, twiddling their thumbs because of the law preventing them from helping civilians.
I also have a very uneasy feeling about the events happening now in the Land of the Free, and I am somewhat surprised that people are not out protesting in other cities as well.
Every time I try to reserve a hotel I am amazed at how bad the current search engines are. The number of beds is a pretty important parameter, and yet there is no way to search for it. But hey, you can search for "reading light"!
This problem doesn't require AI to solve.
Extreme yak shaving: I am now using "AI" to write scripts that modify scripts that fix a problem that other scripts have introduced. The swamp area otherwise known as netplan ethernet interface naming.
Much as we love criticizing AIs writing terrible code, that problem was introduced by humans not using their thinking powers to full effect.
Much to my surprise, Perplexity has become my most often used LLM-related service. It's good, and worth paying for. It's what Google should have become.
If it doesn't follow the progressive ensh*ttification path like Google, I think it's on track to become the future information search, or at least a very strong competitor.
Ben Brockert
PartsBox
