chasteinsect
I've been wanting to do this for ages! I'm rocking a Pixel 8 Pro so I'm considering GrapheneOS, but lack of time keeps holding me back. Also not sure what to do about Google Wallet. I know Curve Pay exists as somewhat of a replacement, but I haven't done enough research on whether I want to trust yet another company with my card purchase data. Was thinking maybe just go back to using physical cards? Even though it's less secure. I also recently added some store loyalty cards to Google Wallet. I do wonder what else I'd be giving up? But yeah it's mostly the time investment to install it and learn it.
Too much unnecessary AI is bad but i feel like you're a bit too much going to the other extreme here. Why are you so against it ? Don't you think some AI, when properly integrated can be immensely useful and time saving?
I do some dev and linux stuff and I still found it a bit hard to justify the cost. Like it's not a bad deal, however i did find myself going through days not really using it properly and just doing simple searches like "product x documentation" or just "site:" searches that i can do with simply DDG or Ecosia (Google). I think it's cuz a lot of the internet is converging into larger sites rather than being scattered all over and i do find myself relying a lot more on LLM's. If you actually test out their search results you will get something like 97% there if you do a Google search and a Bing search to follow up or just use searx.
What has helped me completely stop using them is finding sites with valuable information for my use case and creating a manual "lens" something similar to what Kagi offers. It's really simple and works better than theirs. I have this pasted into my obsidian note for linux (example):
site:archlinux.org OR site:endeavouros.com OR site:reddit.com/r/arch OR site:reddit.com/r/archlinux OR site:reddit.com/r/endeavouros OR site:manjaro.org OR site:reddit.com/r/hyprland OR site:hypr.land
Everytime i search for anything arch linux related so i paste this in and enter the search phrase at the start.
I use t3.chat for my LLM needs (you get way more for the price that you pay, including premium models) so I don't need their LLM's. I havent found LLM web search to work well for my use case so don't need that.
I use DDG as my daily driver and then switch to Ecosia (google wrapper) if i cant find stuff. DDG is a nice search engine overall, fills in that "gap" left by Kagi.
I use zen browser and have created search engine keywords like @ecosia, @ddg, @wolfram so i can CTRL + T and "@ecosia search term" easily.
Overall, I feel like they're not offering anything groundbreaking but their whole package is nice, i see the appeal especially if you browse on mobile. Whether you find them useful or not will depend on your use case. For those 10$ + tax I personally don't. The Russia support is disgusting though.
And what do you think Kagi uses? They rely heavily on the same Bing and Google. If you played around with them you will see most of their searches are identical to what you would get if you did a bing search and then follow up with a google search, you're not getting much more. The fact of the matter is that there are only 2 real choices of search engines. Google and Bing. There's a massive gap between them and every other independent search index.
Everyone should be aware of the fact that Kagi supports Russia by buying Yandex index API. They excuse themselves with neutrality. Well, DuckDuckGo for some reason took the L and dropped them after the Ukraine invasion, so make your own conclusions here. I think it's easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for your actions and I cancelled my sub a couple of months back. They do have a decent product, though but it's also pretty expensive.
My experience is just saying "Yeah I don't need this anyways" to anything that doesn't work and i can't / don't want to fix.
I love how my government (Lithuania) didn't even bother to provide any reason for them supporting this shit. There were no discussions, nothing. One of my representatives (Dainius Žalimas) had to contact the gov and ask for clarifications as to what is their position, which institutions formed this position, why an open public discussion was not organized, was there an analysis been done on the impact. They don't care.