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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2020

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  • I use kagi. I think it depends on your level of concern , as it does with most things. Kagi has a pretty nicely written privacy policy. They do require an account but I signed up with a masked email and cc. For my use I find their privacy policy enough given the other measures I take but the main reason I like kagi is zero ads or prioritized posting. Experiencing search with out ads is a pretty awesome exp in my opinion. There are other ways to get free search with ads stripped out but this “feel” fundamentally different from a service purpose built to be ad free and private. I am happy to pay for ad free platforms vs using platforms that are trying to do privacy preserving ads but this is more of a personal stance and preference. I know your question was more about privacy than ads but I find the two closely linked. I’ve attached a summary of their privacy policy below:

    • Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not see what you are searching at all.
    • We do not log or store your IP address. Your IP address is used only temporarily when enriching location/maps searches, and is not shared with any other party.
    • We only store cookies needed for site functionality. We do not use any web browser analytics or other frontend telemetry.
    • We do not display any ads, or have any first-party or third-party tracking in service of ads.
    • We do not share customer data with third parties, except as needed to perform explicitly accessed services. In those cases, we will share the minimum amount of data needed to provide the service, and will do so in an anonymous way.
    • We collect only the data needed to provide and protect the service.
    • We proxy all images to prevent tracking from third parties.
    • We use HTTPS encryption everywhere. All passwords are hashed and salted.

    https://kagi.com/privacy




  • I think this is probably true for most providers. They could add logs if they were legally required but don’t actively keep them. I think there is way too much stock put in the ‘we don’t log’ comments that are common amongst privacy tools. Most VPN providers can log if they have to and often do log some data for service abuse and load monitoring but quibble over the definition of what ‘we don’t log’ means. I used to work for a VPN provider where we kept statements in our privacy policies about some logging and users ripped us apart despite these comments being truthful + other providers being dishonest ( or at least confusing ); but since so many providers provided false confidence via slamming all over their site that they don’t log the user base buys into these statements as 100% true ( and unchangeable ) and providers that try and provide a realistic view of what can happen get slammed. I am happy to see that proton put the statement up. I would have preferred they had statements up already but just because another provider says they don’t log I wouldn’t trust these statements. For me, I am not too worried if the provider can log some data like ip when they receive a non-avoidable court order ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court ) as I generally expect this to be true for all services and my threat model isn’t to avoid three letter agencies. If your threat model requires avoiding three letter agencies then trusting almost any service provider is going to be difficult. Obviously you should be using tor to connect to anything but you would have to assume almost everything with a server is either compromised or can be given certain court orders. Using services like briar seem like your best bet ( https://briarproject.org/ ).


  • I am not happy with it yet but that is because I want it to be perfect and it never will be but I do find that I engage with content at a larger scale and more varied than I do when I go to a single source. I am using the nltk features from newspaper for key word extraction + the trending sources to monitor a few hundred sources. Currently I store all the meta data + links ( urls ) + wikipedia links in a pandas dataframe ( which is becoming a problem ) and visualize trends and data about news in a jupyter notebook. For the enhanced summaries + named entity extraction I am using spacy (https://spacy.io/) from there I use SPARQL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL ) to query dbpedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia) to augment entity knowledge ( ex: adding data about the size , industry of a company or summary explanations of scientific concepts, etc ). The named entity matching and augmentation is the portion that needs the most work. Newspaper has some nice caching features so I query all sources everyday but only pull in new articles.

    I might play around with moving portions of the data into a graph db and some better ways to query based on concepts. Right now I just write python code to query the pandas DB based on different parameters.

    Are you happy with your solution ? Can you share a bit more about your pipeline?



  • so in a nutshell, they forked Lemmy to something called “Lenny” because they wanted to use the n word? I have no words…

    this feels like a straw-man representation of what is being said. I am not saying I agree with everything or even disagree with everything that is being said on HN but I think it is healthy to have code & policies critiqued from both inside and outside Lemmy. We don’t have to agree with them and as the devs have pointed out it is trivial to fork and modify the lemmy code. Writing off the entirety of what is being said doesn’t seem healthy for lemmy in the long run. I think it is useful for us as a community to listen to outside voices in good faith ( again we don’t have to make changes or think they are correct ). For instance , some of the comments about making it easier to add specific slurs to the slur filter seem valid to me and to the devs ( given they they merged in a PR to do so ). I guess I am responding to more than just this comment. I hope Lemmy doesn’t turn into an us v. them community where we write off the them so easily.








  • I am…I am seeking out recommendations that might be outside of my current media bubble so that I can read more “broadly” and form my own opinions – which seems like using my brain to me :) The point of this thread is to hear what others find useful and what others are reading. Though, I take your point that you shouldn’t just blindly read what others read.







  • I don’t think I “did” anything special. I remember sitting on the couch my brother gave me b/c I couldn’t afford any furniture (crippling college debt & all ) and thinking deeply about transitions, new chapters, and what I was leaving behind. That first day was probably one of the moments I was most aware of change in my life… later I had a few pints of beer and watched “shaun of the dead”, lol.