§ I have been testing out the Kagi search engine this week, using it exclusively instead of Google. A few thoughts:

  • It is expensive at $10/month. It will have to become either significantly better or significantly differentiated from Google for me to continue paying for much longer.
  • Despite what I said above, the results are surprisingly good. On par or slightly better that equivalent Google results. I was expecting it to fall down on local results but no, those were totally fine too.
  • I did not realize how frequently I use search engines until I started paying attention. Around 50 searches, give or take a handful, on a typical day.
  • Kagi has fewer built-in widgets than Google and the ones it does have are less polished. One of the few times I went to Google was to convert milliliters to fluid ounces. It is great to be able to do these simple conversions in an interactive widget instead of a janky, ad-covered webpage.

The most exciting aspect of Kagi, to me, is that it is being actively developed, in the open, and taking direct feedback from its customers. And they are trying new things! Of particular interest to me are their upcoming AI webpage summarizer and AI search features. It will be interesting to see where Kagi is this time next year.

§ Speaking of search engines, I finally got access to Bing Chat.

  • It is really nice to have a decent mobile interface for AI chat.
  • It is slow, much slower than ChatGPT, but if that is the price to pay for its real-time web retrieval capabilities then it is worth it. In practice, built-in web search with citations is a more important feature than I anticipated. It goes a long way to give me confidence that answers aren’t hallucinated.
  • The automatic response suggestion bubbles are occasionally convenient but also oddly unsettling. It is almost as if I am just a conduit for the AI to talk to itself.
  • I was close to saying that Bing Chat is, more or less, a better version ChatGPT but that isn’t quite right. There are certain tasks, like editing and revising an email, where Bing Chat responded with generic email drafting tips while ChatGPT accomplished the actual task at hand.
  • Remember that “milliliters to fluid ounces” conversion I tried on Kagi? Well, later on I realized that Bing Chat might be a better interface for these types of queries than any conventional search engine, and indeed, it totally worked and was the most convenient method overall.

§ The Last of Us Part II is a long video game. There have been three or four different occasions where I thought I was certain the game was about to end only to realize it had just barely begun. It would have been a short, but totally satisfying, game if it had ended after reaching the TV station in Seattle, there has been at least ten hours of gameplay sense then. I mentioned last week that I was enjoying Part II more than Part I, that definitely has not changed. I will be sad when I finally finish it, whenever that ends up happening.

§ Links

§ Recipes

We have finally reached a week where I didn’t cook any new recipes. I tried to keep things pretty simple: I put together a couple of simple pasta dishes, got some takeout, and cooked that tikka masala dish again.