If anything, Ladybird is an independent implementation of the web standards, and the devs have identified and helped solving quite a few bugs and and ambiguities in the standards, which benefits everyone, from browser devs including the big guns to web developpers and users.
Very cool, I implemented this once in python, it's a fun exercise, and knowledge that is gradually disappearing (modern phones with 12-key physical keyboards usually don't even have a T9 implementation, and when they do it doesn't perform well, even higher-tech KaiOS phones).
Although I appreciate the effort, I see a couple of issues with this implementation:
* The demo doesn't seem to work properly, the first thing I tried to type was "hello world", but it didn't recognize "hello" and I got "43556" instead.
* The word list is generated generated C code, which makes it hard to use other dictionaries (languages) or to add words during use (you can't add all place and people names to the list, but people are going to want to reference a handful of them many times). Loading from and appending to a plain text word list would make more sense, and maybe additionally use a custom binary format for the trie structure for fast loading into memory once a word list is imported on first use (hardware that would benefit from T9 might not be fast enough for conversion to be "instant")
* Non-latin script support would be nice. Although I have no knowledge whether Greek or Cyrillic languages used a T9 mechanism, it would be a minor change to define. Korean 12-key typing is also very cool, but I don't know whether that counts as T9.
I tried using a Nokia 6300 4G for a while a few years ago, because I don't use phones for much else than phone, SMS and a bit of Wikipedia.
I had a terrible experience, nothing worked correctly, basic, fundamental apps such as phone, contact, alarms, had lag spikes of over a second for any action and randomly crashed, it had no CJK support (kind of a big deal for me, and like 20% of the world)...
Some apps worked remarkably well, but having Youtube work better than messages is kind of pointless given the sVGA screen size. And the app ecosystem was basically dead. I tried developing a bit for it (apps are a simple html+css+js package), but at the time publishing to their app store required integration of their advertising solution, which absolutely sucked (in 6 month of use, I was never served any other ad than "hot MILFs in my area"), which meant that neither commercial nor OSS apps would target the platfom. IIRC side-loading sort-of worked depending on phones, which means it doesn't work for the average user.
Oh and sometimes the Kai Store app would send advertisement through push notifications.
I loved KaiOS on paper, but using it was a chore. A 2010-era "dumb" phone could do most of what a KaiOS phone can, but better, except for connecting to 3g/4g networks, and older networks are deprecated in many regions, which means they're not an option anymore.
Maybe they got better over time, but what a huge disappointment that was.
OEMs have been doing basically this for years with their phones for decades at this point, pushing customized builds of Android with every phone they make, this has been successful to close the gap Apple created when they released the iPhone.
I guess a hurdle smartphones didn't have as they were breaking into a new market is compatibility; outside of the tech world, virtually all of corporate and personal environment is dependent on Windows and Windows-only software. Steam has shown it can work with SteamOS and Proton, making gaming on Linux a reality for a wide audience. What's missing is a major OEM to build a high-spec laptop with a custom Linux build to optimize performance and battery life, with a decent Windows compatibility layer and that would provide software companies an incentive to sell native Linux versions and support. Is Samsung really going to keep their laptop line depend on Windows, and leave it on the side-line as they will never be able to really optimize battery life and performance and compare to the MacBooks?
Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out
* I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your
* I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.
* Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.
> I don't trust the product's ability to stay around.
I also generally have this mindset, but I've come to think of it through the lens of me getting a better experience for a while and going back down to what I had before vs having never had that better experience.
Before I paid for Kagi I worried "what if it's great and then they go under?" But then I'd just go back to Google and move on, having never had that better search experience. I guess it's kind of like "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?" Except that quote seems a bit over dramatic for a search engine...
User-centered (Kagi) : they listen and take action on every user feedback[0], the results provided are based on user-defined rules and aims to be the ones that will convince users to keep their subscription going
Not user-centered (Google) : they don't give a dam about user feedback, the results provided are based on how much money they can bring to the company through ads/affiliations
The privacy one is hard for companies to prove but in my mind the fact that it is user funded not ad funded suggest an alignment of interests is at least theoretically possible. Which can’t really be said for google and friends
> I don't trust the product's ability to stay around
Why does it matter for a search engine? It's not a tool in which you store your data and need to be stable.
You use it now, when it's available. If one day it stops being available, or stops being good, then you stop using it. Nothing lost compared to not having used it in the first place.
I can provide one data point on privacy, that confirmed that Kagi was worth it to me.
I have been using Kagi since mad way through my wife's pregnancy, and my son is now not far from a year old. Notoriously, the moment the internet gets any sniff about impending or recent parenthood, every advert becomes about nappies etc.. But I haven't had this problem at all. I've done hundreds of searches on everything from toys, nappy brands, to newborn medical stuff, and my adverts stayed firmly child-free.
It wasn't until my son was about 6 months old that I saw any adverts at all, and I'm pretty sure that can be traced back to a FB post (I don't post often).
> I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out
You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it would be better to display that on the pricing page though.
As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording to hide behind.
To be fair, privacy policies are worthless. They could have a squeaky clean privacy policy and still collect data on you illegally.
I did request a copy of all my data under the relevant consumer law for where I live, and it looked like they weren't collecting anything they shouldn't^. That's still not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing.
^ They did still have a copy of all my old assistant threads, including deleted ones, but a mate who works there says that was just a bug with the system and should have been fixed. This was about a year ago.
Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world shows that progress can be made. From afar, it looks like an interesting and good product, but I'm just not going to bite the bullet just yet.
Not only that, but underground infrastructure and surrounding buildings put a high constraint on pavement design by putting a hard limit the total thickness of the pavement: can't build too deep or you'll disrupt other infrastructure, can't build too high or the road will be higher than surrounding building entrances or sidewalks.
Interstate construction don't have such limits are typically half a meter or more, not counting foundation earthworks, which can easily double that figure. In cities where telecom networks are 60cm deep and gas and electric networks 80cm deep, you just don't have the luxury of designing a meter-thick pavement that will have a decent IRI for decades to come.
I think it's a great project to learn and contribute. The scope is very broad, so there are plenty of different areas to contribute to, including not-so-advanced functionality. For example, the initial find-in-page feature was introduced just a few week ago[1] and the core logic relatively simple.
Plus, the build process is well documented and works out of the box (at least on Ubuntu in my experience) and the community is nice and welcoming.
Google has a near monopoly on web search, and they are very aggressively doing everything they can to keep it that way, both by tightly integrating it in their products (browser, browser engine, and OSs, mainly) and funding competitors (Safari and Firefox main revenue source are contracts with Google, under the condition of making Google the default search engine).
Sure, you're free to use DDG and find a workflow, but people are less likely to remember it, especially as they overwhelmingly use Google.
Acceleration and deceleration aren't relevant here, the limit would be passenger comfort either way.
Curved tracks do mean limits on top speed, as the centrifugal force needs to be kept below what would be uncomfortable for passengers. It also can cause some issues for building stations, as curved stations require a wider gap between the train and the platform. But neither is a blocking issue, all train tracks in the world do have curve, and curved stations aren't unusual in public transport systems.
The grandparent probably means disk, not ring-shaped when mentioning circles anyway. Pick any 2 point at random into a 33km² circle, the average distance will be 4km, and worst case scenario 6km. Do the same thing in a 33km², 200m-wide "line", the average distance will be 85km, with a worst case of 170km. A circular city doesn't need nearly as much raw speed for it's public transport to be more efficient than transport in a nonsensical linear city could ever be, even if you throw in ridiculously fast trains and sprinkle magical AI thinking.
It's not a coincidence that all major cities are roughly circular even though they are built around roughly linear features (navigable rivers and/or coast line). It's just what naturally works.
Also, C418 put a creeper face in Minecraft's soundtrack.