ahkurtz
As far as politics... for a lot of people not relying on a single particular global megacorp (who tend to extend the soft-power of a given state or economic bloc) for access to information is a semi-political choice. There is very much an inescapable concern of "who chooses what I get to see and what are their incentives" that can't really be reduced to "I don't care about politics". It cannot be separated from politics, which is why people have such strong feelings about it. I'm not sure that's what people really mean though, I think they talk past each other a lot on this topic. No disrespect meant to you and I appreciate your comments.
I really like the idea that they'd hedge and not give any single index overwhelming leverage over what Kagi users are fed, and conveniently for me (who does care a bit about the who of the thing) if they stick to that approach it should provide more diversity of contemporaneous political messaging... so it can also please the (I think somewhat tedious) "no politics" crowd at the same time. So that seems good?
Tradeoffs maybe, and give them some more time to figure it out, incorporate more indices?
When what this change made and what does it do?
What's your self-hosted choice of the moment?
On their github they reference a related project called "HuggingFace" so you know the sky's the limit with the names in this field, could have been called anything else really.
It's been a long time since most ads served were necessary to have a successful business (try to imagine/remember a world without ad platforms or appropriate regulations against their excess). It's just that if anything could be an ad, like say your TV or your toilet, then a non-ad product has to compete with people loss-leading to monetize their ad/surveillance surface. And then everything becomes filled with ads.
Are they replicating the no-rules surveillance systems of the existing ad market? I have no evidence for that. I've been looking but I haven't seen it.
Saying "the only reason" Apple is countering Google and Facebook here is ad revenue completely ignores what horribly dishonest and harmful stewards of the ads ecosystem these two companies have been. Both companies have knowingly broken the rules of every platform they exist on (not just Apple platform) to work around device permissions to scoop up personal data they have been EXPLICITLY told by the user not to take. Google just had to pay several hundred million dollars for lying to customers about data capture opt-in. Facebook has settled many times as well, and has repeatedly used private APIs and exploits to gather contact info and messaging data. They have also shown no principle whatsoever about who can use that data and for what purpose. Facebook goes so far as to claim in public hearings (and in court) they don't even know how much data they gather or where it is or who can access it.
As tracking grows its access to more devices and more personal data, and as ads appear on more and more surfaces (Google and FB stated goal is every surface btw), the negative effects of this abusive behavior have become visible after decades of relative invisibility to consumers. "Why is my music app giving me podcasts about pregnancy while I'm in the car?", "Amazon shopping (which my partner can see) is showing pregnancy test promotions", etc. And still invisible, down the rabbit hole, very harmful uses of this information for individuals, businesses, and entire geopolitical regimes. I used the pregnancy example for a very pointed reason if you have been following tech concerns in USA related to political rights.
When you push the idea that Apple's product moves are just as bad as our current status quo, I cannot agree. I think you will be proven wrong about Apple's endgame (for at least the next decade, all corporate cultures change). At the very least we can be happy for a time spiting the existing tracking monopoly - who have been hurting us for a long time with no challenge. They are losing a ton of money. May it continue.
I am hopeful seeing an existential threat to healthy society being trimmed down, even if the people doing the cutting (Apple) refuse to pull it out at the root.
You said elsewhere "things change" regarding labor force quality. They do. Asian labor across the board, but especially in China, has been rapidly increasing in cost while for example USA labor is stagnant in overall cost. Apple is medium-term going to be priced out of China just by labor costs. It is actually smart in a real-politik sense (and a business sense you deny) for labor sourcing to start looking a lot more broadly at different countries on a cost basis. USA is rich in some measures, but in terms of purchasing power and compensation of much of working class, it no longer is.
As for the quality of USA workers you've commented on a lot, I'll give you there is a serious decline in education. Saying they are slow or lazy shows you don't know anything about USA. The vast majority of the country is working itself to death and the life expectancy is cratering. As sad and reprehensible as it is, from the kind of logic you're using, a desperate and broken workforce is a GREAT business opportunity.
There is something beyond "American Exceptionalism" and "Asian Exceptionalism" and I think you really need to find it.
As for why so many companies target Apple's level of control over their ecosystem (even if they don't directly compete on a service) ... well ... there's the whole data privacy and anti-ad-tracking thing they have been doing. Nearly all SaaS businesses are also ad or surveillance businesses either primarily or on the side. Most of the press and legal challenges mounted against Apple are attempting to remove Apple's policy-level control over what is deployed on devices.
There is so much more than just the 30% cut.
The revenue generating upsell for VSCode is already here and it IS GitHub Codespaces. They are going to add features you can't live without based off code synthesis (sky's really the limit here) and gate those off saying it can't run locally because it's too resource intensive. They'll charge you (or your company) by the second for all usage.
It would be much harder or impossible for them to do this if Atom and an independent GitHub had been further entrenching in this space for the last decade.
Many of the biggest developer tooling projects big corp are building now existentially threaten smaller developers and apps, by design.
Don't give Microsoft a pass here.
It seems to me that the reverse of your policy would be best for the world. If you free people to move, they can choose community, friends, family, politics over being tied to a single geographic location where most of the activity is. This would help with availability of technologists in many disadvantaged locales, and would provide an influx of taxable income and consumer spending locally. This should have the ultimate effect of improving economic conditions in depressed areas, and when that happens you can actually come back and reduce everyone's wages across all locales because the economy is healthier and more robust. It works out for the owners too in the end, if they take a long enough view.
The reasons they give for discontinuing their e-commerce efforts are that book sales have been dwindling since 2000, and that they simply make too much money on new interactive media and don't want to pay for their own e-commerce infrastructure and staff anymore. I would imagine the publishers they are now relying on can also help them market their titles (which I suggest speculatively would help significantly).
The article I want to link from Laura Baldwin is unfortunately only directly linkable via social media, but for now it's the only article at this link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...
Anectdotally, I bought a lot of DRM free books from O'Reilly directly. While I did share them due to convenience (coworker doesn't understand SSL! No problem), I also shared them with friends who couldn't afford them. I think this was actually good for O'Reilly, and that Tim was right and still is on this score.
I say this because I personally spent many thousands of dollars through their web store. My friends without cash who went on to become computer professionals started paying for the new books they wanted as well. The vast majority of people I shared books with who could afford them would go out and buy several more after seeing the quality and value of particular titles.
It's obviously a culture and economic mechanism that subsidizes certain kinds of customers and use, but I believe it subsidized the "right things". Because much of the content builds value in real marketable skills, free-riders can eventually become wealthy enough that the price to convenience ratio tips correctly and they become paying customers. It helps that they now have very strong brand loyalty. This is how I became an O'Reilly customer in the first place, so many year ago.
O'Reilly direct e-book sales was a positive example of business that creates huge uncaptured value for the domain (technical knowledge), but by virtue of that generates more customers. This is the kind of business we actually need. In some ways I think it was their own success that killed their book business, because ultimately digital books were replaced by more compelling media formats, and those exist largely due to advances in design and technology, and their books are raw fuel for those advances.
I say this many words only because I loved them so much, and am sad to see them go. I have to sadly admit it's been probably two years since I either read or bought a lot of titles from them. I haven't been reading or buying technical books at all. I don't know if this says something about my current level of specialization, perhaps my current level of laziness, my subconscious desire for new media formats, the quality of the titles they've been publishing, their business model, or perhaps the nature of the industry they serve.
I'd personally like to hear more from O'Reilly about this eventually. I know they need to spin everything to look good, but I am incredibly curious if their non-book media is actually increasingly popular as they suggest. Do people just not want technical books anymore? Do people want them but increasingly pirate them and never pay? Are people willing to pay for technical knowledge in different media? Did their business model cost them their business, or is this the result of unavoidable change in the market for technical knowledge?