Early days are where you can move the needle the most. It's hard to make an impact on a huge, entrenched business that works pretty well and has millions of stakeholders.

Google had two choices, and one of them was "bury your head in sand and hope this entire LLM thing goes away". They weren't dumb enough to take that choice.

They probably care more about purging SEO slop. But, also, Kagi has a total of 4 active users. Which means they don't have a SEO target the size of the entire Internet painted on their backs.

There isn't a small army of adversarial SEO sloptimizers eager to skirt the rules or bypass whatever Kagi does to purge SEO spam and downrank content mills.

In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services.

In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors.

In the search space though, competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed.

Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.

Thing thing that gets me about people who complain about google (generally, not in just the tech bubble), is that 95% of the people complaining have used Google for decades, maybe even spending 2% of their waking life using a Google product...

and have never paid Google a single penny for anything.

That's why Google is so dominant. That's why they are so skilled at data collection. The built a system that converts user data into dollars, so users don't have to pay. And users love, absolutely love, like their first born child and high school sweetheart combined into one, not having to pay for things.

Google is not the reason google sucks. People's unwillingness to compensate for services they use is. And before you comment with how you use Kagi, and Nebula, and Patreon. Yes, thank you. You are in the <0.1% of internet users who get it.

You haven't really been getting 'human written and thoughtful content' for a vast swath of search topics for probably 15-20 years now. You get SEO-hyper-optimized (probably LLM-generated for anything in the last 3 years) blog spam. In terms of searching for information and getting that information, there are a lot of topics where an LLM-generated result is vastly better just by virtue of not being buried inside blog spam. The slop ship sailed years ago.

> I think we should start separating discussion of “The Economy” from “human prosperity and wellbeing.”

Do you think Americans' prosperity and wellbeing is tanking?

We can still look at quantitative and qualitative data.

The Economist ran a story in July "What is the richest country in the world in 2025"[1] in which they compared economies in three different ways: GDP per person at market exchange rates, Adjusted for price differences, and Adjusted for prices and hours worked.

Against those three metrics, the US is ranked in 4th, 7th, and 6th positions.

Even these statistics may need further interpretation or further adjustment (the article does a great job explaining why adjustments are needed for places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ireland, Luxembourg).

> While you are probably right in that The Economy, technically is growing, it doesn’t feel like it to normal people I know.

Pew's research shows that most Americans rate the US economy negatively, with a strong partisan divide. 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rat the economy as excellent or good (up 8 points from April) while only 10% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners say so.

Arguments for "better off" than, say, 3 years ago: strong job market, economic growth, reduced debt burden.

Arguments for "worse off" than, say, 3 years ago: high cost of living.

Notwithstanding the pessimism and the visible fact that people are not as economically strong as a pre-pandemic (but certainly much more than 2007 - 2008), I don't know that I would say the US economy is "tanking" OR that Americans are becoming destitute.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/07/18/what-is-...

> consumer debt is at record highs.

While consumer debt is at or near historical highs, it is in and of itself not a problem (broader economic risk).

What you need to look at as well is debt burden ratios and repayment behavior, not just raw totals.

Household debt service ratio (the share of disposable income spent on principal + interest payments) is well below historical crisis peaks (e.g., 2007–2008), suggesting households are currently spending a smaller share of income on debt payments than in past stress periods.

While total household debt is at record levels (~$18 trillion+), debt as a share of income or GDP has not reached past crisis peaks like 2008. That means debt growth hasn’t outpaced income growth as dramatically as in previous crises.

However, delinquency rates, especially for credit cards and student loans, are elevated, nearing or exceeding long-run highs outside recessions.

Mortgage delinquency rates remain lower than unsecured debt categories, but have ticked up slightly. Because they're relatively stable, it mutes broader systemic risk for now.

The new problem with GDP is we can no longer trust government numbers.

1 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...

> The old problem with metrics like GDP, is that they consider the whole but not the parts, it is kinda saying that I and Musk have billions in wealth, but I am in debt.

Does this mean you also think that "the (US) economy is tanking" OR do you agree with me that the economy is NOT tanking?

There's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead).

It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples:

- A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone.

- That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere.

- Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay.

- A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot).

I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations.

[0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.

Not least of all because I misread that as Sora at first, lol

How is a good analogy if calculus is known to be fundamental in our understanding of the world and for ai the jury is out?

This is the right answer. Don't just feed the data to a chatbot; have it write code to do what you want, repeatably and testably. You can probably have working python (and a docker container for it) in under 30 min.

I may try that, but at this point it's already more work wrestling with the AI than just doing it myself.

The most important factor is confidence: After seeing them get some things mixed up a few times, I would have to manually verify the output myself anyway.

----

Re: the multiple comments that suggest to ask AI for code instead of feeding data to the chatbot:

I get what you mean, but I WANT the AI's non-deterministic AIness in this case!

For example, in some countries there are these "omni apps" that can be used for ride hailing or ordering food etc. The bank statement lists all such transactions with the same merchant name. I want the AI to do its AI thing to guess which transactions were rides and which were food deliveries, based on the prices and times etc. Like if there are multiple small transactions those are taxis, and the most expensive transactions during a day are my lunch and dinner.

And there are other cases, that would be too much "imperative" code that would fail anyway.

Like I said, this is a task that any human could do easily after a short explanation, but takes a hell of a lot of wrangling with AI.