• 7 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve been using Kagi for the better part of a year. I find it removes about 2/3 of the time and effort between search and goal. There are a lot of very simple quality of life things that every search should have (and would have if not for user tracking).

    Some people have fairly said that paid search is inherently privacy unfriendly. You have to log in to use it. That doesn’t really bother me, and if it doesn’t bother you, it’s great to use a quality search where you are not the product.



















  • For sure! History is the scientific study of the past using all available evidence. If new evidence showed up, we should absolutely use it.

    Take the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are a huge cache of texts, many over 2000 years old, containing biblical texts and fragments. The Vatican tried to buy up and conceal them, thinking that they might contradict existing manuscripts. They only let approved researchers have very limited access.

    To help the research, some of the scholars created a concordance - basically a list of words and how many times each appeared. A copy was leaked. It became the world’s largest Wordle puzzle and some scholars were able to essentially reverse engineer it into the original text. They published the results, even identifying some of the speculated variants. It was so accurate that the Vatican ended up releasing the original scrolls for study. There was no longer a point to concealing it.

    Although the discovery was tremendous for the field, it didn’t end up ruining anyone’s religion. It just offered new insights into the composition and development of the Bible. Pretty cool.