You don’t have to spend long on my blog to figure out that I default to being grumpy about generative AI, but if I’ve made one exception to that rule, it’s for Kagi Translate, which I’ve found to be a genuinely helpful machine translation tool—and to have some neat features that I haven’t found in its Google or DeepL equivalents.

It took me back a little bit tonight, then, when Kagi Translate straight up hallucinated something on me, in a way that I imagine wouldn’t be out of place for a more mainstream LLM (which I’ve never really used). Earlier today, while working on a paper for an upcoming conference, I was consulting a Jacques Ellul book I was about to cite, and I wanted to make sure that “genetic engineering” would be an accurate translation for his phrase « intervention génétique » (which could obviously also be rendered “genetic intervention,” but I’ve never heard that phrase in my life, so I’d prefer to go with a more well-known phrase if it’s accurate).

Torn between enjoying Kagi’s machine translation tool and grumpiness about using something LLM-based. Still can’t get over digital labor, but I might(?) be less hostile to generative AI if it were more often deployed in these targeted, careful ways instead of as get-rich-quick chatbots.

A few days into finally subscribing to Kagi, custom “bang” shortcuts are my favorite feature so far.

This article is one more push in the direction of my finally subscribing to Kagi.

Has anyone ever tried Kagi’s Kid Mode? It sounds like a great idea but also ups the cost significantly, so I’d like to hear about experiences before deciding.

I don’t know if this is a DuckDuckGo thing or an underlying Bing thing, but I’ve started noticing something weird happening when I search for things that don’t get a lot of results. When it happened again earlier this week, I finally grabbed a screenshot:

So, here I am searching for something related to the (relatively obscure, relatively progressive) religious denomination I belong to, and when DDG (or maybe Bing) couldn’t find anything related to the specific thing I was searching for, the first text result that it gave me was the best result it could find for a subset of my search matched with the town I live in: Lexington, Kentucky.

I have been meaning for months to embrace Kagi, and this is pushing me further over that edge.

One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.