Software that respects time

2024-09-29

My writing is written to respect your time, I consider my time and your time valuable. I do the same with media I consume: Think of it as skin in the game, but different. If I don't have skin in the game, or I'm not really having fun, I shouldn't spend my time on it. Similarly, I don't follow news sites, world news will reach me in real life. Like meetings, for news I find it important that a person changes what they do after learning about it. If you hear negative news only to be outraged and then change nothing: You wasted your time and I do genuinely mean that.

I apply a principle of not wasting my time against attention-demanding websites: News, the Instagrams, Tiktoks, Facebooks, Reddits, and Twitches. Some of these sites I block by running my own dnsmasq instance. When I find a website has been trying to steal my attention I block it.

Things I haven't gotten around to blocking are forwarded to CloudFlare's family-safe resolver. Others, I get too much out of to block. An example of this is LinkedIn. Another is YouTube, I run Unhook with every setting enabled, so they don't try to steal my time with Shorts or recommended videos. I watch the video that I'm looking for and I'm free to leave.

Kagi

Kagi T-shirt announcement

Kagi: "Some months ago now we made a promise to you, our loyal first 20,000 members, to gift you a Kagi T-Shirt to mark the milestone."

Thanks Kagi. I'll be wearing that one.

On to the real subject of this entry. Kagi, a customizable search engine. Why Kagi? Well for one, I don't need to browse it with browser extension uBlock just to still feel slightly suspicious about the results and why the URL changes when I click on a link. I can browse Kagi without concerns about manipulated results. In fact it even lets me customize the CSS if I still don't like something about it.

The best feature and why I actually use it is that you can influence the results. Searching for things on the web is an art, but even then you can get your time wasted by high ranking SEO vandals.

Here's a peek into 5 recent sites blocked. Why were they blocked? I don't remember, but whenever I click a search result and think "I wasted my time". I hit "Block" and I forget about ever seeing it.

Kagi blocked domains
Note the 221 other rules. I'm going to need an extension of that 1000 by the year 2030.
Here's the link to the global domain leaderboard.
Kagi ranking arxiv.org higher
Another example of ranking a good website higher. Thanks arxiv.org for existing.

Summary

Don't let corporations waste your time. Block them at DNS, with uBlock, or with Kagi.

Cheers to all that software.