I think it depends a lot on the user. I never found DuckDuckGo to have good results, I think because it's based on Bing, and that remains laughable to this day (I have recently had to use it a bit and holy hell it's shit). I am comparing to startpage, which is I guess a more anonymous Google.
Kagi is at least as good for my day to day use, though I can't say it's obviously better. What it does have that I find useful is more ability to rank forum posts and the like higher, where they often have the real answers. Along with the "lenses" which let you kind of say what sort of stuff you're looking for - like only forum posts.
Right now, they also added to the Ultimate level a bunch of AI models you can chat with, which actually have pretty up to date knowledge it seems, and wider knowledge. For example, Claude 2 via Kagi was able to both help me as a DM with making a D&D 3.5e NPC (GPT4 can't do that alone, or at least didn't for me, and the plugin I tried to use that was suggested just didn't work at all), all the way to actually quickly finding JunOS commands and giving useful info about various outputs and clarifying what to do - which so far seem to be correct.
But the actual value to me is I can also ask GPT4 from Kagi, and Google Bison, so I don't need multiple subscriptions. I don't actually know how long this will hold true, but for now Kagi does a lot of stuff in one place that's pretty useful for me.
I find that the issue with "Produce something better, and make it something that non-tech folks will love." is just that you get the "Twitter to Threads" sort of thing where you still have the centralized / walled garden / new boss same as the old boss problem.
Or you inherently can't make it "forget about it UX and extremely high quality" as most non techies define it. Because you have the issue that even if a company self hosts a meeting tool, they likely can't get the backbone connections Zoom etc can get. They at least need someone to use a URL to get there. It can be made mostly simple, but then you're back to some company running it - works for corporate use maybe, not for your home user. Even Signal lags compared to Zoom. And people really dislike Signal's phone number requirement, but it's what makes it somewhat possible to route connections for users.
What's a system that a home person could use that's not going to get them routing through one companies servers, but is actually simple enough to use?
The place where I do get somewhat exasperated as a techie is that the equivalent of asking for a phone number or address in any program that isn't an e-mail website is seen as "too hard". This makes pretty much any privacy respecting design impossible to scale beyond nerds.
It used to be for standardization, but I've seen more commercial tools provide Debian / Ubuntu support than Red Hat lately, since the late 2010s. I also think the amount of changes and the issues with licensing here mean that more people might up and convert to Debian than before. But IDK. I also hear that more ML work is done on Debian, and yes - with the containers becoming big - less need to run any particular linux, so I could see swapping out the underlying Linux.
And from a company perspective, Red Hat has already done a big swap out from satallite to Foreman / Puppet to really pushing Ansible. Similarly, they've stopped doing oVirt in favor of cloud style OpenStack, nee OpenShift. Which is great if you're building your own cloud fabric, but not really the VMWare / HyperV competitor oVirt was which is something lots of mid size orgs need. ProxMox still seems to be going.
And for people who aren't paying for support - I imagine they have skilled in house teams that can certainly figure out Debian if they've been orchestrating CENTOS and now Alma say.
A lot of sort of vaguely near pointing out issues with a lot of obvious missing crucial context to push a very strong right wing agenda.
College is expensive because we as a culture vastly overrate who needs to go and for what purpose, while allowing minors to take on insane debt that the government guarantees. It's one of those things where we do the worst of all worlds. If we were leftist about it, it would be free public school like gradeschool-highschool. If we were conservative about it, we'd get rid of the government loan backing and allow people to discharge the loans in bankruptcy, and you'd see prices come down just because otherwise there'd be people just not able to get a loan to begin to pay the bills. We might also stop assuming that all jobs need a college degree, and bring back more needed emphasis on the trades.
Real estate issues are very real, but he just makes a "conspiracy theory" of "evil real estate barons". He might not be as far off as he contemplates given the corporate purchase of houses for rental and AirBnB, but there's a more fundamental issue with his question of "why don't people move to the country" and it's not just that there actually are states trying to chain you down to a bed to have a kid. It's simply the not at all radical and quite obvious idea that there are less jobs in the country. It's all well and good that you can rent a house for $800 month vs $5,000 a month, but if you can't get a JOB paying $800 a month you aren't living there.
I could go on, but he probably intentionally is so misleading by omission there's little point.
Do people find it compelling really? 2,700 members is not that big a site in the modern internet, but they have a pay for social media service that has existed for a long time, so if you don't want to become a unicorn company or have wide appeal / access, it seems like it does work as a business model?
I think this is what FM radio basically is, and def what SiriusXM is. It might also be why radio is less interesting to many than Android Auto or Carplay.
I think you need to define "better". If you're not set on having the same amount of people (because network effects are the biggest pain, and if it was as big as reddit presumably you'd have heard of it)
TV/Movies has forums at dslreports.org, and people sort of discuss on mastadon.
Technology as Ars Technica, here, mastadon instances and hashtags, discord, and if you're talking work, stuff on mailing lists via google and others, and maybe teams?
I have mostly given up on politics - I can't imagine having useful discussions in public online anywhere anymore.
Home DYI had the HOYUZZ (??) forums I think. But again, that's mostly web based I think.
I'm not into the other stuff so IDK on those. I could imagine someone trying to build a competitor - I mean there is lemmy I think.
And the bigger issue even is when these expert designers retire - where do we get more experts? Do we become the elohoi of "The Time Machine" where we don't know how to do anything? Is AI really going to completely replace these designers in their work lifespan?
I'd say this is a fundamental misreading of Musk. He's a good hype man, who started rich, got richer and became famous. Him starting over would be simply that he's famous and so is better at being famous and generating hype than someone who isn't already famous.
The thing is - basically being a grifter is a great skill for making money for oneself and friends, but not actually a skill that helps society as a whole. And sure, advertising is a kind of expertise, but I don't think many people actually hold it in high regard as being worth a lot in terms of "deserving".
I think this is slightly wrong in the other direction. How does people doing things "for the love of the craft" inherently lead to better quality "stuff"? There are plenty of examples of people doing things already "for the love of the craft" either because they're wealthy, or at least doing well enough for it to be a serious hobby. But that doesn't mean they beat our professionals every time.
Hollywood movies seem to be to be one of the least able kind of task to be done "for the love of the craft" across all thousands of people involved in a blockbuster. How does that coordination work out across everyone who's interested "in the craft"? Ever see fan productions? It can be done, but they're also often driven by people actually doing tasks for cash that was gathered via donations.
I also might point to the people who are so well liked and famous that they basically can "write their own ticket" - George RR Martin is an example. His first few books were considered amazing, but it's also considered that given no real impetus anymore - he's unlikely to finish the saga ever. As a whole then, is an unfinished saga really "higher quality" than one finished to make a buck? The answer IMHO isn't obvious.
You'd have to bite the bullet that most human posters are also parrots by that definition I think. It's certainly taking input from what others have said, and it's not coming up with new ideas. But it's answering many questions same as human posters online would, by combining stuff they heard elsewhere into a coherent text post.
Given that the output essentially is similar to what human posters online are doing in many many cases the term isn't useful to distinguish between the two.
It's certainly not working like Eliza where there are specific programmed response trees to choose from. It doesn't seem to be just copying sentences and pasting them into the output.
I'm not well versed in GPT, I've only recently been using ChatGPT 3.5. For scripting I was blown away. In some ways it's better than I am. But I also strongly believe so far you need to be well versed enough to know what it's doing and to safety check and massage its output. I am also regularly using Neeva paid search which has AI responses that cite its sources - a useful feature compared to ChatGPT IMHO.
With both of them, I'm very underwhelmed with "use it like a forum" or "ask it a tech support question". Maybe because my "tech support questions" tend to be much harder than my "scripting questions", but it's not super useful. Anything it finds I actually find "better" because of context and screenshots just using a traditional search and clicking through to the blog or whatever that's talking about the issue.
Ok, now to the "It's just a parrot". I disagree strongly with that. It's no more a parrot than wikipedia authors are. Many of the Neeva AI search results read like an autogenerated Wikipedia page, complete with the source links.
Philosophically - I think a lot of people either aren't bringing philosophy and some sci fi knowledge to these arguments or don't know of them. Many of the "it doesn't understand anything" seem to be somewhat substrate chauvinist to me - I'm not sure if Data from Star Trek showed up in front of them that they'd admit he's intelligent or a person, simply because he's not organic. And you're also right - people claiming it "doesn't understand" can't or won't define what "understand" means in this context. Other terms, like "intelligence" also have changed over time. I'm pretty sure if in 1800 you asked if a machine could do calculus if it was intelligent - people would say yes. However by the 1960s computers were enough of a thing doing math that we decided math was no longer a marker of intelligence for a machine to do. Now we claim that GPT is just advanced autosuggest. Well, I guess an iPad is just an advanced calculator - but I'd argue it's transcended being a calculator in practical use. And I think GPT has transcended next word suggestions. My phone keyboard suggests 3 options for the next word, but it can't write the next paragraph for me coherently, nor does it take directions or questions and output pretty reasonable responses.
So I think I'm in the middle here - I don't discount GPT3.5 and 4, but I don't think the're Star Trek level AIs either. I don't think they are magic as it were.
Kagi is at least as good for my day to day use, though I can't say it's obviously better. What it does have that I find useful is more ability to rank forum posts and the like higher, where they often have the real answers. Along with the "lenses" which let you kind of say what sort of stuff you're looking for - like only forum posts.
Right now, they also added to the Ultimate level a bunch of AI models you can chat with, which actually have pretty up to date knowledge it seems, and wider knowledge. For example, Claude 2 via Kagi was able to both help me as a DM with making a D&D 3.5e NPC (GPT4 can't do that alone, or at least didn't for me, and the plugin I tried to use that was suggested just didn't work at all), all the way to actually quickly finding JunOS commands and giving useful info about various outputs and clarifying what to do - which so far seem to be correct.
But the actual value to me is I can also ask GPT4 from Kagi, and Google Bison, so I don't need multiple subscriptions. I don't actually know how long this will hold true, but for now Kagi does a lot of stuff in one place that's pretty useful for me.