Do they really need to launder anything (genuine question as I could be missing something)? Usually you do that to hide money from the government, but in this case it’s MBS and co using money from oil and other shady stuff to try to propel themselves as relevant in the world. Would not put it past them to also use this as a way to fund more terrorist activity (it’s Saudi Arabia after all)

The saddest part of all this is how they could have used some of all their crazy clickbaity mega spending to help Gaza. Instead they would rather pay a bunch of sports and esports athletes crazy sums to increase epeen

It’s almost odd how rare this attitude is nowadays. I remember being excited for the next Blizzard Games release back in the day because you always heard them talk about quality over meeting arbitrary deadlines.

I get that being out there in the market early is important too. Investments need to pay a return with our current economic model. I just keep thinking of all the games that could have used a little more ripening and they likely would have been a lot more successful instead of losing the studio money.

lol I’m not sure who’s side to take here. I tried kagi and I can’t personally justify the cost. The free trial is hard to use because I perform a ton of searches in a day and I keep thinking “I should save free trial searches for a good use case”.

Also, not hard to believe a company would stick the privacy sticker all over their product and turn around and make money off my personal data.

But those “harassment” emails from the Kagi Owner/CEO to me read like a business person with a passion not understanding where these accusations come from. After reading part of that chain, I came out with the feeling that “Lori” just wanted to write some click baity stuff and didn’t really care to dig any deeper. Yes, AI products by a company right now implies they will use your data to train or sell a dataset to some other company. But I don’t see any damming evidence here, just assumptions.

If Kagi is serious about their privacy mission then they should release a clear ToS and a legally binding statement that they will not use our data or meta data for anything.