As a German, I very much share those observations, and it seems to be underdiscussed and not that apparent to most people here.
The German social scheduling culture can definitely be a viscous circle, where everyone having to plan their calendar in advance forces everyone else to plan even further in advance if they want to have a chance to meet up.
I do think it's probably felt the strongest for adults between ~18-35, where your circle of friends spreads out across the country/surrounding cities/world, and any get together necessitates travel. After that, when people settle down (potentially have children) they usually form new circles of friends that are more local again with more opportunities for spontaneous meetings.
So far, the only solution I know is to set a date and stick with it. Trying to find a solution that meets everybody's calendar is rarely worth the effort. First, nobody has time; later, they have other appointments, so in the end it seems to be a matter of priority.
Set your date and stick to it. If people deem your topic relevant, they will arrange to participate.
They also raised $10M at that time. I assume there were conditions to that deal and/or the launch didn't really turn the trajectory around and they saw the writing on the wall.
While I admittedly also haven't been using them for quite some time, it's sad to see them shutdown. For me they were the first ones that did web search in AI chat well enough to make AI actually into a useful daily tool.
Phind was the first AI search I used as well. But they seemed to be quickly outfoxed by Perplexity. I started using Perplexity after it was recommended to me as having fewer hallucinations - now it can integrate its tools with SOTA models like Opus.
They _are_ in the CI market. Two of their products are the Docker Build Cloud and Testcontainers Cloud. IIRC Docker Hub also came with automated builds at some point (not sure if it still does).
I do get your sentiment tough. For the position they are in, a CircleCI-like product would seem to be quite fitting.
This could've been a "change runs-on to be this" like all the other faster GHA startup products, but instead the way they set it up I would have to keep paying for GHA while also paying for their build cloud. No fun!
Really depends on what you want to do with the agents. Just yesterday I was looking for something like this for our web access MCP server[0]. The only thing that it needs to do is visit a website and get the content (with JS support, as it's expected that most pages today use JS), and then convert that to e.g. Markdown.
I'm not too happy with the fact that Chrome is one of our memory-hungriest parts of all the MCP servers we have in use. The only thing that exceeds that in our whole stack is the Clickhouse shard, which comes with Langfuse. Especially if you are looking to build a "deep research" feature that may access a few hundreds of webpages in a short timeframe, having a lightweight alternative like Lightpanda can make quite the difference.
Well, it was "normal" crawlers that needed to work perfectly and deterministically (as best as possible), not probabilistically (AI); speed was no issue. And I wanted to debug when something went wrong. So yeah for me it was crucial to be able to record/screenshot.
So yeah, everything is a trade-off, and we needed a different trade-off; we actually decided to not use headless chromium, because they are slight differences, so we ended up using full chrome (not even chromium, again - slight differences) with xvfb. It was very, very memory hungry; but again was not an issue
(I used "agent" as in "browser agent", not "AI agent", I should be more precise I guess.)
> why not simply do vertical integration and build your own robot arms?
Robot arms are neither a low-volume unique/high-cost market (SpaceX), nor a high-volume/high-margin business (Tesla). On top of that it's already a quite crowded space.
Because they approach creating such terms in a different way? e.g. some competitors may consider the chances of it to be enforceable to be 0 and not bother with it at all, while others just didn't bother tweaking the standard boilerplate they got from their lawyers unless needed.
Literally the first 4 SaaS companies that came to my mind to check (Atlassian/Jira, Linear, Pipedrive, Stackblitz/Bolt.new) have a similar clause in their TOS.
I can build it myself and skip that step. Or, if the build process is reproducible, you can make trust less of an issue by having a small handful of independent people run their own builds and post their signatures. That way you need those people to all collude with Kagi to forge a bad build. This is how e.g. bitcoind binaries are handled.
The German social scheduling culture can definitely be a viscous circle, where everyone having to plan their calendar in advance forces everyone else to plan even further in advance if they want to have a chance to meet up.
I do think it's probably felt the strongest for adults between ~18-35, where your circle of friends spreads out across the country/surrounding cities/world, and any get together necessitates travel. After that, when people settle down (potentially have children) they usually form new circles of friends that are more local again with more opportunities for spontaneous meetings.
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