Well, I'm personally hoping stem cells pull through for corneal tissue regrowth. I've got significant scarring in one eye. I'd rather not get a donor (cadaver) cornea sewn on if it's avoidable but we'll see.
I'm sure you're correct. That said, I saw a friend who went bald at 28 get all of his hair back from Minoxidil + finasteride. Maybe his folicles weren't closed/gone but he was bald and a year later, was not.
Apparently there's also now-a-days, Micro-needling, Stem Cell Therapy, Platelet-Rich Plasma, and others. No idea how effective they actually are
Sorry my bad. It's called that way in where I'm from. The hair loss is mostly due to mechanism similar to pattern baldness but the hair loss can occur even without death of hair follicles. It could also be triggered by some autoimmune disease.
This isn’t the whole story. Many people have follicles that are dormant. Many people have success regrowing hair on bald spots with minoxidil and/or finasteride.
If you look like Sir Patrick Stewart, yeah, that’s not growing back. A bald spot might fill in with medical treatment though.
Because as with the internet 99% of the usage won’t be for education, work, personal development, what have you. It will be for effing kitten videos and memes.
Openrouter stats already mention 52% usage is roleplay.
As for photo/video very large number of people use it for friends and family (turn photo into creative/funny video, change photo, etc.).
Also I would think photoshop-like features are coming more and more in chatgpt and alike. For example, “take my poorly-lit photo and make it look professional and suitable for linkedin profile”
Also FWIW I understand that the furry community has a strong culture of commissioning artists for their work, so that's likely to be a headwind against using genAI that isn't explicitly trained only on licensed materials. Sure, there are likely some who would use it regardless, but I expect the use of genAI to generate furry porn to be at least as toxic within that community as the use of genAI to generate furry porn outside of that community.
Kagi is building their own index. There are also other open indexes. Over time these can replace the big corporate indexes. The hard truth is that the big players in search are dead. They are now the yahoo of search, with landing pages full of ads and results that are primarily ads.
See their revenue (number of paid users is not a secret): something around $7M annually? It was half of that not so long ago (glad, that the userbase is growing).
With their current pricing they are out of their league of having any full-blown index, crawlers, people, what have you.
I would say year ago I was amazed how they are alive at all (unless I am missing something in their funding).
A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine it's still doable even for a small organization, especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus, there are many organizations interested in having access to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently running their own index and selling to analytics firms.
They already have world class search technology. In terms of indexing they only need to index the most important content. There is so much slop now and it doesn't matter at all if that is indexed. IMO their strategy of focusing on smaller sites with human curated content is correct. They can make some deals to index some of the big walled gardens and that's pretty much world class right now.
What do you think a site like Google is giving you these days? They are explicitly bad at indexing the small web. Their search technology is not better than Kagi, and made worse by ads and LLM ad bias. So what is this big "world class" thing they do that can't be replicated?
The web is not the same place it was years ago. Indexing all the slop and scams and ads is not useful to me as a consumer.
Though my gut tells me the probability of their 100% own full-blown search is very-very low.
From the current point in time few people are in the market for a paid privacy focused search.
Most of the time I spend on kagi this year is a glorified bookmark to imdb, wiki, and what have you: around 700 queries per month, which is basically the same as I have in chatgpt according to yearly stats.
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