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Thanks for raising this! We're looking into this discrepancy (I work at Exa).

Google Search API will be shut down on Jan 1st 2027. It's already closed for new clients, only existing users can run until the end of the year.

https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview

> Note: The Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers. Vertex AI Search is a favorable alternative for searching up to 50 domains. Alternatively, if your use case necessitates full web search, contact us to express your interest in and get more information about our full web search solution. Existing Custom Search JSON API customers have until January 1, 2027 to transition to an alternative solution.

alexey-salminon Web Search API

We do have that in Exa search:

* Extraction of main content from HTMLs, the index stores markdown representations (free of headers/footers/sidebars/menus etc)

* Serving highlights picking the most relevant part for each result to reduce token usage downstream

* Also serving dynamic highlights where we summarize all the sources at once reducing the token counts even further

see here: https://exa.ai/docs/search/highlights and https://exa.ai/docs/contents/quickstart

alexey-salminon Web Search API

>Here we are, one layer of indirection more: Ceramic, Exa, Linkup. Who knows what they use. If you told me that those 3 build and maintain their own index, I'd first question whether that was true, and if it is, I would question whether it was any good (relative to Google/Bing/Brave).

Hi! Exa Head of Index here. We certainly do have our own index and it's one of the biggest among the independent players (i.e. not Google and Bing, which by the way closed off their official search APIs). [1]

Regarding the quality: search is a multi-dimensional problem, you can be better on one set of queries and worse on the other. There are tons of benchmarks in the industry, all the players in the AI search market are fighting very hard to climb to the top, updates are shared every week.

We track dozens of use cases and run evals continuously, we perform well on all the verticals we optimize for. Not only we top the ranking on e.g. financial queries, but also Claude with Exa search performs better that Claude with native search -- as measured by independent observers [2]. This means that the underlying search is materially better for the outcome, it's not just how we evaluate the search itself.

[1] https://lnkd.in/p/e9u3dyEG [2] https://lnkd.in/p/enYe4h7u

alexey-salminon Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

That doesn't really contradict what I said. This definition of intelligence can be useful in some contexts, but on average neither women nor capital are particularly attracted to people who have it

alexey-salminon Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

You may be overestimating how much people actually want to fuck nowadays. There are much easier and less intimidating forms of entertainment available

alexey-salminon Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

It is, if you define intelligence as "how to do well in life" and not as "here are 5 ways how Germany could have won the war in 1943".

alexey-salminon A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

Which is the problem, yes. It was perfectly fine to use physical buttons while driving because you don't have to look at them.

alexey-salminon Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

> “We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…

What signals do you suggest? Regardless of whether it's feasible to put them in the dating app.

alexey-salminon Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

This used to be the workplace: observing a big group of people over long periods of time when they don't pretend to charm you. Are they kind? How do they treat others? Are they secure? Are they ambitious? Are they hardworking? What do they talk about on the lunch break?

Meeting people from dating apps is quite literally the opposite of that: one person at a time, extremely short period of time, they can pretend, no or little interactions with third parties (how they treat a waiter maybe).

I honestly believe that making workplace dating something frowned upon (or even a terminable offence sometimes) was a huge disservice to society. People spends most of their adult life going to work but are supposed to squeeze the search for a partner into the little time and energy that remains outside of work.

alexey-salminon Implementation of GCC's Nested Functions (vs. C++ Lambdas)

Yes. The non-capturing case is equivalent to a static function for both lambdas and GCC nested functions.

alexey-salminon Implementation of GCC's Nested Functions (vs. C++ Lambdas)

>> After all, a debugger can track what variable goes where at every line of code, so this can be done.

> Variable value tracking breaks down pretty much the moment any optimization happens.

I think for nested functions it's not [only] a question of performance/optimizations but of correctness. Even if you properly unwind the stack like a debugger trying to find the parent frame, you may actually find multiple due to recursion. It's impossible to know which one is "yours" unless at least some information about the parent frame was passed to the nested function at invocation time. It can't be a truly static function.

alexey-salminon Implementation of GCC's Nested Functions (vs. C++ Lambdas)

This article somehow omits the 80% of both the complexity and the benefits of the GCC nested functions which makes them pointless. Namely you can cast them to function pointers and pass them e.g. as a comparator to the sort() routine. Substituting the right parent frame parameter at the time the nested function is called down the stack is tricky and requires either an explicit support in the ABI (ia-64) or an executable stack to build a trampoline or a special logic to wrap function pointers with a special but set [1].

Without all this nested functions are as useful as the "rewritten" examples in the article, one can easily do that by hand without any compiler or language support.

This problem doesn't arise with C++ lambdas because you pass them around as special objects, not as bare function pointers.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Trampolines.html

alexey-salminon Mistral raises €3B

> quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.

Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire.

And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.

alexey-salminon It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

I think the kernel.org post proves the parent point rather than contradicts it.

> At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html.

14 CPU cores total for running a website like kernel.org is laughable. This is not worth burning cycles in Anubis on client's devices, this is not worth the time of the engineer who worked on it. Provisioning more hardware would have been literally better for everyone.

alexey-salminon Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)

> It doesn't understand, it can't understand, and even if it could, you arguing with it isn't going to make it "learn" or act differently.

I know people who are like that too.

I'm not sure anthropomorphizing is a problem. Seeing analogies everywhere is an innate human trait, sometimes it can be harmful but more often it's useful.

alexey-salminon Google Kills Custom Search API on Jan 1, 2027

https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview

  Note: The Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers. Vertex AI Search is a favorable alternative for searching up to 50 domains. Alternatively, if your use case necessitates full web search, contact us to express your interest in and get more information about our full web search solution.

  Existing Custom Search JSON API customers have until January 1, 2027 to transition to an alternative solution.

alexey-salminon The EU is not about to censor access to the internet

Not suspicious at all

alexey-salminon Knoppix

100%. The detection/configuration of hardware just worked out of the box. It's a must-have for a livecd and still a reeeealy nice-to-have for your permanent install back then.

alexey-salminon IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

The most surprising part for me is that IBM still somehow owns silicon labs, I was sure it's effectively a consulting company by now

alexey-salminon Dostoyevsky isn't difficult

A thought but maybe switch to the Idiot instead. I think of all the Dostoyevsky works the Brothers is the least enjoyable one. Keep it to the end or else it may suffocate your interest and prevent you from reading some of his greater works.

alexey-salminon Dostoyevsky isn't difficult

I watched it before I read the book and I wasn't aware it's an adaptation (not obvious at all). Imagine how perplexed and confused I was when I finally got around the book :D

The film is hilarious but probably hard to enjoy for someone who's not deep into the cultural context, it's not just the language.

alexey-salminon Ice water drowning survival of young patient (2025)

After a couple of months of coma they are pretty clear.

alexey-salminon French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a duprass always die within a week of each other.

alexey-salminon CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

It's not very relevant here, but curiously some cancers are, in fact, contagious organisms. The most famous example is the devil facial tumour disease. Luckily cases of transmissible cancer in humans are extremely rare (if you count only transmission of cancer itself and not the cancerogenic agents).

Another curious case of "cancer being an organism" is the HeLa line derived from cervical cancer cells taken from a woman called Henrietta Lacks.

alexey-salminon The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings (2025)

The article is the "Chad Tom Bombdadil" meme from reddit, but somehow watered down to multiple pages of text.

>Barges into the narrative.

>Sings a song about how he's older than the world.

>Puts on and takes off the Ring with no effect.

>Refuses to elaborate.

>Leaves.

alexey-salminon AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

Yeah, the community seems great, I enjoyed reading IRC logs :)

alexey-salminon I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

> Here's where I thank AIs for the small mercies of slopping on pleasantries on otherwise tone deaf emails and messages.

God I hate that, please send me more to-the-point tone deaf emails and messages.

alexey-salminon Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day

Well if France could build reactors in the 70s-90s, then Germany could have done it in 2000s, right? It's not an alien technology.

Instead they chose to pour money into wind and solar and ended up with:

* higher CO2 emissions

* higher consumer electricity prices

* all that for much higher implementation cost

The gap is massive. I think it's directly comparable: these are two neighboring EU countries, comparable in size, population and GDP. They made different choices which led to significantly different outcomes.

alexey-salminon Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day

What's the stunt? France built reactors for modest cost and phased out coal.

Germany wasted enormous amounts of money on green energy and made very little progress.

Which country is more "green"? Which technology is more "green"?