deleted by creator

IDGAF what brave does, neither the company nor their browser should be trusted. They’ve done a lot of sketchy and hateful shit:

@[email protected] is the author of everything that follows:

This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t want to however, here is a summary of the key points:

• Brendan Eich’s anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement

• • Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.

• 2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads

• • Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.

• 2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign

• • Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.

• 2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets

• • Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.

• 2020 — Brave puts ads in user’s home screens

• • Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.

• 2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature

• • Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests

• 2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites

• • Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.

• 2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection

• • Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.

• And More!

• • Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
• • The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
• • Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.

AI is changing … how we judge the people we work with.

Yeah no shit, I judge my coworkers who rely on chatbots. What a revelation

Is there a list of known affected models? It wasn’t clear from the article whether they were a contract manufacturer for Google’s own devices or if they were a 3rd party brand option.

No, they aren’t saying that “humans are meant to be shuffling around a warehouse picking and packing orders mindlessly.”

The point is that the processes are designed around human operators with specific considerations for the abilities and constraints of an average human. Dropping a robot into a process without updating said process around the abilities and constraints of the robot creates new problems. Humans and robots work in different ways and cannot be substituted 1:1 without creating problems.

I mean, it’s likely that a good chunk of these hyperscale data centers and some of these big corporate LLMs will run out of cash and close shop. We’ll probably see a big pivot to much more efficient models that are local and/or purpose-built, not unlike what the Chinese are already doing.

An economic bubble doesn’t require that the assets suddenly disappear upon the bubble popping.

The 2008 financial crisis was caused in part by the popping of a real estate bubble in the US. Those properties didn’t magically evaporate after the bubble popped, though many families couldn’t afford to keep their homes.

In the same manner, nobody is really suggesting that LLMs will suddenly disappear after the AI bubble pops, only that they will probably be proven to be significantly less profitable and get scaled back.

Still not eating the overrated bigot chicken.

What a ridiculous fucking clickbait headline

Sure, but there’s a difference between existing in society and actively going out of your way to fund projects that are made by hyper-racists (like the omarchy guy)

Cars have gotta be the worst possible place to put ads. Distracted driving is already a problem, this is just going to make it worse

Lmao how’s that boot taste?

Wage theft is consistently the single largest form of theft in the US, coming in at around $50 BILLION every year

I’m a liar for using basic English grammar rules like em dash and oxford comma? Lol, tell on yourself harder

Lol even more at your edit. I’m as anti-LLM and generative AI as they come, are you just proud of your ignorance when it comes to grammar or something?

I’d love a pair without cameras that have a HUD, though. Being able to pull up weather, camera, directions, etc. right in my field of view without looking away from what I’m working on would be cool af.

Don’t dismiss this as another nostalgic rant from a gearhead refusing to embrace the ‘future’. It’s just physics.

Too bad that’s exactly what this article is, with garbage takes and poor justification under a thin veil of ‘science’ that they don’t actually understand.

No shit internal combustion engines are more ‘advanced’, we’ve been working on improving ICE for over a century. In contrast, EV powertrains are a nascent technology (ignoring the very early electric vehicles we saw in the beginning days of automobiles which are not really comparable to modern EV tech) that have already improved rapidly over the last decade.

They’re also correct that gasoline is more energy dense than current battery technology, but this again discounts that the field is rapidly expanding the energy density, storage efficiency, and charging speed of batteries, as well as the fact that the relatively unoptimised EV powertrains are already significantly more efficient.

The author also confuses complexity as a justification for retaining ICE. The relative simplicity of EV powertrains is a good thing, it doesn’t need to operate under the intense mechanical and thermal conditions of a combustion engine. I really don’t understand how the author can look at the insane complexity of ICE technology and see that as a win. The simplicity of EVs also means that the maintenance burden is significantly lower on consumers, the supply chain for production and operation is shorter and more resilient, and in terms of carbon emissions, we get a one-time fee during production (that are largely recyclable too) instead of ongoing emissions over the course of each vehicle’s lifetime.

What a bunch of copium.

Huh, TIL. thanks!

I wasn’t intentionally trying to be rude, it genuinely took me aback. I’m sorry to have come across that way.

From my perspective, tt felt like you hadn’t actually read my argument and were responding in bad faith, since this comparison is the sort of thing that people say to dismiss software engineering as a sort of thought-terminating cliche.

What? That’s a very different situation than what I was talking about with software development. I thought I pretty clearly outlined the core of what it means to be an engineer- Custodians aren’t doing engineering work. As you said, that doesn’t make the role less important or less deserving of dignity.

Just calling someone an engineer because it sounds better is silly and demeans both the actual role and the work that engineers do.

Yeah I absolutely love my P2, but they sold terribly in the US. Compared to a Tesla model 3 (which are unfortunately still super popular despite Musk), it was nicer but with les range and around twice the stocker price. Polestar struggled to really position themselves here successfully, imo, but they aren’t a particularly high volume brand in other places either.

You clearly have a lot more experience than me- I’m fairly fresh out the gate. Like you, though, I work in a field where licensure isn’t super relevant (manufacturing).

It was drilled into my head in school and by my dad (cheme but does civil work and is on the committee that writes the cheme PE) that that for some domains, like civil and chem, it’s nigh impossible to find work without a PE (even entry level often requires at least the EIT accreditation).

Our system is, frankly, still very wild-west in terms of accountability for engineers in emerging fields.

It’s deeply unfortunate that your experience with the accountability side of things went the way it did. That’s another thing that they drilled into my head at school- if you sign a drawing and that part killed or hurt someone, the victims could call on you in a court of law to explain or even include you as a defendant in the suit. Does that always happen? Obviously not, but at least the possibly is there I guess.

Agreed, but software has already had life-safety-critical and massively financially impactful roles in society for 50+ years now, and I see precious little progress toward formal accountability.

Fully agreed here, I was just struggling to think of older life-critical examples after travelling for 22 hours lol (long day yesterday).