Sure. And whether he was a sacrificial goat here is not for us to know. But let’s not pretend that the CEO had no responsibility.

Whether or not it was his idea is irrelevant, he’s the one who approved it.

It’s almost a philosophical question of whether I can replace us though. Because for it to be anything more than a tool it needs real intelligence, compassion, etc. Basically it would need a conscious.

I’m certain it’ll replace some jobs without that, just because being a tool it’ll make us more efficient and that efficiency will eliminate jobs. But I’m not seeing it replace or assimilate entire industries at this stage.

We are nowhere near AI writing our software unattended. Not even close. People really over estimate the state of AI.

Yeah that’s fair. I’d say it falls into the same boat as the argument against the CEO; they haven’t done anything clearly malicious, but their bad decisions are enough to give you pause and reconsider.

Go and have a look? https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

Being open-source doesn’t automatically make you secure or reputable. Especially considering the open-source ecosystem in particular is a big target for exploitation right now. And auditing a software project of this size by its source code alone is no small feat.

it is also the most private and secure, open-source, mainstream* Chromium browser

“Mainstream chromium browser” is doing most if not all the heavy lifting there. Fair enough if that’s what you’re after, but mixing “private and secure, open-source” in feels disingenuous.

That said, I primarily use Vivaldi because of its customizability and added features, something Firefox seems to reduce with every new version.

Last time I played with either Vivaldi or Brave you had to literally monkey patch the source code in order to customize things further than what the extension SDK allowed you to. You could do the same thing with Firefox, except they make it slightly harder because much of the source code is shipped in archives.

That said it’s been years, maybe this can now be done purely through the extension SDK? It’d be news to me.

Given their crypto functionality uses a third party which has been found to skirt the legal system I’d be a lot more concerned about this integration even if I don’t intend to use it.

Keep in mind the stuff you read about is only what has been surfaced so far. Who knows what skeletons are still hiding?

Personally, I don’t see any point risking it when there are perfectly viable alternatives such as Firefox. Granted the same guy infected Mozilla, but they stood up and ousted him so credit where credit is due.

You see, when someone is known to make bad choices it makes sense to approach what they do with apprehension. This guy not only has a history of bad choices, he’s also the CEO.

You’re free to do as you like of course, but I’d say it’s hardly fair to say the article is unconvincing.

If I were a mod that hadn’t left yet: this would definitely put me over the edge.

How insanely tone-deaf.

Always great to have more options! But this seems very similar to Mlem in terms of goals (Apollo like). Why not combine efforts?