If you want to cut off your access to technologies because the man who invented them doesn't meet your puritanical world-view then you should also disable JavaScript since Brendan Eich invented JavaScript.
As a gay man I could give two shits about his opinion on gay marriage. In my opinion marriage is inherently a religious institution and the state has no business regulating it whatsoever. From the state's standpoint any combination of genders should be considered a civil union for taxation purposes and if you want to have your union blessed by the religion of your choice, go ahead. They can call it marriage, they can call it a ham sandwich. "Gay marriage" shouldn't legally exist because neither should "marriage." But nuance doesn't exist in a world of anger-driven online lynch mobs.
You're playing a lot of mental gymnastics here. Eich isn't anti-marriage, he specifically supported excluding gay people from marriage. He gave money to one of the most vocal prop 8 supporters and a group that fund-raised on prop 8 specifically. Where's the nuance?
If someone says "hey the guy that runs this company doesn't think you should be treated the same as others because of your sexual preference" I should ignore that because "who cares"?
I'm just not sure what the counter-argument is here... it sounds like "everything and everyone sucks, and you suck too, so stop paying attention and trying to improve anything"
Well, yes. But there's another angle as to what you vote for with it.
Voting for the creator's politics is one angle, but there's another one. Whether the creator puts politics into their product.
One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics outside what matters for a browser. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. I don't get politics outside privacy, user control and independent web services pushed to me by Brave. The politics that are there matter to a browser, and the stuff that's outside that scope is left as the people's own prerogative.
The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they also keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
I know I'll disagree on weighty matters by people making both products, but as far the browser matters, we all agree.
Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second, and they are not shy about inserting their extraneous politics into the browser.
We're more and more into a culture where everything under the Sun has to preach some sort of politics, and it usually detracts from making an actually good product, in my experience. I like to support organizations that focus on making good hammers and leave the politics to the parts of life where they belong. Life is far more civil that way.
It doesn’t make people _heretics_ to have a political disagreement.
You could cancel Brave because you think Eich hates the gays. You could cancel Apple because their phones are made in sweatshop conditions that drive workers to mass suicide. Cancel electric cars because the cobalt batteries are mined by African children who die of exposure. Cance Nike because despite their woke posturing they use sweatshops too. Don’t wear clothes because the factories collapse etc.
Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
All of those seem like ... good things to me? (At least to the extent that I believe the factual claims.) Call me crazy, but I am not yet so cynical as to believe that I cannot with my actions make any difference in the world. To be clear, the problem is not so much Eich "hating the gays" as it is him collecting a ~7 figure salary and funneling money from that into right wing causes that hurt people in the real world.
Do you sincerely believe that your existence is a net negative to the world as a whole? Have you internalized that belief? I would quite literally not be able to live with myself if I believed that. I try to minimize the negative impacts my consumption has on others as far as I can. It's not about "cancellation", because that's become a stupid meme and lost any meaning it had, it's about being careful abut what I consume. I don't, for example, buy anything from Nestle.
> Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
This is, at the end of the day, just pure cynicism.
Cool. But that isn’t really that cool. That one is easy. What makes you okay with buying products from Apple but not from Nestle? Is it that Nestle has enough competition that it’s a low cost protest? Is it that Apple is hurting people far away from you while Nestle is exploiting your more local environment?
What would it take to make you buy from Nestle again? If they somehow bought Apple’s laptop division?
Having no beliefs is more laudable than people who act on only the convenient beliefs.
what? laudable by whom? sure it’s lazy to only act on convenient beliefs, but it’s certainly more interesting than doing literally nothing
if my one belief is to cut those little six-pack pop rings before putting them in the trash to benefit sea turtles… how is not doing that laudable? because someone told you it’s cool to not care about anything?
My point though was more specific to the poster I replied to, they hand-waved the parent comment away (partially) by mentioning that they boycott Nestle. It rings hollow that all of the other points are less relevant because they boycott what is quite possibly the easiest company to boycott. I would have more respected a response of either “yeah, I pick and choose what I boycott based on both logically tangible and emotional reasons, so trying to find consistency is not only impossible but also foolish” or just to say “who I boycott and why is up to me. Maybe I boycott all of those companies, maybe none. I don’t boycott to be performative”
You've got that precisely backwards. You have to explicitly enable that feature if you want it.
vs
> your puritanical world-view
I was reading this page earlier today. https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/choose-your-browser-care...
The criticism against brave seems pretty hollow without really any remaining criticism. Brave does have this: https://brave.com/privacy/browser/
Would be interesting to see a link showing Brave collecting data. My understanding is that they don't collect data.
I must admit I am rather ignorant about the fake coins.
>Let's also not forget Brendan Eich is anti-gay marriage. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536
~2014. I am curious if his opinion has changed. Sometimes you find yourself on the wrong side of history and re-evaluate positions such as these. Given your link is getting old... maybe he has?
If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions.
>He is also a COVID conspiracy theorist. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei...
I suppose this is more recent. The problem here is that how many 'conspiracy theories' are now not conspiracy theories.
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1339367981084672000
I suppose in dec 2020 Fauci had admitted that he lied about masks being ineffective. Overall though I really didnt see the content in this nytimes article to justify the title.
I suppose the bigger question for me, does this dude matter at all? Let's say he's literal reincarnation of hitler. Does that really change the browser?
Flipside, this guy's wiki page says he invented Javascript. Clearly he is hitler.
One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services.
The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one.
I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
So in your opinion, Mozilla's CEO shouldn't be saying we need to do more than deplatform politicians? I suppose she was unclear in what more that was exactly?
>The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
Yes, I have vivaldi over on my pinebook pro. I haven't really done much yet with it. excited to check it out.
>Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one.
Their budget is what 90% from google? That money has attachments im sure. Hence probably why they have trashed firefox so badly.
>I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
Yes, it's clear firefox deserves their 7% market share and dropping. I wouldn't recommend firefox to anyone.
Mozilla was actually reasonably clear. Some of it was stuff that might in principle be okay (more transparency on who funds what, which on one hand is good for highlighting certain kinds of corruption but on another can open people up for witch hunts in this fucked up social atmosphere we live in nowadays), but they explicitly praised Facebook altering its feed to prioritize sources Mozilla liked over ones it doesn't - namely the legacy prestige media who are ideological liars the same as anyone else. They might've been less so back in the day, but in the current business model and post TDS, nope.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-why-mozill...
Brave had technical scams too:
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45
https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitte...
https://web.archive.org/web/20181221231556if_/https://twitte...
For every two links you give for Brave, any random HNer can give 10x or more that amount for Google/Chrome or any other Big Tech company these days.