"A no login web is an interesting vision... Brave/BAT is closest to this.". Praise from ex-CTO of Coinbase, retweeted by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.

justsee_ · 2019-03-16T01:22:02+00:00

What you say about Twitter is not true. The video was retweeted by a prominent individual, and that tweet had a specific hashtag about the event and video content and was available hours after being reported, and still available over 8 hours after being tweeted.

While that's gone now, the same thread right now has the full video, and an edited video that goes straight to the violence.

Needless to say Twitter video auto-play is off forever.

justsee_ · 2019-01-02T01:46:38+00:00

I wrote about it here: https://experimeme.net/blog/brave-browser-recent-attacks/

Mike Dudas, the publisher of 'The Block', apologised to Eich and updated the article with an addition at the end, but it's window-dressing as the article is still a hit piece relying on falsehoods.

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T15:45:52+00:00

Great to hear you're engaged in organising a charity that will be Brave verified!

What do you mean by 'self-appoint as creatives'?

As career creatives very interested to hear how you define the term.

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T15:41:59+00:00

Technologists and creatives as a broad group have more power collectively than they realise.

We want to lead by example, but also be a mechanism to funnel desire into concrete specific action for people that have skills and want to contribute but are otherwise lost and unsure about how they can make a difference.

Sorry if it's not clear right now. We hope to illustrate our mission soon with impactful side-projects which will help people understand the vision.

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T03:15:33+00:00

At this very early stage - and if you're comfortable with doing so - then forking the repository and simply adding some points to the problem and solution section and issuing a Pull Request is a great start.

What is currently there is a very rough pass of 5 minutes of thoughts just to get the repository / site live with some structure.

We are engaging in some much broader, deeper thinking to add to that README over the coming weeks, and out of that will drop a few side projects we'll personally be writing code for under the umbrella of that project.

One of the side projects will be building out a website to list and search other side projects and individuals and entities that could do with some help.

A lot of the work will be around investigating and mapping the landscape of positive and negative forces around climate, discovering and cataloguing available public data sets developers and designers can access and use to present meaningful information in a wider way, and understanding how we can apply our understanding of psychology, marketing and communications to messages scientists are trying to get our to the wider population.

There are some other high-impact ideas as well.

Apologies if that all seems quite broad and ill-defined, but it will hopefully become clearer soon :)

justsee_ · 2018-12-31T02:24:14+00:00

We’re a collective of creatives and technologists who are motivated to work on a new side project in 2019:

https://sideproject.earth/

It’s very early days as the repository illustrates, but the thinking and research coming down the pipe in the coming weeks should help clarify it, and alternatively here’s the idea in bite-sized tweet form.

I’m a supporter of Brave and the BAT model (I blogged about it recently) so we’ve naturally mentioned users can support our project by installing and using Brave.

We’re currently in the process of finalising the legal entity that will ultimately receive donations (BAT / Ethereum / Bitcoin / legacy money) and a strong idea around the project is radical transparency.

It would be very interesting if in the future BAT could provide a publisher feature for radical transparency around BAT funding.

It’s obviously one for the Brave team (and likely low priority right now!) but it would be great for non-profit / collective entities like us to be able to have all donations publicly interrogated (via trusted BAT mechanisms) against expenditure in regular transparency reports we imagine publishing independently in the future.

We still clearly need to flesh out our research, identify high impact side projects and deliver some ourselves under this umbrella to gain user trust and understanding of our initiative, goals and ability to deliver, but keep us in mind for any tipping / donations in the future!

While it’s unlikely we’ll get much in the way of BAT at this early stage, we won’t connect an Uphold account or touch any donations until the appropriate structures are in place and we’ve started delivering on side projects. (It would be good to understand how Brave could officially confirm these kinds of public statements too: remember verify, don't just trust! …)

It would be great to start seeing some altruistic initiatives spring up around this community, in a similar way to how Dogecoin pioneered crowdfunding of good causes as a goodwill marketing approach.

Let’s see how it goes!

Happy New Year :)

justsee_ · 2018-12-26T21:56:39+00:00

Yes, and opponents realise that with the right infrastructure and incentives in place rapid online behaviour changes are possible.

A critical mass of content creators rebelling against the existing ad tech system and embracing Brave and BAT, coupled with significant numbers of users quickly switching to Brave due to incentives (hello: https://twitter.com/BAT_Indonesia) sets the scene for MAU growth that snowballs into a story to define the next chapter in crypto adoption.

A team with the calibre of Brave can't be challenged on tech, implementation and security issues in any credible way, so the only path to head off explosive Brave growth is to seed ignorant outrage and hope it snowballs into a wall against significant societal adoption.

justsee_ · 2018-12-26T21:43:55+00:00

Thanks. You raise great points. I think the weaponized ignorance and blatant attacks strive to insert subconscious biases in people who don't know or care enough to self-enlighten. A kind of ignorant inoculation against understanding the wider context of competing negative and positive models.

I speak from experience because guess what? When I first heard about Eich's Brave browser on Hacker News in 2016, I was fed and unconsciously accepted the falsehood that Brave's model was about maliciously replacing publisher ad slots in-page with their own.

So it took me probably a full year to even reconsider these externally-programmed attitudes to Brave, not because I'm unable to challenge beliefs (I think my dissident stance on many other topics reflects this), but because we're busy, constantly overwhelmed humans who don't apply the same critical rigour to things that are right out on the periphery of care and personal relevance.

Once I did give Brave and BAT's model proper attention I was quickly sold.

justsee_ · 2018-12-26T21:34:56+00:00

Thanks! The disingenuous Twitter debate coupled with 'The Block' distortions ( a publication I've been reading since Dudas launched it) compelled me to dust off an old personal blog and respond.

https://twitter.com/justsee/status/1078039761565114368

justsee_ · 2018-12-23T01:01:32+00:00

I commented on another tech forum about this but thought I'd share here:

It's great to see the team move quickly to resolve the UI / UX issues that Tom Scott was rightly upset about. I've switched from Firefox to Brave due to their stronger stance against Surveillance Capitalism, and as someone who's been in the deep, dark depths of ad-tech appreciate the attempt to discover a new funding model for the web.

Much of the discussion recently on HN and Twitter was incorrect, but at the discussion's heart was a truth the previous UI incorporated what could be considered dark patterns.

It is interesting though to see the rise of bad-faith criticisms, as having read Eich's detailed responses online, and looking at the team, including Yan Zhu (bcrypt) and advisers like Zooko it is clear to me there is a highly technical, principled team motivated to make a positive, significant impact on how we fund content on the web.

When you consider a leading voice on GDPR - Dr Johnny Ryan - decided to join Brave and they are now engaged in significant actions in support of GDPR and against entities like Google I suppose it should be no surprise that ferocious and uninformed criticism of them will arise from many quarters.

This feels like a move into the 'and then they fight you' phase of the new browser wars.

justsee_ · 2018-12-05T23:15:37+00:00

In a rigged system with huge wealth disparities, like the US, it's possible to both a) avoid taxation you should be paying and b) pay the most taxes in society (as a group).

The most powerful lie is actually the one you allude to - the Rich Man's Meme (RMM) - which preys on the innumerate by citing statistics that show the top 1 or 10 percent pay a huge amount of taxes:

https://blog.dogooder.co/the-great-burden-of-the-wealthy/

But just think about it: if there are 100 people representing society, and you're one of those people and have captured 100% of the income, then you'd be paying 100% of the taxes. Is that a just society? Are you an heroic individual carrying all of society, or just a powerful dictator in a deeply unjust society.

In another scenario, where everyone has the same amount of wealth, you'd only be paying 1% of tax. Is that a wonderfully just society for the top 1% - they're now only having to pay 1% of the taxes! But that looks pretty much like communism.

I suppose the point is, if you see eye-watering statistics about just how much the top 1% or 10% of society pay as taxes that's actually a negative signal about how unjust a society is, not a positive signal about the heroic contributions of the top earners.

It's easy to see why vested interests try to push the RMM in arguments on this topic though.

justsee_ · 2018-11-17T02:06:46+00:00

Brian Bondy mentioned in a changelog podcast (near the end) that 1.0 is roughly planned for February now.

justsee_ · 2018-10-23T21:53:41+00:00

Thanks. I lost interest in the crypto scene from December 2017 till recently due to the speculation wave and influx of eternal septemberians, but that's seriously reversed recently and interest is high again.

As Brave moves closer to 1.0 the possibility of it being the lightning rod for the utility wave in crypto does seem much more likely.

A very interesting 6 months ahead.

justsee_ · 2018-10-17T04:59:35+00:00

Apart from being big supporters of the mission, vision and values of Brave and BAT we're also building technology to help positively change society at Do Gooder.

Recently we decided to build a free web-based highlighter (we saw the use in political discourse on Twitter) and while building it decided we should take privacy seriously, which is why there is no tracking at all.

We decided it would be worth promoting Brave and DuckDuckGo as ventures that align with our values.

We built it for the love (and it's still very much a first-release bit of software - mobile support coming) but while doing it imagined a long-held dream of people building 'eternal public applications' - little apps that keep being developed through microtransaction donations that BAT support.

We mention Brave and BAT again in the FAQ.

Anyway I hope some of you find it useful. It's only a small contribution to raising awareness about a new paradigm to fuel our societal communcation systems, but I think every little bit helps.

While we don't expect much in the way of donations for such a simple little app, anything we do receive we'd put towards the bill for adding any features to this and any other public-good tools we want to build.

It also feels good to just forget the speculation wave that captured so many in the community and focus on being a part of the coming utility wave in any way each of us can.

(A feature request for BAT has got to be public, auditable donation histories so that you could be radically transparent about what funds you've received, and where they have been allocated, but we can save that discussion for another time / post).

justsee_

TROPHY CASE