unfortunately "selling your data" is why your 401k has been growing for last few years. it is not going to stop unless regulated by governments and tweaked over time as loopholes in those regulations are found (or added via lobbying). my take is, it is not going to stop, just kept in a pseudo check due to public awareness.
Yes, Brave is using the Blink engine (via Chromium). Chromium is an open source project with many contributors (including Google). Google uses this as part of their larger strategy involving ads and trackers, no doubt. But at the end of the day, it's a tool for displaying websites. To what ends you use it is dependent upon your end goal. Google used to tell everybody "Don't be evil" was at the core of their being; Brave says "Can't be evil". This is a stark difference-Google maintains the capacity to do harm, whereas Brave precludes it.
The Basic Attention Token User Growth Pool was created during our Token Sale in 2017; not from VC funds.
Ad Fraud is relevant because it claims more and more digital advertising dollars each year. Estimate today put it over 20 billion. By reducing middle-men, clearing up reporting, and more, there is less revenue lost, and therefore more revenue for creators and users alike.
By moving ad-matching and more into the Browser, we make it much harder to defraud the system. Further, this system rests solely in the user's domain; you control what is shown and with what frequency.
I actually think that pushing ad matching to the browser will make ad fraud substantially easier, since you will collect less of the data that you could use to detect and block it. It also opens you up to entirely new forms of abuse, such as giving the end user the power to e.g. choose only the highest CPM ads to maximize their revenue share. Should be fascinating to see how you deal with these factors.
+1. As a C++ developer with decade of experience, I'm finding Rust hard. It is a truly innovative language with a rising ecosystem that makes life of developers easier in a lot of areas. But overall the safety and performance benefits do not seem to be worth the effort if you just want to get things done. My thinking is, if you are smart enough to master Rust, and you do need tight control of memory that GC overhead is not worth it, you are probably smart enough to write safer C++.
> if you are smart enough to master Rust, and you do need tight control of memory that GC overhead is not worth it, you are probably smart enough to write safer C++.
As both a C/C++ developer with more than a decade of experience, and a Rust developer, I'll posit that if you are smart enough to master Rust, you still aren't smart enough to write safer C++. Not even close. Rust might enlighten you in some ways, and avoid you doing some mistakes in C++, but without e.g. a borrow-checker, there are still too many ways to shoot yourself in the foot in C++, that Rust would find at compile time, while the equivalent C++ code would fail at runtime. If you're lucky and happen to hit the error conditions when you test it.
> My thinking is, if you are smart enough to master Rust, and you do need tight control of memory that GC overhead is not worth it, you are probably smart enough to write safer C++.
Easy for you to say as a C++ developer! As someone who came to Rust as a JavaScript/PHP/Python developer, I greatly appreciate Rust checking all my work. I'm plenty smart enough to work out the problems that the compiler picks up (once I have an error message I can google for explanations and solutions), I just don't/didn't have the experience to know that my naive code was going to cause problems.
Relatedly, I booked an Uber last night from within the Google Maps app on my phone, and the entire experience was in-app -- route selection, driver pick-up tracking, in-ride tracking, and drop-off confirmation. That's a whole lot tighter integration than I've seen in the past. The rumor-monger in me wants to read all sorts of acquisition talks into that level of product integration.
(Which is great for another reason -- I don't give Uber access to my location when I'm not using the app, and the Uber team has apparently decided to basically brick their own app for users like me. But hooray, Google Maps is now a functional replacement for the Uber client!)
