I’m not supporting brave here, but do you have any evidence that the open source Chromium browser sends data to Google in any situation? The way I see it, Chromium is like android AOSP without Google apps, less functional but generally de-googled.

I can’t say I’ve reviewed every line of code in that huge project, but I’d be shocked if the rest of the open source community working on Chromium was willing to have tracking code in it or anything else which phones home to Google, even if the majority of the developers working on the open source project are Google engineers.

Ultimately, both Brave and Firefox are open source, so you can look through the code and verify for yourself whether either browser are doing something unethical.

This ungoogled-chromoim project is probably worth checking out, they maintain a patch set which explicitly removes the only things in chromium which send data to Google, which is pretty much just the web services for search bar autocomplete and DNS pre-fetching etc.

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium?tab=readme-ov-file#motivation-and-philosophy

Thanks for taking the time to reply! I’m definitely not angry, I personally think all of these countries suck and it’s none of my business really so there’s no emotion in it for me, I’m just curious to understand where people are coming from when they post inflammatory / heated messages.

For what it’s worth, I definitely don’t think Iran is any better than Israel overall - they’ve both done pretty awful things over the years. I just think Iran is slightly more of a victim of the US (starting with the 1953 coup) whereas Israel has always had unconditional support from the US. When you’re talking about a war-hungry country with the worlds largest military, that’s a big deal.

I’ve just asked this prompt to an unbiased LLM and read through the responses, would love to hear your take on the below and if there’s anything you disagree with / think is false in it’s responses:

“throughout the last few decades, in all of the conflict in the middle east, has Iran been more of a bully or a victim? and, how much of the conflict in the middle east, including anything with Iran or Israel, has been ultimately caused by the US (directly or indirectly)? please try to remain unbiased in your response, I’m interested in plain facts as much as possible (even though I know I’m asking a subjective question)”

LLM response here; I know it’s a lot of text but it’s super informative, IMO worth a read and I’d love to hear your response if you do read it! https://gist.github.com/beveradb/d35beffc4f26299e24c34fb8889fbb8e

Yeah I’m calling bullshit on that quote, I’d like to see proof of any smart TV having beefy enough hardware to record anything at 100fps+, and even then what would be the point? Nothing played back on the screen will even have a frame rate and 60fps… I’m sure this is a lazy article mistake

EDIT: I take it back, I talked it out with Gemini and understand the logic and realistic implementation now, it’s a dedicated part of the SoC design. Still hate the fact that this is a thing, we just need to spread the word about not connecting your actual TV to the internet at all ever.

https://g.co/gemini/share/e37d7882d427

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I’m genuinely curious to understand your point of view.

For what it’s worth, my personal answer to those questions is the same for both questions, I think - “mostly”.

I think the US is ultimately the one to blame for the vast majority of conflict around the world, as they’ve been destabilising fledgling democracies, installing puppet governments, supplying tons of weapons, assassinating leaders, generally manipulating and bullying many countries for many decades. In general I think the US is the world’s biggest bully, and has a ton of rich people who profit from war, and the middle east has been one of their many warmongering playgrounds for a long time, sadly.

However, I do also think both Iran and Israel are really shitty, for many reasons - from what I’ve seen as an outsider who has never been to either place, both countries seem to have a long standing, deep rooted racially motivated hatred towards one another, and both are very willing and eager to use force and start wars. Not to mention the variety of human rights abuses in both countries.

So basically I think “everyone sucks here”, but I do think the US is ultimately responsible for most of the conflict. They’ve been meddling in Iran for decades, and Israel has been essentially an extension of the US’s usual bullying for decades, unfortunately accelerated by Netanyahu’s excitement to escalate and expand their territory through genocide and settlement, supported by US and various other western countries’ military supplies…

I’ve seen a few of your messages recently and it seems like you’ve got a lot of anger, but I’m confused about who it’s directed at and why 😅

Would you be willing to explain your point of view on the conflict, or link me to a post where you’ve already explained it?

Oh man so much love went into crafting code for low end MP3 players in the Rockbox project, then everyone ended up carrying around smartphones with tons of compute and memory resource to waste