I worked with Ralph when he was at Brave. I fondly remember many long walks in downtown Vancouver with him, getting tea at Matchstick and chatting about Rust and privacy and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I still can't believe this. Huge loss.
Programming with LLMs is fundamentally different than going from a lower-level to a higher-level language, even apart from the whole non-determinism thing. With a programming language, you're still writing a for-loop, whether that's in C, Java or Rust. There's language primitives that help you think better in certain languages, but they're still, at the end of the day, code and context that you have to hold in your head and be intimately familiar with.
That changes with LLMs. For now, you can use LLMs to help you code that way; a programming buddy whose code you review. That's soon going to become "quaint" (to quote the author) given the projected productivity gains of agents (and for many developers it already has).
Programming languages need to give the developer a way to iterate (map, fold, for-loop, whatever) over a collection of items. Over time we've come up with more elegant ways of doing this, but as a programmer, until LLMs, you've still had to be actively involved in the control logic. My point is that a developer's relationship with the code is very different now, in a way that wasn't true with previous low-to-high level language climbs.
The grants came from our token fund, not users' tokens (no way to buy BAT then).
The issue which I found out about late, and fixed right away, was infringing on right to publicity, nothing to do with donations from users' own tokens.
Already shared, but that (what you linked to) was a proposal and no deliverable was ever publicly released. A simple prototype was made and tested by a limited number of employees - instead of showing an ad, it would show a picture of a mustachioed man as a placeholder. That silly picture would be replaced with real code if the idea panned out. It didn't. The idea and the code was canned before I joined Brave and I've been here for almost 10 years (I joined August 2016).
Disclaimer in case it's not obvious: I am a Brave employee
That blog post is about a partnership (which ended), but you probably saw some sponsored images at the time, in new tab pages (1 of 4 then, I think; the rest are just art images).
These are non-tracking, carefully designed (including vetting by Brave), brand advertising images. They are not ads (we never did this) inserted into publisher pages, or (opt-in only) push notifications.
Brave has been working to find ways to sustain ourselves, and these sponsored images are still a good revenue line, although lesser now vs other lines. If you want, turn them off.
Free riding is always an user right, we don't try to stop it on principle, as if we ever could with open source. But there's no free lunch: if you use Firefox, you are Google's product. If you use a Firefox fork, you're free riding on Gecko which costs a lot to maintain. HTH
Self-plug but if anyone is interested in learning more about how browser fingerprinting works and the different protections browser makers deploy against it, I wrote a longer post about this a few months ago: https://pitg.network/news/techdive/2025/08/15/browser-finger...
This would be akin to Chrome sending the user's (unmodified) URLs to Google. Even Chrome thinks that that would be really bad for user privacy, and goes through elaborate techniques to not leak the user's direct browsing to Google, even for security-positive use-cases like Safe Browsing.
