The smartest guy I’ve ever known (MIT aerospace engineer) likes beer and working on classic cars.
The second smartest guy I know is an unsuspecting normie who loves MDMA.
Im afraid having “existentialism” as a hobby doesn’t make you a genius, it makes you a faggot.
Growing up with a bunch of ball busters you always needed to be ready with a retort, a joke, or a clap back.
So eventually you get into a place where every single conversation you’re just absolutely locked in for talking shit.
This becomes weird when you grow up and move into a college and then industry with people that are 100% not ball busters.
You relax. You stop with the negging and jokes.
But the retorts never really leave your subconscious. Even 20 years later, I still hear every conversation with little gray shit talking responses floating in my mind like auotocomplete suggestions.
It’s like in the end of A Beautiful Mind where the imaginary people are still there but he’s at peace with ignoring them.
The imaginary clapbacks are there, sad, waiting for me to use them. Always. Forever.
A fresh Brave install in 2026: sponsored ad wallpapers on new tab page by default (opt out). Brave VPN, News, Talk, Leo (AI), Rewards and other revenue-milking bloat is advertised/pinned by default. Analytics and "phoning home" by default. Google as default search engine in most regions by default. Sponsored search engines like Russian Yandex in CIS countries by default: https://t.co/nCK7ZErytG
Brave has an ad branch that handles advertising within the browser: https://t.co/EwJwKKgWxq. Brave does on-device ad targeting based on cohorts and interests, just like what Chrome used to do and what Google was largely hated for (remember FLoC?). This applies to additional (opt-in) rewarded ads, shipped as part of Brave.
Brave has injected referral IDs to crypto-related URLs entered into the omnibox in the past, intentionally, by design:
https://t.co/hovGMDz8Et
https://t.co/3wdWDEV85H
https://t.co/fo1mD75vAF
Brave also uses dark patterns to drive users away from turning off ads in their browser. For example, an article linked from the "opt out" button in the browser has a wall of text making excuses for ads before the actual steps needed to be taken to disable them: https://t.co/dka1EIMtbw
kind of hypocritical for brave to judge firefox for lesser bullshit, don't you think?