Couldn't recommend it more. I've been on their $100/mo. plan and they keep randomly resetting my weekly usage limit. It's been wild. Don't know how long it will last, but I couldn't go through all my usage if I tried.
Their Sol model has been doing great for most of my tasks, even at its "Medium" setting.
Much different picture then back when I was using Claude. I would sneeze and half my usage would be gone and then it go down several times in between.
I think there's some truth to this, however, I remember hearing similar arguments when people where using calculators on things they were suppose to be working out by hand.
I bet if you had one of these students explain the rationale behind a strategy they put together for winning at TFT, he or she would likely give you a very well thought out, coherent, and smart line of thinking.
If I had to guess, I would bet that it has far less to do with people being "unwilling to think" and far more of kids becoming exhausted by the boring, learn by memorization, pad your writing to fill space, monotony of an old and outdated education system, divorced from anything at all resembling the real world.
Speaking from experience, I did horrible in school and 100% would've been using ChatGPT whenever I could just to get through it.
The second I got out of school and found out work is far more result/merit based, I "learned" really, really quickly.
The old Mark Twain classic: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Every generation thinks the new generation is getting soft, but there is a critical difference this time. Things like calculators replaced the mechanics of multiplication and long division. You still had to know what to multiply and divide, however. In contrast, AI is replacing high level thinking. Now, you just copy questions wholesale into your favorite LLM and copy the answers back. That’s different and a lot more troubling, IMO.
> I don't really get why people have the audacity to presume what other people like and do.
Part of this is that we are increasingly in self-selected communities of people just like us. Prior to the Internet and social media, you more often interacted with people that all you had in common with was spatial location and a dash of socio-economic status. It wasn't an unbiased slice of the populace, but it was at least less biased.
But today, it's much easier to have all of your social interactions limited to a social media bubble that reflects yourself.
That in turn makes it really easy to believe that whatever is true for you must be true for everyone because it seems to be largely true for all the people you see on a daily basis.
I know that I'm in a bit of a bubble with this one, but I am surprised there is still anyone using Chrome instead of Brave. I get the dependency on Gmail other Google-specific tools, but the built-in ad blocking and Google-free aspects of it made me switch instantly and haven't look back after years.
Chrome has stayed incredibly sketchy from the beginning, when Google gained marketshare by sneaking Chrome into the installer for other products that people intentionally downloaded.
Then Chrome did things like "accidentally" uploading your entire browsing history to Google servers when you signed into Gmail.
Now they have declared war on ad blockers, despite the government warning that ad networks are too big a malware vector to ignore.
All they did was add their own affiliate link to crypto links that didn't have them. You didn't get tracked from it, and you didn't lose out on anything.
Still sketchy because of the lack of consent, but people act like Brave personally stole money from them.
The other "sketchy crypto stuff" is one of the few actually workable alternatives to funding websites with ads on webpages. Again, Brave took in no money (BAT) that you as an admin / creator would have otherwise had, and they keep it in escrow, they don't claim it.
The only other sketchy thing I can remember is pre-installing a deactivated VPN so that people could pay, push a button and it'd work immediately. Plenty of companies do hacks like that for the sake of UX. Dropbox used to hack macOS its Accessibility permission so people wouldn't have to dive into settings to toggle certain things.
The irony is that Firefox has had their own scandals like surreptitiously installing a hidden ad extension that would advertise for Mr. Robot, but somehow Firefox stans have erased that kerfuffle from their collective memory.
> The irony is that Firefox has had their own scandals like surreptitiously installing a hidden ad extension that would advertise for Mr. Robot, but somehow Firefox stans have erased that kerfuffle from their collective memory.
Brave is my default browser for non-sensitive tasks; e.g. most web browsing, GitHub, news, etc.
The built-in ad-blocker & tracker blocker alone is worth it.
Use chrome for testing.
Stock Firefox for anything sensitive.
In my mind, no browser is perfect. However, as far as I can tell that’s not nearly as sketchy as the title implies. It’s for local debugging.
Zen has other issues for me on Ubuntu (eating a ton of resources) which is why I usually use FF. But I put Zen in a different category from Brave and definitely better than Chrome.
I switched to Firefox when Chrome started messing with the ad blockers. Haven't really had any issues. I prefer developer tools on Chrome but I rarely need to use them anyway.
The trouble is that Mozilla has admitted they can't survive without Google's revenue. You are basically using Google by proxy unless you use a truly independent browser engine of they get blocked by Cloudflare for not having enough fingerprinting tech.
(Ungoogled) Chromium and Firefox are both projects that are open source and readily available. The code is sitting there ready for you to compile. More users = more donations. You can be the change you wanna see.
> You are basically using Google by proxy unless you use a truly independent browser engine
This conclusion doesn't follow your premise. Google has to pay because if Mozilla dies, so does the claim of any real competition on the browser engine market. So everyone agrees Firefox's engine is truly independent. Google pays so Firefox users don't use anything that has to do with Google.
If you think about it, the only real way to not hurt Google is for Firefox to stop existing. Chrome would end up being spun off from Google.
I don't agree that you are using Google by proxy when Firefox has more technical independence from Google than Chrome and can be quickly decoupled from the few Google defaults it has, search and safe browsing.
What browser can genuinely claim independence from Google? Chromium browsers are all arguably in the same camp. If FF is implicated, then so are forks like Zen.
Because some things only work in Chrome. It's a fact. It's terrible.
We're the frogs being boiled, over the last decade. People sounded the alarms, but they were looked at like they had tin foil on their heads. Now, it's clear they were right.
I'm speaking generally, of course. I use Firefox for all my personal stuff, except for those situations where it doesn't work.
Chrome likes to make up new "standards" and then some websites adopt them immediately.
That said, I can only remember two instances of that slightly inconveniencing me in the past, and both times I was inconvenienced by a Google-run website: once upon a time Google Earth refused to work, and once upon a time I couldn't tweak my Google Meet background. Both are no longer the case.
Citation needed. I've seen the opposite--unless there's a very specific niche that can't be otherwise solved, there's huge internal resistance to going it alone.
The biggest counterexample I can think of: WebUSB was critical to Chromebooks supporting external devices, but I can see why Safari might not want it. It has Firefox support at last, though.
Citation of what exactly? That not all browsers implement the same thing at the same time and that some features are Chrome-exclusive because for one reason or another other browsers refuse to implement it?
Is that really something you need a citation on? You sure seem to have come up with an example of your own.
In the past there were features that didn't work at all; I used to hit those regularly. Device setup flows, AV features, etc. These days, it's never "this doesn't work on other browsers". It's always "this is worse on other browsers", whether because they don't test it or because they don't care.
YouTube is terrible on Firefox. There was a period where it was usable but got increasingly worse with missed frames, low frame rate. On FastMail and Gmail the expanded search overlay doesn't disappear when you click outside (ESC doesn't work), you often get stuck with it. On YouTube when you stop hovering over the "I like this" etc. on full screen video view, the tooltip doesn't disappear. It's death by a thousand cuts.
I wonder if he's using a Radeon gpu, those have had issues like video playback making the entire ui framerate drop. But it happens in steam/electron too, not only firefox. The shader cores aren't used much either, it's just a bug.
A lot of IT now curates the extensions for the browsers and doesn't allow extensions not on the whitelist and then they basically just only do that work on Chrome and disable Firefox. It's kinda self defeating in the long run imo but that's the problem in the industry.
I've run into a few restaurant sites whose ordering pages just do not work properly (or at all) in Firefox. Also webgl2 performance is unfortunately still much better in Chrome vs Firefox; as an example, FoundryVTT (virtual tabletop software) works fine in Firefox but is a stuttery mess IME (though it has improved slightly in the last few years).
ups.com is one that really infuriates me. It shows 404s for me on Firefox and works perfectly on Chrome.
Kaiser's website works mostly on Firefox. Recently I had to print a "letter" and on Firefox it was blank and printed fine with Chrome.
I don't know if it's still this way, but Google Meet didn't work very well in Firefox, so last year I took all my meetings in Chrome.
These are just what I remember. There are a LOT more.
EDIT: on the UPS thing... it happens when I follow links from gmail in Firefox. Sometimes it wouldn't 404, but I'd see a "..." and it would just stay that way.
EDIT2: for a long time (not anymore), sending Kaiser emails was broken. Hitting enter would warp to the bottom on the page and I'd have to scroll back up to finish typing. They're completely redesigned the website recently and that bug is fixed.
95% of people who use Chrome have no clue what browser they are using.
They got Chrome when it was bundled with every single installer ever for about a decade (which was so prolific and scummy that Microsoft had to make the "default app" picker system more defensive, because Chrome was abusing it more than microsoft apps were).
When you installed Java, you also got Chrome set as your default browser with no interaction.
Or they one click downloaded it from Google.com because of a giant banner saying "You gotta download chrome"
It's insane to me how rarely people on HN seem to actually know the history of this. Everyone who worked in tech support in the 2010s experienced this.
It was an identical strategy that most spyware and adware used at the time.
Not everyone has a well paying tech job. Many have to use their devices until they literally die and many more choose to do so because getting a newer device would mean having to deal with the bullshit of newer software.
I've just 'upgraded' a friend who was using a ThinkPad T410, released Jan 2010. So sixteen years. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it except it was capped at 8GB RAM and chugged along slowly.
Oh yeah, I know "the average person" still thinks Chrome is the best browser (if they even care at all about what browser they use), but I mean in tech circles is where it surprises me...
1. Because it's most popular. Guaranteed support and "monkey see monkey do".
2. The adblocking is preconfigured, and non technical users trying to find the right extensions has a very bad history of unintentional malware. Ad block? Adblock plus? Ublock? Ublock origin? This is a great example of what floors a lot of technical folk who would be "why not just install ublock origin" and fail to understand the "why should I when I can just get Brave one and it works"
If you're anti-Google, use Firefox. It's hypocritical to use the browser they're paying to build, then complain about how they generate revenue to fund it.
After years of using alternative to chrome (Firefox, Chromium, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, etc ...) I have stopped fighting the choice of IT for installing and setting Chrome as the default browser on a Mac. I still use Firefox when I can and religiously reroute URLs to it where possible, but this is beating me down and I would rather spend time playing with LLMs rather than continue this struggle.
I use thorium, which also belongs to the empire, so it is not really any different to Brave - but I can use ublock origin still, so that's better. I think we are all in the Google empire here. Praising Brave as alternative, simply does not make a whole lot of sense really.
Firefox is a bit outside of it but it basically got rid of most of its users. When I use firefox, I can not play audio on youtube videos. It works fine with thorium. I tried to convince the firefox developer who said everyone on Linux must use pulseaudio (I don't) but there is no reasoning with Mozilla hackers here. He thinks he knows better than everyone else does. (I could recompile firefox from source, but Mozilla uses mozconfig still: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox... - they are too incompetent to transition into meson or cmake. A failing project, no wonder it lost most of its users. Titanic got nothing on the Firefox team.)
Brave’s owner is a very sketchy dude. With all the news that were happening around brave, all the shitcoin stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if the browser is mining crypto.
The single affiliated link scandal is enough to not touch that project with a ten foot pole.
I was using Firefox, Vivaldi, Zen, and finally got fed up with various issues that Zen was having, so I switched to Waterfox. I am very happy and the browser is very fast; difference is immense.
To each their own, but I've been using Brave for a long time (5+ years I think?). It was one or 2 clicks to turn off the crypto stuff when I first installed it. It was straightforward and no dark patterns were employed. It has never come back, unlike what Google and Firefox tend to do with their annoying features. It even syncs my preferences to any new browser I add so I only had to do it on one computer once and never worry about it again.
The web's dependency on Chromium engines is deeply concerning, I agree. I used Firefox for a long time. But at this point, IMO Brave is the most pragmatic choice if you want a browser that's not Google but "just works" with the modern web.
Vivaldi just works without annoying crypto and most importantly provides lot of customization, brave feels like barebone browser next to it, hard to understand why someone stays on such basic browser not allowing any customization (tried both and was shocked how bad is Brave many promote here).
I want to use a browser engine that is not developed/owned by Google, so I use Firefox. I also don't want to support Brave's CEO's politics, so I would not use Brave regardless.
My theory is that, since I'm going to do things like banking in my browser, I want one that has a lot of skin in the game. Chrome being backed by Google has trillions of dollars on the line should they ever do anything truly evil. Though this sneaky 4GB download comes close.
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OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
yeah I've always thought of cyan as just "blue, but really bright", which does make sense - you're going from 0, 0, 100 (blue) to 0, 100, 100 (cyan) so it's twice as far from pure black. I also see pure cyan as being much more blue than green.
How would you feel about a test for "teal or blue" or "teal or green?" You still need to make binary choices, just along different boundaries. Would it make any difference?
if the question was "is this more blue or more green" it would be somewhat more agreeable. but there really just have to be a "can't decide" option as well.
If you gave me the exact same color code 20 times I might give you green 10 times and blue the other 10 because I genuinely can't tell the difference. So it's not a binary like you're claiming.
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
It's so remarkable how many people here refuse to understand your point. It's like, there is no right or wrong, no perfect score, just pure subjectiveness, and they can't handle it. If I wasn't convinced this site is entirely bots before, I might be now....
It is enlightening to see who has been fixed on math proofs as testing and who has been exposed to observational testing. Seems many people have been brain washed into the former, forgetting the latter exists.
>correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. I understand that there's a continuum in reality, but psychologically, I still tend to perceive each shade as discretely either blue or green, especially when the shade is presented in isolation. Words like "teal", "cyan", etc. aren't really part of my normal vocabulary and to the extent that they are, I would think of them as subsets of blue or green, not disjoint sets.
I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
Agreed, there is no clear premise. Of course that different people looking at the same object will use different colour words is a triviality that anyone over, say, 10 years old knows. If that's the premise of the site, it is boring. People are getting excited because they think this implies something about differences in vision or perception... but it doesn't, that requires much more cleverness to test.
The attempted point being to measure and compare how people classify colors between blue and green when given a false dichotomy between the two.
But it cannot do that without bias, since people always have the third choice to drop out when they don't like their choices. There is also another bias, which is people will just select some random option when they want to say something equivalent to "blue-green" but don't have the choice, then they get a result biased in that direction but what has actually happened is they have given up. This random choice might be culturally biased towards people's preferred color. I personally selected green when that occurred for me and then just sat on green hammering that. Oh, I'm more willing to say green than other people? Meaningless, I wouldn't have called those colors green in a conversation.
When presented in a forum people also have the choice of criticising the false dichotomy which is what you are experiencing here. The point of posting it here is to get this sort of feedback, so...
Conjecture is precisely why you don’t understand the test. Bias is the point! Binary choice is how you derive it. No answer is not an answer. How do you not see this? Any conjecture on anything but the two options defeats the entire point of the test. The test is to find your bias towards blue or green. Cake or death.
I don't have the bias towards green that the "test" suggests for the very reason I pointed out. I and others understand the perspective of the test but you don't seem to understand how it fails to meet its own goal since you are caught up in browbeating people that are trying to explain it to you.
It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
I don't know if there are people who treat turquoise and aqua as distinct, but I certainly treat them as distinct from blue (azure, cobalt) and green. Several of the colors around the mid range in the linked page are not colors I would use the words "blue" or "green" for. That doesn't mean that I have strict rules here; I don't actually know if I would call what you call "cyan" turquoise or blue; ditto plenty of other words like "seafoam." That's kind of my point -- modulo another poster's comment about this being a test of bad monitor calibration, it's really more about language than about color.
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
Our green cones are the most sensitive and their range significantly overlaps with red cones, so it's only natural that going from green towards red you'll be able to make clearer distinctions between colors than the other way.
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)
Their Sol model has been doing great for most of my tasks, even at its "Medium" setting.
Much different picture then back when I was using Claude. I would sneeze and half my usage would be gone and then it go down several times in between.
Hope it goes well for you too!