"the following is a conversation with brendan ike creator of the javascript programming language co-founder of mozilla which created the firefox browser and now co-founder and ceo of brave software whi..."

"tension between theory and engineering that i've been thinking a lot about i tweeted something like good execution is more important than a good idea but one helps the other i think the wording of tha..."

"conversation with brandon ike when did you first fall in love with programming i didn't program a lot when i was in high school but i had a friend who had a commodore pet and after we saw star wars he..."

"at santa clara university and you know i dodged the fortran bullet because i was in the science department instead of the engineering department where they still did fortran card decks i think they ha..."

"maybe uh linger on the pascal like what kind of programming language was it what is it reminiscent of of today because it sounds like it may have had uh an impact on your own trajectory yeah it was in..."

"i was also interested in c in unix by the time i was an undergrad because uh people were bringing unix up on all sorts of hardware i had some friends who were doing their own wire wrapped computers 68..."

"national semi chip and it never got made successfully it was full of bugs and i never could have brought it up but i went on uh out of physics after three years into math computer science and like i s..."

"physics does it make you sad that uh theoretical physics even with strength theory hasn't really had any foundational breakthroughs in the latter part of the 20th century and uh yeah in fact i'd say t..."

"in building up is it closer to elon or is it closer to feynman and einstein and those well those gentlemen are no longer with us and i think that's noticed so like i said the real glory days of physic..."

"don't really have to be tested against reality they can instead become policy tools or they can become like i said uh one of a large family of alternate theories that could be as predictive but nobody..."

"little puzzles i mean i don't know do you to you as somebody who was in math and computer science and then ended up going into places where you engineered some of the most impactful things in this wor..."

"more useful for people which goes from you know design problems which are really kind of an art like you've said anything you can't automate as an art yeah well we can have you know machine learning c..."

"and a friend who'd been there went to one of the last of the super companies the super startups in in the early 90s there were several i suppose general magic was a little after that around the same t..."

"um sort of wide instructions or multiple issue uh and and doing a lot of the stuff in software because the second iteration the set-top box was really for avoiding the cost to the cable company of rol..."

"complex uh quadrature amplitude modulated signal so you're basically taking a to d converters dumping things in buffers and then doing the rest in software all the framing and the reed solomon and vit..."

"and you know when he sent that eric bean had already written the code and you know i talked to tim berners-lee more recently just a few years ago and he was like oh we had another way of doing it yeah..."

"principle of the internet is moving fast wins you could say in in almost any network system like in biological evolution you see successful alleles sweet populations and they don't always have um you ..."

"visual basic script it would have been bad uh so that's a good way to present the alternative but so you're it was a netscape and you were you have written in how many days and why was it only that ma..."

"to do ebay to get people to recognize a url on a billboard and then type it in when they get home and that was huge um that that was so fast moving a rocket that uh mark and um the engineering team th..."

"which was the 16-bit windows 3-1 which was going away microsoft was coming out with windows 95 and everyone was afraid they were going to do you know internet explorer i guess two at that point three ..."

"language it's evolved and improved quite a lot since then too but it was for sort of serious advanced programmers that cost a certain salary or hourly rate and people observed bill bill joy observed a..."

"on what became http one one so i was actually i had done protocol work at silicon graphics with greg chesson uh former bell labs intern grad student intern who knew all the unix founders and greg was ..."

"in java's terms from the c term for double precision floating point um or strings or booleans um and objects and so right away there was this constraint looking like java meant kind of the c curly bra..."

"think and up till then microsoft had been using java components like in outlook web access which had a lot of javascript to be a web mail like hotmail like user interface they had to call the the mail..."

"being successfully the loser and getting kicked out and after microsoft kicked it out it was a plug-in and you would find it required for like smart card banking in in the nordic countries where that ..."

"immutable function over time they had the tooling around that too like that dreamweaver there's a flash flash a director there were a bunch of them yeah i mean yeah they that was a flash builder was o..."

"and what happened with the browser due to microsoft's monopoly abuse for which they were convicted and you know um even after that until i think firefox and then chrome was people kept saying oh the w..."

"some point so like it's like those are those days it would be it would be interesting if you could just describe actually zooming in on the how the cake was baked uh from the you know the the several ..."

"and indeed there are problems if you did it naively you'd see the code laid out as like random gibberish so i had to figure out how to hide that that was a challenge is that is it a breakthrough idea ..."

"to hide it from old browsers including netscape one one which was predominant then so i used an html comment but the inside the container that comment lived in the script tag which is a new element i ..."

"even people inside sun are definitely doubting bill joy was the champion but he was like alone in that in seeing there was a role for javascript as the as i call it the sidekick language robin the boy..."

"in those 10 days sprint between two objects of different dynamic type said no they're not equal their types are different and then after that i had internal early adopters and they were using javascri..."

"out um but during the 10 days i also like i said i was in such a hurry i left out garbage collection came back to haunt me but i got reference counting in in time that people weren't running out of me..."

"vm we wouldn't need sun and mark was like well maybe we can just you know ditch sun or java vm or if you're a javascript vm we now we need graphics so mark was thinking far ahead because he knew you c..."

"so that was an ambitious period and mark was very generative because he was pushing hard he was ambitious and he wanted to have netscape possibly be in control of the ball maybe you could speak to the..."

"back then um gates you know aggressive character not really original in my view not an originator steve jobs famously said once he doesn't have any taste and i don't mean this in a small way there's n..."

"but uh distribution matters and that's why uh i think ie was going to win that's why everybody at netscape felt were doomed this was something michael toy and jamie would say were doomed um but for a ..."

"which i learned later about from eric von hippel of mit which is user innovation networks lead user effects that throwing out javascript even though we weren't doing open source we were doing beta rel..."

"in this it's been a bumpy ride because the standards body got shut down after microsoft i think um took over the web and then felt punished by the usb microsoft antitrust case can you speak to the san..."

"admitted you know the kind of users who were committing these errors and the funniest part was microsoft said hey we're doing xml but the way they put it in internet explorer under the default media t..."

"aggressive they were sending cease and desist letters to people whose middle european heritage meant their their surname was javonko and they called their website javanco.com and son was sent them a l..."

"body which had we thought a sort of a proven record of standing up to microsoft but microsoft sent a lot of people they sent some some people who were pretty good and then when they realized that i wa..."

"beautiful or painful that those early days you as a designer of the world it was painful because it was rushed now guy steel was contributed by sun so even more than sean you had this giant brain guy ..."

"so this is the engineering mindset versus the theoretician so you didn't want to create the perfect language but one that was the popular and shipped and all that kind of and you could say there was i..."

"quickly mozilla took years to really bring up um the standard froze and by 2003 even though they've been sort of noodling around with advanced versions javascript 2 i'd given the keys to the kingdom t..."

"so you look at the family tree and you see these forks and the main ones are the the ones that go into adobe flash acquired from macromedia and the one that went into the server side of microsoft's st..."

"such a big job i mean like you said there's a thread that connects all of it but es6 is when it's like became this language that it almost feels ready to take over the world completely we're programmi..."

"towards the standard over time and i think they've played generally fair there there's some sentiment that why don't they standardize typescript well they've been clear they don't want to they have a ..."

"what do you think about the giant ecosystem of frameworks uh in javascript it feels like because i mean this is a side effect of how many people use javascript yes a lot of uh entrepreneurial spirit l..."

"kind of uh because javascript lacks some of the features of jquery and so like uh now that javascript is swallowing what jquery was then the frameworks will only the ones that truly add value will sti..."

"you can correct me like a beautiful piece of design work it was uh it's not often with web stuff i you have this breadth of just like oh whoever did this is did they fix it this just feels good uh is ..."

"syntax like the fetch api instead of xml http request um video too as well it's ultimately it feels like maybe you can correct me it feels like it was the nail in the coffin a flash steve jobs saying ..."

"we had something that um people didn't realize we had that vision that mark and jason have this this graphics capable to the metal uh portable runtime and we at mozilla realized this and we we saw jav..."

"performance it doesn't touch the garbage collector it calls a bunch of functions that come from the c functions or c plus plus code that you're compiling and you can make the epic unreal engine go in ..."

"let's use the portable native client code that google had acquired native client um which is a separate lineage we're taking basically c code compiling it into a software fault isolated container of s..."

"java has some dynamic aspects due to invoke interface you can have basically collections of java code where you don't know at the time each each module or package is compiled exactly what's being call..."

"today javascript is the most popular language in the world why by many measures why do you think that is is it is there some fundamental ideas that you've already spoke to a little bit sort of broader..."

"but it's it's not true it's a dynamic language small talk had classes um python has classes um there are lots of lisp variants that have classy systems um comment list um so you know people who don't ..."

"yeah and eliminated the fee through various kinds of um you know straddles or some kind of spread operation that helped them eliminate the fee and or eat the fee and in fact you know as a broker in th..."

"cannot rule it out so rest will be around for a long time the longer you're around the more likely you're lindy and you're around a lot of people ask me like uh i i'm i'm often torn between recommendi..."

"two i had my python right it came from a lineage of abc which was a pedagogical language in in the netherlands um and um it uh you know um it it it was a good teaching language too i think it is a goo..."

"blunder that right just you don't get punished for you don't detect and there's an undefined value and you don't know where it came from right i've been reading a lot about military history recently a..."

"javascript event hookup and things like that that that team was fairly burnt out and i think having gone public uh the man upper management wanted to buy a bunch of companies to try to go head-to-head..."

"jamie and a few others put some extra effort into secure mime was supported in the mail built-in mail program and sk4 was late and it was only on windows at first and microsoft had really started doin..."

"the same flavor as the stuff that i did and neither of them was like the later sort of verbose java like dom w3c standardized but ie4 was pretty darn good we i remember a friend scott fuhrman and i go..."

"liking dealing with standardization they they let it rot they just abandoned it i five five five um i6 later but these were not well maintained they had a lot of security bugs and files really closed ..."

"and then like wait a minute you get the groove yeah you get the groove and you understand so that timing what year was this uh so because uh also as a aspiring web designer i used table so we didn't m..."

"was we had an open source project we had a lot of the engineers on staff on our side and we had um people we'd hired for the mosul community were top-notch they'd risen you know they came in high qual..."

"will rise out of the that's exactly right and so we had this this mozilla code base that was getting better in fact i think at some point in 2002 when we declared mozilla 1-0 we i engineered a road ma..."

"and then adding netscape flavor to it were not calling the shots right and they were also under al's thumb a little bit and that they said we should probably put the aol instant messenger chiclet on t..."

"they and hyatt was really the senior hacker he'd done all these things like amazing uh cross-platform menus through the user interface markup language and he knew how to do tab browsing he implemented..."

"posts about how to do tabs right and at some point apple said don't don't blog about that that's our proprietary tab technology you know it's like no it's not it was an opera and i've refined it um so..."

"have their own browsers yeah so in case people don't know the the main revenue source for the browser is the default search engine which is kind of incredible to think about that the that is a revenue..."

"and what really got them started i think was um chrome and you know i talked to larry page in 2005 i think i said you know we're talking about the firefox relationship but he was also saying what abou..."

"browsers had tabs at this point and it had this software fault isolation i mentioned it was through process isolation so in theory each tab has its own operating system process and so what's going to ..."

"wave because it's a large somewhat chaotic structure it's not a unitary good you can't say i'm buying privacy for you know three dollars i'm paying three dollars privacy some people think a vpn does t..."

"tracking there's network uh tracking there's network privacy is not guaranteed at all because you're using the same internet and isp as a public window a non-private window but sorry had that early on..."

"cookies you have tracking because that image server can be serving a little one by one pixel and they still use the word pixel on adtech and that pixel can be served from the same server embedded diff..."

"now they're looking at what social media has created and they're looking at and like a world is looking at itself in the mirror and seeing that privacy is actually something supposed to like a nice th..."

"that so maybe can you like describe what brave is yes and what are its key principles and uh what's broken and what is it brave trying to fix so when i realized that these accidents like the third par..."

"javascript so how do you tell the first from the third party and it's not easy it's not a matter of just what's embedded from a different server because a lot of publishers use benign scripts from unr..."

"exploited intelligent tracking prevention in safari was sophisticated enough to counteract this and it did other things and it's evolved since they did it and we've evolved brave too and so when i say..."

"apple uh and with brave leading the way we we block third-party cookies almost without exception so we've just blocked them and that gives us a very strong privacy uh benefit but it also means some si..."

"letting you know ads appear and it didn't really work and meanwhile the ad blocking adoptions just continued intelligent tracking prevention in safari in 2017 brave from 2016 on with very strong cooki..."

"directly with the user you have limited choices the user generally isn't going to sign up with a ach bank connection or a credit card the the publisher isn't going to sign up the user except just a su..."

"subscriptions so for a long time people talked about micro payments there was glendale and netherlands which came to the us but didn't grow and i thought if you have just a browser and it's protecting..."

"ethereum you can have smart contracts the bitcoin system is not turned complete so what you can do with the script is more limited but you can still do sort of clever things um even with bitcoin scrip..."

"all sorts of problems so brave blocks it and then we give users the ability to give back and because we invented the basic attention token and ethereum we can do this three-way split and we can give u..."

"think the beauty of being able to send peer-to-peer without any bank in the middle without any you know huge wire charge and two-day delay and all that nonsense it's beautiful and i've used it i love ..."

"so the way our ad system works i mentioned it being private but how does that work we don't see your data at all all browsers are sort of the mother of all data feeds your history all your searches at..."

"there seems to be some really profound ideas here that that are different than what the internet has grown up to be if brave or something like brave the ideas the fundamental philosophical ideas under..."

"what if that were web standard what if brave pioneered it first and we took three percent and we did it in a way that was through your browser so we couldn't censor it um yeah that's brilliant yeah do..."

"thought what's you know google's innovator's dilemma apart from just you know getting being mature and having trouble innovating it's that they have come to depend on this ad tech system that has all ..."

"talking about oligarchy i do think and that if it controls a nation state that's formidable it's the tax and the police power the military power it means that you may have the great firewall of china ..."

"can still sort of thread them together yeah that's brilliant and and this didn't happen because browsers got captured by the central powers why did they get captured mostly because of search and searc..."

"you have to have either new land to go to which you know some people's ancestors not mine i did to found the country um um mostly irish german um you have uh new virtual space people go to and that re..."

"i don't know if you've seen this piece yet no i haven't if you tried to say that as a trump supporter in in november after the election you get banned from twitter but now time in its twitter account ..."

"microsoft so but ultimately i don't know you i don't know if you're optimistic or cynical about the possibility of breaking out big tech to me uh i'm optimistic that tools like brave i love the idea o..."

"i i decided to journey out from the world of being a researcher at mit and potentially doing a startup myself and i've been thinking of you know i wanted to come to silicon valley to do so it's the la..."

"think is just good politics um america is fundamentally a commercial republic so you would think this would be what's happening for a long time california was the golden state i came here in late 76 w..."

"it gave freedom to like young kids entrepreneurs young minds brave minds to think bold to try different stuff i mean even if the taxes are high so outside of financial stuff outside of all of that hou..."

"war stuff um you had uh out of the academia you had shockley and then the the traitorous aid and fairchild and intel and but now you know when's the last fab that was built in the valley micro unity m..."

"places that come up i don't know if silicon valley has you know passed some sell-by date because it did hurt the the chronovirus hurt the lockdowns hurt and the fact in the sense that part of what kee..."

"um and uh you know that sort of happened while i was here you saw a lot of money drive prices up along the narrow peninsula and the single people wanted nightlife so they were in the city and the cond..."

"and i i sympathize a lot because i i'm old i got married fairly old so i i understand all that i nothing human is alien to me as terence said uh but um i don't fear it no what do you hope your legacy ..."

"um in some ways it's american right it's uh it's not hard revolutionary it's not trying to burn the past and destroy everything it's more like we have these certain let's say um rights we have duties ..."

"that's not over rometz says it too much but uh i think some special things have already happened in this country and will continue to happen and that's and that spirit can continue no matter you know ..."