arich

The core point is valid. As someone who self hosts, it's become so complicated to get the most basic functionality setup that someone with little to no knowledge would really struggle whereas years ago it was much simpler. Functionally now we can do much more but practically, we've regressed.

George Hotz had a great point about this and how Comma.ai handles defining the driving problem and what "driving badly" actually means, aka, interacting with and driving as other humans are expected to drive, quirks included. His whole talk is interesting but the short part about that is here: https://youtu.be/IxuU5L2MEII?t=38m11s

I've never liked those things that popped up but, as I was reading I thought I'd definitely go for it if I had something like a digital wallet in the browser that I could preload with a balance and simply use to pay for websites like that with one click.

Doing a quick google search hasn't shown anything like that. Does anyone know if a browser extension or something like this already exists?

I'm actually wondering the same thing. Have you seen the hosting cost? $10,000/month avg. Clearly they can handle traffic themselves. What's the advantage here?