taanegl

TL;Dr licensed firmware is garbo - open firmware ftw

This - is what we need.

The only ones who can really push the envelope on getting RISC-V into the hands of consumer, and indeed up to an IPC comparable to ARM, are companies like Deep Computing and Si-Five.

The biggest problem in the computing world, bar none, are not the predatory companies, vendor lockins, or proprietary operating systems, it’s always been licensing. This is why BSD existed in the first place, because a $1000 a month per seat to copy a file without pulling and pushing bits around is a bit too much, even if it was the 70s.

Similarly, in a time of green washing, eWaste and even planned obsolescence, one of the things that help to underpin all of these afformentioned evils is secret sauce firmware.

No matter what you say, if you don’t have access to the source code for firmware and bootloaders, you’ve got a lifetime set by the vendor based on how long they can actually support the hardware - because employees cost money. You can’t realistically expect a company to support something they’re not making money on anymore, and they’d most likely just want to sell you new hardware.

This is where RISC-V comes in swinging. I’m not saying that all RISC-V hardware will come with open firmware, but the ball is rolling and with it we can finally bridge the gap spanned by tech companies, where the average Jane or Joe can in effect easily modify their firmware code, albeit through security principles of course.

Unlike Open Source, Open Firmware is a bit trickier. Decades of industrial precedent, and indeed vendor lockins the OEM’s are beholden to, like proprietary BIOS, makes it that much harder to establish - especially when designing an entire ISA and getting it to prefab is a Lord of the Rings length journey. There is no griffin shortcut.

No doubt I’ll have naysayers. Just mentioning open firmware in the average matrix chat riles the gallery, as is the style, but even the likes of NVIDIA are opening up their code (thanks, AI) to the point where NVK is not that far from stable, untainting your kernel. Yay.

Everybody ♥️ open source, don’t they? But how about giving some love to Open Firmware? In the FUTURE 🐙 we’ll hopefully have vendors and foreign interests shoved tf out of our hardware, and good riddance, because they shouldn’t be in control of it in the first place.

I await your ire.

And shout outs to the libreboot maintainer. What in the ever loving Carmack is FSF up to? Libre ain’t a brand, it’s a philosophy.

The sponsor of this war is VODKA! Here in Russia, we feed it to babies, to make new orcs!

No! Now take this slave labour cobalt and partake in the market place of ideas… I said partake! *shakes fist*

How many states made EV’s illegal, how much subsidies have been misappropriated by mainstay industries, and what have lobbyists been doing to prevent the fostering of EV technology? That’s like, what, 2 decades of corporate meddling and political boot licking for these “job creators”?

Preventing progress and hampering the US’s competitive advantage. Why are they not labelled as traitors yet? The door may already have been closed and China owns that house. How do I know that? Let’s check historic precedent in another technological field.

Most AMOLED and OLED are manufacturers in either South Korea or Japan. Sharp provides Apple with all its panels for instance. This is because both the south Korean and Japanese governments subsidized the shit out of these technologies in the mid 20th century. That’s using subsidies to effectively corner markets - which is a big brain move. China may have done this for EV’s already.

This is because Chinese, South Korean and Japanese politicians aren’t a bunch of rubes who sold their integrity to the highest bidder and have the wherewithal to see one meter in front of their faces. This is also a problem of neo- and classical liberalism, because they still think that their “free market principles” will prevail.

Like the bunch of rubes they are.

We need to criminalise the proximity of congressman around microphones.

Good. The US shouldn’t get a blank cheque to just arrest somebody without a good reason.

That the leaked information caused the US government some pain is not a good enough reason, mostly because no power should be beyond reproach… because it’s extremely undemocratic and very anti free speech.

But congress gonna congress, I guess.

Oh no! It’s not wage slavery? Listen, we just need you to transfer a symbolic amount between accounts, okay? Like we’ve been doing for the past 70 years.

Direct slavery is kinda hard to defend, but wage slavery? That makes our shareholders happy, that millions of people get to pull themselves up by their bootstraps the rest of their lives… think of how much character they’ll build!

/s

Like I’m glad slavery and wage slavery gets a nod, but I can’t help but feel like this is “too little, too late” protectionism.

The west literally pinned up all of this, when around the 50s, executives, shareholders and politicians decided to snub labour negotiations by moving manufacturing and fabrication to communist China so they could cut labour costs. .

But you know, socialists and nationalists like protectionism, for some reason, so ew🤮. Plus it’s not very “free market”. Therefore, sweatshop go brrrr /s

Don’t blame the Americans. They don’t see that we have our own slow crawl in a race to the bottom. The EU has recognised it and pays lip service, but that organ-grinder gotta spin, spin, spin…

…but yeah, regulation wise Europeans get a ton more representation. In the US representation means which talking mouthpiece is going to serve the instituons today, and then they go do a lil insider trading - as a treat.

Show this to someone who believes in the honour system and self regulation… see how they react.

This is what people misunderstand. The question is what effect will it have regarding to how certain governments, organizations and companies deal with ICC law. It’s not a question of getting Netenyahu arrested, but adding more precedent on file to continue pushing divestment.

If the verdict is passed, it’s up to anyone who can use it to weaken the Isreali government and strengthen the Palestinian government, by adding it to the pile of legitimate reasons to cut funding.

So yeah, it’s up to government and people in general - as per usual.

An economist, ey? Running low on shells? Need to nip, tuck a few budgets? Well…

With each passing day that is less and less true. Ask any Hong Kong patriot. Even though China technically hasn’t annexed them, the Hong Kong leadership leans closer towards Beijing every day. I wouldn’t put it past Hong Kong intelligence “doing favours” for Beijing.

You’ll have to install it onto your soul, once again revolutionising the video game industry - and the world at large.

Gosh darn it, Newell. It’s too much winning. So much good faith. Leave some for the rest of us! Look at Elon! He’s dying over there!

Orban.

It’s an ancient political tactic of “I was just defending myself”. What was it the Nazis said about Jews? Oh right, they were just “defending themselves”.

Why not? Because they’ve done this before and it’s getting ridiculous. The process goes thusly.

1. Isreal announces a ceasefire plan they are sure Palestinians will reject
2. Palestinian officials accepts the ceasefire
3. Isreal goes “Well screw it then, now I don’t want to do it” and continues their genocidal ways.

And so on, and so forth.

I wish whoever said that gets smacked into reality, because that is ridiculously tone-deaf.

The reason one would want to discredit sociology are many, but most of them are made by authoritarians who want to “write history” by removing the academic discipline that studies society, because you’re supposed to have society defined by the autocrat.

Maybe Florida should become partly communist, because that’s a big red flag.

And yes, that was a trigger for Floridians, because this is stupid

The Sapmi are really taking up the fight here, you guys, not just for them, but for Norwegians as well.

For some context, the windmills in Norway are EXTREMELY disliked. Partly because trusting cost cutting European companies was a mistake (they are proned to error have a tendency to fall apart) and partly because they make the Norwegian landscape look ugly AF.

Fun fact about Norwegians, is that we are suppusedly “national romantics”, in that norwegians supposedly worship the forests , the mountains, the fjords… until the deforestation, wanting to dump coals in the fjords, the fucking cruise liner tourism my fucking GOD the cruise liner tourism…

Suffice to say, our neo-liberal parties are a bunch of toadies. I and many other Norwegians thank the Sapmi for checking the powers that be. But we still gotta protest, we still gotta make sure collective power isn’t trumped by elitism.

Also, the government “gave back” a ton of land to a Baron family, which was acquired by the Norwegian government because all nature belongs to Norwegians. Its now being defrosted as we speak. See how neo-liberalism is also fucking up Norway?