The esp32 supports efuses that can be used to require a signed binary to boot. So they could lock their hardware to only work with their binary. Source code wouldn’t matter.
Of course if the source is open you can buy and put together your own hardware and then put their code on it.
I’m not advocating what they’re doing. Rent seeking is rent seeking even if they need to recoup development costs. I’d rather pay for open hardware and software with no monthly fee.
I realized a while back that social media is trying to radicalize everyone and it might not even be entirely the oligarchs that control its fault.
The algorithm was written with one thing in mind: maximizing engagement time. The longer you stay on the page, the more ads you watch, the more money they make.
This is pervasive and even if educated adults tune it out, there is always children, who get Mr. Beast and thousands of others trying to trick them into like, subscribe and follow.
This is something governments should be looking at how to control. Propaganda created for the sole purpose of making money is still propaganda. I think at this point that sites feeding content that use an algorithm to personalize feeds for each user are all compromised.
Is the list if 40k apps public? Can someone write an app that checks to see if any of them are installed on a phone?
It seems to me they did the current balancing for the 3090 because they had to. Cost wasn’t a driving factor when the goal was to push the most power to the card, but they don’t control any aspect of the PSU and can’t be sure how it will deliver power.
Once they rolled out the 12V HPwr standard they got those sense pins and someone looked at the design and said hey, we can save $$/card by not doing our own power management. It might also, if we’re being nice to nvidia, have been removed because power switching is probably an electrically noisy operation, and a source of heat, so they wanted it to be away from the video card.
But they left two resistors in there for a tiny bit of redundancy.
Then someone said hey, this resistor is doing nothing and we need the board space for… Any number of reasons, or they wanted to save a few pennies, and it got axed.