DVRs were the starting point. The namesake for what you're talking about, tivoization, is Tivo, the DVR that existed way back when TV was still analog and being displayed on CRTs.

It's why the GPLv3 was made: to add clauses to forbid tivoization. Instead, a lot of the open source community moved in the opposite direction, moving to licenses that allowed companies even more freedom to lock up their code.

Good luck. This is not a new fight by any means. You could argue that the FSF has been fighting it for almost half a century. People by and large do not care.

I'd be amazed if this wasn't already the case. We've already been through this with Tivo, it was one of the reasons behind the creation of the GPLv3. Tivo based their DVRs on Linux, and provided downloads of the Linux code. But their DVRs used hardware DRM to ensure that only code signed by Tivo would run, making it so that even with the open source code, you couldn't run changes on the hardware.

From what I can tell, Vizio is doing the same thing, but isn't providing downloads to the kernel code they're using. It's possible that there's some proprietary hardware drivers that they don't want to release code to, but Nvidia has already show how to work around that.

I expect the end result to be like Tivo: a bunch of archives of the open source software used in the TV, but none of the code required to make it useful and no signing key necessary to allow any changes to run on the TV itself.

You can't count on voting records to mean anything, thanks to the "designated villains:" the politicians whose job it is to tank a law that a party wants to be on record as having voted for, but don't want to pass. We're watching this happen right now with votes on the Iran war. Democrats don't want them to pass. What they want is to be on the record as being against it and want Republicans to be on the record as supporting it, even though there is no chance they'll do anything to stop it if they get the power to do so.

Both sides play games like this, with the end result being that only laws that have the support of large donors having any real chance of passing. Who votes for and who votes against is always carefully calculated to let vulnerable politicians give the appearance of supporting things constituents support, while never needing to support those things in actual fact.

It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

Wow, Apple, screwing over a partner? Who ever could have seen this coming?

I don't understand why anyone would ever partner on Apple on anything. They are notorious for screwing over their partners at this point. There's even a term for it, "Sherlocking." People seem to have forgotten that Apple's "privacy" stance originated as Steve Jobs not wanting to share any of the data "Apple owned" with anyone else.

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.

They'll use the same excuse when AI perfects the Torment Nexus, I'm sure.

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Oops. I thought I was responding to the story about the grossly insecure White House app.

Still, it's incompetence all the way down.

Although I'm not as big a fan of Hanlon's Razor as I used to be, I'd be willing to chalk this up to typical government incompetence, farming this work out to the cheapest bidder in a way where no one involved in any decision-making has any technical expertise whatsoever.

Nothing is going to get better as long as the U.S. education system is captured by ideologues whose priorities are _not_ an educated, literate and thinking populace.

It went to the same place that Winamp 4 went to.

I loved Hack 1.0.3. At some point between then and now NetHack got unreasonably difficult for me.