Did you know that the Pi 5 in 2024 received a firmware update that blocks people from soldering on larger ram chips?

However, this brings an element of risk to the user - the board hasn’t been tested by us - and is a potential support burden for us, with customers complaining of unreliable devices. We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size. And for improved compatibility with a variety of suppliers, we now also program in some other device attributes, meaning that switching parts of the same size may not work.

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2380887#p2380888

Are We Having the Wrong Nightmares About AI?

A talk by Zeynep Tufekci of Princeton University (2025)

Thanks, Christoph!

unlocking any car from X brand in most of the world

HN thinks it’s that brand that builds those indestructible pickups.

The nuclear disaster we haven't learned from

A 2-Hour video essay on Fukushima and regulatory capture by HGModernism.

How Ethiopia’s Gas-Car Ban Sparked an EV Boom

TL;DW: Having to import fossil fuels is bad for their currency, so they just decided to not do that anymore by banning the sale of new ICE cars.

Also, meta: Bloomberg has their own self-hosted videos with self-hosted ads instead of just using youtube, because they’re bloomberg and they can just do that.

Live 3D twin of an Oral-b iO5 smart toothbrush - /r/homeassistant

As many of you know, io5+ ships with a 6-axis IMU which is used to predict the brush’s position

Yes, of course. Everyone knows that.

Deploying Proprietary Models Securely with NVIDIA Confidential Computing on Self-Hosted Kubernetes

So turns out that this whole thing with “The DRM-protected movie gets decrypted on the GPU and the GPU composites that into the output invisible to the OS” doesn’t just work for video but any kind of data. LLM weights for example.

Could probably even go so far as to having to buy a per-GPU per-model license? Maybe?

My uninformed guess is that we’re just not seeing this yet, because none of the labs want to hardware-lock themselves to NVIDIA specifically more than they already are.