@hipsterelectron @whack after many years doing hardware engineering work I've decided that firmware blobs do not fucking matter. Now do I hate that I can't have the source and mess with them? Yeah. Definitely.

Do I think they matter in general? Not really. So many blobs are basically just abstracting over the fact that there are thousands plus registers and it's very hard to not just have one place to manage all that and present a common interface.

I still want it. To study mostly because I'm not blowing up my GPU with a mistake not in this economy. But I'd rather have a working GPU or whatever (the actual example I'm thinking of is some TI RF chip that I don't remember the name of but they give you the registers it's just the documentation is well over a thousand pages long)