Hardware is physical elecronics: PCBs, ICs, etc.

Software is, when all is said and done, machine code, 1s and 0s.

To get a basic understanding of firmware, read up on EPROMs and EEPROMs. Nowadays "firmware" can be any number of things e.g. the OS of a printer, TV or network adapter flashed on to some kind of EPROM, but really it's still software. The "firmware image" which is flashed to the chip is a binary and thus software.

Historically, firmware was very simple code, often written in assember, to run with limited resources for a very specific taske - nowadays the Intel Management Engine OS for example, which was found to be based on MINIX 3.0 and a typical UEFI are very large and complex.

Funny thinking the interplay of bigLLM and libresoftware.

Vibe coding is one central sales pitch of bigLLM . Obviously .. most libresoftware is free (as in no price!) .
So uploading all that code to LLM big data centers is :
- a fast and cheap way to create a good pitch that it will attract the usual attention of the usual big-tech (as in big pockets) lovers.
- a fast way to give credit to your ultra hype balloon in order to start tapping on investors money and politicians egos.

So as a hypothetical  LLM investor that is on the LLM bandwagon tapping on piles of public subsidies , water , land , and investors money i should first of all thank RMS and FSF ??

What do i miss ?

Also i wonder if bigLLMs (as in big in size and belonging to big pockets) are ok with binary files ? Could i give them e.g a closed nvidia driver or some nvidia blobs and do vibe coding with it ? I wonder what policy nvidia (the ex-gaming-gpu corp and currently most big AI company) has on that issue ? I wonder how Nvidia could protect it self if a local LLM could cracks its blobs . I wonder if Linus would approve that vibe coding since he poses as a show me the code guy. (blob you say ? ....xmm.. that piece of '''software''' that is even less intelligible that machine code... signals calibrating on semiconductor-level unique quirks ... like speaking a language no one understands? no ISA involded? interesting ... so maybe an LLM would throw up a blob??) (i wonder if a blob qualifies as a software .... i think not.. its semi-level signaling quirks).

And generaly i guess bigLLM want good and cheap training food.  In an cut-throat-evolutionary view of the world imagining big trucks offloading big piles of old books (1) and libresoftware in front of big LLMs for training through destructive data-decomposing kind of aligns perfectly with that world view .. dont you think ?

Speaking of bigLLM data diet .(or web-crawelrs's d-diet) . I wonder.. is there a data that cant be eaten ? That would make it throw up ? Or bad for digestion ? Or totally un-eatable ? And how that is related to the essence of what is 'software' and what is digitized data .
I've read recently many news about microsoft increasing the window security patches. That means that it's binary is increasingly used as LLM food . But LLM controlled by what would ms consider hostile. So it's kind of peculiar funny irony what happens. How ms or other big companies would protect their binaries from hostile LLMs? I wonder if for a LLM binary-assembly-higher source code structure is rather irrelevant to it's abilities. And if yes.. why not make windows open source ? Why ? As a defense maybe . Or because it's irrelevant.  And if source is irrelevant what is open source ? Maybe a defence is windows as firmware on a chip ?

..So from an LLM's perspective both Linux and Windows are very good structured data food with Linux perhaps been a little lighter to it's ram-guts due to its higher source code ? (like a sauce on a food ?)

(1)@Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training

Apropos of the original post:
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UK.gov begins killing off passwords for 23 million users
Passkeys promise fewer phishing headaches – and £600 a day off Whitehall's SMS bill
by Carly Page @The Register - Mon 14 Sept 2026 // 09:16 UTC
https://www.theregister.com/security/20 … rs/5296088
---

In the end, in 90% of cases it is all about money, be it the government (in this case the UK), banking or [fill in] institutions needing to use authentication.

Where I live, most banks, both public and private, have been closing branches all over.
Eventually, there will be none and banking will be a *smartphone thing*, where you have ended up being the banks' employee.
But worry not, you will still be paying through the nose for their 'services'.

The requirement of facial recognition to set up a bank/[fill in] provided application on a phone is a huge red flag for me: it is nothing but a metadata farming hustle in disguise and hidden behind a security measure, many times for a service which by any measure does not need that level of security. ie: looking up how much your bonds are worth once or twice a year.

More so if your PW expires in six months if you do not log in during that period.

The state owned bank (highly coveted by the usual privatising suspects) where I had chosen to have my salary deposited for over 25 years and where my pension was also deposited for 6 or so, one day decided that I could no longer do any sort of remote banking if not via a phone and their centralised application.

Being to all intent and purposes locked out of my account and not able to find a reasonable answer to the problem their actions generated for me and countless thousands of other pensioners, I told them in no uncertain terms to fuck-off and shove it.

The private bank I have used for the last 34 years or so is slowly heading that way.
For the time being, I can still choose to use a five digit F2A that is sent (after logging in) either to my cell phone or to the email address I have registered with them, which works just fine. The credit card account I have with that bank uses the same system, albeit with a six digit number.

Another account I have with a broker provided me with an application (Aegis) that runs on my phone.
It is set up with a unique QR code provided by them to set it up with and gives me a six digit F2A to enter after logging in to their secure web page.

That said, I have an absolute level of distrust for any and all banking applications wanting to run in a 'smartphone' as I consider the combination to be a recipe for disaster.

Best,

A.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC

https://forum.foldingathome.org/viewtop … 77#p374677

old adagios still holdeth true:
those loudesth shoutesth, seldom the brightesth.

So i fixed it, after reading this thread.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam- … sues/11921

What could possibly cause the two steam components from not being able to communicate with each other.

So I was trying to set the system so eth0 wasn't enabled at boot until a script in rc.local brought it up at the end (after doing some stuff to the network connection and I forgot I did it).  So I spent an hour trying to make this work yesterday.  I finally used the networking script in init.d, without even considering that if I told it not to setup networking that it would kill lo as well.  So no loopback enabled.  eth0 came up on the script like intended, but I never enabled localhost.  So it appears steam and steamwebhelper communicate together over localhost and since there was no localhost, it crapped out.

So I typed "ifup lo" and fired up steam and it works, no errors.

You live to learn.