To combat this I think drivers, firmware, etc. should be acknowledged as being in the same category as spare parts, manuals, repair tools, etc. They are equally as vital to being able to repair your device, and therefore should be open sourced at the latest when a manufacturer pulls support. Of course I would prefer them to be open sourced immediately, but with how software IP works currently that seems like a pipe dream, especially for devices with very complex drivers, like GPU’s.

But they do it stochastically, so you only have a suspicion watching gives you fewer ads, but aren’t 100% sure

IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies…

Even if it’s just playing back videos, it still should compensate for the distortion of the spherical display. That’s a “simple” 3d transformation, but with the amount of pixels, coordinating between the GPUs and some redundancy, it doesn’t seem like an excessive amount of computing power. The whole thing is still an impressive excess though…

Friendly FYI: Brave is based on Chromium, so under the hood it uses the same browser engine as Chrome. I can’t recommend switching to Firefox enough, not only because it’s a good and fully featured browser, but also because its existence is vital to keeping Google’s power in check.