> Levittowns are six large suburban housing developments, three of which are actually named "Levittown." They were created in the United States (including one in Puerto Rico) by William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed builders that qualified veterans could buy housing for a fraction of rental costs. Under Levitt & Sons, Levittown housing would maintain racial covenants that excluded non-White would-be buyers.
Italics added. Seems the government was somewhat involved in the US too. Of course, now the reason "the free market is terrible at pumping out houses" is government regulation too....
Sure guys, why can't someone just build you your personal phone at the same price as the iPhone whose development costs are amortized over seval billions consumers :-/
Yeah, all of that would be great. Good ideas all round, and thank you for gathering all these sensible requests into one centralized list.
Slight problem, and it's not clear whether you've realised this: everybody else in the world knows that we can't have everything! Still, it's good to have goals, even if they can't be met, and it'd be monstrous to mock the ambition on display - which I do declare we should in fact salute. Good on you sir/madam, for not being a cynical jaded asshole like the rest of us.
Making one isn't "that" hard once you factor in China's production capabilities. The problem isn't even making it, the hardware part. ( Ignoring IP for a second )
Once you have all that, it is how do you sell it, and sell enough unit to even have a ROI. And that is ignoring UI / software.
I don't think people on HN understand, hardware business is brutal.
What's the point of complaining about use of jargonisms in a specialist-leaning spaces?
Anyone with a resemblance of a functioning brain (that is, any "normie" included) can understand "ability to install and run custom aftermarket operating system, or modify pre-installed one", assuming they know what an "operating system" is. And if they don't know what it is, that can - and should (!) - be explained too.
This ability matters to people who don't know any much about any computer programming, because it affects their ability to use the devices they own. They may not know how it all works, but they do express regrets when something doesn't work the way they expect or want it to work. And we all know and hate enshittification here, don't we? Personally, I'm tired of saying "no, because Apple/Google decided only they can control this, and neither you or me can change this on this device" to "can this work so-and-so" questions.
And "open bootloader" is a jargon shorthand for that. Crude, because it should be actually more like "bootloader that can be configured to validate software integrity with user-provided key material", but most people familiar with the space and lingo get the right idea anyway, and shorthand needs to be short. And this is Hacker News, not a Wendy's, so jargon is more than expected.
If someone (a "normie") reads something and don't understand it, we should all be encouraging them to ask questions and try to give them accessible answers. Not shield them from this knowledge, not fetishize mindless consumerism, not behave like snobs, and especially not dismiss something important only because it's not commonly understood.
For marketing materials that target "normie" audiences, it should be just phrased in "normie"-accessible way (look how Valve does that with their hardware), but when we're compiling a HN wishlist from HN comments, complaining about jargon is silly.
In fact, jargon is only "low resonance" until it isn't; plenty of key social and political issues resolve around jargon terms normies have no more fucking clue about now than before, but it doesn't stop them from discussing it like they were experts - all it takes is bunch of pundits on the news to say the jargon words out loud with straight face, be it "open bootloader" or "MRNA vaccines" or "COVID-19 pandemic" or "fracking" or "monosodium glutamate", and suddenly everyone is an expert.
It's just a matter of the topic having a popularity spike.
My point was just that nerds are indeed bad at communicating their knowledge to the "normie" world. Because they forget what is daily lingo for them - is just black magic to them.
Everyone - save for people with developmental difficulties or ahedonia - has a specialty, something they know that the majority of other folks don’t. Every such domain of knowledge (useful or otherwise) has its shorthands and jargonisms.
Some domains of knowledge lag behind their technological adoption. Which is natural and fine, except that society at large got infected with this silly idea of normalizing mindless consumption with a shallow (if any) underlying mental model. In other words, the nerds are actively told to shut up and keep their mumbo
jumbo talk to themselves and spare people from knowing how things work under the hood.
So it’s not just that those silly nerds bad at communicating. That too, but it’s meeting with the unwillingness to learn is what makes it truly bad. It’s in the very idea of a “normie” - an anti-knowledge, ignorance-normalizing, curiosity-dampening attitude - that’s to blame. Not that nerds use nerdy words on nerdy websites and that usage spreads to less nerdy areas - that’s part is just life as usual.
BTW, those “loud idiots” are the actual normal people learning and making mistakes (including the mistake of overconfidence - especially easy to make when something feels important) and having opinions. Modern mass communications changed the world’s landscape, so instead of a few peers in their kitchen they’re broadcasting their knowledge (including the errors in it) to orders of magnitude more people and that sometimes gains traction - but that’s a separate issue, very far from nerds and their words.
What I don’t see much of in the article - and still less in the comments that seem to see AI-led progress in mathematics as nothing but a disaster, because mathematics exists only to provide employment to mathematicians - is a sense that mathematics has a social purpose, or duties beyond the community of mathematicians.
I thought the reason we were encouraging people to go into STEM, and providing clever people with large salaries, was that mathematical results were of practical value to the wider human race. In which case, it’s surely very good news that AI can get those results.
Isn’t all this handwringing just the equivalent of Hackney cab drivers bemoaning the advent of the motor car? Phrased in much fancier language, of course, because the people involved are cleverer and more articulate.
> I thought the reason we were encouraging people to go into STEM, and providing clever people with large salaries, was that mathematical results were of practical value to the wider human race. In which case, it’s surely very good news that AI can get those results.
The impact of mathematics on other disciplines goes much further than specific results. Just as important, if not even more so, are the language and ways of thinking that typically come out of the process of establishing those results. Results without the accompanying conceptual understanding are about as useful as a mere oracle for math theorems.
Another point that seems to be frequently missed or mischaracterized is that mathematicians are not opposed to computational tools as a matter of principle and in fact do use them when they help their research. The current controversy is not about a hypothetical future where mathematicians have easy access to open-source, open-weight, auditable natural-language assistants to help them internalize a new result or search for counterexamples. It's primarily about the recent behavior of certain for-profit companies suddenly trying to disrupt mathematics by caricaturing it in the public eye as a game they can "solve" or "beat" for headlines and valuation.
> The impact of mathematics on other disciplines goes much further than specific results. Just as important, if not even more so, are the language and ways of thinking that typically come out of the process of establishing those results
What makes you think so? I can think of lots of specific results that helped e.g. economists - convex optimization or supermodularity, say - but I don’t think the broader way of thinking of mathematicians has had any input into economics for the past fifty years, and arguably nor should it - the discipline can think for itself. Similarly, sociologists can use linear regression, or geneticists can partition variance, without having to think like mathematicians.
I agree at the high level. STEM bringing general benefit and greater understanding of the world is the main reason. This is true whether or not humans or an AGI is driving the progress.
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