Integration, testing, and support are all expensive. Right or wrong, that's a reason why if a laptop "just works" (like a Mac, Windows Thinkpad, or a Chromebook), it probably has proprietary binaries.
Also, if you aren't paying for the OS (via the hardware it's coupled with), you can't expect the OS to have the benefits of tight hardware integration.
Even Framework laptops use proprietary boot firmware, and they've been pretty clear that they only provide support for Ubuntu and Fedora, not the alphabet soup of other Linux desktop distros.
> Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.
If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same.
> Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always.
> Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines.
This sounds like a semantic disagreement.
I think you are using the word "farmer" to mean "large agricultural landlord". Today, those terms may have a lot of overlap, because most of us don't work in agriculture like we did then, but in the past, it wasn't so much the case.
Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master".
"Farmers" were mostly people who worked as tenants on their land. The confusion in US history started early as the local feudal lords of the time (the founding fathers) rebranded themselves as farmers in opposition to their British rulers, but the economic structure of the societies was scarcely different.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, slavery and sharecropping were primary forms of agricultural labor.
Those are far closer to medieval feudal peasantry than 20th century industrial labor, regardless of the lack of an official hereditary aristocracy in the US.
> Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
> There are no plantations around here.
FWIW you haven't really stated where "here" is for you. It's not necessarily going to be the same for everyone, and based on the parent comments, the potential area under discussion could include the entirety of the US and Europe (although the initial comment only mentioned UK specifically, it doesn't seem clear to me that it's explicitly only talking about that). I'm not sure you can categorically state that no one in this conversation could be talking about areas that have plantations.
AKA "too big to fail". The interests of major and early AI capital owners will be prioritized over those of the later capital and non-capital-owning public.
> Things that are too big to fail can end up being nationalized when they do fail.
And if that happens, will the taxpayer be on the hook to make investors whole? We shouldn't. If it is nationalized, it needs to be done at a small fraction of the private investment.
When the government takes your property with eminent domain, they don't give you what you've put into it or what you owe, they give you the market value for the property.
If one or more of the AI companies fail, the government would pay what they feel is the market value for the graphics cards, warehouses, and standing desks and it will surely be way less than what the investors have put in.
I wish the same could be said of car UX these days but clearly that has regressed away from optimal.
reply