Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch

This really resonates with me. I love math now, but absolutely loathed it in high school. The curriculum lacked any sort of way to apply math to real problems. I simply cannot learn things in the abstract like that. It's like learning a programming language without ever building a program.

I even have a huge interest in history, but I remember my first history exam on World War 1. I was ready to answer questions on its causes, the people, how industrial war changed the nature of fighting, the new countries that formed after the war... First Question: What was the date the Serbian nationalist Gavrillo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Second Question: What was the dates each country declared war...

It also took me years to actually sit down and read JRR Tolkien as we read the Hobbit as a class book in grade 8. First question for the test: List the names of the 13 dwarves that attended the party at Bilbo's house (1 point each for a test out of 30 IIRC).

It is no doubt an incredible achievement. I don't like the 'anyone can do this' when that clearly isn't true - it comes across as a humble brag and seems to be a strong part of hustle culture. I would much prefer 'anyone with a decent amount of money and a high enough intelligence can do this', or 'this is now far easier to do than it has ever been'.

I do like the idea of MIT being a beacon to the best and brightest and I do think that the lack of a level playing field means that many otherwise talented people miss out on that opportunity. Perhaps what I would really like is for the world to have more MITs but I don't know if that is possible and I worry that attempts to do this would undermine the quality of MIT. So perhaps I should be content that MIT exists as is and that some people get to go there even if I did not - we all benefit from the fruits of their labor. My university was a top tier university renowned for harsh grading and I was still rather disappointed by the quality of my peers and I worry that the quality at universities in general has since declined further.

Cheap and high quality small batch electronics and hardware fabrication is rapidly changing the world in a way that I think few people understand. It used to be that you had to have a decent size company to do this kind of stuff and that company needed capital investment, layers of management etc. So the cost of bringing a widget into the world was really expensive, risky, and took a long time. The only way to make that money back was to do things in bulk and sell a lot of them which meant you had to be sure there was a sufficient target market. These days a single person can design and fabricate a single item for comparatively very little. And if they want to make it accessible to the rest of the world there is no need to build a factory, just upload the plans. If it's a popular design in all likelihood someone in China will produce it in bulk at commodity prices. The speed of commodification has become so fast that it's practically instant. There is a bit of a phenomena going on at the moment with 'high tech overproduction' where it is claimed that China is intentionally over producing high tech goods to undermine Western markets - it's my view that they're ahead of us on the commodification curve. As manufacturing also manufactures the manufacturing tools the commodification process is a self reinforcing cycle.