the real world problems we care about are straightforward, the main challenge is wealth distribution and control over the power to do something about them

> What are YOU on about?

Can you please edit out swipes like this from your HN comments? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your post would be fine without that bit.

Personally I think it's a fallacy to assume that HN users mention everything they care about in HN posts, but that's not a moderation point.

> If people cared they would [have mentioned it before]. What are YOU on about?

I explained why and how I think this is both wrong (especially in the ridiculously absolute form it was posted in), and a weird point of contention.

This is a tech (startup) forum, with an increasing pull towards more general audiences. Math and sciences have strong ties to tech, but you won't see people discussing specific math conjectures here much, save for the ones that make the popsci or tech mainstream. It is only chance encounters like this where a person from the relevant neck of the woods might engage, provided they happen to be readers here, e.g. because of a passing interest in technology.

Given this, being surprised that you cannot find a mention of this conjecture in the post history of the site is difficult to describe as any kinder than just plain daft.

> If it’s so good at solving hard problems

A problem being hard (in the relevant sense here) doesn't mean they're lucrative to solve, or hold direct and broad societal relevance. Kind of a theme with maths and logic problems, and not by coincidence.

Conversely, a lot of practical hard problems are, well, practical. They're not logically hard, but in some empirical way. You're conflating different avenues of difficulty, and rejecting that there's even a multitude of them.

> Why is there no real world progress on things we do care about?

We?

Well, there's been very real progress on things I - and I'd think most this community - care about. I've been shipping tickets end-to-end with minimal involvement via LLMs agentically for a while now. It's been great, and an honest game changer. I've been delivering faster, more, and better. Exactly what you'd expect from a breakthrough technology: a wholesale improvement across normally competing dimensions. In a number of cases, the difference was outright stepfunction like. That is to say, if it wasn't for these models, they would simply not have happened.

This is its latest iteration and its newest - alleged - tour de force. That's why it's posted here to extensive reception. That it is nice to hear it being a boon in other sectors too. If this somehow escaped you two, I don't know what to tell you.

Wait, what things do we care about?