Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?

479 pointsparpfish319 comments

A few weeks ago I was doing some soldering and I started using a spool of insulated 22-gauge wire.

Maybe it was the solder fumes, but I started thinking about what it actually took to create that spool of wire -- everything from the geologists and miners extracting ore, through all the metallurgy, industrial engineering, and plastics work. And I started to marvel at all the work and expertise it took to make something that I normally would've just considered a semi-disposable consumable item. It made me wonder whether that spool of wire was actually a piece of technology on par in sophistication with all the software that I build every day.

It was such an odd moment, but it's has caused a lasting perspective shift. almost every day I'll look at some commonplace object I took for granted and think "this is actually so complex, no single human has all the knowledge or expertise to create it".

I'm curious if anybody else has had a similar experience and/or what are some simple everyday objects that give you pause when you stop to think about their complexity

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Sometimes I have similar thoughts, and it makes me realize... there are a lot of humans.

Imagine we evolved on a planet with only enough land for 10,000 people. We would never have most of this stuff because people's work would not be specialized enough to get us there. One person would be responsible for so many different things that they wouldn't go into depth on each one. For example, maybe we'd have a library, but one person would be responsible for both printing the books and running the circulation desk. We would have technology (someone would have invented, say, a wood stove), but we wouldn't have anywhere near as much of it.

But instead, we have billions of people now, and it was at least 2000 years ago that we reached 100 million. When you have that many people, although most of them are still working on the basics (growing food, building housing, etc.), in absolute terms there can be millions of people working on specialized tasks.

It also makes me realize how prosperous we are as a species. Although we haven't eliminated poverty and hunger (and should and probably could), as a species, we are far from being on the edge of survival. We have enough resources that we have people working on niche stuff that will pay off in the future if ever. We have projects that require hundreds or thousands of person-years (in other words, equivalent to multiple lifetimes) of work, and the end result of the project is (say) yet another action movie or romcom.

Humans are smart and creative, but the reason we have what we do is lots and lots of people over a very long period of time with way more resources than what we need for subsistence. Which is pretty cool because any of those things could have not happened, but they all did.

"people's work would not be specialized enough to get us there"

This reminded me of one of the arguments in "Selfish reasons to want more humans" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686 : we can get more scientific, technical, and economic progress with a larger population on Earth, as more people can specialize in narrow domains.

Though not if they're impoverished and miserable, so if an extra 8 billion suddenly appeared in random places by magic I tend to think that would be a bad thing.

One argument I found interesting is that the apparent "massive acceleration" in technological progress can largely be explained by the fact that most "productive human years" have actually been lived quite recently. I think the latest estimate is that "109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years" and half of them were in the last 2000 years. It's probably even more extreme if you only count adults (due to improvements in infant mortality).

That simple fact dominates more complex explanations like increased specialization, long-distance communication, organized education, and preservation of knowledge.

I think your point is true, but the implied causation is the other way initially - it's when we started getting rich (= increased productivity), that we could start to support increasingly large populations...which then in turn did lead to more humans producing more knowledge

Interesting summary on the topic of "what changed to allow progress to happen?", from the intro to the book "Bourgeois Dignity" by Dierdre McCloskey: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/556659.html

It's really important to recognize the incredible resource we have. All of the inventions, all of the music, all of the stories, all of the buildings. All made by humans.

Humanity is how we are going to cure cancer, deploy green energy, travel the stars, and answer the big questions. I really hope the current projections showing human populations will peak in the next century are wrong. I think we should aim for as many humans as can feasibly thrive.

We can probably offset the decline by starting to value human life and time humans can spend creatively. By not gatekeeping humans from education and not exploiting the young in the most braindead service jobs.

To what degree does your definition of feasible include the life we share the planet with? Is a worm or a lemur any less amazing than us humans?

I think we have far passed the tipping point, and what we need is a drastic reduction.

We're not that different from fruit flies. They multiply like crazy as long as there's enough food, and when it's gone, there's a mass die-off.

We're confined to this planet, and it just doesn't have the capacity to support this many of us, be it for resource (agriculture) or just sheer space (balanced ecosystems).

The way I see it, we have two options. We either find a humane way to reduce the global population and allow the planet to find a balance that includes our survival, or we keep going like this and will end up like the fruit flies after that bowl of rotten fruit is gone.

Along this line of thinking: it also had made us resilient.

If all technology was to stop dead tomorrow, following the chaos of civilization collapse, we’d still have enough humans to do substinence farming and other survival tasks to help us get quickly back on our feet.

I envision a situation closer to the walking dead vs what you described.

Might subsisting on what the land and sea provide also be considered thriving, if done with a close group of people?

I might be in a grass-is-greener mentality, but I think we're kinda broken now; we've hacked the earth computer and aren't taking seriously the job of stewardship. Watching the birds and the recently-emerged Douglas squirrel and the moth that got into the house- I'm envious of their lives. I don't want to give up meta-cognition, but I do want to give up the specialized roles and the reliance on technology and move on (with others) to hunting and gathering on a suitable area.

The earth-computer is marvelous to observe. Being of the Star Wars generation I've grown up with computers and see them as a sideshow now, not to last long because of the complex infrastructure behind it all.

Some influential books I've read:

Wool, by Hugh Howey

The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook

Why We Need to be Wild, by Jessica Carew Kraft

Feral, by George Monbiot

Not to disagree in any way, but as a species, we are also one good asteroid hit or gamma-ray burst away from elimination.

> But instead, we have billions of people now, and it was at least 2000 years ago that we reached 100 million. When you have that many people, although most of them are still working on the basics (growing food, building housing, etc.), in absolute terms there can be millions of people working on specialized tasks.

Now let's imagine what happens when AI and machines step in and completely take over the menial jobs. The redistribution to cognitive task occupation will deliver another technological revolution.

Unless everyone will just binge on low hanging dopamine fruits.

"It wasn’t until 1841 that Joseph Whitworth managed to find a solution. After years of research collecting sample screws from many British workshops, he suggested standardizing the size of the screw threads in Britain so that, for example, someone could make a bolt in England and someone in Glasgow could make the nut and they would both fit together. His proposal was that the angle of the thread flanks was standardized at 55 degrees, and the number of threads per inch, should be defined for various diameters. While this issue was being addressed in Britain, the Americans were trying to do likewise and initially started using the Whitworth thread. "

It hasn't even been 200 years since invention & usage of standardized parts. We've come a long way.

https://www.nord-lock.com/insights/knowledge/2017/the-histor...

Small parts like bolts are standardized, but things like car parts that easily could be aren't. Car manufacturers fight tooth and nail to block third party suppliers of spares for their cars. It will always be like this because most car manufacturers make very little profit from cars themselves. All the money is in credit fees and aftermarket care and servicing. If you can control the market for that you make a lot more profit.

This is true for cars, electricals, furniture ... everything really. It's only the very simple base elements that are standardized.

Standardization and modularity are really the keys to making things that last and reducing our material impact, as opposed to the semi-disposable manufacturing we do now.

But the current financial/capitalist system does not incentize modularity, or creating open standards.

Modularity != standardization. You can have modular components but that are not standard and standard components that are not modular.

Another option is the biodegradable route, as chosen by so many human civilizations we don't see much evidence of.

It was here on HN where I learned about a city in now-Cambodia (I think) revealed by ground-penetrating radar. I found it fascinating, and I love the idea that awhole city could leave so little evidence.

The industry definitely is going in this direction.

You can find cars from different brands with the same light covers.

A lot of manufacturers use the same base system for their daughter companies.

Ah, but are those going to be different brands across companies? After all, most auto manufacturers have multiple brands (traditionally, the big three automakers had a low-end, middle-tier and high-end brand, e.g., Ford’s Mercury-Ford-Lincoln trinity, although in the last thirty years a number of brands were shuttered. Add in international consolidation (Chrysler was owned for a while by Daimler-Benz and now by Fiat, Ford used to have an ownership stakes in Jaguar, Volvo and Mazda among others) and you might be seeing intra-corporate part sharing, not inter-corporate.

It does happen that smaller car makers will use parts from other makers in their cars because it is too expensive to design and produce all of the parts themselves. Switches, tail lights, etc are often done this way.

It is not uncommon for parts that are made by third parties will be used in cars by different makers. Aisin makes transmissions used in many brands. This can backfire when the third party maker has a production problem which affects a wide range of cars in multiple makers. The Takata air bags were used in many brands of cars until they were found to blast shrapnel into the faces of occupants. Takata has been struggling for years to produce enough replacement parts to fulfill all of the recalls.

In the USA, bolts can come in plenty of sizes, but 2-56, 4-40, and 6-32 are common small bolts.

You want metric? You would think 2mm, 3mm, 4mm would be enough, but no! There are 2.5 mm, 3.5 mm, 4.5 mm etc. Are these 'necessary' even if they can be produced as 'standard'?

It's the old saw about Standards -- there are so many to choose from.

> Car manufacturers fight tooth and nail to block third party suppliers of spares for their cars.

Source?

A cursory glance [0] at a few 2020 model year cars from many brands (Volkswagen Golf, Genesis G70, Ford Mustang, Toyota Corolla, Honda CR-V) show a multiple of aftermarket parts for most common items (ignition components, brake components, steering and suspension components). I’ve owned a dozen cars that I’ve repaired almost 100% by myself, and it’s very rare to be unable to find aftermarket parts; usually only in cases where the car is sufficiently old and uncommon that the manufacturer is the only one interested in making parts anymore (as was the case with my RX-7).

Some brand-new (2023+) cars may not have aftermarket parts available, but this is almost always because they’re too new for the aftermarket to have made any yet.

About the only parts that are hard to find third-party are those that are too low-volume to be profitable: modern headlight and taillight assemblies, which usually last for thousands of hours and may only need replacing in a collision; body panels that generally only need replacing in a collision; specialized controllers such as for adaptive suspension or pseudo-limited-slip-differential-through-braking. ECUs are commonly brought up as an example (“the manufacturers don’t want people modifying the cars they own!!”) but this really boils down to both the manufacturer and aftermarket companies not wanting to be held responsible by the EPA/other environmental agencies, as well as the fact that ECUs very rarely fail relative to, for instance, brake rotors or fuel pumps.

[0] https://rockauto.com

I have this book purchased but as of yet unread, which I believe covers similar topics

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35068671 (in my market it's actually titled "Exactly", with the same subtitle)

I often think about how the simple machine of the screw is such a profound and impactful invention. From furniture in our home to the home itself to spacecraft we have sent into the cosmos, the screw has been quietly holding our world together for millenia.

It was invented in 400 BCE by Archytas of Tarentum, a Greek philosopher (the father of mechanics).

> "The hip of Trigonopterus oblongus .."

Screws are also found in nature, like this weevil uses a screw 100 million years ago, to move a joint allowing it to cling onto plants more robustly.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigonopterus

Nature has always been a great source of inspiration for invention.

For instance, "If we had the sun at night then it wouldn't be so hard to see things!" (Fire, Lightbulbs, LEDs...)

And today we have US and UK regular garden hose threads: same TPI, same diameter, slightly different thread pitch. You can turn the former about 1.5 turns onto the latter before it jams up.

Standards!

Are you telling me I packed all this hose for my trip to London for no reason at all? Can I pick up an adapter at the airport?

The UK was such a pioneer in those times! Quite sad how backward-looking the country has become.

A huge part of it is that when you're working with wood, standardization isn't terribly important.

Nails can vary in size, hammer them in. Even screwing into wood really doesn't care terribly much as long as the drill and the screw are roughly the same width.

But machine work, those need to be precise.

While interchangeable, standardized parts are significant, they are unnecessary if we make and repair our own stuff out of materials sourced from the land and water, and said stuff includes: canoes, paddles, baskets, bedding, shelter (even large houses for several families), hand tools (including weapons), and clothing, off the top. These "old ways" will keep us going on Earth awhile yet, and not just scudding along the bottom, but thriving, together.

I think a lot about "steel saucepans with copper bottoms". I read this article by Le Guin at a time in my life to make a real impression on me

> We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe...

Link for those interested:

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology

Nice read, she is such a clear thinker.

When I first saw this quote, I tried looking up "fleece vests spun from recycled glass" but didn't find anything. Anyone know what this reference is about?

Maybe Le Guine meant (plastic) bottles and Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Yarn?

That is also super complex for something that we take for granted

You get recycled glass spun into fibreglass for insulation. But as far as I'm aware it is not used in clothing.

You also get fleece jackets made from recycled PET plastic bottles.

Possibly the two have been conflated.

> I think a lot about "steel saucepans with copper bottoms". I read this article by Le Guin at a time in my life to make a real impression on me

Same for me but with sewing machines. Relevant Veritasium video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQYuyHNLPTQ&ab_channel=Verit...

I've seen people argue on this site that "technology" only means new technology, and that even cars aren't 'tech'.

Tap water. I can't stop marveling at the fact that we have (mostly) unlimited, clean, drinkable water on demand and virtually for free.

But also many other things, many of which others have mentioned here (cars, mass housing, garbage collection, electronics).

So much so that I feel frustration at the fact that in my job, I do not participate in human society making any of these fascinating things possible; and I have decided that my next career move will have to make me part of the supply chain of one such thing, even if I am just the tiniest of links.

Sewage is interesting too! Having to pump against elevation, making the water usable for other purposes, etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpHOkHxpTvQ

+1 for "Practical Engineering". He has an amazing series on making a new pump station called Practical Construction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcXkmvXXwU&list=PLTZM4MrZKf...

Tap water is actually a re-invention.

You're supposed to just be able to drink out of the river, but due to our own pollution and the lack of build up to diseases in the water we can't drink it directly anymore.

I prefer "disease-free water" to "water containing unpleasant pathogens that probably won't kill me, because I've already gotten sick from them many times and maintain natural immunity".

Also, immunocompromised people deserve life too. Physically weak humans wouldn't survive in the natural-selection world that preceded civilization—the purpose of human civilization is escaping, nullifying, the brutal morality of the natural world and substituting our own.

Clean water is a gift of life.

Animals are fine, and so are people who grow up drinking that. It probably strengthens certain parts of the immune system.

The main reason we need to purify it is because of the stuff humans put in it.

How do you know that animals are fine?

Because you only see the ones who are doing fine.

This.

Animals in nature are incredibly healthy. You won't see any with even a deep cut.

Isn't that because the ones who aren't healthy die? That sounds like saying we shouldn't bother having modern medicine because it causes us to have a lot more sick people. The problem is we wouldn't have a lot more healthy people that way; we'd have a lot more dead people.

That's exactly what the comment I was replying to said.

An alternative explanation is that nature is some peaceful place where no animal ever gets hurt, for any reason... What would be a purely comedic exercise if people weren't believing this one all over the thread.

It is. This subthread is clearly ironic.

All my cats, dogs, horses & chickens have all been drinking rain & groundwater.

They've never died of any infectious disease, nor needed treatment.

Have they ever had the runs? Giardia can be fatal to puppies and sick dogs.

The danger isn't rainwater. It is stagnant water and running water that has been contaminated. Both are more of a problem in rural and wilderness where there are animals that have been contaminated.

Hmmm, most of my friends' animals (pets) kept at home, medicated, fed "pet food" and "clean" water, tend to be significantly sicker than my outside-kept animals, and always seem to have a short lifespan. They have certainly had the runs more often than my outside-only-"kept" animals. My cats literally drink stagnant water every single day, algae, bacteria, various protozoa and all. The safety'ism in HN is out of control.

"If you ignore the worms it's all good!"

And you should, as they're largely beneficial.

? Because we raise them, live with them, watch them live a long and healthy life?

You're forgetting the people who absolutely were not fine. If those people die in childhood often enough, that eventually gets removed from or significantly reduced in the gene pool, but people have to die first. It's like asthma. Those kids used to just die. Now we have inhalers, so it appears like asthma is on the rise when it's more that less people die from it. It looks like adults who grow up drinking that water are fine, but you're ignoring the toddlers who died from drinking that water.

There's even a whole Wikipedia page on waterborne diseases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_disease

I have to respond here with "WTF are you talking about". You are engaging in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy without use of your critical thinking facilities. Any water source that has rotting plant material, or is exposed to the feces of animals puts you at high risk of serious illness. Some water sources will have natural bacterial contamination and/or mineral contamination (think arsenic).

Absolutely huge portions of the human population died to water quality issues before the 20th century.

He is also saying that animals are fine. Animals are not fine. Many animals that consume water out of the river only live for five years or so. Diseases still get them.

What are you talking about, almost all animals in wild live longer dan in captivity in Western Zoos. That's def. due to stress, but it means purified human water isn't a bigger factor then stress & movement. Animals and humans aren't stupid, we have an idea what water is safer then others.

You can remove the captivity factor by looking at feral vs. domestic animal lifespans of the same species.

Personally I have no idea what water is safer unless it smells, but maybe that’s my genes.

Most dogs & cats, even cattle, drink rainwater all the time.

Not only drink, but all animals always prefer rainwater in puddles, or other random "unclean" (by modern human standards) containers vs. pumped ground water. There is a lesson there for humans, if only we would pay attention.

>almost all animals in wild live longer

I seriously have to ask if you're an LLM trained to spout BS?

I would like you to drop the source of your 'wild vs zoo' statistics? If need be, expand that into wild vs general captivity. Here, let me do it for you...

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep36361

>We found that mammals from zoo populations generally lived longer than their wild counterparts (84% of species). The effect was most notable in species with a faster pace of life (i.e. a short life span, high reproductive rate and high mortality in the wild) because zoos evidently offer protection against a number of relevant conditions like predation, intraspecific competition and diseases.

I generally don't go out of my way to call out peoples BS, except in this case you're spouting things that are potentially dangerous to others. Don't go drinking out of puddles your dog does. I've seen dogs eat out of hot trash cans and be fine. Also I've seen dogs eat small chocolate bars and die. Trying to guess the quality of your water on the longevity of your dog is a great way to end up with brain cysts.

Calm down homie. If you've never drank rain water out of random "containers" in nature, have you even lived? Ever stay out in nature, alone for 3-4 months without a clean mountain stream nearby?

Pretty much since we stopped being nomadic / developed more sedentary agricultural societies

Going to the stream with a bucket is still a lot more effort than turning a tap. And don't forget the hot water that can also come out!

> due to our own pollution and the lack of build up to diseases in the water

I'm not sure this is exactly correct. Modern people still need to boil water to safely drink it even if the water comes from a remote area which does not have any pollution or disease.

You are right that it is a reinvention though because we used to do this regularly because we had antibodies and other things which could handle whatever was in the water in small quantities. Everything we have now is so pure that our immune and digestive systems can't handle anything that isn't pure anymore.

> Everything we have now is so pure that our immune and digestive systems can't handle anything that isn't pure anymore.

Ancient people were just ok with some risk of dying.

We can probably cope better with a bit of contamination than almost everybody through history. But we accept even less risk.

> Modern people still need to boil water to safely drink i

Not everywhere. Drinking water in the little town I live in in Norway is merely filtered and a little aluminium sulphate added to precipitate out the solids. You absolutely could have drunk the water before that treatment with no ill effects. That's because it comes from a lake high in the hills above any industrial or agricultural activity.

Industrial and agricultural pollution are not the only potential pollutants in tap water. There are natural sources of viruses, bacteria, and parasites that exist.

>That's because it comes from a lake high in the hills above any industrial or agricultural activity.

Half correct, but not completely correct..

I'm also assuming it remains very cold or even frozen for a huge portion of the year. The water is never getting to a temperature that allows much of the dangerous things to humans to grow. For example here in Texas you're apt to get amoebas in the 25-35C waters.

Also that high in the mountains you're probably getting water off mineral rock that's had very few interactions with the biosphere to accumulate wastes from animals.

You don't need industrial or agricultural activity to kill you.

Of course diseases still happen, but overall streams in mountains, wells etc. were relatively safe.

Cities with human feces, and factories still dumping waste mostly destroyed water ways.

It's state of water in most modern countries is disgusting.

Humans didn't have time to boil water before electricity & modern kitchen.

>Humans didn't have time to boil water before electricity & modern kitchen.

Again, you seemingly have very little knowledge of history at all. Outbreaks of waterborne diseases could happen at any time from a single bad water source. Just look up historical rates of dysentery. Humans in the past fermented and drank far more beer like substances for this reason.

Humans in the past also just fucking died... Anti-biotics and the chlorination of water explains the take-off rate of human population starting around 1900. Before then human populations were self limiting (and this goes for most animal populations too), when you get too many people or animals in one place, they pollute their own water. There was no 're-invention' here. Your entire premise sucks and does not reflect reality.

Maybe I think a bit further down.

Infant mortality was high for a reason. Some people may have been able to handle it, but not all. Even today, people in remote areas living as they always have with “clean” environments die of parasites, bacterial infections, and so on from their water sources.

You'll get parasites and random organisms if you consume water like that

"You're supposed to just be able to drink out of the river" seems incorrect at best

Note, for those thinking I'm foolish. This an example of the last decades. Amazon Tribes are forced to now use rainwater tanks with "taps"; since the Oil companies came decades ago the water in stream & rivers are not drinkable anymore.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/28/a...

So that's what I mean with a re-invention, tap-water is mostly needed due to human caused pollution.

Now were there pathogen in the rivers, for sure, did they get sick sometimes, most likely. Did it cause higher child mortality, I haven't been able to find data for or against that. But overall they were fine & it's up for debate whether those being exposed to small amounts of pathogens were a win or lose in the long run (some theories suggest our lack of pathogens are connected to auto-immune diseases & allergies)

Also our cities of course bring a lot of sewage issues causing another issue with water streams.

>Tap water. I can't stop marveling at the fact that we have (mostly) unlimited, clean, drinkable water on demand and virtually for free.

Somewhat unfortunately a lot of Tab Water in even developed countries today aren't drinkable without going through a very decent filter.

"Isn't palatable" isn't the same as "isn't drinkable".

I am not entirely sure if Lead or other heavy metal content in Water is consider Drinkable.

While lead is generally considered to not be drinkable, even in desperation, no one's putting the Brita water filters on their faucets to remove lead, and it's silly to even suggest it.

true, but significant lead in the water is a failure mode, not considered a normal state of most drinking water in developed areas. Generally, when found, some action is taken to address the contamination (unless there is some other regulatory failure, such as in Detroit).

A lot of developed (HDI greater than 0.8 and GDP per Capita greater than 13k) countries don't have regulations similar to the "Clean Water Act".

Turkey, Hungary, Cyprus, the Baltics outside the capital city, Malaysia, and Romania are great example of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Leal

Chlorinated water is a pretty recent invention at about 115 years now. Most interestingly it was first done without permission and the only reason Leal wasn't jailed for it was the immediate positive impact on health.

Wow, that's absolutely fascinating. Thanks for sharing that history

CLEAN? LOL.

Bill Hammack, The Engineer Guy, has a number of videos taking a deep dive into the development of seemingly simple things. Disposable Diapers, Aluminum Beverage Cans and Coffee Pots are a few of the things he explains. He's also very approachable, willing to put his number out for SMS conversations.

https://www.youtube.com/@engineerguyvideo

Thanks a lot for these! As someone who grew up watching How It's Made, I found it surprisingly difficult to scratch the same itch since.

Absolutely. He also scratches my How It's Made itch. Another one to look at would be Practical Engineering, for the Civil Engineering side of things.

As a Mechanical Engineer, I love how Bill able to present technical subjects in a way that accessible to people up and down the mechanical aptitude spectrum. More than once I've considered "How would Bill say it?" when I needed to communicate technical things.

https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel

Yes I do, all the time. Your post and the comments it elicited reminded me of the excerpt from Adam Smith's Weath Of Nations about the Woolen Coat. It is given as an example of what can be achieved thanks to the division of labor. I took pleasure in re-reading it so I copy it here:

"The woolen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool-comber or carder, the dryer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! how much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!... Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next to his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on... the kitchen grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage...; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided... the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be tue, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many of African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages."

Obligatory critique of the division of labour from that same book:

> In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

Only the market could possibly create the magic of modern society. Countless independent firms operating with knowledge only of their inputs and outputs, adjusting prices and wages based upon their unique window of the larger economy.

The market creates a minimum saleable product.

Somehow every time I go to buy something there are hidden qualities I lack the information or skills to judge.

Clothesline Pegs: I've made some effort here because I like functionally good design. Currently own "pink pegs" but half of those have broken (fragile plastic over time - not sure if brand changed or I didn't get original brand). Bought some stainless steel pegs - threw first lot away because they get tangled. Bought second lot but they appear to be getting rust spots. My parents have some 45 year old plastic pegs that still work great!

Appliances: broken Miele about 5 years old. Luckily discovered one model of Microwave with a good UI (so good I got my parents the same model). Struggled to find an induction hob/stovetop with actual knobs: current fashion is touch-sensitive buttons and they all have UI faults that fail for my elderly mum. Touch-UI fails for me too - I fucking hate my stovetop UI and just yesterday my friend struggled to use it).

iPhone: I discover a new bug in the UI all the time. Some are subtle and you would only notice if you really care and are knowledgeable about UI. Some you find workarounds for (Getting to the "Select All" menu). Helping mum with her iPad discovers a whole new set of serious UI flaws. Frustration for mum then too much time out of my day because a number field gets screwed up by her typing in a comma. If you have a phone call and go to the Home Screen, then tap the phone icon why are we not returned to the current phone call screen?

The market for disabled equipment is completely screwed. Spent days trying to find a usable wheelchair. Rollators with brakes that don't work. Hard rubber tyres that get stuck on small surface variations. It's a nightmare: the only thing that helps is that I have the time and skills to find something that almost works (usually with glaring usability faults). Often unobvious dangerous faults remain like the rollator that scratched my mum's ankle badly and required doctors and months of recovery and heartache for my dear mum.

Products and services are fractally complex and there seems to be no solution to the problems for an average person.

Huh, in those closing remarks Adam Smith appears to care about wealth inequality per se, that's slightly surprising.

I think you are up for a surprise if you read the Wealth of nations. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher and was pretty preoccupied by the negative consequences of the division of labor.

Yeah, I've found other surprising passages in it before (I don't think I ever read it right through though). This was published before the French revolution, and a year before the United States happened, so it's cutting edge stuff.

I would say it's "surprisingly modern" and quite prescient - definitely worth reading.

I have noticed that Smith's writing is often mischaracterized by those with a mythology they want to promote.

If I remember correctly, Smith was concerned that the mercantile, feudalistic economies of his time was the source of poverty and inequality, and that free market economics would bring more prosperity to society.

Hence the title, “Wealth of Nations”.

This complexity for even the most mundane of objects is why, in my opinion, Centrally Planned Economies are doomed to failure.

You can’t optimize this! As far as I’ve learned and studied this, supply chains are NP hard.

Having so much success with "The Things That Worked" that we used some of the excess bounty to allow testing "The Things That Might Not Work" until we found more of "The Things That Worked" was one of the best parts of the enlightenment age to the industrial age.

For most of my life, I didn’t. I’m in my late 30s now, and a year or two back I walked into a grocery store and the reality of what that store represented absolutely floored me.

It’s absolutely stunning to think about the number of humans involved in making my process of acquiring food simple. Not just the farms and processing centers and canneries, etc. but the sum total of human knowledge required to make it all happen.

I started to pay more attention to “mundane” things, and started to realize mundane is just a label that limited my perspective.

We live in this push-button world where most of what we interact with is an abstraction on top of an abstraction on top of an abstraction. The fact that I can literally push a button and food shows up at my door makes it easy to lose touch with the reality of how utterly incredibly that is.

I’ve started to intentionally spend time each day paying closer attention to the basic things. Making dinner can be a mind blowing experience if you bring your full attention to it and ponder the reality of how dinner is possible. The sheer number of other humans we each depend on without realizing it is staggering. There are unlimited opportunities for this kind of exploration.

I’ve some to see it as some kind of “spiritual awakening”, although I think those are really loaded words. But in essence a cultivation of a broader awareness of the inherent complexity and interconnectedness of everything we interact with.

It brings a kind of awe and wonder that has deeply shifted my perspective and worldview, and has made me want to engage more fully with everyday things.

And it’s fun as hell.

You should check out "Connections" by James Burke.

This was brought into sharp focus during Covid and the supply chain break down. We are so incredibly reliant on so many points in the chain and we take it all for granted. When it works its incredible and when we get a single point of failure, everything breaks down.

> the sum total of human knowledge required to make it all happen.

A couple weeks ago, some idiot wandered into /r/farming with a question and immediately pissed off everyone by referring to "the simple process of growing food."

It really is unfortunate that most people don't think about where food comes from beyond it somehow showing up at the grocery store.

> I walked into a grocery store and the reality of what that store represented absolutely floored me.

During a state visit to Johnson Space Center Boris Yeltsin decided to make an impromptu stop at a supermarket. He was floored by the selection and prices. Apparently that was the moment that inspired him to leave the communist party and begin economic reforms in Russia.

I have this exact same experience about every other time I walk into a grocery store as well. It's hard not to be in awe of the amount of time and effort that went into every single one of those thousands of products. Multiple people studied for years to learn the skills required to create a small part of just one of those products.

> I’ve some to see it as some kind of “spiritual awakening”, although I think those are really loaded words. But in essence a cultivation of a broader awareness of the inherent complexity and interconnectedness of everything we interact with.

Imagining the hordes of humans and machinery behind the simplest of products is truly awe inspiring.

Of course there's an XKCD for that. https://xkcd.com/676/

I drive along in my Jeep and now and again marvel at the bazillion pieces in it.

How many man hours went in to the design, drawings, renderings, steps to make ready for manufacturing, finding a contractor, casting it, coating it, polishing it, bagging it, tagging it, and shipping it to the assembly line for the lever I used to open the door.

Can you imagine being in the design meeting for that thing? 10 folks around a table, the buffet with scattered lunch trays on it, marking up white boards, feeling prototypes, discussing material costs and shipping and raw material availability. The feel of the curves, too big, too small, "needs to be upscale because of the market for the vehicle".

That's just one piece.

"Let me introduce the 'push-to-talk' button", rinse and repeat.

I appreciate that they're going to use the part for at least 5 years, that they're going to be making at least a million of these parts (making some decisions even more important, remember, every penny costs us $10,000!). And it's a touch item for the consumer, vs bracket under the car, that may receive a bit less scrutiny.

But there are 50-100,000 parts in that car. Not to mention the probably pushing million line of code in the dozen plus CPUs. My car has more computers than I do.

Then my mind swims, and I get a little dizzy, and think "I probably shouldn't be doing this at 80MPH", so I turn on baseball.

As somebody that works in cars and often have to design and manufacture custom parts the fact that they can make all those parts fit is the most incredible. I don’t recall a single time where something I designed that involved more than 3 parts at least one of them hadn’t to go back to the design stage to be re-manufactured.

I share your sense of wonder at everyday objects. The essay “I,Pencil” captures this rather poignantly.

https://cdn.mises.org/I%20Pencil.pdf

Thanks for posting this. I saw a video[0] with Milton Friedman in it that quoted this essay but didn't understand it's origin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

Very interesting. I had never seen that, but had seen this other essay which is clearly based on it, which supposes the complications that might arise if the FAA required pencils to certified for aviation use. I think it's a lot funnier than I, Pencil.

http://www.rstengineering.com/rst/articles/tsodpencil.pdf

Whenever I think of "I, Pencil", for some reason, I think of John Wick.

George H.W. Bush (the father not the son) actually expressed a thought like that about supermarket scanners at a grocers convention[0] while he was running for re-election. The New York Times used this to falsely portray Bush as unfamiliar with supermarket scanners. Of course the lie ended up being better remembered than the debunking so it hurt Bush and may have cost him re-election.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket_scanner_moment

> may have cost him re-election

Perhaps, but I suspect “read my lips, no more taxes” and Ross Perot taking a large chunk of republican voters might have more to do with it.

Perot got almost 20% of the vote which is huge amount for a third party candidate, and being a succesful buisnessman and outsider as opposed to the government bureaucrat Bush made him appeal to many traditionally republican voters.

Perot supposedly drew equal numbers of voters from both sides, and I can see how that would be the case. If you wanted an “outsider”, Clinton was the governor of a small southern state who openly flouted political norms and was affectionately nicknamed “Bubba”. (In reality he was groomed for the ruling elite from his youth, but at the time people still fell for the Bubba act, just like they did less than 20 years previously for “Jimmy” Carter). The country wasn’t as polarized back then, or at least was polarized differently. Perot carved out his own lane in a lot of ways, but for every conservative Republican who was upset at Bush, there was probably a unionized auto worker and lifelong Democrat who was upset at Clinton for selling out on NAFTA.

> Perhaps, but I suspect “read my lips, no more taxes” and Ross Perot taking a large chunk of republican voters might have more to do with it.

Your analysis is correct, but the quote was slightly different:

"Read my lips, no new taxes"

GHWB also lied during the presidential debates. Afterward, his staff said, basically 'oops, sorry for the error'. That is, they were relying on Brandolini's Law to hold - and for people to believe the lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law?useskin=vec...

OK, obligatory joke: "How do you know a Politician is Lying?" "Her/His/Their/Its Lips are Moving!" ok, maybe 1% of a joke.....

> Of course the lie ended up being better remembered than the debunking so it hurt Bush and may have cost him re-election.

How far we've come. Today, politicians use lies to win elections.

Version of this is happening right now with the Trump "Bloodbath" comment. He is clearly speaking in the context of automobile manufacturing but the media has spun it to insinuate he is threatening violence. Personally I very much dislike Trump but the media spin on this from supposedly neutral news companies is egregious.

“Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.”

It’s clear he introduced his bloodbath metaphor in the context of talking about the auto industry. But it seems as he was saying it he had this thought - that the bloodbath wouldn’t just be confined to the auto industry. “… it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.” The ‘bloodbath’ he expects in the auto industry is in his mind an example of a more widespread threat. A ‘bloodbath for the country’.

Pretending his use of this language isn’t connected to a larger apocalyptic narrative he’s selling is disingenuous.

Everything he stated was in the context of the auto industry. Pulling it out of context and then applying your own interpretation is the disingenuous action. You and the media have added your own spin to a completely out of context statement. Don't get me wrong, I think Trump us dangerous but people and media doing this and misleading about what he said works to his benefit. It erodes trust in the news.

Here's the article: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/05/us/bush-encounters-the-su...

You seem very convinced that the NYT pulled this notion from thin air and Bush was experiencing a moment of wonder towards everyday technology (the theme of this thread).

After reading the article, I believe this is the first electric scanner Bush saw. Bush is quoted saying "This is for checking out?" "I just took a tour through the exhibits here," "Amazed by some of the technology."

"Some grocery stores began using electornic scanners as early as 1976, and the devices have been in general use in American supermarkets for a decade."

This tells me that he hadn't been to a grocery store with this technology, which seems very plausible for many politicians, then and now. They have people to do that for them, they're out of touch (at least to some degree).

If you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole, you can follow along with John Plant on YouTube, he started with a well chosen rock, and got to an Axe, fire, kilns, huts, and recently has been smelting iron source from the iron eating(?) bacteria in a local stream.[1] He generally doesn't talk, but explains things in the subtitles if you turn them on.

Machining for me, is the particular course I took... I find the whole subject fascinating, especially making gears, and gear shaped objects, which I did for 5 years. I hadn't realized until that point that properly made involute gears have a rolling contact, they never slide against each other. That's how they last so long.

Look into Precision, especially Gage Blocks, for some fascinating things.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

> If you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole, you can follow along with John Plant on YouTube

He's better known by the name of his channel, Primitive Technology. Most viewers probably don't know his name. Unlike most YouTubers, he never speaks to the camera (or speaks at all), and rarely writes about himself.

When I finally got my own set of Gage Block, I finally deeply realized how important they were/are to worldwide precision product design.

I would like to add "measurement" to high precision as well to these lists. Our ability to do accurate measurements allowed observation of phenomena otherwise hidden. (e.g. with a 4.5 digit DMM, you'll get a solid, stable reading. With a 9-digit DMM, you'll see a 'random walk' in the LSDs - caused by all sorts of interesting phenomna)

> With a 9-digit DMM, you'll see a 'random walk' in the LSDs - caused by all sorts of interesting phenomna)

Can you elaborate on this some?

Related: designer Thomas Thwaites had the same thought and created a toaster from scratch, starting with iron ore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942190

Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw

> In the end he put together a haggard-looking stripped-down version of something we can buy for the price of a sandwich. It only took him nine months, several trips across country lines, and a many moments of lateral thinking. He did plug it in once, but because he wasn't able to make insulation for the wires, the toaster started melting itself about 5 seconds in. Thwaites considers it a partial success.

Sometimes it's equally surprising to me that some people have so much time on their hands to pursue things like this...

Or he worked tirelessly on this for 9 months, and had no free time for anything else. But many things came of it for him, and it had an impact (it’s still being quoted now.)

After sleeping and working, most people have several hours a day left over.

Time into which they have to fit eating, cooking, cleaning, showering, laundry, shopping, commuting, exercising, childrearing, family, professional development, dating, socialising, home maintenance, personal paperwork, pursuing hobbies, and relaxing.

You can have a lot of time for one of those - if you're willing to prioritise it over all the others.

> the toaster started melting itself about 5 seconds in. Thwaites considers it a partial success.

and the difference between that diy contraption and this fancy old toaster is like a difference between a skateboard and a car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

Reminds me of a story I read about a North Korean who defected to the US during the Korean War. He came across an American nail clipper and was amazed by the machining and intricacy that went into something as mundane as trimming nails. He realized that if this is the complexity of a nail-clipper, he was surely no match to American weapons. He'd defect soon after.

> He realized that if this is the complexity of a nail-clipper, he was surely no match to American weapons. He'd defect soon after.

Heh, of course he failed to thus learn the lesson that sheer numbers can solve many problems when the People’s Liberation Army crossed the North Korean border

“Quantity has a quality all its own”

He probably just realized SK priorities are completely different given that the north would never spend valuable industrial resources to produce a mundane item such as this instead of feeding the war machine

I remember this story a bit differently: he came across the nail clipper in the grass next to the shared trail in the DMZ and left it alone, since if he picked it up, the South Korean that lost it would accuse the North Korean border guards of theft of a valuable tool and spark a diplomatic incident.

The next few times he patrolled the trail he would check if the clipper was still there, and it was. What was more puzzling, the grass along the sides of the trail showed no traces of a search. Then he realized that no one was coming back for it, that not only was South Korea so rich that a random border guard could afford a nail clipper, but it was so much richer that the loss of a delicate tool like that was just a mild inconvenience, that the guard must've just went and bought another one.

Interesting. Perhaps different tellings of the same story? This appears to be the story I read from the book Nothing to Envy:

> A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?

and now the north koreans sell arms to Russia, which says something.

Possibly from "Nothing to Envy" by Barbara Demick: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Nothing_to_Envy/BgKWDwA...

I've also seen the version recalled by orthoxerox elsewhere (reddit) but couldn't find a more authoritative source.

Yes, that's where I read the story

Reminds me of the famous story about Boris Yeltsin.

While he was on a state visit to Johnson Space Center, he made an impulse decision to check out a grocery store. He was astonished by the selection and low prices. Apparently it was this visit that caused him to leave the communist party and start to reform Russia economically.

Ah! This gets compounded when you have kid(s), especially from about 3-4 years to about 10-11 years. “Papa, I will show you something,” my daughter said a few years back. “See, the light in the fridge turns off when I press this button. Do you know the light is off when you shut the fridge, and this button does that trick? I had to look up YouTube videos to know how that works.”

We take a lot of things for granted, but slowing down the speed of our daily routine/duties and looking a tad closer gives us a different perspective.

Some of my most profound joys have been small moments like that with my, now, 5-year-old. Many of them about the physical world or technology, but also just discovering all the best little things about being alive - like pie.

I once thought about a plastic spoon. You need to dig up stuff from the ground use losts of chemistry knowledge to make it into plastic, have machines to bring it into this great form that is very thind and delicate hence stable. Then you need someone to bag lots of them up and put into boxes and ship halfway around the world to bring them into a shop so one can buy them.

And because this spoon costs next to nothing all this is considered less valuable then using a reusable spoon and wash it after usage.

If you think about it, this feels just crazy.

Or the take-away restaurant puts in a spoon with your order, but you go home and eat with your own cutlery, throwing this spoon in the trash, and the energy and CO2 expended to produce and bring you this spoon was all for nothing.

There's so many examples of this, like sugar packets you get with coffee, left unopened and thrown in the trash as you leave the coffee place..

Absolutely. Usually not about the complexity required to make it (although the thought "holy shit, even with all of today's knowledge making a simple generator or motor in medieval times would be nearly impossible due to the need to have wire, and to have that you need..." has crossed my mind), but I've occasionally stopped to admire the amazing engineering that went into some simple everyday objects.

Either something made in a genially simple way, or something that's much more complex than it looks at first glance, or just really clever problem solving in general. I don't remember what it was the last time, but I do remember something made me stop for a few minutes just so I can go "wow" at the engineering, discovering one little detail after the other.

IKEA furniture are masterpieces of engineering, often using just the absolute minimum of material to still deliver a decent-quality product, designed so it can be not just manufactured but also delivered and inventoried cheaply, and easily assembled by the average consumer.

Just the other week I was thinking: the hardware store is my bolt lengthener. I had a bolt that was too short, and no means to make it longer. I simply went to the hardware store and got a replacement. Of course this encumbers all of the requisite industries (mining, manufacturing, shipping, and a mom-and-pop shop correctly guessing what I would need and being willing to stock it). But for me, it all wraps up functionally into being a bolt lengthener.

Yes, all the time..... :)

99pi is a podcast about things like this: https://99percentinvisible.org/about/the-show/

But it's a great way to view the world. The next time you see an object, ask yourself how it all comes together. The table your laptop is sitting on? Think about the screws, the joinery, the glue. Think about the screw itself, the washer, the nut. The precision tooling for the screw's teeth. Think about the glue and the packaging it came in and how it was applied. Think about the machines that cut the wood, the assembly, the material used to polish it. The complexity in packaging it, storing it, picking it, transporting it, shipping it, all of it. And in each one of those transitions, consider the complexity of the cars, ships, shipping containers, cranes -- how much went into all of it. It's a beautifully complex world.

And then all of the digital physically-insubstantial parts of it too. All the computer code and files, all of the financial side of things. money is mostly digital these days. Insurance is a whole conceptual thing too. The way it all has to happen and work together to make it all happen is simply magnificent!

I was thinking about it one time, coincidentally I went into the example of metal wire itself. I call it the "Stack trace of an object"

https://chat.openai.com/share/3bad8272-c632-4659-8c0b-59578e...

There is also, based on this definition of the stack trace, what are the most simplest objects. the simpleness of an object is defined by the height of that stack trace

so maybe it WAS triggered by solder fumes!

Yeah, all the time. Most recently I was marvelling at the new tethered lid on a bottle of fizzy drink. They'd designed it so that as you unscrew the cap, it twists enough free material to form a hinge and then it has a little lip that catches to hold the lid fully open. When screwed back down it takes up no more space than the previous, untethered design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cpfdhKLW3A

(I apologise for the big jazz.)

While marvelous... I hate those caps with a vengeance.

Veritasium had this video about the history of sewing machines recently [1].

I remember watching it and ended up in awe of how something that we take for granted took a journey of several thousand years to be get invented.

While I'm thinking about it, his recent video about the development of blue LEDs [2] is very interesting as well if you haven't seen it.

[1] https://youtu.be/RQYuyHNLPTQ [2] https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M

Similar, but different - I am sometimes totally overcome with sonder, especially when passing a large residential building or flying over a city.

/Noun. sonder (uncountable) (neologism) The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it./

Same here. Perhaps the craziest bit is all the microinteractions that we have. For example, you and I may never interact other than in this one comment thread.

So am I. In fact, I remember exactly when it started. Never knew that there was a word for it, though.

Great word. When flying over a foreign country I like to look out the plane window at people driving on remote roads and wonder what they're like and what stories they have. Didn't realize there was a word for that.

It's a word made up by tumblr-ists though...

Made up just like every other word.

Oof, yep. Look at a stop sign. And think about all the lives of all the people through all the decades that sign has been standing there.

Each person connected to everyone else in a web of history.

Every single living being having a unique experience, every second of every day. Every inanimate object having a history that might span back through to the beginning of time. Lonely rocks floating through space for longer than we can even fathom.

Sonder is a wonderful feeling.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig.

https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...

It's listed in dictionary.com, but it's not in Merriam-Webster or Cambridge dictionaries yet.

People that I meet that don't share this kind of feeling and are not impressed at all by the complexity of the mundane are very disappointing to me... sorry, but it's a way I have to judge people very quickly

I used to think this line of thinking was a bit elitist¹, but I find that I also get a bit depressed by people who simply don't look up at birds. It could just be a lack of eyesight, but I find even with people great eyesight, just wont look up, and I perceive it as a general lack of any curiosity about the world around them.

1: and it is elitist to a degree, if you believe these people will never develop the interest. I live in the knowledge that they will, and that we're all late bloomers in some certain respect.

I was once standing at a bus stop when I heard the sound of a large radial engine. Looked up to see a Lockheed Constellation flying overhead! Not a single other person standing at the bus stop or walking past looked up.

I went to the American History Museum for the Smithsonian a few years ago, and they had a floating exhibit about the history of the refrigerator.

For reasons I don't really understand myself, I sort of became transfixed on it. I became fascinated with how recently we have been able to preserve food, and how quickly the fridge just became "boring" and cheap. 200 years ago, a real, working mini fridge could probably be sold for basically any amount of money, but today you can get a cheap one for basically any college dorm for like $50.

You should try Factorio. It is an awesome game where you can experience building up a super-simplified version of our economy from scratch with the final goal of putting up a space rocket together. Even with god-like capabilities of your character and the unreal possibily to fully automate every process, it can be mind-bogglingly hard to achieve just this simplified economy to work smoothly towards the end goal. A great way to see that the huge part of that complexity is also logistics and ecology concerns, not just production!

I constantly marvel at infrastructure. Growing up as a "STEM" guy, the world of "construction" was kind of looked down on. Later on, as I started to build physical things, and realized how much time, effort, and planning goes into even a simple structure like a shed or a retaining wall, I started to look around and be amazed at almost every bit of infrastructure. Any random building or road you see took so much will and intention just to exist. So many collective man-hours surround us everywhere and are so easy to take for granted if you haven't experienced the process of building something.

When I was at the Met in New York, the thing that struck me the most was the building itself. It's almost a quarter mile long. How many individual pieces have been placed? How many light bulbs are there, that need to be maintained and replaced? The amount of infrastructure in Manhattan as a whole, and what it takes to build there, is just mind-boggling. There was construction next to Grand Central Station I think, and there was an absolutely massive crane or backhoe thing sitting on top of the new building, and I thought, how did they even get that there, in the middle of all these constantly busy narrow streets?

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. —Carl Sagan

We stand on the shoulders of giants, working for thousands of years. And it’s quite interesting what the ancient world had already figured out.

Marcus du Sautoy has a series about the history of math. They were studying it and had taxes already in ancient Sumeria.

James Burke’s Connections is a great series on the haphazard progression of technology. And Cosmos is great as well.

I immediately searched for this quote when I read the OP. Thanks!

If you've never worked on-site (even in an office) somewhere that has a production facility (e.g. factory) that you can take a tour of, I highly recommend it.

I had early jobs for a chemical company and it gives you insight into all the work that happens upstream in an supply chain before something shows up on a retail shelf (of any kind).

Really gives you perspective that so many people in our sphere just don't have

I always find cars (especially ICE cars) more impressive than more "advanced" technologies like airplanes or spaceships.

To make cars, it not only requires technical sophistication, but also needs to be reliable enough to be operated by ordinary person everyday and be extremely affordable. The more i think about it, the more it sounds like a miracle.

The affordable part isn't a miracle or anything amazing, it's simply the product of huge economies of scale. If airplanes were made in the hundreds of millions per year, they'd be a lot cheaper too (still a lot more than cars because of the materials and labor costs).

But you're right about the reliability aspect: cars really are a lot more reliable than airplanes, in that they don't need lots of frequent maintenance. If you compare modern cars with cars from 50+ years ago, the difference is staggering. Ask your grandparents sometime about how long their cars lasted, and how much maintenance they needed. You can see it in old advertisements from those times: cars needing lubrication every 1k miles, for instance.

> If you compare modern cars with cars from 50+ years ago, the difference is staggering

This - even 30 years ago, if you were doing a 4 hour+ journey, there was a pretty decent chance your car would break down at some point. It would be on your mind. Nowadays, it’s really almost unheard of, to the point where people don’t even think about it.

It really impresses me that a typical ICE can run at thousands of RPM for years on end with relatively minimal maintenance, and then then it's not the pistons and engine block that will fail first.

For some reason I always think about that in the context of hypotetical self-sustaining Mars colonies.

In internet discussion there is always talk about the big resources: We'll get oxygen out of water ice, methane out of the athmosphere, we'll get iron out the the regolith, we will farm in greenhouses, etc.

But a sustaining colony need rubber gaskets for airlocks and a million little things which in end effect need the whole of Earth's supply chain behind it. Can you make an economic case for Mars if you need to transport ca. 99% of the needed manufactured goods to the red planet first and do that for centuries? What do you sell in return? What is the equivalent to Marsian beaver furs?

I'm not sure about mars, but at least for the moon it might be using helium-3 isotopes abundant in moon rocks as a fuel source for fusion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3

Yes, but where you’ll get the molded plastic for the electric plugs to use your fusion power?

Phones. The absolute pinnacle of engineering.

Mining, materials science, cutting edge, chip design manufacture, international logistics and supply chain management, quantum physics in the display, relativity in the GPS, some very complex data compression and coding schemes in the modem, adaptive noise cancellation for voice and video, a global backend of satellites, fiber optics, and microwave/radio distribution for the comms infrastructure, a global collection of server farms and connection protocols, OS design and computer science in the software, a common-ish standard for browsers, AI and adjacent systems for image and video processing - and the whole thing spends most of its time serving ads and distributing cat videos.

Phones are amazing. Shame about the user lock-out via software.

Leonard Read had the same feeling when he wrote "I, Pencil". Here [1] you have it narrated by Milton Friedman.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

I was going to post this but decided not to, because it's a nice story until the end, where it devolves into capitalist propaganda.

And, if there were ONE economist 'responsible' for the current economic inequalities, it is Uncle Milty. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/11/-milton-fr...

I often think many trivial items are curious.

For example these: https://keyring.com/heavy-duty-small-snap-clip-key-ring-soli... (I had trouble finding a link/pic of one even though I think we all have come across these things...)

- What are they actually properly called? ("Snap Clip" doesn't return these if you search for it.)

- How does the little spring loaded pull down bit get attached? (If you've ever played with one there's no obvious way to remove it, making it unclear how it was put together.)

In general, lots of items are kind of subtly mysterious like that.

Yes, very much so. I spent a week once just thinking about my alarm clock. It's a $15 Chinese unbranded alarm clock, but it's so complex there are probably no people on Earth who could completely understand it. Analyze its circuit, the code that drives it, the materials and components that compose it, their historical origins, their supply chain origins, etc. You'd always be able to find a new way to observe this alarm clock. This got me really thinking about how interconnected things are, I theorize that you could start at any one thing and with enough effort end up at any other. There must exist a path between toilet paper and rocket science.

6 degrees of separation between bacon and anything else.

Yes, I have similar thoughts. Getting older, traveling more, seeing the hustle and bustle of large cities, becoming more aware of all these details that many people don't think about, etc...has all greatly expanded my world view. One of the big thoughts that these kinds of realizations have left me with is how vanishingly small each human's view is compared to the total scope of the universe. None of us is able to escape the confines of our skin and our personal perspective. However, we all tend to extrapolate this vanishingly small slice of ours to the whole universe. Problem is, it's very difficult to figure when that extrapolation is valid and when it is over-fitting, which is probably the root of a lot of human conflict.

You may enjoy the book How To Invent Everything[1], which scratches the surface of recreating everyday inventions/conveniences in a satisfying way.

1. https://www.howtoinventeverything.com

Also The Design of Everyday Things:

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

Interesting. I just yesterday talked about this book with a friend during coffee. If you read this, good morning Sveniboi.

How to invent everything was a bit too hand wavy for me. It would barely scratch the surface of a topic (like making steel) and declare "and now you've invented steel" so that it could move on to help you invent other things now that you have steel ignoring the time and labor and trial and error required to reliably produce steel (which could be years).

If you like that thought experiment though (reinventing society from scratch) I recommend the anime Dr. Stone and the YouTube channel Primitive Technology.

Reminds me of The Internet from Rocks at https://julian.bearblog.dev/the-internet-from-rocks/.

My attention has lately turned to the possibilities offered by ‘new’ materials, especially ceramics. I have a hunch that 40% of everything the industry produces with metals could be built with oxides and rare earths [not so rare, actually]. New materials force redefinitions in shapes and textures. A completely new world of shapes and textures will appear in the coming years/decades.

The deterioration of the online environment in recent years has made me turn my eyes to the world of tangible things. Reality has a reassuring character. In the last few years I have become a maker of real things[0] and I have been happy that way. I am also enchanted by the beauty of certain forms created by human industry.

(!)This links to my blog, so I’m breaking the url so as not to be accused of spamming the board.

[0]h\ps://voxleone.com/2024/03/05/3d-printing-im-making-a-500c-ceramic-hot-end/

Yup, it crosses my mind all the time, and it's been like that since I was a teenager.

The awe extends also outside of physical objects, I get it, for example, when reading a good book and realising how much work was put all the way through from the creative process itself, how hard was it to come up with the ideas, develop it, then edit, etc. to all the production, distribution and other processes until it got into my hands. Or when watching films/series and thinking how much work was the whole production, writing it, casting, filming people on set, all the equipment used being made (lenses, cameras, etc.), how many people are involved in the whole chain.

Sometimes it's overwhelming, every little thing I interact with depended on the labour of so many (from tap water, electricity, sewage, food, transport to every object anywhere, all the way to virtual products on the internet, my phone, my computer) that it frightens me on how fragile the whole web connecting the production of it all feels like, at the same time it's quite resilient just from the fact it's all human.

The "Iron, How Did They Make It" collections from Bret Devereaux ( https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-... ) describe the complete process of making iron tool (you want to make some steel: for that you need some iron; for that you need to melt it; for that you need heat; for that you need coal; for that you wood) in a medieval setting.

Otherwise I enjoy the Primitive Technology YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550 ). John Plant makes stuff strictly and entirely from scratch. It really shows how difficult it is to start civilization.The distinct lack of spoken narration and typical YouTube overstimulation is refreshing (it's closer to the ASMR style of channel in that regard).

Cats.

There are five cats who live under and around my house. One of them is the mother of the rest of them. Sometimes I look at one of them after they've wandered into the house and I just marvel at the complexity of the biological processes that turned a bunch of cat food into these creatures with distinct personalities.

100% yes. So many things seem like magic.

Big things, like big mechanical things or carpentry, I get.

But the incredible precision that we’ve achieved at the microscopic scale with CPUs and such always confound me. So many things happening perfectly in sync at mind boggling scale and speed.

And yeah, even the mundane products that we can produce at incredible scale. CAT-6 cable by the mile, seemingly effortless. Glasses and contact lenses curved to a perfect shape by the millions, no problem.

The corpus of thought and work that’s built up over the span of human endeavors is really pretty impressive.

How To Make Everything was a great series on YouTube. It really did a good job of capturing how incredibly difficult it is to go from nothing to even a primitive existence.

Thanks for your post!

One year before passing away, he sent a beautiful email to himself with this sense of awe:

"I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being."

It's remarkable how brain habitually ignores stuff that is relatively constant, no matter how impressive or how important.

I bought a small screw-cutting lathe during lockdown.

Ever since I've found my self looking a small metal parts and wondering if/how I would make them on my lathe.

i.e. what order of operations I would use, how would I hold the work, do I need extra milling operations?

I can happily waste an afternoon looking at a toilet roll holder working all that out.

A real puzzler for me was, how do you make hex sockets at home? Answer: The magic that is the rotary broach[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broaching_(metalworking)#Rotar...

One day, a long time ago, I walked into a small machine shop after hours and asked the owner what the words "Screw Machine" in the business' name meant. There were lots of small shops around called "x Screw Machine Co." and I was curious.

He took me on a short tour of his shop and showed me what a screw machine was. Most of the equipment was 40+ years old and many of them still had the stencil, "Property of War Department."

In short, it's a bar-fed high-speed automatic lathe with all the automation done with cams and gears. I watched it make some kind of specialized spacer, each piece taking about 40 seconds, and as a software engineer familiar with CNC, I was amazed that this could be done so fast without a single computer in sight.

And yes, there are now CNC versions that can do even more mind-blowingly complex operations, but I'm still impressed by cams and gears.

Having recently bought a metal lathe, and in general having a long time fascination with manufacturing, broaching is freaking mind blowing. Imparting form into metal by extremely strategic shaving off thousandths until you get to what you're looking for. It just doesn't seem like it should actually work at all, yet we wouldn't have things like allen bolts, splines, or keyways without them. Turns out all you need is the right geometry and super hard metal to make it work.

Rotary broaches are just so cool in that getting the right angle and wobble to the tooling is incredibly important, but it just seems like magic when it actually does it's thing. https://youtu.be/GWyHJVOxKK4?t=444 It's only when I saw what it was doing with the rotary motion stabilized that it started to make sense. https://youtu.be/4-3gPWl6wfU?t=95

Any good resources on screw-cutting? That sounds like a rabbit hole I'd like to lose a few hours in..

There’s loads of good books like Machinery Handbook but I generally just keep a set of Roebuck Zeus Tables in my pocket.

I love the Workshop Practice Series books including this one on the screw cutting lathe[1] is a good introduction.

As much as possible I stick to the ISO Metric Course thread standard. That’s the M sizes.

I can get away with just one set of change gears, taps and dies and one set of tapping drills.

E.g. to tap an M8 size hole you need a 6.8mm drill so that when you tap it it will have the correct size. You generally won’t find that a set of drills from a DIY store.

I avoid it but if I do need Metric Fine threads I can cut them on the lathe with the same set of change gears.

For other non-metric standards for a specific purpose I buy one off taps and drills but I really try to avoid this.

e.g. camera mounts are usually either Whitworth or UNC but you won't find these much else where.

Quality drills and taps really help with small lathes where motor power is limited. I’ve tried cheap stuff but it's somewhat frustrating when a cheap, no name tap breaks off in something you've spent days making. Now I just use Presto[2][3] for everything.

1. https://www.specialinterestmodelbooks.co.uk/product/screwcut...

2. https://www.presto-tools.co.uk/

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rxqIL15aCY

Not just the complexity but the absurd amount of human effort behind to produce every object around us.

As John Collison tweeted: "As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects."

https://twitter.com/collision/status/1529452415346302976

You could ponder the convoluted logistics and manufacturing of a Hakko FA-400 fume absorbing fan while you are soldering next time. Might not be the same trip but at least you won't get the headache that caused this post.

Yes, my marvel usually points to the stuff most of us couldn't do. Like "lets say we put this 100 people from this park (not around the MIT..) in an island, could we build a [1] in a decade? Probably not. What about 100 years? Still don't think so..."

But weren't most things invented and built in a similar period? And a group of randos that knows the basics of each invention can't replicate the steps?

[1] -> sheet of white paper, simple light bulb, cathode tv, modern electronics

[2] Actually I think we would even have a hard time making metal from sand...

Yes, often. Sometimes I'll look at a throwaway item of packaging, and imagine all the engineering and design, material science and raw materials needed to construct a "single use" item such as a plastic bottle.

What seems of no value to us would have been amazing to someone from the past. What is thrown away today could be considered a priceless artifact in 2000 years (well, maybe.)

I'm reminded of that film, "The Gods Must Be Crazy!" If you haven't seen it, it's well worth a look.

Spoiler > A discarded glass cola bottle is found by a tribesman who discovers it has many abilities: it can hold water, it can crush grains, it is a weapon, it can start fires (lens effect), and it is even a musical instrument, by blowing into it.

To the tribesman it's an artifact sent by the gods. To the outside world, it's just a glass bottle that's been thrown away.

I too think about this all the time. Even as a post-doctoral graduate, I still could not make a spoon. Even given a piece of sheet metal, how would I cut, bend and form it into the right shape? And that's a static object made out of one material.

The problem is that you cannot live off of making one spoon a day. Mass-producing everything has diminished the value of one-offs to near nothing. Worse, it has diminished the value of knowing how to make objects. That's why machinists are grossly underpaid.

The closer you get to raw materials, the more price deflation. If you are planning on making something for a living, you'll have to be the most efficient at making a lot of that one object to keep the price down. I met a business owner in Colombia who made "aluminum rods." I don't speak Spanish, and I was confused and asked, "Your company makes rods?" He replied, "Yes, of all shapes and sizes, via extrusion." He is an expert at extrusion. To me, making a rod is harder than making a spoon. Yet, the process is so well understood that there's too many such companies worldwide. There's push by U.S. steelworkers to enact antidumping laws on aluminum extruders from multiple countries (see: https://www.internationaltradeinsights.com/2023/10/petition-...).

Oh, all the time.

I'll happen to look at some random object and be struck by the difficulty of manufacture and realize that it's done at such incredible scale that it can be sold for a pittance.

I've been doing software & electronics development for 30 years. The insane reduction in the cost of microcontrollers that I've seen in that time still amazes me. Logic that we would spend weeks tweaking in the early 90's, I can now do in an afternoon with a $0.50 chip.

You might be interested in the article: Reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].

> It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

Yes, it's a marvel how the world functions at all. I speculate even a simple toothbrush is a result of coordination between dozens of supply chains. Even a safety pin is a marvel of engineering. Of course, it can easily be explained by humans' ability to specialize and coordinate in really large numbers. Yet, it doesn't take away the fact that how far we have come.

[1]: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

To answer your question, yes.

I really enjoyed this book, and it sounds you might too

The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are Paperback – February 1, 1994 by Henry Petroski (Author)

https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zip...

I've felt like this when walking through major cities such as NYC. Looking at empty lots and then the girders on the side of the existing building on which the new buildings will be connected. We built this massive 3d structure, fill it with billions of individual items, computers, chairs, beds, etc. Millions of people and then everyday we replenish the food, fuel, etc.

Its an incredible example of complexity.

Same! You may enjoy "Everyday Engineering: Understanding the Marvels of Daily Life" from The Great Courses [0]. It's free on Kanopy through many libraries.

[0]: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/everyday-engineering...

I think about this all the time, but the recent video showing the manufacturing process of the Apple Vision Pro takes this to another level entirely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luFGI13Mv8o

There are so many components in that which require state-of-the-art manufacturing, all put together in one device. It's really absurd how futuristic the thing is.

Any one of those components, something like the 3D knitted headband, would have probably required Manhattan Project levels of resources to create 100 years ago.

Yes. I value things far more than normies do because I know I could never recreate them.

I hope AI will teach people a little every day. I hope as we do things in our daily lives, we will not yake our cars in for repairs or maintenance. Instead we will learn to do it ourselves with AI as a mentor. Imagine how intelligent and capable someone will be after living 80 years with the world's greatest experts and teachers looking over their shoulders every minute of that life, offering advice and demanding "do it yourself."

For something similar in fiction, look at Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age." The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer that transforms Princess Nell's life is an example of what I think can be done.

The Diamond Age is one of my favorite books.

I subscribe to the Technology Connections YouTube channel, where the guy has the exact enthusiasm towards random things, and explains the background, the context, and the workings of them. He's mostly concerned with household objects, not industry, but sometimes he presents infrastructure inventions, like the sodium streetlights.

Always cherish the feeling of joy, no matter how it presents itself.

Keep going further back. Imagine being Robert Hooke and realizing for the first time in human history that every time he looked closer at something under his microscope, there kept being tinier living things. And they didn't seem to get less complex, they kept getting smaller but were still filled with as much detail as you would see looking at a dog with the naked eye. And then to realize that the human body is absolutely full of them! Vast armies of invisible foreign living bodies inside of each person. No matter how powerful the magnification of his microscope, he never stopped discovering more tiny living things. It would have meant a complete reordering of his understanding of the world and man's place in it which most of us just accept because it was taught to us in school.

You probably should crack open a window or two :D

An idea that stuck with me was that everything around you that isn't natural was made by somebody. Buildings, roads, sewer grates, televisions, whiteboard markers, candy wrappers, all of them were made - directly or indirectly - by humans. That's a lot of things!

Paper and plastic packaging are marvelously complex. The paper is light weight, but sturdy, often in the form of corrugated cardboard, which needs a good glue to function - already we have multiple ingenious engineering feats that need factory scale production. To print things we need inks and printing mechanisms which is a whole other branch of technology. And then we often add plastic coatings or wrappers to that, giving it some weatherproofing or additional solidity.

When you look at what's happened to fashion, what we've done lately - you know, since the 40's or so, when the tech really started to get going - is mostly to come up with fancy plastic bags to wear over ourselves. But those are building on millennia of textiles and weaving, even so.

The complexity of a object is not just the complexity of its ingredients. It's also the complexity of the factory needed to create that object. Time is a very important factor - and again, not just the time to make an object and the time to make the objects the object is made of, but time time to make the object that makes the object.

I've recently discovered Assembly Theory. There are so many interesting ideas in this interview, I don't know where to start. I think my favorite is: According to complexity: the Earth is the largest place in the universe. The Sun is simpler than a spool of insulated 22-gauge wire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boI0DJME_D4

I've recently acquired a 3D printer and have been teaching myself 3D modeling with a CAD tool.

It made me appreciate that every. single. line. on man made objects was a conscious decision of a person. Even if the tooling or physical constraints influenced the decision, somebody had to place it there.

I recently had this in regards to roll-on deodorant and ballpoint pens.

If there's ink/deodorant available, rubbing it on paper/skin will deposit it.

If there's no ink/deodorant available, this causes friction on the rollerball causing it to rotate and reload the liquid.

Such a simple concept but hard to get right (at least initially) - Ball too big, concept doesn't work. Ball too small, it'll leak everywhere.

Someone came up with the idea in 1888, but it didn't really work out until 1943.

Neat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen

And of course there's a whole other can of worms in what it took for me to be able to express this wonder to people all over the world via this comment

Yes this is why lots of men are into mechanics, its cool stuff. I get just as many "who is hiring these incompetent engineers?" though: In the last 10 years maybe less than 5 percent of those "tear box open" tabs has ever worked properly. There are suppose to actual engineers coming up with these cardboard box designs. I see bags with integrated ziploc, where the CUT HERE is on the wrong side of the ziploc. I see simple home plastic such as a water filter, where there are incredibly sharp parts right near where your hand holds the thing. What is going on? I thought junior engineers are complaining they aren't getting jobs? Seems like they are making everything these days.

I often find myself marvelling at the fractal of businesses and public spaces (shops, museums, cafes, galleries, hotels, etc) that exists around me as I'm walking down the street - some are obvious and easily discoverable, others I will probably never learn of.

I find myself marveling at how much stock the store at my local petrol station carries.

There are shelves full of different varieties of chocolate bars, and each of those wouldn't be there if people weren't buying them. Yet if you look at how many people are in the store at any given time, and how many of those people are buying chocolate bars and extrapolate then it _feels_ as if it shouldn't be worth anyone's while to carry so much stock.

the stock of over-the-counter medications is wild.

there's are a few places synthesizing complex chemicals with insanely high degree of precision to go into asipirin and cold medicine and such. and then they get thrown into a broad distribution network that ensures almost everybody is within 5 miles of access to them

There’s an entire supply chain behind that too. Cut off trucking into town and even the big grocery stores will run out of everything within days at most.

The human eye! Everytime I try to capture the moon with my phone camera and it comes back horrible . Or whenever I have to adjust camera lens for moving left to right to focus on an object, I marvel at the autofocus of the human eye across miles and directions.

All the time. I believe I heard about it from a Buddhist concept (if someone knows the term, please drop it in a reply).

You can also extend it to think about your own actions, and how they might interfere with someone else. For example, way back when I lived with my parents, I used to just put the dishes in the sink and leave them there - not considering that my mother was going to have to scrub it clean, putting it away.

It's possible she drops it and cuts her hand, which could have been prevented had I just cleaned the dish myself.

Same in public restrooms. I do my best not to leave towels on the floor or make a mess. _Someone_ has to clean that.

There are just so many examples to list, I think you get the idea.

I had to take a moment to marvel at your everyday comment on this everyday website, on my everyday computer surfing the everyday web, in the everyday cafe in the middle of an everyday city. I think one of things about the spool of wire is that, despite it being almost unfathomably complicated to think of how it came about, is that it is still _just_ about simple enough marvel at. Then again, maybe that's just a trick of perspective, and a lack of imagination of what is actually involved. I mean, where does it end? My mind starts to fall down holes of evolutionary pressures birthing humans, and interstellar mechanics birthing heavy metals...

That's one reason I do not like people doing software/computer/AI thinking themselves smarter than people doing other industries.

I know a lot of people who are very smart, many of them are not in the software/computer industry.

Yes, and I went one step further, specifying the "N-good" protocol, which characterizes objects based on the (log) of the number of components. Raw material is a 0-good. Something with 10 components is a 1-good. Something with 10000 components is a 4-good, and so on. An aircraft carrier is an 8- or 9-good. Of course there is some ambiguity around what constitutes a component - perhaps a better way would be to count the number of distinct operations required to produce the final product, recursively. But I think just counting the parts is probably okay for most things.

Yeah, I'm still stumped by the whole supply graph because everything requires tooling, and tooling required research, which required benchmarks, more tools, computers.. which required tooling .. so on and so forth. It's easy to forget how much time, effort and people are involved into anything, and all that had to be handled over economic and finance theories and logistics ... quite the madness.

And while we're at it.. I often look at insects the same way. That's a tiny ecofriendly, self reproducible (or almost), fault resistant, pretty smart nanotechnological robot.

I get this kind of feeling often when I ride my motorbike. Like just the materials alone, a variety of steels, aluminium, copper, ..., different plastics each chosen for their specific purpose, from insulation around cables to rubbery seals so the housing of the headlight. How many people are actually involved just gathering and refining the raw materials?

And all of these parts play together in harmony, so that I hop on and just start driving with no second thought.

I take the machine for granted, sure its a hobby but its also what I drive to work with. But it is a marvel of engineering no matter how I look at it.

I'm always amazed by Crispix. It's not a heterogeneous material, it's not a poured mixture of two parts, it's not a coated material, it's an assembly. And you can eat it by the handful.

I once interrupted my own eye exam so i could poke a sprocket to see what it was made of. The apparatus they use for moving the lens box closer/further from the patient had these weird looking gears on them.

I asked the doc if i could touch, he said yea but was confused why. Told him i was curious what it was made of. Turned out to be plastic though it looked like unpolished metal. The reason i was so curious was because of its design. Wasnt a typical sprocket, and instead had dimples where the teeth would be

Reminds me of a Richard Feynman quote from his biography.

> “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”

I think about it quite a bit in my daily life.

One of my recurring daydreams is that someone from a few hundred years ago is accompanying me in whatever mundane task I’m doing. When I’m driving, for example, I try to imagine what questions they’d have about what’s going on and how incredible they’d find it.

I think frequently about how European kings didn’t have the variety in spices that I do in my cabinet, or machines that could lower the temperature of a room.

Marvel, or worry about how drastically our ability to make things will break down in a disaster? Eg, a big war or solar flare or certain climate problems or COVID shortages?

It honestly scares me. Even the most common objects take whole supply chains and years of study to create. Like if you became a sanctioned small country, how do you even survive?

You survive by trade, like if you are a citizen in a normal country.

Entire large countries depend on trade for survival. Nobody does it alone.

I would have become a small sanctioned country years ago if it weren't for this

Clothing - that’s what did me in (annd anctually inspired me to learn sewing!). All clothing is still assembled primarily by hand, whereas your spool of wire probably has never been touched by anyone but yourself. Both need an army of suppliers, and like Adam smith’s wool coat an army of transportation behind those suppliers. But your shirt was… made in a fundamentally different way than your spool of wire.

I highly recommend 'How It's Made' for anyone interested in the complex processes that create the everyday items we take for granted. Humans are awesome!

I suspect that's somewhat of a technologist-centric POV: we take a spool of wire or a knife as "simple" and a mail client as "complex" but for non-tech people, both would be "simple".

Similarly, a post office employee would look at a the spool of wire and think "actually, this simple object might be as complex as routing mail internationally".

_everything_ is complex and taken for granted by almost everyone!

Even im fascinated by such things. I would definitely suggest you to read a book titled ‘The Toaster Project’ where the artist tries to create a toaster from scratch including the plastic casing.

This also inspired me to write about a thought experiment called ‘Man from the Future’: https://rishikeshs.com/man-from-the-future/

I like to think how even things as common as screws have a huge world around them. There are different heads with quite a history behind each. There are different sizes and measurement systems. The angle of the thread is meaningful, the material, the various forces a screw can tolerate, the lead, the pitch, classes of fit, handedness.

It's a huge world and those are just screws. Almost everything is like that.

Trees do that for me, the graceful sweep of the branch, the weird way they can silently execute an evolutionary strategy while standing still, their symbiosis with their own death (the part on the inside is largely dead, but holds up the outer layers which are alive). Next time you see a tree really look at it. Look for the grace in the sweep of a branch, think about what it is and how awesome it is.

Hmm solder fumes!!! When I think of the world being shit I also think of all the complexity of everything built by humans that is going on all around me, not just tech but by folks just going to work and doing daily jobs. It’s insane We only see a bit of the complexity the world of humans do every moment of the day and night. It’s kinda kookoo.

Video calling someone on the other side of the world with a small rectangular box in my hand not physically connected to anything blows my mind.

Reminds me of: "Louis CK Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy"

He shares a great bit of this on Conan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4

I mostly marvel at how cheap/non repairable/made to break things are these days. Most of new items seem necessarily complex and solve tasks which are becoming more and more meaningless

Although I do marvel at some items, especially the ones we've been used mostly unchanged for centuries: opinel knife, cork bottle opener, moka pots, a good wooden chair, willow weaved baskets

You're not alone, I get that plenty :) You may enjoy reading Sapiens by Yuval Harari for his take on human history and collaboration, brief overview here:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/List-the-main-r3qz4dndR1e7G...

Yes! You'd probably enjoy this blog: https://ciechanow.ski

Sure, I even have a similar taxonomy of foods. I think of pizza as high tech good. You need agriculture, all the knowledge of yeast and fermentation you need cow farming, cheese making, meat curing for the toppings etc. You need centuries of knowledge and an entire economy to make pizza. Compare all that to grilling a steak or making a fruit salad.

I will sometimes look at certain products and think about the labor involved to make them. Especially things that are packaged such that you know somebody in China or Indonesia was sitting there 10hrs+ a day to put on the zip ties or put something in a plastic bag. This sometimes influences my decision to purchase those things.

I tell my junior engineers; that humans took rocks and struck them with lightning, and now they work for us.

Still blows my mind sometimes.

i had a prof many moons ago who liked to start each semester with the observation that computers do two things: add bits and move them around. everything else is an elaboration on that.

i’m not enough of a circuit of electrical engineer to know if that’s still essentially true, but it definitely made an impression.

All binary operations can be reduced down to NAND gates, so in a sense all your computer does is that one operation given a variety of inputs.

I had a very similar line of reasoning one afternoon when making a salad for lunch. The fork, the plates, the kitchen, the ingredients, the electronics needed. All the details, history, effort, CAD, software, billing, logistics, sales, monetary transactions... which all led up to the moment where I could enjoy a salad.

Even things that aren't too complicated (extruding plastic beads into credit card thickness) lead to increasing the rate of production until producing them becomes complex again. Just trimming the edges off the plastic sheets involved roller tension, knife angle, tear angle, and heat shrinkage that got the better of me some days.

Yes and I also think, How did this complexity come to be? What is required to sustain it? Progress is not monotonic.

Absolutely I do. I've posted about it here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39350721

When you stop and really think about all of the things we have around us it becomes apparent that we are actively living in the future.

This is why I wonder how long it will take to recreate civilization in the event of a global catastrophe that wipes out enough people with the knowledge to make stuff. There will be generations that hear about all these wonders but will never have seen many of the things we take for granted.

Some opinions are that it might not really be possible at all because many of the more accessible critical resources have been depleted and the harder to access ones are too difficult to harness without significant technology already.

Yep, all the time. The amount of complexity involved in all the precision engineering in everything I use daily has me in constant awe. It's the entire reason I'm an engineer in the first place. It's incredible that everything works at all and is affordable to a mere student.

I find the evolution of hard drives to be fascinating. It is in true terms, pushing boundaries to go beyond what was at one point imagined to be impossible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wteUW2sL7bc

Recently I was repairing a BambuLab A1 mini 3D printer.

Man, there is a lot of thought and tech in those things!

So yeah, sometimes I Marvel.

I do!

I have 3 pictures on my phone from my trip yesterday to Ikea where I was fascinated by the two shot overmolding on a plastic step stool. There were some cool runners on the inside that gave a window into the action of the tool.

Love this stuff!!

Edited to correct the typo noted in the comment below

> "two shot overloading"

Had to search a bit, is this it?

> Overmolding is a multi-shot injection molding process that produces a single product from two or more different thermoplastics

> Overmolding enables the unification of the substrate material with the overmold material in a fraction of the time that it takes to join two or more parts together in a secondary operation on an assembly line

From https://sybridge.com/overmolding-overview/

Exactly! Anything that has two types, colors, hardness' of plastic is made this way. Also things like screwdrivers are plastic oveplded onto metal.

Sometimes I wonder, if I were thrown back to King Arthur's time by a time machine, what I could make to impress the locals... and frankly, I can't suggest anything. I don't even remember the dates of solar eclipses :(

Maybe a sandwich?

You might be interested in the book, "The Knowledge"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...

(not to be confused with the cab driver test)

There was a big article a few years ago on how a cheeseburger is one of those foods that was practically impossible to make in the old days.

Getting all the ingredients in one place is logistically difficult...and in winter, well, no.

Had the same experience when I first saw an oil rig in the middle of the sea. Can't believe people built a platform in the middle of the ocean with so many moving parts and all work together. Amazing

I think about the logistics and shipping and manufacturing and packaging and warehousing and manual labor when I buy a $12 tea kettle made on the other side of the planet.

I don't really understand how it's profitable.

It’s profitable because the supply chain is made of robots and of people who can’t afford a $12 kettle.

Yeah quite a lot! Kicked off years back when I had a short period of interest in Marxist labor theory of value and I started thinking of commodity goods in terms of labor-hours required to convert it from raw inputs to a finished product. I live in a city now so almost nothing around me wasn't modified or produced by human labor at some point in the production chain. The knowledge and skill required to assemble all the things that surround me gets pretty heady if I think about it too hard haha, but it's also a little comforting in an odd way to think about being held up and supported by so many hands.

One fun and maybe 'surprisingly' complex everyday item is a door hinge. I use them daily, but until I changed a few back in January I never really reflected on what an ingenious little design a hinge is. Can you imagine trying to engineer one by hand, let alone design it if you'd never seen it before? Always nice to remember that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

I don't know if I marvel at their complexity, but I find it very hard to try and picture out how a device would work, or how to build a machine to fulfil a particular function.

The Material World book by Ed Conway might be worth a look. He goes into the depths of different materials used and really makes you appreciate the complexity of things more.

I marvel more at say a cat than a spool of wire.

They are physically skilled in ways that humans aren't! They don't have language, but they do know a lot about what's going on.