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This is an incredibly impactful childhood. I'm from Honduras, a developing country where there is practically zero investment in science or the arts, and I was fortunate enough to also have gotten a similar book. One thing that struck me is how not a single person around me ever conceived of the things we use and consume on a daily basis as having been created by someone...another human being with our same physical faculties. I found all kinds of tech fascinating as something one could create, but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development. I felt like a fish out of water telling everyone about water and them not noticing it growing up over there

I wonder if this is why so many fantasy narratives lean on the trope of a long-dead precursor civilization which had greater knowledge and capabilities than our own. To most people, real historical innovators are in effect members of some mysterious and magical "precursor civilization", rather than "just people" they could identify with, or feel any kind of continuity with.

This kinda sounds like some middle ground between forced modernization of Eastern European countries (this isn't our tech but we could make it ourselves if we wanted to but we don't want to because it would be inferior) and the cargo cults of the Pacific islands (technology literally comes from the sky).

I kinda wish somebody made some study of how different ways societies acquire technology impacts the given society's making/tinkering culture. I wonder what patterns would emerge.

While difficult to control (as a study) it would probably be a solid basis for a PhD in anthropology or sociology. If you could compare two cultures, one which was exposed to the knowledge of how the technology came to be, and one which was simply allowed to buy the technology they wanted, over the next 30 - 50 years how does it change the group. If we ever were visited by extra-terrestrials this would probably be something they had already studied :-).

> but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development

Your culture is the outcome of colonization, dictatorships propped up by first world powers, and being ruled by the same families that came with the Spanish 500 years ago.

Might be worth it to also invest time in reading another book, like "Open Veins of Latin America", to understand the realities of what happened to Latin American countries in general, so you stop repeating stuff like that.

Extremely condescending to imagine that I have no knowledge of my own nation and region's history? I absolutely know and have extensive readings of how things came to be, and I have even lectured on the topic in my national university. Do you know more about Honduras than a native Honduran that has dedicated years to the topic? Have you liver there? I have my whole life. And yes, I still believe our culture is radically behind and we can no longer make excuses for it.

The “gossipy, lazy, no work ethic” culture of Latin America is a tale as old as time. Even the Portuguese and the Spanish used that, might want to change the tune a bit.

I never said the word lazy. Please explain to me your experience with the culture in central America in-depth and how people tend to think over there, if you wish to elucidate your points further. There are tons of broken elements of the culture of my country that are directly perpetuated by my people and are actively working against our development.

> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.

Edison did not build his stuff himself. Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph.

Kruesi started as a locksmith (which meant actually making locks in those days) and ended his career as the chief engineer at General Electric in Schenectady, the world's leading electrical works at the time. If you go to Greenfield Village in Detroit, you can see Edison's lab, moved from New Jersey and rebuilt. Ask which was Kruesi's bench.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kruesi

Both your points hold.

The distinction is rather that the device was made next door, from raw materials, with them possibly watching. Certainly acknowledging the craftsmanship, but still while understanding your tools.

Today, labs are filled with expensive machines and you are not able to peek inside. You need something? Only from a catalog, made in a mystical factory, without you knowing what's inside.

This abstraction speeds up your process (the tool you bought is fully qualified for what you plan to do) but also detaches you from the low level inner workings. Kids are fascinated if you take an everyday object apart with them (but maybe only if it was already broken)

Taking apart modern day “advanced” objects is way less fulfilling than those from the past. Miniaturization/integration and the increased complexity puts things beyond what even an adult can easily and visually grasp, let alone a kid. It’s mostly “black box” chips now.

Those advanced lab tools were built by many very skilled people. We’re past the time where a single person could hold it all in their head. One man could build a modern lathe back when they were a new thing, one man can’t build a modern lithography machine today.

One man could not make an ordinary #2 pencil. A modern lathe was already out of reach.

I wanted to say that lathes have been around for over 2000 years and for most of that time a single well trained man could build one. In fact I’d wager that most lathes and indeed maybe even every part of that lathe up until the industrial revolution were built by a person working alone.

The advanced machines of today are no longer within reach for almost any single well trained man. Now it takes an army of people with non-overlapping skills and knowledge.

200 years ago a basic component was wire or a metal sheet, you’d get them “pre made”. Today the basic component is a chip with millions of transistors and thousands of lines of firmware code that do 99% of the job.

At least you can understand every part of a pencil even without having one in front of you, what it does, and a bit of experimentation would get you an absolutely terrible but technically functioning pencil. Make the tiny leap to a pen and you already lost everyone.

Could build a lathe from parts they could purchase, but not from scratch. The simple ballpoint pen is an absolute marvel of precision engineering that we take utterly for granted. That ball in the tip? Not something you could knock out in a weekend by hand. Even wire itself as a basic component is freaking impossible to feasibly do from scratch compared to going down to the hardware store and spending $5 for a spool. That I can also get a microcontroller devkit that's impossible for me to recreate from a local store is mind-blowing, if we stop to think about it.

2000 years ago the person who was capable enough to think of and build a lathe didn’t go to order the pieces. They modeled the raw materials (wood, metal, stone) into what they needed. But let me give you a less debatable example. Watch makers or even the people who built the Antikythera mechanism didn’t go to the cog and sprocket store to get the parts. They manufactured the components from the raw material or as close to it as possible. They probably built their own tools to for the longest time.

And when I said pen I meant fountain pen. It’s counterintuitive but probably more people today can draw a conceptual diagram of a ballpoint than a fountain pen. Ballpoints are a very simple design limited only by the very tight tolerances need to make them work.

But that was my whole point, complexity got so high that most things around us cannot be built without specialized tools, specialized building blocks, and specialized knowledge that takes years to gather. And this needs to be repeated for almost every object. Different tools, building blocks, and knowledge.

A highschooler today knows more chemistry than Mendeleev but that doesn’t help because the complexity in each field or product increases faster than one person’s ability to keep up with learning.

>Edison did not build his stuff himself.

Edison did not start his career as a successful businessman. He built things, he sold patents, and later in life he lead teams that did the same.

You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.

In industry, you usually have professional machinists and toolmakers doing much of that. They're better at it than grad students.

I once worked at an R&D facility for heavy hydraulic equipment. It looked like a factory with an office section, but only made and tested prototypes. The production plants were elsewhere. About three quarters of the workforce were factory workers, good ones. Engineers did not operate lathes. That was prohibited by union rules.

> All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work

I grew up with this book - I have vivid memories still of the pages about a nuclear reactor - and I was pleasantly surprised to visit a bookshop recently and find it still in print, updated with new things like LIDAR, 3D Printers, MoCap, etc.

It is a great book. Very accessible and a great way to engage with your kids.

The author David Macaulay taught illustration at my college. His original series started with buildings like “Castle”. The way things work was a breakout hit.

I was also a childhood lover of Castle and Vikings :)

Those books were captivating and I was really surprised when I showed up at College and met the source.

This book is probably 90% of my understanding of how why so many transistors can add up to a CPU, and I didn't learn any programming for a good ten years after I pored through that book as a kid (for me it was "The new way things work", updated for the computer age).

Yup it's my 6yo favourite book.

It’s cloudy now but I think I also remember hours spent in a CD-ROM version of that book.

Bring back CD-ROMs.

> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.

Most chem labs re still like this — ours certainly is. Certain instruments you might buy (gas chromatograph, micrometer) but it’s hardly unusual to find them adapted as well. There’s lots of blue tape in the fume hood too.

And our prototypes are all hand made because it’s simpler. Once we’ve worked out the physics of the device (with lots of tweaks along the way) we can then start to think about DFM. You’ve seen a picture of one of those prototypes: the boards were sent out but mostly we did the welding, bending, assembly, firmware etc all ourselves.

And as a startup a small team can move faster and more flexibly than a bigger organization when making these kinds of things.

Yeah, research in general. Sometimes the thing you want just doesn’t exist. The story of the blue LED is like one guy with a CVD machine he could adapt with great precision because it was the only thing it had.

I agree with your premise, but I think it’s also important to reconcile this with the idea that nothing is simple. Everything that’s made is usually much more complex than it appears in the surface

Suggestion for parents: Prepare jam for the children in front of them to make them realize how much sugar they are eating.

What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone? Of course the first sets of people to build something aren't buying it off the shelf... but the reward for the millionth person to be able to do the same thing from scratch is also gone.

How useful is it to know how to spend 5 times as much time and money to make your own piece of equipment that is now a commodity and readily-available?

For instance: 3d printers and automated metal and woodworking tools. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, it's never been more accessible to make your own tools and gadgets and toys with them. But no, they aren't tools that let you have even a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being the next Tesla or Edison.

I've re-soldered shit in Xbox controllers, I've fixed stuck mechanisms in motorized Christmas decorations, I've saved thousands on labor for car repairs, I've built my own furniture, I've re-wired speakers and installed conduit at home.

But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.

I'm still limited by the state of the world I'm playing in. It's worth learning those things if they strike your fancy, if you want to be able to do it for the love of the game, if you value knowledge generally (and I think you should!). But. It's also a something of a luxury hobby at this point.

I can't fab a new high-performance CPU. I can't even realistically learn enough to even compete design-wise with the teams upon teams of people already standing on the shoulders of giants in that industry, or in any other highly-technical highly-advanced one.

I would strongly disagree with the idea that 'low-hanging fruit' is gone.

> But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.

Two things; First those skills are more useful than you can imagine when you're using commoditized things to do something new and second, it isn't "low hanging fruit to recreate something you can buy anywhere.

If you look at today's software (as an example) we have programs that waste the crap out of resources. Is making them more efficient a win? Yes if you can re-purpose the resources you freed up for other things. I've thought long and hard about things people use "computers" and the "internet" for today that could be built more securely on simpler hardware with ironclad privacy guarantees and more utility. That is a low hanging fruit.

What I'm hearing when I reading your comment is that you feel that all the value has been sucked out of the market and there isn't anything left. And in that I think you'll find that enshittification has polluted the value so much that new opportunities have opened up for unpolluted value. There are many things that are currently "solved" with an existing and and over priced solution which creates opportunities to re-imagine the solution with something less expensive and come in underneath the market. The IBM PC/AT completely displaced minicomputers at small to medium businesses, you can build a PC/AT equivalent today for $6, not $6,000.

The thing here is that 'technology' isn't the same thing as 'value.' Just like knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. As the author in the linked article writes, it doesn't take a whole lot to stand up a manufacturing line to make a new thing these days, and if that thing has value because it solves a problem, then people will pay to enjoy that value. And to pair that with the earlier metaphor, if you wanted to start a local newspaper (high value) you could with a printing press, some newsprint, and a journalist or two. But without the experience of how newspapers are valuable to their readers, you might be unsuccessful even though you know everything you need to know about writing news stories and printing them.

I'm not trying to be pedantic here, yes there are lots of things going on, and it can seem hopeless, but it isn't. And if you do want to design a high performance CPU you can get a kick ass FPGA to host it for cheap. Variants on RISC-V are pretty impressive and you can make a new one and license it to a chip fab if you choose to. This is WCH's entire business. Don't worry about being the next Tesla or Edison, neither of them knew they were going to be the Tesla or Edison we know today. They were both just trying to create solutions to problems. Look for the problems, think about ways to solve them, and then talk to people who live with those problems day in and day out and see what it might be worth to them to have that problem solved. People love to complain in my experience :-).

> What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone?

Depends on why it's gone? For example, before the shocker of Facebook buying Oculus, there was an active community of side-gig businesses selling kits around VR, large touch panels, haptics, and such. What couldn't exist, was scaling that beyond hobby kits. No VARs, no integrators or assemblers, no OEMs, no contract or bespoke manufacturing, no searching for viable niche products. Because "it's merely a kit" was the only way the US patent system allowed the stuff to exist at all as a business. The gap between what you could make, and what you're allowed to sell, is large. Even now, we can't reasonably search for those niche market fits, because such scales are beneath the notice of big patent-holding companies. So absent FRAND reform or some such ("you're required to let me use it and pay you"), no fruit for you.

CA lacking non-competes, "Stealing IP!", grew software fruit in CA. But the US has lacked the growing conditions for Shenzhen fruit. So, what happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone, from the US? Fruit is grown, and enjoyed, elsewhere.

Simple money. If you already have a scrap motor and some lumber from somewhere (or even if you have to buy new, in many cases) the cost can be more affordable to build some tools at home, especially if the commercial market for that tool is not competitive.

I'll start my first job in an engineering role in a few days and I could reach behind to my bookshelf and flip through "The Way Things Work" right now if I wanted to. Fantastic book that really inspired me when I was younger.

I think the mindset is usefull personally. When large complex systems are required and economic pressure is applied it can rapidly turn into an dangerous strategy. You will quickly realize that no you can't just build that.

You'd be missing the point though. The foundational point. All things have their origin story.

(both things are true, yes reality is infinitely more complex and no you're probably not going to be the next President or cure cancer, but that's not the lesson one ought to instill. And I do believe there is a scaffolded way to do it. All things are possible... to explore. The feedback loop of fidelity of lessons, comes incrementally, after.)

> libraries full of books about making stuff

Any standouts you recommend? My 6 year old son loves all those David Macaulay books. Haven't taken that to the next level of "How to build stuff" yet.

> I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that."

Outside of Silicon Valley, most organisations strictly only buy commercial-off-the-shelf (CotS) software. If they do get something developed bespoke, it'll be an isolated thing with very defined boundaries.

This gets absurd after a point, where'd I've seen organisations was millions of dollars to avoid what amounts to an afternoon of scripting... and that was before LLMs!

If you even suggest custom code "an executable" (gasp!) to some people, they'll nearly faint from the stress of even thinking about it.

I've always found this kind of self-imposed constraint a bit odd, but it is surprisingly pervasive.