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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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

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

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

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

Possibly the two have been conflated.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

Standards!

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

Hence the title, “Wealth of Nations”.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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)

Can you elaborate on this some?

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.

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

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

"Read my lips, no new taxes"

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.....

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

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

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

(I apologise for the big jazz.)

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

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.

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.

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

/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./

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

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

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.

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 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

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

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...

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?

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3W2v7LN-88

I, Pencil by Leonard E Read

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

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!

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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

1. https://www.howtoinventeverything.com

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

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/

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

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...

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.

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

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

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

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-...).

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.

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...

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

> 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-...

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

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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

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