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

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.

"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...

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.

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."

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

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...

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./

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

One thing always wonders me is coffee. How did we got to harvest, dry, mill, roast, grind, brew it just to make a beverage that is not even nutritious?

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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

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."

See also Louis CK's "Everything is amazing and no one is happy" clip.

I have similar thoughts occasionally. Like how amazing common materials are like plastic or fabric or aluminum foil. YouTube channels like Primitive Technology make you appreciate how difficult it is to refine materials from nature as a "solo dev".

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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-...

Every time I scan a QR code to view a restaurants menu… I’m at amazed thinking through all the technology necessary to pull that off

Practicing "mindfulness" is a sure way to a more zen life.

You'll get less done :-P but you'll be more zen about it.

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

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/

All the time! It's actually really nice to read this, as I always feel a bit lonely in this regard -- this perspective is unfortunately rare, it seems.

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.

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.

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.

I, Pencil

https://mises.org/mises-daily/i-pencil

I do that quite often and it is eye opening.

Capitalism for the win.

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.

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 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

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...

Only ( or mostly ) when the Object is Physical or Atoms.

It is however completely opposite for anything "bits" such as software.

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

You might enjoy this:

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

I, Pencil by Leonard E Read

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 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?

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.

Guitar strings

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.

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

Ask HN: Do You Also Marvel at the Complexity of Everyday Objects?

No, i spit in disgust. Why does a webpage with less than 1kB of text need 30MB ?

Why are the scrollbars soo small on my big monitor ?

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.

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

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

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!

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?

Tomato sauce!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uURB-vo9rZ4

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.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851

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

Not really an everyday object, but as the linking output scrolled by as I was compiling the Linux Kernel the other day... It really drove it home how many man hours were invested into making this modern marvel of human collaboration into what has become the by far most used software on the planet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, it also puts the ideal of self-reliance in perspective: While some level of self-reliance can be desirable, there is tremendous value in specialization and trade.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I don't marvel at it. The scale of it all and understanding the destruction of nature for it all is very distressing to me. It does make me wonder "why?" and if it's all really required for a healthy modern life.

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.

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!

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 genuinely marvel and appreciate the massive mega-project that is plumbing for cities with populations >1M.

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...

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..... :)

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.

All the time -- especially thinking about software. Abstraction is insane.

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-...).

I bought a pill cutter for my mother and I spent 15 minutes marveling at the design of this little piece of plastic.

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).

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.

Steve Jobs once wrote something like this when he was high I believe.

I did not invent English or the alphabet, I didn’t grow my own food, etc.

The XKCD comic about this [0] helped give me that same perspective. It's fun to introspect and think about the things WE do at work every day that end up in front of customers that could make a similar comic.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1741/

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.

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.

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

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 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...

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

It is really hard making something complex seem simple.

A lot of what we take for granted has had plenty thought put into their design.

The book the Design of Everyday Things goes into this in more detail.