> no fancy technology in it at all
It's amazing we can use huge machinery with internal combustion engines and declare it "no fancy technology"
> no fancy technology in it at all
It's amazing we can use huge machinery with internal combustion engines and declare it "no fancy technology"
Any technology from before the time of your grandparents, and often parents, is usually perceived to be "not fancy". Because then those elders can't tell you in your childhood what life was like before that technology. So in your lived experience that technology was always there. Reading history later on, doesn't change your emotional experiences.
Freeze LLM progress right here and the future is still totally inconcievable. Humans who have only ever known being able to talk to machines...
It's already inconceivable since today's teenagers have never not had an iPad.
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Disagree. There's lots of products and goods that have become less fancy as a result of changes in labor/material cost as industrialization ran its course and the old way is considered the fancy way.
Wood furniture joined with glue and pegs rather than inserts and screws. Solid wood furniture at all. Leather and natural fibers gave way to plastics. Ornate castings gave way to simple stampings and simply castings (where things are still cast).
An internal combustion engine may be complex, but it's not fancy. I can see and touch and understand every part of it. I can maintain and modify and repair it. This is not true for fancy electronics and certainly not locked-down proprietary firmware.
For every modern car I had or used in the last 20 years, the engine itself never was a problem, other than the regular maint, oil, filters, belts, plugs, cables...
Now, electronics problems, albeit relativelly rare, were far more common and fucking expensive.
And then, but this more due to the state of modern roads and streets than the car themselves, suspension issues.
The magic of an engine is less in how it operates, and more in how it was built. At least around the time they started showing up, manufacturing lots of precision metal parts was not trivial.
Although modern electronics take this further, with both operation and construction being utterly complex.
One of my vehicles is a 2009 Civic. It continues to amaze me that with minimal maintenance, that 17-year-old vehicle will fire right up with the turn of a key, with hundreds (thousands?) of parts moving in a specific way, many of them with tolerances in tiny fractions of an inch.
2010 MB C300 I bought in 2013 from a dealer after the lease expired, parked outside without a garage or cover since then (Virginia).
About 3 years ago a large branch (about 8" diameter) from an old overhanging tree fell right on the transparent sunroof cover and shattered it into a million pieces. After picking them out of the sunroof mechanism (which no longer worked after the impact) and the inside of the car, I covered the opening with several sheets of magnetized vinyl. Works great, never a drop of water inside since then and it's stayed in place without any attention. Temperature control inside the car at rest or while driving at highway speed is like it was before the damage.
Being old now I never go anywhere since I can get stuff delivered. About every 3 weeks I go out and the car starts right up, I drive a 5-mile loop to circulate the oil and then park it for another 3 weeks. Been doing this for years. I do get an oil change annually.
Any sufficiently mundane technology is indistinguishable from... furniture?
Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
Maybe it is fancy to you now, but with a few primitive hand tools and no docs at all, a HS graduate can take it apart and figure out how it works.
Try doing the same on the ECU in your car. I'll wait.
I learned how engines worked by taking apart, cleaning and reassembling an ancient lawnmower engine so I could use it on my go-kart. I then learned how cars worked by taking one apart and putting it back together again.
Neither of those machines had a transistor in them. It was all basic electricity.
> HS graduate can take it apart and figure out how it works.
Sure you wouldn't like a qualifier on that? I've definitely met some HS graduates that would not be able to do this.
Wait a few years and no HD will be able to do something similar.
See other story on front page right now: educational scores are trending down and that trend is only going to accelerate now that every student is using LLMs.
We also don't call a hoe fancy technology, but it is.
I don't know about you, but my mother is definitely not technology
The hoe wasn't fancy, but the plow was (at the time).
Yeah, I was introspecting as I wrote that!