> 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"

abdullahkhalids 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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WarmWash 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Freeze LLM progress right here and the future is still totally inconcievable. Humans who have only ever known being able to talk to machines...

	▲	pocksuppet 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's already inconceivable since today's teenagers have never not had an iPad.

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MrMetric 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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WarmWash 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	organsnyder 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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efskap 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any sufficiently mundane technology is indistinguishable from... furniture?

	▲	contingencies 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nice one. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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lelanthran 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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WalterBright 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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dylan604 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

	▲	lelanthran 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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throwaway27448 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We also don't call a hoe fancy technology, but it is.

	▲	malfist 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know about you, but my mother is definitely not technology

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adamcharnock 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, I was introspecting as I wrote that!