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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

You should read "From NAND to Tetris". You could totally build a CPU yourself after a year of study. Not something that can compete with a modern microprocessor of course, but then again you probably couldn't build a compressor for a fridge with the same quality as a factory either.

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Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. [0]

[0]: Milton Friedman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8

If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe - Carl Sagan

I also love this showerthought from reddit:

All the materials for wverything made has existed on earth for billions of years, they just werent assembled in the right order yet.

Humans are the right collection of molecules to form a self aware machine that can make showerthoughts. We are literally animate matter.

But did we have any of them before we invented the shower?

There's the guy who spent $1500 and six months making a sandwich from scratch[0], including growing, collecting and killing the ingredients

[0]: https://youtu.be/URvWSsAgtJE

  spent $1500

(By flying from Minnesota to LA and renting a boat to get salt from the sea)

You're right, he cheated by using premade vehicles. He should've made those himself

I think the animal husbandry skill tree would be fastest, but children and a sedan chair would work if more time was available.

Sorry to differ, I think this is twisted by an era where liberal market was held as god like status.

Take the rubber and metal out because for now. To draw a dark line on a surface, you take the first bit of wood you find, grind it into a point and burn it. You have a pencil.

I really believe that the free market centuries made people believe it was the only or most efficient way to get an object done, just like people thought java ee was the only way to make a web application in early 2000s.

You’ve moved the goal posts.

It’s not that the construction of some thing, anything, that can be used to write with is difficult. As you point out a piece of charcoal isn’t hard to make.

Milton Friedman’s point is that even something as simple and inexpensive as a pencil involves people all over the world working together to create it. Some mine graphite, some run ships to move the graphite, some manufacture paint, some grow rubber trees, etc. All of this activity, coordinated and made efficient by the market is behind even a simple thing like a pencil.

I agree on goalpost but still differ on Friedman's point. Culture shifts into thinking you need objects to the point of making you forget what you wanted in the first place. Friedman wants to marvel at the thought of his beloved market.

Friedman does wax lyrical about his beloved market toward the end of that video, but the main point I drew from his quote about the pencil is that it's absolutely mind-blowing to stop and contemplate the incredible cooperation and pre-existing systems required to construct so many of the mundane, dirt-cheap objects of the modern world.

The fact that someone could eschew mass-produced lead pencils in favour of a self-made writing implement doesn't diminish the fact that it's practically impossible for any one individual on the planet to ever actually build a pencil you can buy for the equivalent of a few seconds to minutes of labour. That pencil, and so many other mundane items like it, are artifacts beyond the crafting capabilities of any one human.

After viewing primitive technology and crafting videos I'm convinced of the opposite. Culture makes you think that only mass market can do that.

I feel that again misses the point. Sure, it's perfectly possible for a resourceful and knowledgable human to hand-engineer various tools from the environment. But to make something very much like an ordinary pencil made of wood, graphite, rubber, metal, and paint would be a monumental task, far beyond the cost of a pencil in our established society.

The fact is that globalization and industrialization has democratized the construction of literal artifacts. Consider the single-use plastic bottle, with a precisely machined screw neck and matching lid. It's lightweight, transparent, and will last for years. It would be exceedingly difficult to find and process the raw material to craft such an artifact from scratch, yet millions of them per day are used once and discarded.

Same goes for most office supplies, now that I think of it. And we haven't even touched integrated circuits yet.

I kinda see, the value is in efficiency of delegation but IMO there are drawbacks that this 'efficient' perspective hides, namely people believe you can't do anything without the market.

Yep because history has proven that believe to be correct.

The complexity of a modern economy is more about efficiency than anything else.

If you want a pencil that uses graphite and an eraser, that’s actually fairly easy to construct with the correct raw materials. A single person in the right location and with the right knowledge could have made a single pencil 1,000 years ago, though the pencil would not have been worth the effort. Further, they could not have made 100,000 of them where I could actually buy 100,000 pencils by being part of the modern economy.

The thought experiment was not "how can I draw a dark line on a surface from scratch" but Making a Modern #2 pencil

and no one ever thought java ee was the only way to make a web application, not even in the early 2000's

> I think this is twisted by an era where liberal market was held as god like status.

The author more than the era, but sure. (To the extent it's also true of the era, the author was more of a cause than an effect, being one of the leading evangelists of the market of his generation.)

Friedman's example is more an illustration that when we want to design a replacement for a working system, there is often a lot more complexity than expected - reinvented wheels are often square. Your example ends up with a piece of charcoal that doesn't have an eraser, gives you slivers, gets charcoal all over, has to be burnt every time you need to sharpen it (with a market-produced lighter or matches), doesn't work with pencil sharpeners, and smells like smoke instead of that "freshly sharpened pencil" smell (yeah, that's a thing).

Your re-invented wheel is square.

Yes, Friedman wants us to examine how the market works - because it works better for these complex coordinations than any other system we've devised. The market has facilitated the discovery and communication of the user requirements, and the price mechanism has coordinated the work of all the producers/transporters/exchangers of all the raw ingredients and intermediate products as well as the final product, and has enabled an ecosystem that produces compatible pencil sharpeners, grips, etc.

And did anyone ever think Java EE was the only way? That was much more an example of a designed system to replace the messy evolved world of CGI/Perl/PHP.

you don't need a lighter to make fire, and you don't need to sharpen, you regrind.

j2ee is an example of mass mistook for an example of good. It was taught as the ultimate goal to marvel at the complexity of the remote objects.

you don't need a lighter to make fire, and you don't need to sharpen, you regrind. j2ee is an example of mass mistook for an example of good. It was taught as the ultimate goal to marvel at the complexity of the remote objects.

ps: if I had to glorify something it's globalization incentives to improve metrology. Precision is what gives you modern things.

actually, lead pencils were all originally made in a single location. the outcome now is just due to modern manufacturing. If people wanted to build a decent pencil locally, it would be possible, just not economic.

That's not what was said. A "single person" cannot make a lead pencil. I agree. Ask yourself whether the Primitive Technology guy could make a pencil in the middle of the Australian rain forest. He can make a lot of great things, but in order to make a pencil, he would need additional tools, and those tools would be made by someone else, hence the statement that "a single person cannot make a pencil."

My statement is 100% consistent with Friedman's original statement: https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/

Note that multiple times in history, due to war reasons, societies independently developed making pencils because they did not have access to the resources, and substituted other resources.

You don't even need a year. If you pick a really simple instruction set like in "Mano's basic computer" you can get it done within couple of months.

Ref: http://sandsduchon.org/duchon/cs311/ManoTutorial/ManoIntrodu...

I built one years ago for university course in Matlab Simulink.

See also Sam Zeelof's DIY silicon fab. Even using commercial equipment and supplies, the amount of work needed to make even the most rudimentary IC is quite staggering.

http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/

If you're not counting physical hardware, it can take even less time than that. I built a MIPS processor in verilog over the course of a month or so back in college

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