TED
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2019–2025
11:22 · 282K views · Jan 14, 2011
Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.
HN uses it as the standard illustration of hidden complexity and supply-chain dependencies behind everyday objects.
9 comments from Hacker News
The Toaster Project is a good example of this: this video [LINK] He attempted to build the basic components of a toaster from scratch. Smelting metal, molding plastic, etc. The book is a tough recommendation because he sortof gives up on the later parts and limps to a finish, but overall its a fascinating look at how difficult these processes are if you build them up from scratch.
Great book! In the introduction(IIRC) the author mentions Thomas Thwaites' TED talk "How I built a toaster from scratch" - which is a great example of the hidden complexities of "from scratch" (and also just a fun talk) this video Kind of reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
Haha, way ahead of you on that one, bought a C64 and learning assembly/soldering and looking at how to make my own computer on FPGA (async. CPU) with my own OS/programming language and in parallel to that my own P2P radio internet: [LINK] Even looked at making my own gerber editor and print my own PCBs with my AxiDraw plotter. On the subject: this video I looked at your github but nothing is playable out-of-the-box, you could make something presentable?
Full stack? Must mean you're able to design an instruction set, design chips, circuit diagrams, pcbs and finally write the firmware for it so it can boot the operating system you'll write, along with the drivers you write, so you can finally write some applications that runs on this new machine ;) dunno, maybe it goes deeper.. something about sand, and how it's hard to make even a toaster from scratch* * this video
Everything in the physical world is the same. There are hundreds of pieces even in the smallest toaster, and no one in the world knows how to make half of one without all those external dependencies: this video It's not a software thing, it's just how humanity works.