Let’s take apart your phone

bbookofjoe 6 days ago 26 commentsRead Article on everythingmachine.io

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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

matherial•about 2 hours ago

What an odd website. It explains everything in incredibly childish terms ("The display you’re reading this on is an absurd grid of exactly [wrong number] tiny, multicoloured light bulbs, known as pixels."), has lots of needless word-salad LLMisms ("Electricity made light effortless. The torch in your phone made darkness optional."), and all in all, feels like a wasted concept because it doesn't really say anything that isn't patently obvious: a phone has a screen and a camera and a CPU... okay? Not exactly mind-blowing.

It doesn't really even do anything to support its thesis that it's the "most intricate machine you've ever held". I don't know, I'm holding a Thinkpad laptop right now and I'm pretty sure it's a superset of what's inside a phone.

londons_explore•about 1 hour ago

You're absolutely right.

I guess this website isn't ready for primetime yet.

Let me rewrite it all only to still have most of the same issues it used to have, and a few extra ones too.

E-Machine•about 1 hour ago

Fair dos on the LLMisms. I'm still working on keeping my human voice despite being able to plug any words in to get a smooth AI version.

I'd push back on the childish terms. It is firmly pitched to a general audience, but I think it stands up in both depth and breadth. If you have better examples I'd love to see them.

I'd also square up on the thinkpad. It has larger and more powerful versions of some of the components, but it's also missing a lot of phones ones: the accelerometer, gyroscope, linear resonant actuator, magnetometer, barometer, multiple cameras, probably one with OIS; all in a much smaller device. Very keen to debate, tell me about your laptop!

Retr0id•about 1 hour ago

I think a phone does beat a thinkpad, but not by much.

CapitalistCartr•about 2 hours ago

The most intricate machine I've ever held was an inertial guidance system, back when they were hugely complex. My phone isn't even close.

nayuki•about 1 hour ago

> Petrol stores 50 times more energy by weight, but it needs to be exploded. A doughnut stores around 15 times, but it needs to be digested.

You left out a very important fact: Combustion requires external oxygen, which is not counted in the denominator when energy-by-mass is typically considered.

E-Machine•about 1 hour ago

Ah that's a really good point, so it reduces the x times for both petrol and doughnuts. I'll recalculate thank you!

mzajc•28 minutes ago

This is essentially just LLM output listing common smartphone components and various vaguely related trivia. Most of the "navigation" section isn't even about machine navigation for crying out loud, and the 10 second/week drift figure seems completely hallucinated.

jimnotgym•about 2 hours ago

I came here hoping to hear stories of the more intricate machines people have held.

I held a baby. Does that beat a phone?

E-Machine•about 1 hour ago

I put a lot of thought into that problem:

So a baby, a seed, any living thing (or even a chunk of something that was once living I suppose) is more complex, which I why I went with 'machine' to exclude those.

I also toyed with saying 'own' rather than 'held', but a modern electric car is basically a beefed up phone with a bunch of driving stuff too, so they wouldn't pass that test.

There are some edge cases: someone upthread held a classic inertial guidance system, and a modern GPU is arguably more intricate, though much more single-function, and good luck getting your hands on one of those anyway!

TMWNN•about 1 hour ago

>Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely unskilled labor?

—Scott Crossfield, 1954 <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/01/computer/>

dylan604•about 2 hours ago

Puts a new spin on designed in California, built in China

bluejellybean•about 2 hours ago

Beats it for sure, humans are by far the most complex machines, a true marvel of the world. By comparisons, humans make phones look like simple toys.

FartyMcFarter•about 1 hour ago

I don't know, it's different. Humans are analog wonders, phones are digital wonders, both impressive in one of those categories.

nayuki•about 1 hour ago

Humans have a bunch of digital components at their core: DNA, RNA, and peptides. It's not all analog.

Likewise, phones have numerous analog components: microphone, speaker, camera, screen, radio modem, power regulation.

Please don't equate the word "digital" to the notions of being electronic, man-made, or modern. Digital is simply an agreement between a sender and receiver that information is finite and perfectly copyable. (By contrast, analog information is infinite and cannot be copied perfectly.)

jollyllama•about 2 hours ago

Spectrum analyzer might not be baby-tier but it probably is more intricate than a phone. Not that I've held one.

nonameiguess•about 1 hour ago

Any animal beats an engineered machine. Heck, the bacteria in your hand are probably more intricate than a phone.

vablings•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War Battle tested too!

Retr0id•about 1 hour ago

Not enough tokens for some diagrams/illustrations, too?

E-Machine•about 1 hour ago

We're both rubbish at drawing unfortunately

sandcat_•about 1 hour ago

Been expecting this. An AI slop equivalent of the likes of https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ etc. A similar style or approach in theory, but without any of the care or attention to detail or humanity as what they’re mimicking. No interest in teaching, or accuracy, just prompt out the slop, get the views, move on.

> I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes, please shout them and I'll fix!

Depressing.

E-Machine•about 1 hour ago

Author here, thanks for sharing.

The idea is that the smartphone is an incredible entry point to the history of technology for a general audience. A huge range of human needs were met by increasingly sophisticated tools over millennia, then collapsed into a single device over the last 30 years.

I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know any you spot.