[hnlmorg]

I don’t think you’re reading these articles in the right spirit if that’s your take away from them.

What I find more interesting is to compare how complicated the tech we don’t think about has become. It’s amazing that a cable, not a smart device or even 80s digital watch, but a literal cable, has as much technology packed into it as Apollo 11 and we don’t even notice.

Playing devils advocate for your comment, one of the (admittedly many) reasons going to the moon is harder than charging a USB device is because there are not off-the-shelf parts for space travel. If you had to build your USB charger from scratch (including defining the USB specification for the first time) each time you needed to charge your phone, I bet people would quickly talk about USB cables as a “hard problem” too.

That is the biggest takeaway we should get from articles like this. Not that Apollo 11 wasn’t a hugely impressive feat of engineering. But that there is an enormous amount of engineering in our every day lives that is mass produced and we don’t even notice.

[nzach]

Your comment reminded me of this[0] video about the Jerry Can.

A simple looking object, but in reality it had a lot o tought put in to get to this form.

It also goes along the lines of "Simplicity is complicated"[1].

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwUkbGHFAhs

[1] - https://go.dev/talks/2015/simplicity-is-complicated.slide#1

[argiopetech]

This is actually about the wall warts the cable could be plugged into.

Otherwise, I completely agree.