My Dad gave me a "Visible Engine" model to put together for learning.  It was awesome - not only could you assemble all the hundreds of pieces... it moved and "ran" (on an electric battery motor - not gasoline).  That was a special present... lots of learning came from that present.

I became a small engine repair teen... when he sent me to a summer school to learn in a proper shop.  In college I learned all the theory.  Very few of the labs used real equipment like a V-8, so I didn't learn much about the very basic engine that runs so much of our lives the ICE (internal combution engine - as it's known now that electric motors are comming of age).

Much later, a colleague and friend took me to his basement where he had a transmission taken apart and on the bench.  The same model as in my 289 4-speed Mustang.  One learns when you get your hands dirty.

So today (2024) I'm learning to trade stock market options ( you have heard of derivatives - like crashed the markets back in 2008)... turns out ... when you get past the hype - they can be and are quite safe.  But, like a laser pointer - they come with a warning:  "Don't point laser in other eye!"

Most of the Options trading world is just beyond ticker-tape technology,  yes, they traded in there green-screens, for IBM PC 286s and even upgraded to Windows...

You have seen the twenty-two monitor setups of the very important traders... on TV, the nightly News ... yes, even Wall-St has computerized...  in fact, guess when they went to using the decimal system (instead of the 1/8 of a dollar increments...) - go ahead ... google it...  yeah... sometime in the early 1960s right?  Wrong not last century ... but THIS century!  In 2001 - the NYSE went decimal!  That should tell you something about a traditional system.

Being a computer nerd... I know a bit about them... and what they can do.  I also know what we as humans are not very good at... and what has driven the modern world... it is NOT Software.  But that is what is "eating-the-world" if you buy into the hype (don't buy)!  All the gains of the last 80 years are in hardware (none in software) - trust me.

I've not ... yet... done any real AI.  I started a Harvard CS in AI course... but it started at square one and didn't appear to be moving ahead at a rate that would take the student to ChatGPT before the next century.  So I went out on my own...  a learning path I'm quite familiar with.

Everyone is talking about AI - but it is really the poor cousin to AI - Machine Learning that the real progress is being made.  This is purpose-built tooling to solve a unique problem domain - that can be elucidated with tons and tons of examples (data - give me data).