Use the Saw, Fear the Saw(stephango.com)
stephango.com
Use the Saw, Fear the Saw
https://stephango.com/saw
15 comments
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I don't like the 'fear' part. You should respect your tools, not fear them. Fear makes you do stupid things, respect stops you from doing stupid things.
My best power tool tip, learned years ago, is "go pee first" meaning that you'll be less careful if you're trying to hurry through the cut because you need to go to the bathroom.
This short little article manages to summarize a long-standing feeling I've had about safety and societal progress. We protect people by making things safer, but in doing so, we oftentimes incrementally lose a combination of functionality, ability, agency, experience, and wisdom.
I think the loss of agency due to the aggregation of safety rules and features is an underrated force in society for the worse. It bleeds into things like chat control and locking down of our devices, and it’s something that the wrong politicians are only too happy to take advantage of.
There are masses of people who have never felt the exhilaration of throwing themselves into life and finding that they have built-in tools to deal with it.
There are masses of people who have never felt the exhilaration of throwing themselves into life and finding that they have built-in tools to deal with it.
I super agree. Life today is unrecognizable from life just like, 80 years ago. I'm not advocating for like, taking the warning labels off the bottles and letting the problem solve itself or whatever, but I do think there's something insidiously infantilizing about modern society.
This is a shorter version of Neal Stephenson's metaphor of Unix as a Hole Hawg drill from "In the Beginning was the Command Line".
I grew up around woodworking and then went off to the soft world of computers.
I learned to cut 2x4s floating them in on hand with a circular saw in the other, cutting so the longer one side remained in hand without the concern of binding.
It is best to learn from old men with all their fingers or young ones with digits numbering less.
I learned to cut 2x4s floating them in on hand with a circular saw in the other, cutting so the longer one side remained in hand without the concern of binding.
It is best to learn from old men with all their fingers or young ones with digits numbering less.
Ironically, I don't think glibly remarking that you "still have all your limbs" and some handmade furniture at the end properly demonstrates someone "fear[ing] the saw," and it demonstrates some of the hubris we're seeing in current tech culture.
One of my high school teachers impressed the same caution upon my cohort but was missing the end of a finger.
One of my high school teachers impressed the same caution upon my cohort but was missing the end of a finger.
When I was four years old, I was playing with a stick in the back yard and my dad accidentally got parts of his four fingers cut off by his radial arm saw. It did not slow him down too much, but I was always afraid of that saw.
Radial arm saws fall in the category of dado-blades etc.; woodworking tools really on the far end of dangerous, and not even commonly used in a lot of countries (excepting the US for some reason).
Was the stick ok?
Still given the option, I would prefer the tool that gets the job done that is safer and reduces error over one that is just sharp edges. For example, TypeScript vs JavaScript.
This reminds me o sharp knifes argument. In programming you may want to provide tools that can shoot you in the foot, if the alternative is not as powerful. here is a conversation with DHH about it [0]. For instance, you may consider dynamic languages if the alternative is too much type gymnastics.
The first time I've seen the argument was in the prag-prog magazine that sadly is not active anymore.
[0] VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ&t=8396
The first time I've seen the argument was in the prag-prog magazine that sadly is not active anymore.
[0] VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ&t=8396
The mythology is strong: I am especially amused by youtube woodworkers who, when cutting sheet goods, make "initial" cuts with a tracksaw, because it's so much safer and more practical, and then do "final", "precise" cuts on their table saw. I cut my sheet goods once, with a tracksaw (parallel guides FTW), and they are perfect.