Use the Saw, Fear the Saw
13 comments
·October 25, 2025Freak_NL
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.
dogman1050
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.
OhNoHereWeGo
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.
clickety_clack
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.
mprovost
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".
pizzafeelsright
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.
zippyman55
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.
Freak_NL
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).
comrade1234
Was the stick ok?
luis_cho
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.
Ygg2
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.
Or, just don't use a table saw. Get a tracksaw. It simply isn't true that a table saw is "required" for woodworking. Yes, there are cuts which take more time and/or are more difficult with a tracksaw, and in general you need to think more. But you don't waste a ton of space centrally in your workshop, and you get to keep your fingers, as it's a much safer tool.
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.