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I am completely confused by your example. Buying a better knife doesn't make you a better chef. Buying a faster car doesn't make you a better driver. Buying a m

by dpedu 2y ago

I am completely confused by your example. Buying a better knife doesn't make you a better chef. Buying a faster car doesn't make you a better driver. Buying a more powerful laptop doesn't make you a better developer.

lelandfe 2y ago
My dull chef's knife got caught when I chopping an onion and nearly lopped my fingertip off. I was not a very good chef that night.
- dpedu 2y ago
  I'm not sure what that has to do with better vs worse tools. Expensive knives get dull too. Good chefs, on the other hand, keep their equipment in working order regardless of its value.
  - lelandfe 2y ago
    A dull knife is a worse tool. You’re getting awfully literal, though.
- xxs 2y ago
  So you are saying tool maintenance (well any maintenance) is important?
jpalawaga 2y ago
no, but with a shitty laptop it can be hard to be a good developer. having dull knives will make cooking experience, slow, dangerous, and unpleasant. having a boat-car will make it difficult to practice any sort of skilled driving. it's not that you can't overcome adversity and do the thing anyhow, but you're certainly not making it easy. In all cases, using the proper tool allows you to remove the extra difficulty factor and focus on that task at hand. But also, cutting a tomato with a sharp knife is way, way easier than with a dull knife. Same with soldering. Ignores the rest of the parts of being a chef, but you get the comparison.
belthesar 2y ago
"Better" is definitely the wrong word, but the jist is sound with the right framing. A better tool often allows you to do work safer, and that is what was attempted to be conveyed. Applying the approach to one of your examples, a faster car doesn't make you a better driver, but a car with more safety features makes your driving experience safer than one with less.
Larrikin 2y ago
Do you cook? There are dozens of obvious examples. A crappy knife will tear instead of cut. You'll ruin tomatoes, have uneven dices, crush and smear delicate herbs, have ripped apart meat and fish that you'll destroy more trying to get rid of the trim. That's not counting the downtime you'll have when the knife slips instead of cuts and you can't cook at all due to injury. Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that has never cooked before will not make them a Michelin chef, but their progress will be faster when they don't have the knife working against them.
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  I have a ~80 dollar knife that is dull as an EA and you're vastly exaggerating. Tomatoes, meat, fish, I use my $4 serrated knife. Everything else is fine. With proper technique it's basically impossible to cut yourself even with a very dull knife.
- spookie 2y ago
  Fair enough, but for anyone wondering, you can make a shit knife shine if you take good care of it! Sharpening it, using a chef's honing steel in between some harder cuts to take care of those nasty burrs and you're off to the races!
- lttlrck 2y ago
  Now you've introduced "expensive" muddying the argument even more :-)
- dpedu 2y ago
  I don't cook, but I solder. And I got a lot of mileage out of a dirt cheap Radio Shack iron. Well, I do cook, but I'm not into it or as skilled at it to the degree I am with soldering.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  I cook, and I disagree with the assertion that a better knife makes you a better cook. Good knives are useful, but ultimately you're still going to produce crappy results if you're a bad cook with a good knife.
rsch 2y ago
That is a common fallacy, I suspect it comes from having enough budget to not having to think about being able to afford something decent. It is like photographers with $5,000 worth of equipment in their camera bags telling you that equipment doesn’t matter. I mean, there is a reason why they spend all that money right? Of course a good photographer will be able to get good results with a cheap camera, but only in situations where that cheap camera can actually capture the scene. For example, if it is not sensitive enough to capture enough light at night time, you are not getting night time shots, period, no matter how good you are. (this very much used to be a thing 10 years ago) If you employ programmers, you will buy fast workstations because it will make them MUCH more productive. A slow computer will interrupt your work by making you wait. I think it is in fact the exact opposite, the better you are at something, the more likely it is that you become limited by your equipment. I will probably not be able to cook better if I get very expensive knives. But I would speculate that an actual professional cook or butcher will be able to work better with sharp knives that keep their edges well.
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  Programmers are also frequently better equipped to make underpowered machines work for them, by adjusting their techniques, monitoring resource usage and stopping or uninstalling things like bloatware. Whereas normal people will tend to struggle if they just buy the cheapest machine they can find.
cthalupa 2y ago
The problem is that bad tools can be a limiting factor, regardless of skill level. The more skilled you are the more likely you are able to compensate for bad tools, but you'd still be more productive with good ones. A knife that won't hold it's edge will mean you are explicitly going to perform worse as a chef - you will get ragged cuts, you will be more at risk for injuring yourself, etc. A slow laptop will mean you learn more slowly - doubly so if you are working with compiled languages or anything where you spend significant processing time before determining the outcome of whatever you're working on. The quicker you can get feedback on your work, be it from compilation errors, manual review of the output, your tests running, etc., the more you get to iterate and the more you get to learn. A cheap soldering iron explicitly can make soldering more difficult and result in worse outcomes, particularly for a beginner. Be it cooking, soldering, photographing, programming, whatever, there is frequently a point where going from a cheaper tool to a more expensive one will make the life of a beginner easier and let them produce better outcomes. As you get more skilled you can learn how to more quickly and easily sharpen knives, or produce fewer bugs in your code, or how to better handle aperture vs. ISO or whatever. But in those cases there will still often be productivity/efficiency gains from using nicer tools

by dpedu 2y ago

lelandfe 2y ago

My dull chef's knife got caught when I chopping an onion and nearly lopped my fingertip off. I was not a very good chef that night.

dpedu 2y ago
I'm not sure what that has to do with better vs worse tools. Expensive knives get dull too. Good chefs, on the other hand, keep their equipment in working order regardless of its value.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  A dull knife is a worse tool. You’re getting awfully literal, though.
xxs 2y ago
So you are saying tool maintenance (well any maintenance) is important?

jpalawaga 2y ago

no, but with a shitty laptop it can be hard to be a good developer. having dull knives will make cooking experience, slow, dangerous, and unpleasant. having a boat-car will make it difficult to practice any sort of skilled driving. it's not that you can't overcome adversity and do the thing anyhow, but you're certainly not making it easy. In all cases, using the proper tool allows you to remove the extra difficulty factor and focus on that task at hand. But also, cutting a tomato with a sharp knife is way, way easier than with a dull knife. Same with soldering. Ignores the rest of the parts of being a chef, but you get the comparison.

belthesar 2y ago

"Better" is definitely the wrong word, but the jist is sound with the right framing. A better tool often allows you to do work safer, and that is what was attempted to be conveyed. Applying the approach to one of your examples, a faster car doesn't make you a better driver, but a car with more safety features makes your driving experience safer than one with less.

Larrikin 2y ago

Do you cook? There are dozens of obvious examples. A crappy knife will tear instead of cut. You'll ruin tomatoes, have uneven dices, crush and smear delicate herbs, have ripped apart meat and fish that you'll destroy more trying to get rid of the trim. That's not counting the downtime you'll have when the knife slips instead of cuts and you can't cook at all due to injury. Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that has never cooked before will not make them a Michelin chef, but their progress will be faster when they don't have the knife working against them.

chipsrafferty 2y ago
I have a ~80 dollar knife that is dull as an EA and you're vastly exaggerating. Tomatoes, meat, fish, I use my $4 serrated knife. Everything else is fine. With proper technique it's basically impossible to cut yourself even with a very dull knife.
spookie 2y ago
Fair enough, but for anyone wondering, you can make a shit knife shine if you take good care of it! Sharpening it, using a chef's honing steel in between some harder cuts to take care of those nasty burrs and you're off to the races!
lttlrck 2y ago
Now you've introduced "expensive" muddying the argument even more :-)
dpedu 2y ago
I don't cook, but I solder. And I got a lot of mileage out of a dirt cheap Radio Shack iron. Well, I do cook, but I'm not into it or as skilled at it to the degree I am with soldering.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
I cook, and I disagree with the assertion that a better knife makes you a better cook. Good knives are useful, but ultimately you're still going to produce crappy results if you're a bad cook with a good knife.

rsch 2y ago

That is a common fallacy, I suspect it comes from having enough budget to not having to think about being able to afford something decent. It is like photographers with $5,000 worth of equipment in their camera bags telling you that equipment doesn’t matter. I mean, there is a reason why they spend all that money right? Of course a good photographer will be able to get good results with a cheap camera, but only in situations where that cheap camera can actually capture the scene. For example, if it is not sensitive enough to capture enough light at night time, you are not getting night time shots, period, no matter how good you are. (this very much used to be a thing 10 years ago) If you employ programmers, you will buy fast workstations because it will make them MUCH more productive. A slow computer will interrupt your work by making you wait. I think it is in fact the exact opposite, the better you are at something, the more likely it is that you become limited by your equipment. I will probably not be able to cook better if I get very expensive knives. But I would speculate that an actual professional cook or butcher will be able to work better with sharp knives that keep their edges well.

chrismorgan 2y ago
Programmers are also frequently better equipped to make underpowered machines work for them, by adjusting their techniques, monitoring resource usage and stopping or uninstalling things like bloatware. Whereas normal people will tend to struggle if they just buy the cheapest machine they can find.

cthalupa 2y ago

The problem is that bad tools can be a limiting factor, regardless of skill level. The more skilled you are the more likely you are able to compensate for bad tools, but you'd still be more productive with good ones. A knife that won't hold it's edge will mean you are explicitly going to perform worse as a chef - you will get ragged cuts, you will be more at risk for injuring yourself, etc. A slow laptop will mean you learn more slowly - doubly so if you are working with compiled languages or anything where you spend significant processing time before determining the outcome of whatever you're working on. The quicker you can get feedback on your work, be it from compilation errors, manual review of the output, your tests running, etc., the more you get to iterate and the more you get to learn. A cheap soldering iron explicitly can make soldering more difficult and result in worse outcomes, particularly for a beginner. Be it cooking, soldering, photographing, programming, whatever, there is frequently a point where going from a cheaper tool to a more expensive one will make the life of a beginner easier and let them produce better outcomes. As you get more skilled you can learn how to more quickly and easily sharpen knives, or produce fewer bugs in your code, or how to better handle aperture vs. ISO or whatever. But in those cases there will still often be productivity/efficiency gains from using nicer tools