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> If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws. You can say that about

> If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws. You can say that about everything that has some form of guardrails. It goes faster without them. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right decision to remove them. People tend to change their minds after they have an accident, which to me is an indication that they can't seem to properly assess the risk and the outcome beforehand.

pm215 1y ago
It might alternatively be an indication that they can't properly assess the risk and the outcome afterwards.... (More likely both: we are as a species absolutely terrible about assessing low-probability risks.)
- cinntaile 1y ago
  Yes, that is a valid point you make!
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I've benefitted from modern "safe" languages. I cut my teeth on things like Machine Code, ASM, and ANSI C. I don't miss them, at all. Nowadays, I write primarily in Swift, and I absolutely love not testing for leaks, anymore.
  - cinntaile 1y ago
    How does this support your original position? Now you're saying you want the guardrails, I don't get the point you're trying to make.
    - franktankbank 1y ago
      I think he's happily retired.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    I enjoy the non safe parts and proving with code in production for decades it works... it is sort of like code golf. however I use everytrick I tan to get memory safety when possible.
- darkerside 1y ago
  It can also mean they properly assessed the risk and got incredibly unlucky
  - pm215 1y ago
    In that case they would not change their mind, though.
    - ptero 1y ago
      Not necessarily. Having a painful accident often leads people to a position of "even if I know a mishap is very unlikely I am not doing this again".
      - pm215 1y ago
        I think that falls into the "did not correctly assess the risk beforehand" bucket (and as you say and as the post I was replying to said, this is quite common). If they had correctly assessed "this is going to be really awful if it happens such that want to rule out even an unlikely possibility of it" they ought to not want to do it the first time.
        ptero 1y ago
        In this definition I think virtually no one assesses the risk correctly. It is a human nature to overreact (post-factum) to an unlikely event to the extent that most languages have a dedicated saying ("having burned yourself on hot milk, one now blows on water" is the non-English version I heard as a kid). No offense intended, but I also yours is not a good definition of "correctly assessing the risk". If it were followed, an extremely unlikely possibility of a horrible outcome would stop people from doing most optional things. For example, a risk of a horrible disease while on travel will lead to no travel. Personalities differ and there are daredevils and scaredy cats that differ in pre-event risk assessments, but post (unlikely and traumatic) event assessment change is pretty universal. My 2c.
        1y ago
jiggawatts 1y ago
I've repeatedly heard the anecdote (to the point that I suspect it's now data) that inexperienced users of chainsaws are terrified of them, experienced users are comfortable with them, and very experienced users are even more terrified of them.
- the_af 1y ago
  I've heard this of driving: that very novice drivers are terrified and extra careful, as you gain confidence you lose your fear and make dangerous mistakes, and when you're truly experienced the rate of accidents decreases again. Don't know if it's true. I can say I know cases of extremely good people committing very dangerous mistakes due to disabling safety checks, thinking they don't apply to them...
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    I throw these sort of quips the internet love into the same mental bucket (the trash can, tbh) as tabloid health advice. Even if the general rule is right it likely comes with caveats that make it inferior to applying situation specific information or qualifiers that make it little better than chance or a coin toss.
gwd 1y ago
A couple of years ago we bought a 50-year-old-house and gutted it. We had professionals do the stuff that required expertise or a lot of time / skills (electricians, plumbers, plasterers, etc), and did most other things ourselves. At some point I'd come in to do something within my remit while the electricians were here. I'd put in earplugs to do some masonry drilling, because I've only got one set of ears and I'd like to be able to hear things when I'm 80. One of the electrician's assistants, probably in his late 20's commented on it, something like, "Got your ear condoms on, huh?" I'm at a stage in my life where I don't really care about that sort of thing, so just blew it off. A few months later, that same guy came in to do the final wiring on something. He'd lost the end of his thumb -- had an accident with some tool or other and cut it off. It's hard for me not to think that his attitude toward earplugs and his accident were related. Nobody deserves to be maimed for life, but we live in a universe which can be pretty unforgiving.
- Mtinie 1y ago
  Quite possibly. In my experience, the people who make unsolicited comments about others’ risk mitigations have incorrectly learned that safety precautions indicate weakness or inexperience, when experience teaches the opposite. Seasoned professionals know that tools and environments don’t care about your skill level. A tool will injure anyone who doesn’t respect its inherent dangers. The mockery typically comes from those who’ve either been lucky so far or selectively absorbed workplace cultures that prioritize appearing tough over staying whole.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    On the other hand, there's the people who make a big song and dance ritual over putting their eye and ear pro on just to impact off one bolt that'll be maybe a couple clacks of the hammer. It's not realistic to do that for every single transient noise or tap on something, the safety is just performative at that point. I have no problem letting those people and behaviors be ridiculed.
    - Mtinie 1y ago
potato3732842 1y ago
Opinions like yours are wildly popular on the white collar internet because they "feel good" to people who are far removed from actual danger and productivity. But if you go to a part of the internet where many are self employed such naïve and un-nuanced opinions will be laughed at and ridiculed because they completely ignore the benefit side of the equation. We all only get so much time on this earth and on some level quality and quantity are fungible, if inefficiently and imprecisely with some element of chance. How much is a life worth? What's a finger worth? What's a crippling accident worth? And so on and so on. Once you define these terms numbers can be crunched and it can be determined whether you are right or wrong in any given case, and I assure you, there will be cases where your attitude computes so poorly it is farcical. Is the retired carpenter with 10 fingers really better off than the one with 7? Sure the guy with 7 wished he'd not made that foolish mistake but the lifetime productivity gains of habitually moving fast likely show in his quality of life. More complex benefit calculations simply make the problem more complex, but they do not change the fundamental nature of the tradeoff. Depending on what an injury is worth, the compensation structure, etc, etc, it may very well be the right decision to disable all the safeties on everything and work fast for 10yr before losing a finger and moving on to something else because the faster man can command the higher labor rate, etc, etc. Likewise, often times it's more valuable to write crap software in a week that solves a transient need for a year rather than spending 7mo spec'ing out and developing the arc of the goddamn covenant. Yeah it might shit all over your production database but if you're smart about the details it won't be much more likely to do that than "good" software and you can be on to the next value producing task.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Unfortunately, this is pretty much exactly the view of many pros. Time is money, and they will shave off things that may cost time (sometimes, that's Quality). I mentioned that they removed the safety guards, but I never said it was good. Myself, I would not do that. I enjoy having some of the safety features that modern languages offer. I can work very quickly, indeed. I probably work faster (and safer) than I ever did, because of this. A big danger of seasoned pros, is that they get casual with extremely dangerous things, and remove the safety stops, in order to accelerate their workflow. One day, they are too casual, and you end up with a smoking pair of shoes on the floor.

pm215 1y ago

It might alternatively be an indication that they can't properly assess the risk and the outcome afterwards.... (More likely both: we are as a species absolutely terrible about assessing low-probability risks.)

cinntaile 1y ago
Yes, that is a valid point you make!
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I've benefitted from modern "safe" languages. I cut my teeth on things like Machine Code, ASM, and ANSI C. I don't miss them, at all. Nowadays, I write primarily in Swift, and I absolutely love not testing for leaks, anymore.
- cinntaile 1y ago
  How does this support your original position? Now you're saying you want the guardrails, I don't get the point you're trying to make.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    I think he's happily retired.
- bluGill 1y ago
  I enjoy the non safe parts and proving with code in production for decades it works... it is sort of like code golf. however I use everytrick I tan to get memory safety when possible.
darkerside 1y ago
It can also mean they properly assessed the risk and got incredibly unlucky
- pm215 1y ago
  In that case they would not change their mind, though.
  - ptero 1y ago
    Not necessarily. Having a painful accident often leads people to a position of "even if I know a mishap is very unlikely I am not doing this again".
    - pm215 1y ago
      I think that falls into the "did not correctly assess the risk beforehand" bucket (and as you say and as the post I was replying to said, this is quite common). If they had correctly assessed "this is going to be really awful if it happens such that want to rule out even an unlikely possibility of it" they ought to not want to do it the first time.
      - ptero 1y ago
        In this definition I think virtually no one assesses the risk correctly. It is a human nature to overreact (post-factum) to an unlikely event to the extent that most languages have a dedicated saying ("having burned yourself on hot milk, one now blows on water" is the non-English version I heard as a kid). No offense intended, but I also yours is not a good definition of "correctly assessing the risk". If it were followed, an extremely unlikely possibility of a horrible outcome would stop people from doing most optional things. For example, a risk of a horrible disease while on travel will lead to no travel. Personalities differ and there are daredevils and scaredy cats that differ in pre-event risk assessments, but post (unlikely and traumatic) event assessment change is pretty universal. My 2c.
        1y ago

jiggawatts 1y ago

I've repeatedly heard the anecdote (to the point that I suspect it's now data) that inexperienced users of chainsaws are terrified of them, experienced users are comfortable with them, and very experienced users are even more terrified of them.

the_af 1y ago
I've heard this of driving: that very novice drivers are terrified and extra careful, as you gain confidence you lose your fear and make dangerous mistakes, and when you're truly experienced the rate of accidents decreases again. Don't know if it's true. I can say I know cases of extremely good people committing very dangerous mistakes due to disabling safety checks, thinking they don't apply to them...
- potato3732842 1y ago
  I throw these sort of quips the internet love into the same mental bucket (the trash can, tbh) as tabloid health advice. Even if the general rule is right it likely comes with caveats that make it inferior to applying situation specific information or qualifiers that make it little better than chance or a coin toss.

gwd 1y ago

A couple of years ago we bought a 50-year-old-house and gutted it. We had professionals do the stuff that required expertise or a lot of time / skills (electricians, plumbers, plasterers, etc), and did most other things ourselves. At some point I'd come in to do something within my remit while the electricians were here. I'd put in earplugs to do some masonry drilling, because I've only got one set of ears and I'd like to be able to hear things when I'm 80. One of the electrician's assistants, probably in his late 20's commented on it, something like, "Got your ear condoms on, huh?" I'm at a stage in my life where I don't really care about that sort of thing, so just blew it off. A few months later, that same guy came in to do the final wiring on something. He'd lost the end of his thumb -- had an accident with some tool or other and cut it off. It's hard for me not to think that his attitude toward earplugs and his accident were related. Nobody deserves to be maimed for life, but we live in a universe which can be pretty unforgiving.

Mtinie 1y ago
Quite possibly. In my experience, the people who make unsolicited comments about others’ risk mitigations have incorrectly learned that safety precautions indicate weakness or inexperience, when experience teaches the opposite. Seasoned professionals know that tools and environments don’t care about your skill level. A tool will injure anyone who doesn’t respect its inherent dangers. The mockery typically comes from those who’ve either been lucky so far or selectively absorbed workplace cultures that prioritize appearing tough over staying whole.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  On the other hand, there's the people who make a big song and dance ritual over putting their eye and ear pro on just to impact off one bolt that'll be maybe a couple clacks of the hammer. It's not realistic to do that for every single transient noise or tap on something, the safety is just performative at that point. I have no problem letting those people and behaviors be ridiculed.
  - Mtinie 1y ago

potato3732842 1y ago

Opinions like yours are wildly popular on the white collar internet because they "feel good" to people who are far removed from actual danger and productivity. But if you go to a part of the internet where many are self employed such naïve and un-nuanced opinions will be laughed at and ridiculed because they completely ignore the benefit side of the equation. We all only get so much time on this earth and on some level quality and quantity are fungible, if inefficiently and imprecisely with some element of chance. How much is a life worth? What's a finger worth? What's a crippling accident worth? And so on and so on. Once you define these terms numbers can be crunched and it can be determined whether you are right or wrong in any given case, and I assure you, there will be cases where your attitude computes so poorly it is farcical. Is the retired carpenter with 10 fingers really better off than the one with 7? Sure the guy with 7 wished he'd not made that foolish mistake but the lifetime productivity gains of habitually moving fast likely show in his quality of life. More complex benefit calculations simply make the problem more complex, but they do not change the fundamental nature of the tradeoff. Depending on what an injury is worth, the compensation structure, etc, etc, it may very well be the right decision to disable all the safeties on everything and work fast for 10yr before losing a finger and moving on to something else because the faster man can command the higher labor rate, etc, etc. Likewise, often times it's more valuable to write crap software in a week that solves a transient need for a year rather than spending 7mo spec'ing out and developing the arc of the goddamn covenant. Yeah it might shit all over your production database but if you're smart about the details it won't be much more likely to do that than "good" software and you can be on to the next value producing task.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Unfortunately, this is pretty much exactly the view of many pros. Time is money, and they will shave off things that may cost time (sometimes, that's Quality). I mentioned that they removed the safety guards, but I never said it was good. Myself, I would not do that. I enjoy having some of the safety features that modern languages offer. I can work very quickly, indeed. I probably work faster (and safer) than I ever did, because of this. A big danger of seasoned pros, is that they get casual with extremely dangerous things, and remove the safety stops, in order to accelerate their workflow. One day, they are too casual, and you end up with a smoking pair of shoes on the floor.