Captain Aggravated

Software developers are uniquely arrogant in their belief that they have a right to choose when the workers of entire industries or sometimes everyone in the world needs to re-train on the tools they use to do their jobs.

I’m a woodworker. Imagine if I walked into the shop one day to find my table saw replaced with one of those mutant sliding table European things because the manufacturer pushed an update. “We’ve replaced your tool with one that conforms to recently adopted industry norms, buzzwords and trendy design patterns we in the table saw industry have been peer pressuring each other into adopting. You may proceed to suckle upon our genitals in gratitude and worship.”

Meanwhile I’m losing money because the tool I rely on to run my business no longer functions how I was trained to use it. I have to tell my customers that their orders aren’t getting filled because I was visited by the saw fairy and instead of building their furniture for them I have to read manuals, learn how to safely use this thing, find where all the controls went, and then remake all the jigs and tooling I relied on for production and hopefully I can get back to doing actual work before they change it again according to their needs and not mine, on their schedule and not mine.

That’s what it’s like using software in the age of nightly updates or worse cloud-based solutions. You never know when your tools will change out from under you mid-project.

I remember labs full of networked Win 98 machines in middle school, with like Novell software on them for login credentials and whatnot. The computers sat there with a login screen and when students logged into it you would be presented with the Office suite and a restricted web browser and some educational packages. A lot of normal Win 98 stuff wasn’t there though, like any settings menus. But there was some convoluted way where you could bring up a help text and then by navigating deep in the menu system somehow cause it to launch to a “normal” Win 98 desktop.

Wheatley is a great character, he’s just got a minor case of serious brain damage.

“A large data centre” this wasn’t. I saw a couple washing machine-sized vats of oil-soaked computers.

Holy shit, that’s it. GPT is Wheatley from Portal 2. The moron you attach to a computer system to make it into an idiot.

I’ve seen a video of at least one spa that does that. They mine bitcoin on rigs immersed in mineral oil, with a heat exchanger to the spa’s water system. I’m struggling to imagine that’s enough heat, especially piped a distance through the building, to run several hot tubs, and I’m kind of dubious about that particular load, but hey.

Is Linus still doing the thing with the videos? Huh.

Aluminum can gang represent.

if you own a thickness planer, you don’t immediately need a jointer. You can flatten a face with a sled and shims in the planer, and joint edges a frillion different ways. I have a jointer and sometimes I use my router table for edge jointing.

Maybe, if you ask the sawyer nicely.

Which is why I buy stock rough sawn and mill it myself.

The word “Sawmill” from my quote was a link. This is the first picture on the page it links to. Hell of a hand tool that guy’s using.

You’re not only stupid, you’re dishonest. I bet you vote Republican.

From Wikipedia:

Sawyer is an occupational term referring to someone who saws wood, particularly using a pitsaw either in a saw pit or with the log on trestles above ground or operates a sawmill.

Operator of a sawmill = sawyer.

A 2x10 can move a half inch while drying? Sure. It shouldn’t be “while drying” while the construction crew is installing it.

Okay, are we talking about “boards sold as 2x10s might vary in width from board to board?” Because I took you to mean that a given dried and milled 2x10 might move up to an inch, which it had better fucking not. Because yeah, the likes of Georgia Pacific are going to be a bit sloppy with the final dimensions of 2x10s, because it rarely matters that much for what that board is going to be used for.

I’m a woodworker, I buy rough sawn lumber dried over a period of months, I shop dry it for a couple weeks then mill it myself. I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy how much it will move.

A sawyer is an occupational term for a person who operates a sawmill. My sawyer’s name is Bill.

Would you call that a “structural use?”

I think if I was you I’d go have a talk with your sawyer, talk about “man if I wanted my wood this wet I wouldn’t have broken up with Meagan. Is your kiln in working order?”

The consumer doesn’t need to know the dimensions at harvest. But the lumberjack and the sawyer do. They care about how much of the tree was needed to make a particular board, not how much board the customer ended up with.

Absolutely sure. It’s not really a factor in construction because of how the structure is engineered, but woodworkers have to constantly think about it.

Wood expands and contracts across the grain, but not so much along it. If you take a board that has been in a dry environment, put it in a humid environment, and allow it to acclimate, it will increase in width and thickness but not in length. At the microscopic level, wood is kind of like a bunch of ropes glued together with sponge, as it soaks up water the sponge wants to expand but the ropes don’t let it expand along their length.

Us woodworkers have to think about that when building things like doors, which might fit fine in the winter and then stick in the summer. It’s why we build frame and panel doors like this:

The large panel in the middle can expand and contract so much that it might be a problem, so we literally put it in a box. The outer dimensions of the frame are made mostly of the length of boards so it won’t expand and contract much, and the panel rests in a groove in the frame, not nailed or glued in place so that it can safely expand and contract as it wants to.

Attaching wide boards end-to-face can even present a situation where the boards want to move in different directions and they’ll eventually break each other.

You can even calculate the amount of wood movement given the species, of the wood, the dimension of the board and the amount of moisture change, you can read about it here.

A yellow pine 2x10 might move a tenth of an inch, not a full inch.

Construction lumber, especially pressure treated lumber, is sold so wet I don’t think it really matters. I’ve actually never tried to calculate wood movement for construction lumber because who the fuck cares? But for furniture lumber which is dried to between 6 and 14% moisture, there is a formula:

width of the board in inches x percentage of moisture change * expansion coefficient for a particular species.

Yellow pine (extremely common construction lumber) has an expansion coefficient of .00263. A 2x4 (actual dimension 1.5" by 3.5") that undergoes a 4% moisture content change will grow/shrink 3.54.00263 = 0.03682 inches, or just over 1/32". That’s in width; it’ll vary by less than half that in thickness. Wood basically doesn’t move along the grain; the board won’t get appreciably longer or shorter.