This is a really bad take. Professional arborists don’t “rip every guard off their saws”, there aren’t even that many guards to begin with, and the ones that exist (chain brake, hand guard, throttle lock) don’t slow anyone down. They’re there so you don’t bleed out in a tree.

The “LARPing” angle makes even less sense. What’s the software equivalent, saying that keeping engineers out of direct prod access is just an ego hit? That’s not LARPing, that’s risk management. Same way arborists keep the guards on because downtime from losing a hand costs more than any pretend efficiency.

Bad tools don’t make you a pro, and pretending guardrails are just for “fools with money” is an incredibly bad take. It’s like those YouTube get rich folks that never mention how much of the success is luck.

I guess the equivalent would be compiling rm without the '--no-preserve-root' option?

Realistically I know a professional arborist. Not only does he have all the safety equipment on his saws, all his crews have full PPE available and use it. The only piece of safety equipment I've ever seen that was dubious is the "sawstop" for table saws, primarily because it false triggers so often.

Well, I made a couple of mistakes, when writing the post[0]. It was misinterpreted, but that was entirely my fault.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45027284