mrinal
6.2K posts


@samlambert reliability is important and intellectual bullies have no friends
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The razor blade slot is one of the most quietly brilliant pieces of home engineering ever built, and the reason it looks insane is the exact reason it worked.
A 1903-style Gillette double-edge blade is carbon steel, weighs about a gram, and is thinner than a sheet of cardstock. It also stays sharp enough to open skin long after it's too dull to shave with. That made it almost impossible to throw out safely. It sliced through trash bags, cut the people sorting cans, and survived the backyard trash fires Americans used in the 1930s, then waited in the garden ash for a bare foot. Every disposal method lost to the blade.
So the wall became the container. Drop it in the slot, it falls into the stud bay, gone.
Here's the part that was actually smart. A cavity between two studs runs about 14 inches wide, 3.5 deep, 8 feet tall: roughly 4,800 cubic inches of dead space. A blade takes up around five-thousandths of that. Account for how blades pile instead of pack neatly and the void still swallows something like 80,000 of them. A man changing a blade every week or two fills it at a rate measured in centuries. He'd calculated, correctly, that he would die long before the wall did.
Then rust finished the job. Carbon steel blades oxidize and fuse into a single corroded mass on the bottom plate. Loose sharps turn into an inert brick. The pile actually gets safer as it ages.
It was the cheapest sharps disposal in America for fifty years. A free, effectively bottomless container whose contents rusted themselves harmless. The only failure mode was a future stranger with a sledgehammer.
Stainless steel ended it. Blades that lasted weeks meant far fewer to throw out, and by the 1970s the fully disposable plastic razor shoved the whole problem back into your trash can, where it sits unsolved today. The cartridge you tossed last month is in a landfill right now, still sharp.
The guy filling his wall with blades in 1955 had a better disposal system than you do.
aspen/sparx || #1 edtwt kegel advocate@2oosm4ll
thinking about how people used to just chuck their used razor blades behind the wall and call it a day
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mrinal retweetledi

"Most of those wall-of-green-boxes profiles are people who aren't solving hard enough problems to slow them down"
James Cowling@jamesacowling
@jgreze If someone's built something leveraged and widely used on github then that's a strong positive, but just churning out code is zero signal. Most of those wall-of-green-boxes profiles are people who aren't solving hard enough problems to slow them down.
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likely true but typical outcome is a 50 iq dictatorship
dictatorships are low iq
the rare exceptions prove the norm
Ramsri Goutham Golla@ramsri_goutham
130 iq dictatorship >>> 50 iq democracy
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mrinal retweetledi

@uberstuber nervous system downregulation app but it's just joe hudson singing you a lullaby
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