Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales is published by Cool Tools Lab. To receive the newsletter a week early, sign up here.
Every time a newsletter goes out, I get wonderful emails from readers telling me how much they enjoy it. At the same time, I get a spate of unsubscribes. Often, the subs go up by the same number they go down. It’s frustrating. Because of the positive emails, I know there’s an audience for what I’m doing here. Can you help me reach more of it? Can you post a link to this newsletter in your social media? Share with other maker enthusiasts? Thanks so much for your help.
Let’s Talk About Clamps
In this “Ask Adam Savage” segment on Tested, Adam is asked about shop clamps. This leads to a typically-Adam thoughtful and wise deep dive into the many uses and types of clamps: c-clamps, bar clamps, vice grips, quick-grip clamps, welding clamps, jeweler’s clamp, bench vises, lever clamps, kant twist clamps, and last but not least, spring clamps. One great tip takeaway: Don’t ever buy one clamp. Buy at least two, and if you can afford it, but 4 or more.
I subscribe to FineScale Modeler magazine, even though I’m not really a scale modeler. I was as a teen and still like looking at what people are up to in that hobby. Mainly, I look for modeling tips that I can apply to my hobby of miniature painting and tabletop game modeling. Here’s a great case in point. You can use a scribbing compass to cut circles in styrene. You just have to be patient, make multiple passes, and finish up with a hobby knife if the piece is thick or stubborn.
A Collection of Razor Rules of Thumb
A “razor” is a rule of thumb that simplifies decision making. Here’s a collection of the sharpest razors gathered by Sahil Bloom and posted on Twitter.
The Feynman Razor Complexity and jargon are used to mask a lack of deep understanding. If you can’t explain it to a 5-year-old, you don’t really understand it. If someone uses a lot of complexity and jargon to explain something, they probably don’t understand it.
The Luck Razor When choosing between two paths, choose the path that has a larger luck surface area. Your actions put you in a position where luck is more likely to strike. It’s hard to get lucky watching TV at home—it’s easy to get lucky when you’re engaging and learning.
New Column: Ask Gar
If you have questions about tools, things you might have read here in the past, resources you’re in search of, email me.
Reader Rick Griggs asks: “I need to buy headmounted lighted magnifying glasses. I don’t know what to look for, and thought you’d reviewed (or linked to a review) of these in a distant past newsletter that I could read/watch to learn more, but I can’t find anything. If you have done this, please point me to which one.”
Hey Rick,
I’m not sure it was in the newsletter. I know I talked about these in my old tips column on Make:. The one I have is shown above. It costs under $10 on Amazon! For my purposes (miniature painting), it’s great. It has two lenses that offer 1.5X magnification each and a third monocle lens at 7X magnification, providing intensities at multiples of 1.5, 3, 8.5, and 10. The light angle is adjustable in two directions and the light pack can even be removed from the headband for use elsewhere. A lot of features for under ten bones!
***
My old pal, Steven Roberts, asks about racks to hold Stanley organizing cases:
“Do you know of any quick-turn kits/products to handles stacks of Stanleys? Of course the solution is obvious, but I have so many projects that I don’t want to do it. If someone has made one, or published a good repurposing of something like a bakers rack or other off-the-shelf (heh, so to speak) tool, I’m all ears!
”If you have responses to questioned asked by readers here, let me know.
Regarding the term Minimal Viable Product (MVP). It was coined by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup as a way of learning what potential customers found valuable before spending a lot of time and money building something that people didn’t want to buy. Unfortunately, I think Reis did not do a very good job of naming this because it really doesn’t mean a stripped down product. In his world, it refers to anything that you can quickly learn from. Some examples could be a fake landing page which actually does nothing but gather insight about whether customers click on the link or not. I know of a company that used wire frames drawn on paper as an MVP to learn what people would pay for. Yes, it can be a stripped down version of an actual product, but in most cases, if you’re doing that before you’ve learned what people want to pay for, it’s overkill.
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Imagine a patient in a vegetative state who can actually feel everything happening to them but can't communicate it. Picture an octopus being boiled alive, experiencing every second of agony. Consider an AI system that might be developing genuine feelings while we treat it as just another tool. These are the ethical questions that keep Jonathan Birch up at night.
As a philosopher and ethicist at the London School of Economics, Birch has spent years grappling with one of science's most perplexing questions: how do we know if another being is conscious and capable of suffering? His book, The Edge of Sentience, argues that we've been asking the wrong question all along. Instead of demanding absolute proof of consciousness — which may be impossible to obtain — we should focus on identifying "sentience candidates" and taking practical steps to protect them from harm.
This isn't just academic theory. Birch's work has already influenced real-world policy — he led the team whose research convinced the UK government to legally recognize lobsters and octopuses as sentient beings. Now he's turning his attention to an even broader range of cases, from human patients with brain injuries to the possibility of conscious AI.
Here are four key insights from the book:
"Assume Sentient" When Lives Are at Stake
"A patient [with a prolonged disorder of consciousness] should not be assumed incapable of experience when an important clinical decision is made. All clinical decisions should consider the patient's best interests as comprehensively as possible, working on the precautionary assumption that there is a realistic possibility of valenced experience and a continuing interest in avoiding suffering and in achieving a state of well-being, but without taking this assumption to have implications regarding prognosis."
Look Beyond Brain Size and Intelligence
“Sentience is neither intelligence nor brain size. We should be aware of the possibility of decouplings between intelligence, brain size, and sentience in the animal kingdom. Precautions to safeguard animal welfare should be driven by markers of sentience, not by markers of intelligence or by brain size.”
On the Hidden Nature of Experience
“At least in principle, there can be phenomenal consciousness without valence: experiences that feel like something but feel neither bad nor good. It is not clear that humans can have such experiences (our overall conscious state arguably always contains an element of mood). But we can conceive of a being that has a subjective point of view on the world in which non-valenced states feature (it consciously experiences shapes, colours, sounds, odours, etc.) but in which everything is evaluatively neutral. Such a being would be technically non-sentient according to the definition we have been using, though it would be sentient in a broader sense. Would such a being have the same moral standing as a being with valenced experiences?”
On Future AI Risk
"As these models get larger and larger, we have no sense of the upper limit on the sophistication of the algorithms they could implicitly learn... The point at which this judgement shifts from correct to dangerously incorrect will be very hard for us to see. There is a real risk that we will continue to regard these systems as our tools and playthings long after they become sentient."
