138 points by surprisetalk42 days ago | 52 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
One term in high school I put a laptop bag strap on a hanging file box and used that as a bag for a semester. It made me nuts that teachers hand you stuff you need to hold on to that has no holes in it, but you're supposed to store it in a 3 ring binder. Everything you are supposed to bring with you to class is the shape of a rectangle, but a backpack is a blob that lets your stuff fall to the bottom. Best grades I ever got. Ended up hurting my back so I went back to a backpack. I got a lot of "why don't you just…" questions for a day or two and then it was chill.
This bag shape seems far superior for the purposes of carrying paper hither and thither than any other bag shape I've seen.
this was written with at least the help of ai- it’s still a good article and idk if i’m the only one who can tell or we’re beyond the point of needing or wanting or caring to point it out. idk
I was trying to ignore the classic tells of LLM writing, but I still find them irksome when reading an otherwise informative article. There is just too much fluff in the language
We started adding a short editorial pass after any AI drafts — just to strip the hedging and qualifiers. Makes a huge difference. The bones are usually fine, it's the "furthermore" and "it is worth mentioning" padding that kills readability.
Funnily enough before opening the article, having heard of the japanese backpacks, I was wondering if it was going to talk about bulletproof ones or japanese ones.
Before reading the article I was surprised to find them similar to old german Sout backpacks.
They are really sturdy and durable: your kid needs just one of them for all primary school (grundschule).
They are explensive (not so much considering 3-6 years of continuous abuse by kids), but when the kid gets tired of it, some people put them on sale.
I have one that I know was resold at least 2 times and it still in perfect shape...
Great for airport travel, btw.
Schulranzen have been built to this spec since the 70s. DIN 58124 covers reflectivity. Scout, Herlitz, Ergobag — all similar construction. The resale market exists because they genuinely overbuild for a 6-year use case. Same pattern as decent outdoor gear, same outcome.
Interesting read. The title made me think of Catholic School Book Bags that everyone in my city who went to Catholic Schools used. Public school kids (me) just carried the books to school, rain, snow or shine. No school busses back then.
I could not find a picture, but there were like small army duffel bags, dark green with a yellow fabric strap. You held the strap and slung the bag over your shoulder.
I'm one person how used it for 6 years, and let me to state something that wasn't mentioned. A average family will keep using one bag untill junior-high school. So what? If you buy a bright red or pink bag as a pure 6/7 year old boy, and some how your parents had a Idea not to stop you, your doomed in the age of around 10 begging your parents to buy a new one. Very unpractical. There is not a bit of benefit at all.
> The government has taken the issue seriously enough to study it and to encourage lighter materials, reduced textbook carry, and the use of digital teaching tools. Some manufacturers have responded with more synthetics and lighter reinforcements.
I guess they're so married to the traditional design that they just refuse to add a frame and waist strap to offload the weight to your hips.
Only an LLM could liken a first-grader to a scholar: "In a stratified society where the imperial family sat at the symbolic center, that gesture mattered. The randoseru moved, almost overnight, from battlefield to classroom, from soldier’s kit to scholar’s gear." This is an interesting topic, but this kind of AI writing gets very, very grating. Additionally, though this is somewhat unrelated, I feel like LLMs tend to argue points through gaslighting, rather than actual argumentation; they prefer to stack a bunch of tangential, or parallel, evidence and then assert that it proves their point when, in reality, it does not have any logical coherence—unless, perhaps, one reads it at 2am, in which case it might make sense.
LL Bean for me. Original at first, then the deluxe later as I got more homework. And I used an accordion folder, one slot for each class, for holding handouts etc. in addition to the notebooks and binders.
JanSport's lifetime warranty is the real differentiator. Zipper blows out at 2am before a flight, they just... fix it. No questions. That kind of reliability policy doesn't exist anymore.
I bought a black JanSport backpack from my university bookstore in, I think, 1998. It was the first version that had a laptop slot in it because laptop computers were still a rarity then. I got it because my job at an dotcom startup bought me a bright orange iBook. Still one of my favorite laptops.
That JanSport lasted me 20 years. It outlasted that dotcom started, the entire dotcom bubble, the Great Recession, and three jobs. It took on dozens of flights and road trips. On long hikes in the Smokey mountains, and sleepovers at several girlfriends' apartments. It was an absolute tank.
What finally gave out was the rubberized coating on the bottom started to get gummy. But, wow, did I get my money's worth with it.
Every generation accidently recreates the same object with newer materials and better marketing. This is basically the modern equivalent of a satchel, except now it comes with aerospace fabric, limited drops, and a Discord server.
Minor pedantry: "randoseru" comes from Dutch ransel, not German as some sources claim -- the Dutch were Japan's main Western trading partners when the bag was adopted. Either way, the rigid boxy shape really is wildly impractical for a child to carry.
This bag shape seems far superior for the purposes of carrying paper hither and thither than any other bag shape I've seen.