The irony of an article about taste displaying little of it.
Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
11–20 of 396 posts
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#12I don't think "taste" in UI-adjacent things is important.
Tinkering habit is kind of important as even small interactions help to build an internal model of how things work, how to operate them, etc. And this model might generalize.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#13[flagged]
Taste is real and a question of subjective alignment with objective reality. Hence, we can speak of the objectivity of beauty, but the bad taste of an person. That is only possible if both exist and an misalignment exists between them.
Whether the author knows what he's talking about is another matter.
And that font of his could use a few treatments from the taste bat.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#14If anyone's wondering, author makes no attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the title, he just talks about being a tinkerer and why it's important to have taste nowadays, and lets the reader make the connection.
edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#15> Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game? Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.
Maybe tinkering is a necessary but insufficient condition for taste
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#16I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?
I imagine the intent is to simulate the look of an old CRT monitor
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#17I despise the word "taste" for preferring specific software and workflows. Why are you selecting for aesthetic experience over usefulness? I do get satisfaction from the results of my work, not through the mechanical process of arriving there. Tools are useful or not and this is the category by which I decide to use them or not.
Can the aesthetic experience improve usefulness? A million years ago I had an MP3 player with all of my mp3s on it. I listened to it every now and then. But when the iPod came out, and I put my same MP3 library on there, I listened to it all the time because it was super nice to use and interact with
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#18If anyone's wondering, author makes no attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the title, he just talks about being a tinkerer and why it's important to have taste nowadays, and lets the reader make the connection. edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.
Ah yes, time for the daily article of the form "If you don't do , you aren't "
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#19What exactly does "taste" mean in this context? Taste is about artistic quality. Aesthetics is generally a tertiary concern when it comes to software or hardware tinkering. That assumes it's a concern at all.
And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#20The irony of an article about taste displaying little of it.
Funny part is he points out at the end that it's highly subjective...
I actually really liked the look of the blog. It gave me a retro vibe, which is obviously what he was going for. But I'm also reading on my phone. Maybe the choice was more annoying on a larger screen.