I’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?
the entire page has horizontal lines washed over it
At the wrong refresh rate so did my monitor at one point.
Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
61–70 of 396 posts
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#62> GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least)
I keep hearing this same "GitHub Desktop bad, git cli good" take, but I just don't see how the cli can compete terms of things like being able to go through each changed file, see a clean visual representation of all my changes, and to choose exactly what lines I want to commit just by clicking on them.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#63I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.
^^^ this, with life coming more to the ending part you start to value your time that you got left tinkering is good when you're < 30 or maybe even < 25
> No time spent learning, is time wasted.
From TFA.
If you don't want to tinker, don't! But it's absurd to suggest that it's only something for children to enjoy. (30 should not be considered near the end of your life btw.) Please don't tell others they should feel bad about learning for fun because they're adults.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#64As a person who doesn't do much tinkering the thing I dislike about this article is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either. Not saying that the article is bad but I was curious about the author's mindset and felt he didn't talk more about the appeal of tinkering.
> is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either
It's literally stated in the second paragraph: "It’s how I learn." You can learn how the things around you work by tinkering with them.
Of course, you can then ask why someone would want to learn things, or why they enjoy learning, and I honestly don't know how to explain that, but I feel like it's the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be asked.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#65This applies to fashion as well. Hackers should tinker with their clothes and jewelry more.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#66I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.
I maintain a personal dotfiles repo on github, and when I start at a new job etc, I just git clone my dotfiles repo and then run ./setup.sh and everything is set up nicely with my fonts, colors, and stuff. It didn't take much effort at all and I get to use what I like. And I haven't tweaked my dotfile in years.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#67I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it: "Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things. When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities. The more I thought…
I agree with you. But taste is a skill that should be learned. People who have better taste can select better stuff by their skill.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#68I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.
Fonts are like my dotfiles, I fucked with fonts.conf a decade+ ago and have just lived with that since then. So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that. I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol
I wish this viewpoint were more common/well-known. Somehow people get it in their head that people are tinkering with all their stuff constantly and never working, but just as TFA says, you'll have configs that haven't changed in over 6 months and are customized to your liking so you can work more efficiently and comfortably. Get a new PC? rsync configs over, or git clone your dotfiles repo or whatever. The work you put in doesn't disappear.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#69You don't have interesting taste if you write articles like this.
People are just figuring out taste matters for product, so at this pace in 10 years they'll figure out that having novel tastes that aren't just a distillation of the echo chamber you live in matters just as much.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#70If you're going to make changes, make big changes. Learn to squat 100kg. Finish a triathlon. Learn intermediate Chinese. These are all impactful goals you can hit in a year, worth way more than colors and fonts.
Nobody who is raising children is able to do those things in a year.
Raising a child well is also an impactful goal.