The examples given are not what I would consider "tinkering." Changing editor configs? Tuning mouse sensitivity? Really?
Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
121–130 of 396 posts
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#122Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…
For coffee, I get beans from a local roaster, like $14 per pound nowadays. I like the taste and it is nice to support someone local. Then I put it through a ~$200 Flair espresso machine. It is a manual press, so it has become a fun project/ritual. Plus, Americano is or espresso tastes better than coffee (and IMO mine is better than the coffee shop… a lot cheaper at this point I guess, too).
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#123I feel like this is true as ever, yet the current environment seems to be going towards the opposite, I.e. not about taste but just doing as much as possible, as much hours, as many responsibilities, just shipping out slop as fast as you can, don't waste time on stuff, all about being a 1000x AI engineer etc..
I'm tired boss
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#124Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…
At some point I think there's almost an inverse relationship with how much time you spend researching a product and how much you enjoy it. I fell in to this hole with gaming monitors. At the top end, no product has it all, no product is without flaws. So then you start getting frustrated that you can't find one that has the right HDMI version, freesync, 240hz, 4k, USB-C with decent power delivery, etc. And what you b…
Ah, but it can give you such fun projects. Go, hunt down your headphones’ frequency response, cancel it out in PulseEffects (if that’s what it is called this release…), then adjust to the Harman Curve…
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#125God I hate how much this reads like I wrote it about me
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#126> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. I think in this age of vibe coding where anyone can code anything, the discriminating factor between two developers, at a technical level, just comes down to "good taste" (lots of other more important factors, too, like a good human to work with). And like the…
Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or intere…
I know exactly that blank stare response.
Very sad to me because the building and solving puzzles is the fun part.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#127Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…
I never enjoyed shitty coffee. I never enjoyed shitty chocolate or chocolate flavored things like cakes.
Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate.
Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things.
Same even more so for chocolate. 99% of chocolate products you come into contact with are garbage. Actual chocolate is like an entirely different product. It's not a better version of the usual thing. I ate it and thought "Oh. Ok THIS must be why chocolate ever became this huge thing in the first place. Hundreds of years ago before all the industrial process and market forces produced all the "chocolate" I ever tasted in my life, what they had was this, actual chocolate. Of course they loved it."
To restate the point, I was never happy with the regular version in the first place. I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. Turns out I love them both.
And it's possible to continue to enjoy the results of having discovered and grown some taste in some area indefinitely without diminishing returns or anything like that. I'm not much of a sweets person so I still don't buy a lot of chocolate or chocolate things like cookies etc, but we have a Trade subscription and get a new and different bag from some random indipendant roaster every 2 or 3 weeks and it's great. I don't love every single bag but I at least find them all interesting and I do love the overall high level of quality basically all the time. I'm not now overall poorer for having discovered good coffee. Life is better. And what else is there?
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#128> This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.
Lost me here. If tastes don't converge in the limit, then there's no point and you're just justifying a hobby.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#129[deleted]
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#130> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. I think in this age of vibe coding where anyone can code anything, the discriminating factor between two developers, at a technical level, just comes down to "good taste" (lots of other more important factors, too, like a good human to work with). And like the…
Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or intere…
The Daily WTF is going to enter a new era soon.
(For those not familiar https://thedailywtf.com/)