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Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

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Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#161

Post by monster_truck »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #141
mberning wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Distinctive style is actually bad. You want your code to be uniform, readers should not be unable to tell who wrote what. Otherwise you run into the danger of having parts that are peculiar and or obscure to everyone except the one who wrote them. That's if you are lucky, if you are unlucky the person who wrote them won't be able to decode them either.

I think you're conflating the look and feel of the website/app with the code itself

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#162

Post by hug »

cedws wrote: post #41
saxelsen wrote: post #22

I 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 would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences. A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song." A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they…

Taste is fashion, baby.

Taste has nothing to do with your awareness of your preference, and cannot exist in a social vacuum.

Taste has everything to do with others opinions of your preference: If your preferences, on display, are enough to bring many others to agree that your preferences are similar to their preferences, you have good taste. If your preferences, when encountered, are enough to bring others preferences into alignment with yours, you have excellent taste. If you can recognise what is the new hotness before anyone else does, you have even better taste. You don't have to be able to justify it, you just have to know it.

You don't need to be aware of this to be happening. You can have incredible taste while just sitting around and doing your own thing.

You can have incredible taste in only red wine without ever tasting white. You can have good taste in only hip-hop and not jazz, or in impressionist art and not abstract expressionism, or any other number of things.

If I know that your recommendation for a category is going to be good, then I know you have good taste.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#163

Post by throwawayffffas »

monster_truck wrote: post #161
throwawayffffas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distinctive style is actually bad. You want your code to be uniform, readers should not be unable to tell who wrote what. Otherwise you run into the danger of having parts that are peculiar and or obscure to everyone except the one who wrote them. That's if you are lucky, if you are unlucky the person who wrote them won't be able to decode them either.

I think you're conflating the look and feel of the website/app with the code itself

I don't think so, the parent is taking about the code.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#164

Post by weitendorf »

cedws wrote: post #41
saxelsen wrote: post #22

I 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 would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences. A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song." A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they…

Software is a bit different from music or wine because taste can mean “has the right function and attention to detail and aesthetic and interface and data model and conforms to my expectations and has a certain kind of API and has documentation with actual examples and uses the right JavaScript framework and”, whereas taste in wine can mean “has a blend of flavors that I particularly like” and taste in music can mean “pushes the boundaries of its genre and introduces genuinely new sounds”. Most but not all of what we want out of software is about function and utility and intuitive UX.

But wine and music and other subjective consumption-hobbies that enable snobbery are much less grounded in practicality and tend to become arenas for novelty/pure experimentation (charitably) or countersignaling and identity-building (uncharitably). So you end up with situations where the people who “have good taste” consistently associate themselves with music that sounds legitimately bad to regular listeners or never gets popular enough to be recognizable because it’s about being better than casual music listeners more than it is about the music to them. Or, proclaiming that no taste preferences for icecream products are worthy of respect unless they come from someone that regularly consumes pistachio ice cream - it’s not about the ice cream to them.

That’s why we can say “this UI needs to be collapsible and expanded by default” about software - we want it to be a certain way. The type of people who relish in their taste in music and ice cream don’t tend to say things like “maybe cut the bridge 10 seconds and add some kind of duet with reverb” or “it used too much nitrate fertilizer for loamy soil and ended up kind of woody (for ice cream)” because they want themselves to be a certain way.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#165

Post by Brian_K_White »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #142
Brian_K_White wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entire…

> I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. So have you tried Cuban cigars?

No, I've tried cigarettes, which is all I needed for that sentence, something I don't like.

I guess it's a natural question given the rest, and expensive cigars might indeed be different than cheap cigarrettes, but it's irrelevant, since the point was not that no matter what you don't like you might still like the good version.

The point was only that discovering the good version of something did not leave me worse than before because I used to enjoy something abundant and now I can only enjoy something scarce.

It's a bit like Feynman on flowers too. You don't have to be ignorant of the biological workings of a flower to appreciate it's mere outward properties exactly the same way as the layperson does. I still love a box mac & cheese even though I thoroughly appreciate far better home or chef made mac & cheese.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#166

Post by joshdavham »

iLemming wrote: post #139
joshdavham wrote: post #97

Could someone here pitch me on neovim? I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?". Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's becau…

I don't want to sound like "advising", because long-term recommendations often carry the personal weight with them- whatever I tell you worked (or didn't) for me had an effect on me - it's never guaranteed to have any implications on someone else's life. But here's what I learned after a long time trying different things and what's worked. Don't try to find objective reasons for making big shifts in your workflow - b…

> the 'big idea' of vim-navigation

What is the 'big idea'?

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#167

Post by defrost »

alwa wrote: post #158
sydbarrett74 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The best writers all have one thing in common: they’re voracious readers.

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers,” said Truman…

Apparently not all 'leaders' ...

  “He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate.”
~ Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/america...

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#168

Post by joshdavham »

jes5199 wrote: post #147
joshdavham wrote: post #97

Could someone here pitch me on neovim? I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?". Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's becau…

I used vim for decades and the sensation is that I can hold the code in my hands and manipulate it directly. Other editors feel like I’m wearing thick gloves, can’t move correctly. but it’s like learning to play the piano, it only feels natural after years of practice nowadays I’m faster with Cursor so it doesn’t matter as much

So you use Cursor now? Do you at least still use vim motions there?

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#169

Post by joshdavham »

DauntingPear7 wrote: post #100
joshdavham wrote: post #97

Could someone here pitch me on neovim? I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?". Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's becau…

If you dislike the terminal or aren’t comfortable there, you should try using the vim keybinds for VSCode. They’ll get you most of the way there, and the rest is a lot of customization to get things how you like. The vim motions are the best part! They take a while to get used to, but they’re incredibly convenient.

Thanks! I've also heard this advice before elsewhere.

Also question: is there much of a reason to switch to neovim after learning vim motions in vscode?

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#170

Post by sagarm »

weitendorf wrote: post #164
cedws wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences. A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song." A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they…

Software is a bit different from music or wine because taste can mean “has the right function and attention to detail and aesthetic and interface and data model and conforms to my expectations and has a certain kind of API and has documentation with actual examples and uses the right JavaScript framework and”, whereas taste in wine can mean “has a blend of flavors that I particularly like” and taste in music can mean…

There's plenty of room for creativity, and therefore taste, when developing software that meets functional requirements.
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