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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

#171

Post by spectraldrift »

This is the second article I've seen on taste here. It seems to me the author's definition of "tinkering" is primarily describing hyperfocused, repetitive behaviors found in neurodivergent individuals, potentially even a complex form of stimming. I think this is unrelated to taste.

I think good taste in engineering comes down to a mix of skill and knowledge. It isn't just about how you can reach a goal, but rather about having a solid internal map of the world and an understanding of which parts of the map you are unfamiliar with. To those lacking knowledge, the map can deceptively appear much smaller. Skill allows you to effectively find your way to the places you know you can go. With knowledge and skill, taste comes naturally. Those with bad taste, I've found, are those with limited knowledge of the vast universe of tools available and/or the lack of skill needed to utilize those tools effectively.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#172

Post by keiferski »

stavros wrote: post #74

Decades 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 think you have to “aestheticize” the cheap stuff in a way that doesn’t add value purely on price. In other words, you aren’t just picking the absolute best quality of a thing, you’re picking it for some specific aesthetic reason that puts it above the more expensive one.

To put that into more concrete terms: I really like dark roast black coffee. There’s something about the bitterness and presentation that reminds me of coffee’s history, the variety of people drinking it, etc. and thus it is more appealing to me than the “high quality” light roasts with subtle flavors available in the expensive cafes.

Another example are diners. If you become such a gourmand that you only eat at Michelin restaurants and disparage anywhere “normal”, I think you miss out on the real culture and quality of diner food, which is a unique phenomenon.

Hopefully that made sense.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#173

Post by weitendorf »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #160
weitendorf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously there’s a line to draw somewhere so that your code doesn’t end up looking like a YouTube comment section or have half of its API with Spanish names. And if by style you mean that overly “clever” or dense code without detailed comments and formatting for readability ought to made digestible by those who lack context about the why/what of it, or that “dangerous” or unsafe practices like rust’s unsafe/python’s…

> Everything else is so inconsequential that it truly pains me to see people spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars of their time having to indent, comment, or space things in a certain way just to get CI to pass or merge a PR. I generally agree with that sentiment, but the solution is to use automated formatting and lint fixing. I as a mostly python developer have my gripe with mypy. The powers that be decid…

You say that, but sufficiently advanced automated formatting and fixing can be its own kind of footgun. The unsung heroes behind making absolutely sure my code passed Go linting also enabled an automatic formatter that would constantly remove imports immediately after adding them, because they were now imported and not used.

However a normal person might actually handle auto formatting in their CICD still requires spending a decent amount of upfront time and ongoing maintenance on running scripts/containers that convert true tabs into 4-spaces tabs. Most of the time, anything that’s fully automatically formattable into something that passes linting is so trivially superficial like reordering or replacing or spacing out things, so if it’s necessary for anything more important than that I’d be questioning things.

I can actually see value in encouraging explicit types for most of the kind of stuff I work on, but I’d never choose Python for them to begin with because of that. LLMs make some of this stuff a lot easier to handle in one shot, but the ceremony and constant implication that you can’t be trusted to good work without being forced to wear a monkey backpack with a leash just wear you down when you run into them consistently over long periods of time.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#174

Post by scott_w »

franciscop wrote: post #149
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades 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 recently tried to play a bit of tennis, which I've already stopped. My friend was appalled when I proudly announced that my tennis racket costed $15. "But we are in tech!" he cried. But for a couple of games, I know I won't be able to tell the difference between a $15 one and a $150 one (I know because I've played tennis in the past). And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I do…

Absolutely the right choice. I do triathlons and your comment makes me think of all the people who turn up, do an Ironman and leave the sport after. Or people who sign up for a marathon, do it, then never run again.

Meanwhile there are shorter events you can do on much less training and cheaper equipment to see if you’ll like it before investing in the extreme end of the sport. If you run a 10k and hate every step, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time, pain and money.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#175

Post by gnarlouse »

layer8 wrote: post #99
gnarlouse wrote: post #77

Reminds me of the Steve Jobs biography. He was a notorious tinkerer. He obsessed over the design of Macintosh, the NeXT step cube, and a bunch of other products.

I don’t think he tinkered much himself. He let others tinker until their output met his vision.

No he definitely tinkered. Yes, his primary tinkering mechanism was "having others execute his vision," but like if that's not tinkering then neither is editing config files like the article author mentions, because you're directing other peoples code into configuration.

There's one story from Macintosh era where he spent weeks harassing one engineer over the calculator app: "it looks too bloated, it looks afwul, these lines are terrible.." until the engineer got fed up and said "here this is the Macintosh Calculator App: Steve Edition. You get to pick your font, your layout, your color theme." And Steve sat there for hours literally tinkering on a calculator app until he got what he wanted.

He tried to get Paul Rand to change the colors on the NeXT logo--who promptly directed Steve to go have s*x with himself.

There was one point in the Apple Store's inception where they had basically reached done, and Steve decides that he didn't like a certain aspect of it, which was essentially going to require them to redo the entire thing. So he did, and they started from scratch. I think it might have been the Carrara marble floors but I can't remember for certain.

I'm not saying I have immense respect for the guy as a human being, but he was absolutely a notorious tinkerer--a complete menace of one.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#176

Post by lettuceconstant »

heavyset_go wrote: post #75
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades 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."…

This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun. I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll…

I do the same, although my reasoning probably slightly differs. I hate the idea that I'll mangle a pastime as "primitive" as hiking or biking into some technology optimization problem. People did this stuff way back with perfectly simple gear and were entirely happy enough.

Sure, I could probably be a bit faster or go on a bit longer if I had better gear. But I could also achieve that by just getting into a better shape. With this level of commitment the gear is not the limiting factor. If I can't go faster with this bike, then I don't deserve to go faster with a fancier one, god dammit.

My work is very complicated and technical, so I get some satisfaction from keeping my hobbies ascetic.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#177

Post by weitendorf »

sagarm wrote: post #170
weitendorf wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t dispute that. What I’m saying is that functional and even non-functional taste in software tends to be grounded in how it can more effectively serve our needs. In a way that’s actually a more profound kind of creativity and taste than something that tries to just look cool.

OTOH music and anything else snob-adjacent aren’t grounded in serving our direct needs to some other end the same way software tends to be, so to them “taste” could be reducible to just a favorite flavor or becomes a kind of status/value/oneupmanship. The products are consumed directly as ends unto themselves so people who have strong opinions on their comparative tastefulness care about that for different reasons than they do software.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#178

Post by anonzzzies »

stavros wrote: post #150
franciscop wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried to play a bit of tennis, which I've already stopped. My friend was appalled when I proudly announced that my tennis racket costed $15. "But we are in tech!" he cried. But for a couple of games, I know I won't be able to tell the difference between a $15 one and a $150 one (I know because I've played tennis in the past). And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I do…

Yeah, I played with a $15 racket for years. I only got a $150 one when I could tell the difference between them.

I just look around in the most expensive street in my city for posts online or offline of people selling rackets that have maybe 2 hours of use on them. Then you can usually get 150$+ rackets for $15 as these folks threat $150 as I threat $15. Some of them are just given away to charity shops etc.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#179

Post by harrall »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #80
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades 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…

I know friends who describe a product more by its specs rather than whether they like it.

I prefer to just ask for a recommendation. Looking at specs is often just a money sinkhole to me.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#180

Post by jacobolus »

keiferski wrote: post #172
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades 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 think you have to “aestheticize” the cheap stuff in a way that doesn’t add value purely on price. In other words, you aren’t just picking the absolute best quality of a thing, you’re picking it for some specific aesthetic reason that puts it above the more expensive one. To put that into more concrete terms: I really like dark roast black coffee. There’s something about the bitterness and presentation that reminds…

I think it's possible to get a careful dark roast, but often "dark roast" coffee mainly tastes like burned toast. It's still warm and caffeinated, but it's not really that enjoyable. There's a reason so many people make this kind of coffee very watered down or drown it in cream and sugar. Maybe it feels historically connected to cowboys brewing coffee in a sock over a campfire or whatever, but is that connection really so valuable?
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