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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

#301

Post by writeslowly »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #254
Brian_K_White wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. nailed it. I agree that at least to my limited vacation experiences, it's not true in say Italy that 99% of chocolate products are garbage.

Some of the American chocolate for high volume candy bars is very waxy and not very chocolatey. For example, compare the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to Trader Joe's peanut butter cups [0]. It may be that the Reese's ones used to use better chocolate or it may be that my tastes changed as I grew up. But I used to love them as kids and now they taste off. Similarly for Twix etc. [0] I'm sure other stores sell peanut but…

I look at products like Hershey's chocolate or Reeses more like their own category of processed food, kind of like Spam. They have a close, but not exact resemblance to "normal" chocolate or peanut butter, but they're also sort of an acquired taste, and I think their customers would be upset if Reese's Peanut Butter cups suddenly tasted like the Trader Joe's versions (with real peanut butter instead of a mysterious chalky peanut-flavored substance), or if Hershey's stopped using the butyric acid process that makes them taste like vomit to non-americans.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#302

Post by sbarre »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #291
cyrialize wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree. If you look at my github, you might think I don't program all that much. If you look at my ~/Code folder on my PC, you might think I program too much. Tinkering with fun little projects has made me a better programmer and understand my language (Ruby) much better.

I put many of these into GH anyways because who knows when someone else might find it useful. https://github.com/CharlieDigital?tab=repositories

Thanks for this, it's very timely for me: https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/

:-)

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#303

Post by jpfromlondon »

MangoToupe wrote: post #284
ehnto wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you from the US by chance? I only ask because specifically for chocolate and coffee, I would consider the US baseline to be exceedingly average, even terrible. Even "okay" chocolate and coffee from other countries better known for food will blow it out of the water. The US does do excellent coffee, and excellent chocolate, but you have to seek it out. In a country like Italy or Australia the default, okay stuff i…

Is there any place on earth that has good coffee? Italy's coffee is horrible , even if they have quality machines to make it with. 99% of people will use "ille" or whatever that brand is, which is far worse than starbucks worst roast. Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.

>Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.

You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.

Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#304

Post by jpfromlondon »

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."…

it's stochastic, our tastes grow as we do, a stale mars bar is sufficient for a child, where a small square of 80+% dark single origin might be the evolution of that taste over thirty more years.

I was raised a snob by chefs, my snobbery extends to all areas of my life in the hope that I might find reason enough to stay.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#305

Post by wiseowise »

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 use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.

It's the same argument as "why do you spend so much time and money on food, it's going to become shit anyway".

No, just no. You can close your eyes, chant lalala with plugged ears and inhale all sorts of copium, but listening uncompressed music and movies on expensive equipment is a completely different experience, period. You can't say that you enjoy it as much as they do, because you are you and they are they.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#306

Post by iLemming »

joshdavham wrote: post #166
iLemming wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

"The Idea" here I think is in the revelation of the ultimate preeminence of text in a programmer's life. Plain text deserves our utmost attention, yet many programmers overlook its significance and rarely give it deliberate thought.

"Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else."¹

Vim-navigation provides a mental and spatial "language" that enables efficient text manipulation through keyboard input. Rather than forcing your brain to process raw character chunks on the screen, it allows you to reason about text in meaningful units: letters, words, paragraphs, tags, nested structures - e.g., "delete everything between parentheses" - and more.

Sadly, we keep moving away from plain text conventions, making our work increasingly complicated. Have you ever tried quickly extracting text interwoven with code from Slack into your editor? Ever gotten mad when websites won't let you copy the content or use colors and fonts that make it unreadable?

I implore every programmer to reject the status quo and reclaim agency over text interactions - always find ways to deal with text on your own terms. For instance, I'm reading this thread and typing this very comment in my editor. Why wouldn't I? It has all the tools I need for it - vim-navigation, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation, etymology lookup, LLMs, and tons of other tools.

Final point: do not assume code is somehow different. Code simply is structured text. Don't try to find perfect "code editor", prioritize plain text. Good plain text editors are the best code editors, but even the most sophisticated IDE at some points brings mostly frustration if it cannot nicely handle the simplicity of plain text.

___

¹. Graydon Hoare. Always bet on text - https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#307

Post by wiseowise »

somehnguy wrote: post #280
norome wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a good starting point though. I like to try out the cheapest option and see how it really feels or tastes. For mattress shopping i always ask, "what's your second cheapest option?". For most consumer goods the diminishing returns kick in pretty quick

How often do you buy a mattress? I went high end and have only needed 1 in my adult life so far.

This. Ruin your back for life with shitty mattress, but save $100 is a really shitty advice.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#308

Post by wiseowise »

p00dles wrote: post #241
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."…

novice -> informed -> asshole I strive to be at the informed part of the spectrum. Wine example: - Novice: "I'd like any red wine" -> waiter brings you something you don't like - Informed: "I'd like a red wine that is dry, not st" -> waiter brings you something you are quite likely to like - Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like th…

> - Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences

So asshole is having preferences that don't fit the norm? If they don't impose their standards on you, and do not act a snob, why do you care?

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#309

Post by chankstein38 »

I think the problem, for me, is that people turn tinkering on something INTO the hobby. People will spend years tweaking their 3d printer to have the perfect settings and have a bunch of weird plastic things attached that make it look like something from Tron but will never design and print anything useful. Same with so many things, the guy mentioned neovim and it's the same there. I am not here to judge people's hobbies but I think a lot of people have too much taste these days based on discussion on reddit. It's annoying, you can barely find a community that isn't just overly toxic about each aspect of their hobby.

Try going to any random hobby subreddit. Browse for a little while and try to not find like "The community favorite" (which is actually just the most expensive, well-marketed option) that everyone swears by and will make others feel like, if they don't have that, they don't have anything.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#310

Post by psunavy03 »

MisterTea wrote: post #299
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…

The point of coffee is caffeine. If coffee didn't have caffeine it would be some boring curiosity tucked away in specialty markets. Same with beer, wine, and spirits; it's the alcohol. This is why people still buy Folgers, Pabst, and Night Train: they get the job done for cheap.

Yeah, this is not true. This is the type of argument that people make when they insist that "no one actually likes IPAs and they just want to get drunk quicker."
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