Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

seated.ro

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 396 posts

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#311

Post by psunavy03 »

croisillon wrote: post #270
defrost wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

from his vocabulary you can tell he's at most semi-­literate

I think that's a sign of senility more than anything else. There's been articles which show clips of his speech in the 1980s and 1990s. His vocabulary was much more extensive, and he used more complex sentences than the word salad he spews out these days.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#312

Post by stavros »

wiseowise wrote: post #305
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…

You misunderstand the point, I'm afraid. It's not that better things aren't better, it's that they don't increase your enjoyment of the better thing, but decrease your enjoyment of the worse thing.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#313

Post by MisterTea »

psunavy03 wrote: post #310
MisterTea wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

No, people like IPAs because they taste good to them. I have never heard anyone complementing the flavorings of Pabst (yuk), Schaefer (worst beer I ever tasted), or Milwaukee's Best (aka The Beast). Same with Old English 800 or Colt 45, they're awful but get you drunk for cheap.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#314

Post by kulahan »

ehnto wrote: post #203
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…

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…

This is definitely the main issue in the US. People are always clamoring for the cheapest thing that's good enough. The US has some of the best coffees, chocolates, beers, food, and more in the world. I mean, if you wanna make money, you sell to Americans.

But they're all artisanal products that few access. The baseline Starbucks, Hershey's, Budweiser, TGI Fridays, etc. are all... so bad.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#315

Post by ahel »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #157
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'll offer a counter-anecdote and suggest this advice isn't necessarily ironclad. I've used the same pair of $20 headphones for decades (replacing them with the same model when they die), or else laptop/TV speakers. A couple of years ago I got $200 headphones included with a new phone purchase. The $200 headphones were amazing. I got to listen to all of my favorite music with a new perspective. But I still use the $2…

yeah sometimes it can be that. but most of the time it's difficult to step back once you raise the bar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill and all that

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#316

Post by ahel »

criddell wrote: post #295
jorvi wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a horrible way to enjoy life. By your reasoning, you should subsist on protein blocks and watch paint dry for entertainment. By lowering the bar to the absolute lowest threshold, you'll classify everything as enjoyable. The pareto principle holds strong. Just put 20% of the effort in and you reap 80% of the results.

I get what they are trying to say. Looking for negatives is the problem. When I was in college I got into beer. I was brewing at home and whenever I went out I was looking for something new and tasting it like I was a beer critic. It was great fun at first, but then the more refined my palate got, the less I found myself being able to find beer I enjoyed. Like if I went to a hockey game, I'd complain about the only c…

Tell me more! I need to hear this! I'm fed up with being a critic. It feels like a trap I set myself into without realizing. I'm at the point where I can only enjoy coffee brew at home with expensive toys and I'm becoming miserable about it: Id prefer the freedom to have anything anywhere while being able to enjoy. Applies to coffee but also other things. So yeah, pls tell us more.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#317

Post by SergeAx »

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."…

Here's a handy recipe for your friend: go to a blind tasting. This way, they will probably find out that they really can't tell a $15 coffee from a $150, or a $500 machine from a $ 5,000 one.

Works like a charm with wine: I know a lot about it, can maintain a conversation for hours, but will never buy anything above $50/bottle except for a gift.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#318

Post by wiseowise »

nonethewiser wrote: post #289
Theofrastus wrote: post #214

I moved away from tinkering, ever since I had to juggle family, job, chores, and social contacts. I don't want to spend the little free time I have fixing broken configs. Instead of rolling my own self-build NAS / home server like I used to, I just have a Synology now. I moved back to Windows after I fcked my graphics driver on linux and didn't have enough time to fix it in a day or two. Still, I love the tinkering s…

For many things, tinkering is a hobby. Obsidian note keeping strategy is another one I see a lot. No thanks. I'll just brain dump into files in a flat directory and use search if I ever need to. Do whatever works for you but I'm not going to take notes in a way where my ability to take notes requires maintenance .

You can literally use Obsidian as a plain text dump with search, nobody is forcing you to use advanced features.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#319

Post by ahel »

cyrialize wrote: post #286
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 sounds to me you're describing the feeling of being content, rather than having the least taste. I prefer to look at things that way rather than not having taste. Some people really enjoy $600 headphones, while others don't really care. I think everyone has some "taste" though, you don't really realize it until you compare experiences. For me personally, having taste doesn't ruin my experience for anything - it ju…

yeah for headphones, I also feel the same. But for food and coffee, I really cannot go back to lower standards. It feels like I put myself in a trap with this attitude. I have not found a way out yet.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#320

Post by throw4847285 »

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…

That's not true. The best evidence that somebody has taste is that they introduce something to you (a band, a movie, etc.) that you've never encountered, but they are correct that you love it. But whatever they chose to share might not be their favorite work of art. They just knew that you would like it, because not only do they have a well formed sense of what they like and why, they can read other people the same way. They can find enjoyment in a huge range of art, because they can tap into what about it is enjoyable rather than reflexively labeling things good or bad. That is the definition of people with taste.
Post reply on HN