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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

#351

Post by mock-possum »

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."…

Honestly that sounds like a personal issue. I’ve gf the opposite experience - trying the high quality version of a thing has allowed me to find more intentional appreciation of the low quality version. I like shitty wines better now that I know what a good wine is, because I know what I’m paying for. “This isn’t great but it was like $8” and “this is great and well-worth $40” are better together than just “this is cheap and I dont mind it” in my book.

Then again I’ve never understood the appeal of ‘ignorance is bliss’

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#352

Post by nonethewiser »

wiseowise wrote: post #318
nonethewiser wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. But that's specifically not what I'm talking about.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#354

Post by lolive »

Tinkering is a very demanding activity, especially when you are total newbie at a new domain. The first steps are very intellectual-draining. [and that is probably why so few people learn new things, when adults].

Having good mentors [on Youtube, among your friends, or a vendor at a localshop] can really help you figure out things much faster, that will have taken forever to discover by yourself.

So don’t fear to ask !

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#355

Post by Brian_K_White »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #332
kulahan wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First time I had Valrhona chocolate I was actually furious because I felt I had been cheated my whole life...

I don't know that brand but this exactly haha

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#356

Post by feoren »

bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #252

I think the author has a point, but his examples are bad. He talks about mouse sensitivity, windows manager, keyboard switches, and vscode. All those things were made to be tweaked . He's not so much exploring as he is playing with a toy the way it was intended. The stickiest learning comes from getting things wrong, and that happens when you're using things the way you're not supposed to. For example disassembling a…

> For example disassembling a microwave

Getting this wrong will not be a learning experience, because it will kill you. This is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and should only be done by people who already know what they're doing.

That's not just a tangential tidbit -- you don't learn well when you are completely out of your depth. You learn well when you are right at the edge of your ability and understanding. That involves risk of failure, but the failure isn't the important part, operating on the boundary is.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#357

Post by Brian_K_White »

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.

idk man, I would say the opposite but I tended to avoid the Illy shops because I already knew I didn't care for that brand much.

Right here in NJ a shop a block away from me had it as their distinguishing feature and I didn't like it much (still better than sbux though). And then when I go on vacation in Italy and other European countries I see Illy mostly in vending machines, so when I see and Illy shop I'm not tempted, when there are 500 other more interesting looking shops every direction you look. And in all of those, I mostly had a lot of cappucinos, and they were basically all excellent.

I cannot call Italy's coffe bad. But I confess I never drink it perfectly straight. Usually cappucino. The European style, a pretty small and strong espresso that is foamed. Not a honking big american cup.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#358

Post by Johanx64 »

iLemming wrote: post #321
Johanx64 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not what a Japanese swordsmith or any craftman does, they obsess over the end result, polishing it until it reaches perfection. Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. If it did, world would be full of polished, high quality software, what instead we have is endless sea of garbage produced by these cough , cough "craftsmen" - tha…

> Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. Hmm... excuse me? Linux kernel - most contributors use vim/emacs extensively, with some deep customizations. Git - Linus developed it in his own heavily customized Emacs fork Rust - Core team members use various customized setups Postres - core devs use vim/emacs Kubernetes - vim/emacs What the f…

"Most is software is written using a some text editor."

What an astute fucking observation you've made, mate!

And so it happens, that webdevs and web infra people (which is the extent of your understanding of "high quality shit") tend to use unixes and consequently vim/emacs as their text editor. No fucking way!

Perhaps, you can even tell just by looking at a piece of code - oh, this is beautiful, clean and clear, bugfree, this surely must have been written vim OR emacs?

Or maybe, just maybe, you're just making shit up on the spot and thinking backwards and attributing software quality metrics and outcomes to choice of a fucking text editor and how riced it is.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#359

Post by mrguyorama »

ahel wrote: post #315
anonymous908213 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The hedonic treadmill is a choice

The entire concept of "comfort food" and "poverty food" is about people excusing the enjoyment of "low class" stuff that is eminently enjoyable and shouldn't need justification.

You can learn tasting notes in wines, and how to identify wines that are well balanced with good tasting notes or an interesting character. You can appreciate all the care and expertise that went into that process and how it meshes with the "flavor pairing" guides and cheese that it was served with. You can then buy an entire case of $6 wine from that winery because that wine tastes exactly like Welches concord grape juice and when you were a kid you always expected wine to taste like tasty grape juice but make you drunk and have always been disappointed that wine doesn't taste like grape juice.

That wine was so good and it was $6 because snobs hate simple pleasures.

Don't be a snob. Good is not the inverse of simple, and complex is not inherently good.

Nobody can stop you from drinking boxed wine cut with gatorade. Nobody can stop you from enjoying boxed wine cut with gatorade.

If you find you can't enjoy the simple things, you don't need to "upgrade" or get more expensive stuff or keep up with the Jones's, you need therapy.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#360

Post by iLemming »

Johanx64 wrote: post #358
iLemming wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. Hmm... excuse me? Linux kernel - most contributors use vim/emacs extensively, with some deep customizations. Git - Linus developed it in his own heavily customized Emacs fork Rust - Core team members use various customized setups Postres - core devs use vim/emacs Kubernetes - vim/emacs What the f…

"Most is software is written using a some text editor." What an astute fucking observation you've made, mate! And so it happens, that webdevs and web infra people (which is the extent of your understanding of "high quality shit") tend to use unixes and consequently vim/emacs as their text editor. No fucking way! Perhaps, you can even tell just by looking at a piece of code - oh, this is beautiful, clean and clear, bu…

I'm not making shit up on the spot nor am I attributing any metrics to vim or emacs specifically or how riced should they be, I'm simply telling you the facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will".

Most software is not written using "some" text editor, I would love to see maniacs writing kernel patches in notepad.exe or nano. Tools are tools - disputing that vim or emacs are not great tools is plainly dumb, obviously there must be something about them for why they've remained a popular choice among highly skilled pros for decades.

Of course, simply picking up a tool isn't enough - I can perfectly write shitty code equally well in Emacs, InteliJ or VSCode, yet saying good stuff never ever got done there is just disingenuous - it was, it is, and it will be. Of course, ricing the editor and terminal doesn't guarantee amazing shit, but the opposite is also equally true - you can't magically build some awesome sauce by paying for proprietary, sophisticated IDE that "just works" either.

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