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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#91

Post by robocat »

madprops wrote: post #61

I tend to like images in a split second, when they try to achieve a certain aesthetic at least. I can later inspect them more carefully and understand why they're good. Reading text, it can either grab me or it doesn't. I've asked about that to an AI and there's some reason for that. Some text is more compatible with me, due to the rhythm or combination of chars/words used, how they actually look/feel, it's not just…

> later inspect them more carefully and understand why they're good

Reductionism is hard to apply to intuitions, and we often fool ourselves.

I personally call this the obviously test: smart people correctly notice something and say it is obvious. It is a rather rarer skill to understand and explain why. I have particularly noticed it with coaching (which adds the next levels of difficulty in getting someone to grok what you've seen).

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#92

Post by purplemoonx »

notpushkin wrote: post #23
purplemoonx wrote: post #10

Taste was all that was left when product design peaked in like 2010-12 too and it was a great time. But the advent of design systems and software like Sketch and Figma pretty much automated the job away. You didn’t need the raw Photoshop skills anymore - any CMU grad could be a top tier designer now. I see the same thing basically happening here. Taste will matter for a while but eventually people are just choosing t…

Design is not moving pixels around in Photoshop or Figma. CMU grad could be a designer, but to be a great designer you do have to have... well, taste. Figma didn’t change that one bit.

I never quite fell for the scam of “designer who can’t photoshop”.

You can’t do product design without visual design - and many designers don’t. They’re picking from UI libraries like Tailwind or MUI, which is really something any developer could do, and many do. That’s why the job mostly died.

Even the most abstract of painters, fine artists, and so-on should have good fundamentals. They’ve gone through the discipline and developed taste, they don’t choose it from a library.

The CMU grad (using this as a stand-in now for any so-called educated hack, sorry CMU) is skipping all that and asserting personal authority without proving or living anything. And that shows IMO.

My probably unpopular opinion is that using AI can be very creative and you can get into flow states, and the quality of outputs vary by skill of the user.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#93

Post by conartist6 »

dvt wrote: post #64
causal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also just patently false. Taste is not all that is left. Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product?

> Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product? Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best things to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.

[flagged]

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#94

Post by dcre »

dcre wrote: post #21

This post is awful! Annoyingly written and zero insight. Most posts about this taste concept are bad (and there have been so many), but this is below average.

Heh whoops. I thought my other comment didn’t post so I wrote this one instead.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#96

Post by drekipus »

This was a great and resonant post. Don't worry about the green names.

I think there is almost a split between people who have read ZAOMM and people who have not.

I recently made a post in my circles about how "meaning" is what human quality is. If you look at classical art a lot of it could look objectively nonsense and have technical mistakes, but just because the machine can make a picture does not mean that it attributes any meaning or communicate any intention. The difference between human-made classical artwork and machine-made classical artwork is the meaning and symbology behind it

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#97

Post by skydhash »

sodapopcan wrote: post #83
inigyou wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have computers, computers can automate things. Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). But then we add infinite automation features to reduce boilerplate and we get C++, and C++ programmers decry the excessive number of features and want to delete them all and go back to writing boilerplate by hand. I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript fu…

> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). It's also a sign of refusal to learn an editor or IDE deeply. Most of the ones I know have mechanisms (or plugins) for generating the boilerplate. Although back to the language, usually the biggest boilerplate killer are macros and so many developers seem to really have a problem with them.

This pretty much, Emacs, Sublime, Vim, Jetbrain’s IDE,… have snippet tooling solutions that are very configurable. And most unix editors support piping so you can easily write a programs for that. Or just a good old code generator.

My goal when writing a software is always to reach a point where modifying a business rule is as easy as writing it in plain english. Which means abstracting the essential complexity (while being pragmatic).

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#98

Post by NathanKP »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #89
hellojomp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, when you have a McDonald's McDouble, do you really care how it was made or do you just care that it's yummeroni and costs $2.99?

it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1rhug58/mcd... so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"

That is a significant leap in logic. A vibecoding tool is not a McDouble. Nor is Chris Kempczinski the same person as Dario Amodei.

The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps where the code is straight up horrible.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#99

Post by drekipus »

prerok wrote: post #45
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #7

There's a lot here that I enjoy muddling on. And I think taste is very vital. Taste, ambition, seeing possibility: these resonate to me, long resonate, as what I've wanted to see. And honestly: I've been tired of an age of engineers that are beat down, that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious. It often is still very sensible and practical and w…

I agree with your criticism of "the good enough" and "done with taste" dichotomy. I would like to comment on this, though: > that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious. I am always aiming for simple. If it's simple, it's maintainable and can be easy to reason about. Doing that is hard work, though. I used to spend three iterations to achieve it:…

Perhaps it's... "simple to implement."

Usually it can be that the complex artifact is the simplest to implement. It's harder to make the simple thing

Classic, Rich Hicky, "simple made, easy" talk reference.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#100

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Speaking of taste the author basically tells me not to read the article immediately as soon as I hit the page because the commenters on this site (HN) have made them feel so bad about it

I’m pretty sure it was not technology that killed the web it was the kind of toxic crap like that, that we’re seeing from communities and that’s nothing new

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