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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

151–160 of 574 posts

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#151
post #142

We've been talking about taste for a year now as it relates to AI, so I'm going to counterpoint it: if competitors can reproduce your features, UX, and visual decisions within days, your taste is not really an advantage. How many apps implemented pull down to refresh once one person did it? How many people even remember (or care) whose taste spawned that UX pattern? [1] AI is not inaugurating an age of taste. It is s…

Also Microsoft couldn’t match Apple taste with effectively all resources in the world. And they really tried. True taste is interesting because is more like a worldview, a modus operandi, a continuous process… those are harder to replicate.

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#152
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is gar…

> I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? To quote the parent commenter: > They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but not long term

But that means they're good enough for the short them. This is why I find it such an interesting question to wield, but also, it is why my wording was poor in the post.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#153
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? To quote the parent commenter: > They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but not long term

But that means they're good enough for the short them. This is why I find it such an interesting question to wield, but also, it is why my wording was poor in the post.

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#154

On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often: “For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to deve…

"Consistent sensibility" is a tasty little phrase.

I think taste is developed from a combination of sensual attunement (clarity of perception and focus) and experience (exposure to relevant, high quality 'stuff'), but the catalyst is joy, or at least some kind of pleasure.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bes…

> but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code

It’s hard to give something like “vibe coding” a rigid definition, but I think we can all agree that it’s inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more I examine the code while building, the less the activity is about vibes.

So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble anymore, but it's also not so much of a vibecoding tool anymore either.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now we're all training AI models on our taste. All of our chat logs are being uploaded, and the AI companies are training the models on them to get them right the first time. It will soon no longer require taste. Or at the very least be 95% of the way there on the first run.

This was the basic theory behind Tesla eventually being able to stop killing Tesla drivers with FSD. It has not worked out.

Google also uses ML to train the Waymos, they just have better sensory capabilities. Lidar is much closer to how the human eye functions (inverted, I suppose) than cameras are anyway. But FSD is still really cool, you just have to make sure you don't take your hands off the wheel!

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#157
These artsy fartsy takes on a subject that would be better studied as a science are fun but are they useful? I am not saying there is no such thing as taste and neither will I attempt to define taste except to say "tasteless" is probably the opposite. "Judgement" seems more valuable as some have mentioned, maybe judgement and taste together identify something we want?

Still, I like better when we actually do try to name what we're talking about. We've probably all read the motorcycle guys take on quality and things like that right? I guess the theme some are going with is that quality can't be objectively quantified and to define it is futile but I've never liked that take. If we think LLM generated code is low quality then it certainly makes sense to start our attempts to define or at least describe what makes the quality needle move, because language is how we encode lots of information and information is what feeds LLMs.

People also like to rag on uncle Bobs takes, clean code, etc but I like how at least he tried. I've been a fan of his for awhile but I'm not big on objects so don't care about his pushes on that sort of thing. The best take that offered hints that I would call quality is "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout, there is plenty of stuff in this short little book that was very satisfying to me, like for instance where Bob wants short/small functions, Mr Ousterhout was much more flexible on this, like for instance maybe some functions can be bigger if the need arises, things like that.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who the FUCK speaks like that? If we assume that it is LLM generated, as suggested, apparently a lot of people, as the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write). You might find it to be unusual because you probably have never read anything written by most people. Only peculiar characters tend to get noticed.

> the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write) It's a foundational model (fresh from autoregressive pretraining) that approximates the probability distribution of human texts. And, no, it's not the statistical average of how people speak. It approximates how a person who could have written a text in its context would have written the next words. Fine-tuning, RLHF, reinforcement learning change this probabi…

> it's not the statistical average of how people speak.

How could it be? There would be no mimercicky if it were an average of how people speak. No human speaks like the average.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#159

I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…

I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is gar…

It’s a good question and I don’t doubt they’re useful.

But I mean they’re not good enough to do the things I need them to. Not enough that any difference can be chalked up to “taste”.

Put it this way, if you hired a very good handyman to build you a cathedral, you wouldn’t stand looking at the smouldering wreckage of the construction site saying “oh well that’s just a matter of taste”.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#160
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is gar…

> I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? To quote the parent commenter: > They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but not long term

Breaking down long term problems into small shorter problems we can solve one after another until the long term problem is solved is the essence of engineering.
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