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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#211

Post by agentultra »

> I do not miss the wall, and I will not pretend to.

The wall is the point, if you want to truly know the truth of something. I still believe there is no royal road. Taste isn’t the answer to why you would choose a bump allocator over a slab when designing a system. It is experience, wisdom, and the long hard road of trying yourself and failing. Taste comes after.

There is much joy in suffering when the result is knowing.

Too many people have tried to declare victory over software engineering prematurely and it shows.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#212

Post by psadri »

dbtc wrote: post #154
hellojomp wrote: post #8

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.

This is an awesome thread. I agree - the catalyst is joy, in a broad sense of the word. One is lucky to find joy in something that can take you deep.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#213

Post by Urb_RS »

boron1006 wrote: post #128

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…

[flagged]

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#214

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

hellojomp wrote: post #8

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…

An important feature of taste is also that it is highly variable between people, and because there is no system or proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's taste is objectively better than another's. This is what causes one person to build a large software system in a classical OOP language while another builds almost the same system in a typed functional language, each following their own internal logic of what is good taste. In the end we learn something from it, and maybe someone who worked on both projects refine their taste and starts preferring something that lies in between the two paradigms and comes up with a new interesting programming language.

One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#215

Post by agentultra »

notashelf wrote: post #146
boron1006 wrote: post #128

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…

The market logic isn’t going to be defensible. The market is highly irrational and prone to be influenced by those with the most capital, not the, “invisible hand.” Cars are freaking everywhere not because they are the best solution of transportation but because people with vested interest in the sale of oil and cars made it so by buying politicians, starting political and marketing campaigns, and on for generations. It took decades for the car to become the de-facto mode of transportation in North America let alone the rest of the world. It’s not good for us. It’s highly irrational to prefer cars when freaking wildfires and climate change threaten our very existence. In a similar vein, LLMs as they are, are not around because they are necessary and superior.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#216

Post by nullbio »

derangedHorse wrote: post #147
madrox wrote: 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…

It's not about being the only person doing it, it's about choosing to include it. Many don't know what works and what doesn't. Being able to discern a set of features that are cohesive to a smooth experience is taste. Innovating and establishing oneself as the first person to deliver those experiences is a moat in itself.

Competitors can reproduce your discernment as well, it's the sum of your product and can be equally cloned. So how is this a moat?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#218

Post by lmm »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #182
deathanatos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short term can, IME, be very short. I've seen people generate, say, a bash script with an LLM. It's generated: short term, the problem is "solved": we've generated a bash script. … but does it work? Someone comes along, reviews it, "this is garbage, and does not do what it says it purports to do". Perhaps it even gave an output: the script computed … something, but it's just GIGO. But that "check if this works" frict…

If this is your working environment, it sounds like quite an unusual place. I literally can't imagine generating a script with an LLM without testing it at all. Bash is one of those situations where LLMs can do really well. No human on Earth can remember all of the commands and even fewer humans can remember all of the switches for all of the commands. This kind of remembering, searching, and assembling is exactly wh…

> I literally can't imagine generating a script with an LLM without testing it at all.

Then you're extremely unimaginative as well as unusually fastidious.

Certainly someone - several someones - are generating lots of scripts and not testing them, given the PRs I'm seeing.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#219

Post by crooked-v »

esikich wrote: post #209
boron1006 wrote: post #128

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…

This is just a problem of articulating what you want. Most people can't write for shit, I'm sorry. Because they maybe took one writing class in college. It's a skill in it's own. LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with and the reasons are obvious. If it rambles or is too "purple", that's on the person prompting it, because they can't write for shit to begin with.

> LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with

And yet every time I see AI-written documentation, there's paragraphs worth of throat clearing and space-wasters like the word "genuinely" for things that could have been outlined in a couple of bullet points.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#220

Post by chongli »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #192
notashelf wrote: post #146

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…

> Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is garbage" but what about the people, as pointed out many times in this thread, that simply do not care? Does that not count as "good enough"? Aside from the "amateur" qualifier, the Booch quote below provides insight to those questions: The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic, some sensational method or…

The use of “amateur” is indeed a very poor choice. An amateur is someone who seeks to master a skill or perform a craft for the love of the art, not for money. It’s the professional who is looking for the shortcut, not the amateur.

The amateur is the one who hones a tool’s edge until it’s razor sharp, and cuts away all unnecessary detail until they’ve found the essence of what they’re trying to achieve. The work of an amateur is often highly impractical and uneconomical, but sublimely beautiful.

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