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Taste Is All That's Left

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#241

Post by rwyinuse »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #184
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…

They're "good enough", but they're not good. If you're trying to run a business, programmer skill isn't worth the money you spend, LLMs are cheaper. If you care about the quality of what you produce, they're trash. Programming is no longer skilled labor. Quality is a hobby.

If your business involves storing any kind of customer data or handling payments, you probably should still hire a programmer who at least reviews the results of your vibe coding. Getting hacked is bad for business.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#242

Post by kazinator »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #221
dmarcos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny you mention Apple because they are proof that taste can be king. Yeah they also kidnap their users into their ecosystem and make smart business decisions, but what really differentiates them is taste. And Microsoft is sort of the counterpoint. There's more than one way to succeed I guess.

Or, used to be proof.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#243

Post by foundart »

It's an interesting article. To me it reads like someone who is not confident in their writing, but is very interested in getting their idea across, iterated with an LLM to produce it.

It set off all my LLM writing triggers and I noped out after about 3 sentences, because I'm designing/coding with AI all day and I'm 100% sick of its writing. I don't really care if it was written by an LLM or a person who writes in LLM style.

HOWEVER, the surprising fix for me was to ask a number of LLMs to summarize it. I omitted the "is this AI slop?" parts when I pasted it in. Like I said, I don't care about who wrote it, but I hated the writing style.

The AI summaries were quite readable.

They converged at a high level on the summary, but with a good bit of variance in nuance. I had a good follow up discussion with one of the LLMs, so I'm glad I tried it.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#244

Post by KurSix »

Generating the first version is almost free now. Understanding why that version is subtly wrong, debugging it in production, maintaining it six months later and deciding whether the abstraction was a mistake are all still expensive...

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#245

Post by KurSix »

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…

Yeah once taste can be fully reduced to rules, it stops being taste and becomes something you can optimize for

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#246

Post by KurSix »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #214
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…

The problem may not be that LLM taste is bad, but that it is incredibly easy to converge on

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#247

Post by chanux »

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…

Loren Brichter [1]

Never thought of finding out who until you mentioned! What a small but fantastic contribution! Thanks Loren!!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#248

Post by KurSix »

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…

[dead]

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#249

Post by chanux »

chanux wrote: post #247
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…

Loren Brichter [1] Never thought of finding out who until you mentioned! What a small but fantastic contribution! Thanks Loren!! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh

PS: Think about the next evolution of it, the auto refresh (from the great apps Instagram and LinkedIn).

Did I use the word evolution right?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#250

Post by [deleted] »

ryeights wrote: post #149
ricardobeat wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The update itself has strong AI tells: > I do write like this sometimes. The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines—all of it. It’s just the way it is. > That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it. > So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one Either the author is doing…

Right, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading all the comments taking this article seriously. I think AI has broken HN. The readership is so head-in-the-sand about AI that they wouldn't recognize 2000 words of Claudeslop if it genuinely slapped them in the face

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