Is the post-mortem written to sound like AI slop, or is it just that? Offending either way :P
Taste Is All That's Left
281–290 of 573 posts
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#282I 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…
There's the hope that they'll make all employees redundant and that businesses that adopted AI quickly will be able to exist as a pure money-printing entity without the liabilities of products, customers, or employees.
Put another way, LLMs are just another part of enshittification.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#283Generating 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...
Yeah. The Fable oneshot is a myth, the software will still require constant refinement and maintenance. I've been daily driving my "vibecoded" projects and they're never really finished, there's always something to do.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#284Earlier 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…
Not disagreeing with you but the "resource allocation" which I presume to hint at the fallacy that capitalism is somehow great or optiomal at allocating resources is not really true. Just look at any big company such as meta and see how much inefficiency and bad choices there is. Stock market as a measuring stick is completely irrational.
Facebook/Meta is a great example indeed when one remembers that they took part in a genocide, and still haven't faced consequences for it.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#285We'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.
That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental to the process of making the product.
Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org structure which generated stupid requirements.
And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design outcomes.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#286I 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…
[deleted]
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apple's taste during the 1990's almost killed the company.
It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack, and that in turn was making them uncompetitive in application support, which would likely have killed them.
It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would never have won out.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#288Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#289We'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.
Microsoft was superior in both in the windows 95-2000 era, and with Metro (on phone, on desktop it was half-assed). The problem was when they started to try matching Apple, instead of staying true to the core of their own aesthetics.
Both the Fisher-Price XP style which was bot zeitgeist, and an attempt to answer for the skeumorphic tragedy apple was pursuing, and the recent floats, spacings, central taskbar mimichking the dock, etc...
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#290Unconscious intuition you can't explain in words, thus can't reason about, as the main guiding principle in the ever more cognitively demanding world, yeah, good luck.