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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#341

Post by remify »

kaizenb wrote: post #230
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…

"What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive advantages anymore?" This is the question I've been thinking about. All can be copied very easily and in scale these days.

Copying means you have a valid target.

I'd argue that a well thought UX isn't easy to copy in the first place because it's not something that can easily be put into word.

It's the same for a lot of things, I have some clothes that I love because of their, design, quality and more ... something intangible that I have hard time describing and that can easily be explained with: It was done with taste.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#342

Post by nevertoolate »

ReservoirPengui wrote: post #318
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code. If this is an acceptable definition of software engineering productivity, where "quantity over quality"…

It's textbook historical revisionism. It's not like we didn't have mountains of bad code in the pre-LLM era. I'm old enough to remember endless complaint posts about having to wotk with legacy codebases full of horrible spaghetti code. Somebody took a long time to write it by hand.

Have you realized you are attacking a straw-man? Nobody said all “hand written” code is good. I _think_ the implicit argument is: “all vibed code lacks cohesion”.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#343

Post by throwatdem12311 »

habinero wrote: post #199
aprdm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. That's not true at all. And not how projects are done on startups or big companies. Execute fast or get nowhere, a series of small wins get you to live long term.

Nah. You can succeed in every single individual thing but fail at the overall project because the parts don't align into anything that makes sense. If you need examples, look at game dev. There's plenty of games that have good execution but aren't fun to play or they're a confusing mess because there wasn't good overall direction.

Videogames are a weird comparison because they are basically the ultimate culmination of the combination of both engineering and art. The two can crossover in weird ways but still have distinct aspects that do not really compromise the other.

Just because a videogame isn’t fun doesn’t mean there wasnt a cohesive engineering vision. God of War: Ragnarok is a good example of this. Excellent technical execution and (arguably) great direction but a terribly boring game.

And many games that are terribly engineered are also incredibly fun. Dark Souls is a good example - runs like ass, looks very rough even by the standards of the time when the game released, with terrible enemy AI in a combat focused game - one might even call it a confusing mess (and I laugh at the notion that it doesn’t have good direction)… despite all this it’s a classic and arguably the most influential game since its release.

Elden Ring carries a lot of legacy baggage from years of iteration on the same engine as ~~Dark~~ Demons Souls - and it’s widely considered From Software’s magnum opus and a masterpiece. Yet considering the scope of the game it is a great example of how small wins added up can solve large problems when executed with the skill and judgment gained from experience. So one might still consider it a success in terms of “engineering”.

Would From Software have been able to make the same game using Unreal Engine 5 built from scratch with dime a dozen “Unreal experts” brought in off the street? Not a chance. Want to know why western game development studios are suffering right now? Compare American layoff culture and race to the bottom economics to the retention rates of Japanese game studios like Capcom, Nintendo and other heavy hitters.

For many of the most marvellous things humans have ever built, if you take a peak behind the curtain you’ll still probably find some amount of duct tape and popsicles sticks somewhere keeping it all together.

Fun, however, is a matter of taste and you can’t engineer that.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#345

Post by sixhobbits »

nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

yes this is 100% AI, the article and the 'post mortem'. People are so gullible. Anyone who has read a lot of AI can spot it instantly, but Pangram also says 99% of this is AI. So many signs, and no there were no human authors who wrote like this

"What it actually is"

"Here is the uncomfortable mechanism"

"Let me be plain about it"

"The floor"

"Everything downstream of the verdict"

I'll eat my hat if this isn't AI.

Very similar style to my AI 'utopia' https://aiking.dwyer.co.za/utopia

I don't even think all AI writing is bad, but lying about it definitely is.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#346

Post by dwedge »

> Robert Pirsig spent an entire book circling a word he refused to define, because he had convinced himself that defining it would kill it.

Just reading the title and I was already thinking about that book. It's a great book though it gets progressively more difficult

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#347

Post by Good4boothee »

sixhobbits wrote: post #345
nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

yes this is 100% AI, the article and the 'post mortem'. People are so gullible. Anyone who has read a lot of AI can spot it instantly, but Pangram also says 99% of this is AI. So many signs, and no there were no human authors who wrote like this "What it actually is" "Here is the uncomfortable mechanism" "Let me be plain about it" "The floor" "Everything downstream of the verdict" I'll eat my hat if this isn't AI. Ve…

Please, I couldn't care what Pangram (or any other "detector") says. If it feels like AI, does it even matter if LLM was co-author? It lands in the same "bad writing, I won't continue to read that" category.

That said I am recently getting paranoid about YT videos, I hear Claude traces in every 5th script. If people are going to spend substantial time recording and editing, is it worth "saving" time on most important part?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#348

Post by socketcluster »

dimgl wrote: post #208
socketcluster wrote: post #86

In software development, good taste translates to readability, succinctness and maintainability of the code. It also translates to intuitiveness, reliability, security, performance, scalability and utility of the software. All this doesn't necessarily translate to sales though. Because, to evaluate those things requires attention, trust, time and effort. This is a significant barrier because a lot of software will ap…

> I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. I'm seeing the same thing. Of course, it's always possible that AI capabilities grow significantly from here and this worry is moot (and there will be other things to worry about, like whether I'll have a job). But seriously, after a while AI generated codebases really fall apart. It's a bit of cope from me that this problem won't be…

I'm feeling quite confident that AI won't be able to produce quality code in the foreseeable future. Because the bottleneck is not technology, it's people and incentives.

Firstly, people don't agree on what good code is (developers who get paid by the hour tend to favor complexity so they think good code is complex code), secondly, AI companies have an incentive to produce more tokens; this works against good architecture since good architecture would cost fewer tokens to maintain. Thirdly, many decision makers tend to conflate complexity with intelligence, hence they are more likely to prefer complex solutions over optimal ones.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#349

Post by dwedge »

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 desperately wants to replace wages and the idea of a machine doing the work you previously needed to do before is so enticing, and the initial results so promising, that the rest doesn't matter.

Look at how many AI lay offs there already were a year or two ago - back when almost everyone would agree they weren't good enough. If good enough didn't matter then does it matter how when AI is better?

And despite what you might be trying to prove, it's obvious I'm replying to an LLM (a green account at that), but it's not for you, I don't expect you to bother reading it.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#350

Post by attheballot »

darkwater wrote: post #325
nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

I really don't know, their GH profile [1] and their projects, even the recent ones [2], seem pretty non-LLM. IMO the post-mortem is more a satirical response to the HN criticism, doubling down on the "AI slop" writing style. [1] https://github.com/NotAShelf [2] https://github.com/NotAShelf/tuigreet

> IMO the post-mortem is more a satirical response to the HN criticism

They have edited it again to be slightly more emotional. It's why their "On Taste" closure doesn't actually pertain to Taste anymore. Of course, they wouldn't notice the mismatch - they didn't write it in the first place.

They aren't being satirical. They're pissed they got called them out. Were they not, they'd not bother with edits.

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