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Taste Is All That's Left

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#391

Post by inigyou »

coldtea wrote: post #312
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 We can't say it in times of a general culture of confusion, like now. In times when there was an established cultural and artistic hierarchy, they could.

Was it objectively correct or was it just the king's taste?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#392

Post by inigyou »

don_esteban wrote: post #337
coldtea wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think it is a bit of an overblown fear that LLMs will just kill creativity and innovation in coding. Hackers will be hackin Hacking and a taste for hacking is a muscle you develop. LLMs will make most people not train it at all. Same way a huge number of people are obese and out of shape. For LLMs to be bad news in this regard, it doesn't matter if some people will still find a way to do something creative. A…

It is exactly like that. Yes, there are exercise nuts who are exercising like crazy, but the average population is getting weak and obese. The same with mental muscles. How many people can do mental calculations in their head nowadays? What about remembering several phones numbers? What about simply navigating with map but without GPS? (Or, heaven forbid, just by common sense and observation?) Properly thinking about…

Heck, how many people in this room remember their own phone number?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#393

Post by red-iron-pine »

base698 wrote: post #383
dcow wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used enterprise software?

Seriously. Whatever slop is going to be an improvement for 99% of enterprise products. 99.9% of internal tools at large companies.

something something SAP something

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#394

Post by luckystarr »

Taste is something you use to build the guardrails of AI over time and many paper cuts endured. Once you have a big enough set of these (call them rules) recorded, they become your development substrate. You narrow the paths the agents can take to arrive at a coherent system. If you don't do that, superficially it may look similar, but it's not and users will be able to tell.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#395

Post by customguy »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #378
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…

I'm a little confused. She follows describing people with good/bad taste immediately with the statement that there is no system for taste. If it is all relative, then how is she determining that someone has good or bad taste? Is there anything between moral relativism and mathematical proof? Just your own ineffable belief that you are right?

well yes, you can't help but have your own taste, and like the taste of others according to your taste of taste(s?).

And I think taste is subjective by definition, it doesn't compete with "objective taste" because that makes no sense.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#396

Post by pornel »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #204
pornel wrote: post #173

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. LLMs are also useful as a natural language interface. They're pretty useful for search (as RAG and autore…

> 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"…

I'm not happy about the drop in quality either, and I'm not advocating for just making software shittier.

However, look at history of DSLR cameras vs mobile phone cameras. Mobile phones were always worse than large format cameras, and we've got a massive quantity-over-quality explosion in photos taken. It didn't replace professional photography, but let people upload photos of their lunch to social media.

I think in programming we're getting frustrated because we're trying to naively use high-volume low-quality code generators in our previous low-volume high-quality workflows. We're still discovering what's the programming equivalent of bathroom selfies, photos of receipts and QR codes.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#397

Post by red-iron-pine »

inigyou wrote: post #391
coldtea wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 We can't say it in times of a general culture of confusion, like now. In times when there was an established cultural and artistic hierarchy, they could.

Was it objectively correct or was it just the king's taste?

literally: sumptuary laws restricting what you can wear, eat, or own

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

not kings per se, maybe sultan, or the royal court, roman senate, etc.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#398

Post by jmbwell »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #378
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…

I'm a little confused. She follows describing people with good/bad taste immediately with the statement that there is no system for taste. If it is all relative, then how is she determining that someone has good or bad taste? Is there anything between moral relativism and mathematical proof? Just your own ineffable belief that you are right?

Someone with questions about this excerpt of Sontag on taste would do well to read the rest of the work, which does a fuller job of drawing distinctions between sensibilities like taste, and systematic ideas like good/bad, morality, relativism, mathematics, proofs, and wrong/right.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#399

Post by NothingAboutAny »

jatora wrote: post #115
GrayHerring wrote: post #40

Hard disagree on "Good enough", most things are mediocre at best. Despite the massive AI boom I can at best count on one hand "fresh" products made with AI that are meaningful in day-to-day usage. Not to mention most of them seem to be targeting AI-space itself instead of bridging some actual business use case. Just look at all the products on ShowHN, you can "tell" a vibed product in seconds.

You are using countless products that are built or have become maintained by AI without realizing it apparently.

I'd believe it, my spotify breaks all the time now and I seem to remember them announcing none of their devs code anymore. not 10 seconds ago I had to force close it to get it to stop playing music on my phone.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#400

Post by jhbadger »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #378
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…

I'm a little confused. She follows describing people with good/bad taste immediately with the statement that there is no system for taste. If it is all relative, then how is she determining that someone has good or bad taste? Is there anything between moral relativism and mathematical proof? Just your own ineffable belief that you are right?

Even if something is relative, you can compare it to what other people believe. If most people who know person X think X has "good taste" (that is, that their tastes more or less agree, or at least that they aspire to having similar taste like how more people admire those who like classical music than listen to it themselves) then it is reasonable to say that person X has "good taste".
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