151–160 of 201 posts
why everybody is just repeating safe things, instead of expressing themselves... ai is not en explanation. we should have interrogated ourselves about the whys this happens. complaining about AI is, again, missing the point.
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> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts. Absolutely not. Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to compensate you to use whatever you’ve made. Art is rarely profitable for its own sake, but that doesn’t mean everything that is profitable is intrinsically devoid of taste.
> Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to compensate you to use whatever you’ve made. In the spherical cow in vacuum market maybe. In practice there is rent seeking, profiteering, corruption, nepotism, etc ...
Apple Ferrari Google Porsche Smaller companies like Yeti or Braun Etc etc
Once they use design to achieve dominance yes they do the rent seeking you are talking about.
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Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective…
Isn't that just a lot of words to say "my taste is objective / rooted in reason, other people's tastes are a crapshoot"? Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"? Sure, there are things we do in a particular way because of manufacturability or utility considerations, a…
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Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer. The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including red…
Yea coherent systems are satisfying. Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.
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Isn't that just a lot of words to say "my taste is objective / rooted in reason, other people's tastes are a crapshoot"? Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"? Sure, there are things we do in a particular way because of manufacturability or utility considerations, a…
When you spend a lifetime learning design you learn the difference between taste and fashion. Taste is the ability to make solid choices coherently within a system being it fashionable or not. Fashion is just the latest system that is popular. Tasteful people can design good things regardless of the fashionable era. Great ones can create new fashionable eras.
“The loudest voices preaching about taste and AI are often the ones who never demonstrated taste before AI.” Yes, and if even these people can tell that AI generated stuff is godawful and tasteless, that tells you everything you need to know about AI.
Or is it only bad when "AI people" do it?
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Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes. If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants. So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste. And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated…
No. Tastes are subjective; beauty is objective. This is what permits us to say whether someone has good or bad taste. If it were purely subjective, then it would be impossible to make these claims. They would be nothing more than expressions of power, whether by the majority or some authority. Fads and fashions occur, sure, but they aren't always aligned with good taste. And you can have varieties of beauty (why can'…
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Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes. If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants. So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste. And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated…
Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective…
The gap between practitioners and bystanders is wide.
There was a "AI art or human art" quiz posted on HN [0]. I got > 90% right while the median score was 60%. I thought I was good at telling AI-generated content and was proud of myself.
Last week I listened to music on a random channel Youtube pushed to me for hours without realizing they're all AI-generated.
In turns out it's not that I have a human's soul or something. It's just that I practiced digital painting before but not music production.
[0]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar...
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The "only thing that matters are money" ideology at its peak.
Money isn't all that matters but it is one of the few objective signs we have.
Its value comes from agreement by a large number of humans that it is valuable.
A stack of Benjamins would be nigh-valueless to people from 9th-century China.