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No Skill. No Taste

blog.kinglycrow.com

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Re: No Skill. No Taste

#161

Post by alexpotato »

For all of the "saturated market" talk, I always think of the following examples:

- Restaurant Row in NYC is full of packed restaurants b/c people like variety and the demand is high enough to have multiple market participants

- Clorox is a chemical with a fancy bottle and a lot of marketing. They make $150 million+ profit a QUARTER on this [0]

- As someone once said: if it's visible and people see it as part of their identity, there are many brands e.g. clothes, cars etc. If it's not visible, there are fewer brands e.g. underwear

- The ability to personalize applications has been around for over 20 years but people still want predictable user interfaces so they can share with friends, spouses etc

0 - https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/clorox-posts-lower-pro...

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#162

Post by skydhash »

embedding-shape wrote: post #31
ryandrake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of useless if it can't be defined. Let's say I'm a software developer, and my product is criticized for "lacking taste." What can I possibly do to correct this, if we can't even agree on a definition? Let alone agree on what actions can be taken to "add taste" to the product.

> It's kind of useless if it can't be defined That's just the programmer/logician in you screaming "unknown feeling!" :) Programming (for me at least) is as much of a creative endeavor as it's one of logic. You can train yourself to at least recognize "good" from "bad", even though it's much harder to teach yourself how to go from "blank" to "good", or even being able to actually define why something is better than a…

Also studies. In art, especially painting and music, you do a lot of studies of masters’ works, to discern how they’ve decided to make their intention manifests.

Same can happen with code. People may talk about readability, maintainability,… And it can be hard to improve in those aspects. So you read a lot of code that is lauded as good, figure how people goes from ideas to a written version of it, contrast it to your approach, a d reflect upon that.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#163

Post by ianbutler »

tptacek wrote: post #154
ianbutler wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly tried to not inject my own standards into this and tried to stick around dynamics as much as possible. I think you shouldn't post to post, but if you've considered your audience and thought about something outside of yourself as to why someone may like this, earnestly, and not just kidding yourself, you are acting in good faith imo. Similarly, I should have done more in the post to steer people way from th…

The way you're expressing it, it sounds like you simply believe your own standards are representative of what everyone else's are. I disagree, for whatever that's worth.

My standards aren't expressed in the post at all is what I try to keep getting across. I'm describing an objective fact of social dynamics.

"Things that don't consider their audience get ignored or are perceived poorly."

The only thing I stated was a simple thing which is almost immovable fact at this point, that someone posting should be considering that.

My opinions are actually a lot stronger than anything I've written here and if it was about them the post would have been radically different.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#164

Post by vunderba »

wafflebot wrote: post #107
vunderba wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taste is subjective. If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure s…

I agree! Taste is downstream of such things as design principles which can be described in objective terms. Taste is not synonymous with personal preferences, otherwise we wouldn't describe some taste as "bad taste" or "poor taste." Rather, to me, one's taste refers to one's power of discernment as to what is good. We can enjoy cup-of-noodles without conflating our enjoyment as being good taste. I like a lot of thing…

> We can enjoy cup-of-noodles without conflating our enjoyment as being good taste. I like a lot of things that are fairly trash.

Agreed. As someone who watches an embarrassingly large number of isekai, I'm not going to drink from a public water fountain and call it a pierian spring.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#166

Post by XenophileJKO »

ianbutler wrote: post #119
tptacek wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the sentiment I detected in the previous thread, where a small group of people seem to have decided what the etiquette of daring to post a Show HN is. I'm not sure I remember being consulted on whether you should be keeping these gates for the rest of us. My reaction is the same as it was when people tried to argue Show HN was only for open-source software: says you .

I'm not gate keeping anything, to do that I would have to make specific statements beyond "consider other people when you post something" Right and my point is you (or i) will never be consulted, it happens emergently through community dynamics. No one sat in a group and decided this, Show HN in particular has always been selective. Different things are interesting to different sub groups and they select for differen…

Shaming, ridiculing. People that dare to create something you don't like. Maybe the right answer is if you don't like what people are sharing that they made.. YOU make something and share it and lead by example instead of complaining.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#167

Post by tptacek »

ianbutler wrote: post #163
tptacek wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you're expressing it, it sounds like you simply believe your own standards are representative of what everyone else's are. I disagree, for whatever that's worth.

My standards aren't expressed in the post at all is what I try to keep getting across. I'm describing an objective fact of social dynamics. "Things that don't consider their audience get ignored or are perceived poorly." The only thing I stated was a simple thing which is almost immovable fact at this point, that someone posting should be considering that. My opinions are actually a lot stronger than anything I've wr…

Always a helpful discussion strategy, just declare whatever you said to be an "objective" or "immovable" fact. I'm not sure there's much for either of us to gain by continuing. Anyways: now you know how I, and at least one other person I guess, read what you wrote.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#168

Post by anonzzzies »

I am happy with all the apps I am creating only for me. Nice if someone else likes them, but I create them for me. That now takes 1 day from idea to playstore instead of weeks to months. I don't really care if someone calls it slop. My life is better for it so I shall continue.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#169

Post by lumirth »

While I think there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy with this particular shift, I find myself struggling to care about it in particular. I get the impression that things will just be… different now. When finding an app for your phone, you might have to skip a few obviously vibe-coded ones to find what you actually want. But that’s not much different from before, when you’d have to filter through ads and apps that haven’t been updated in 6 years.

Are the people that make these apps tasteless? Or soulless? Or do they just have no respect for the craft? Probably. That’s not much different than how things were before. I’ve had tasteless coworkers who only programmed for a paycheck. The were perfectly pleasant people to work with, and I don’t judge them in the slightest. Besides, how do you distinguish an excited novice who genuinely wants to get into programming versus someone trying to extract value versus someone using AI to finally bring a hobby project to life? The same way you did before.

Point being, I doubt HN will suddenly stop being discerning or start celebrating low-effort garbage any more than they did before LLMs. The tasteful remain tasteful. The tasteless remain tasteless. And as such, I find myself more interested in directing my AI-related concern elsewhere.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#170

Post by selridge »

zoogeny wrote: post #153
selridge wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can lead yourself astray imagining that there’s a big difference between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. One is just a college educated term for the other. More importantly, I think that enough time has passed that we can critique poor old Kant on this matter. When he says the taste has no interest in something what he is really implicitly describing is that taste is the province of rich people. If on…

I think your analysis is interesting but I would argue it has more to do with status than money.

They are both intertwined, often strategically. Bourdieu’s book Distinction is all about how (and when in life) status and money can buy taste.
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