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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#161

Post by QuiDortDine »

dyauspitr wrote: post #132
mdwelsh wrote: post #35

This article resonated tremendously with me, speaking as someone who has been coding since the 1980s and had to develop my own taste the hard way, through lots and lots of mistakes. Whenever I see a software demo built by someone mostly using agents to do the work, I have to question whether it's any good on the inside - or whether any real intuition or judgment went into its design. On the flip side, maybe none of t…

The LLM has its own intuition and judgement which at this point is quite good. I’m not just throwing that around, I use LLMs 12-14 hours a day and for a long time reviewed atleast 75% of the code.

Perhaps you're the one making it work well?

I've spent a day fixing a feature my very junior colleague pushed, and which was merged by my should-have-known-better colleagues who have almost as much experience as me.

We have access to the same models. Why did her version suck and my features don't need fixing?

There's still something there, thankfully.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#162

Post by asdewqqwer »

But this is basically reinventing the term "Aesthetics" which is a field that had several centuries of philosophy research about it. Not all of them will agree AI cannot have it.

Actually I think it is possible to reconcile Kant's third critique with the statement "LLM is possible to make aesthetic judgement" (with certain generous application of principle of charity, naturally).

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#163

Post by asdewqqwer »

FLeXMurphy wrote: post #53
DiscourseFan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people in Comp Sci don’t read Kant unless they have a concentration in Artificial Intelligence, so I’m not blaming them.

I'm not only referring to that, I'm also referring to a reductionist view when I read "Taste Is All That's Left" - which is a statement that has been mindlessly parroted around as of late.

Why is it a reductionism view? A true reductionist will no doubt claim taste won't left as well, at least not as a non-private langauge.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#164

Post by [deleted] »

drekipus wrote: post #96

This was a great and resonant post. Don't worry about the green names. I think there is almost a split between people who have read ZAOMM and people who have not. I recently made a post in my circles about how "meaning" is what human quality is. If you look at classical art a lot of it could look objectively nonsense and have technical mistakes, but just because the machine can make a picture does not mean that it at…

[deleted]

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#165

Post by andyg_blog »

Hasz wrote: post #74

Taste good, taste hard to cultivate, taste easy to fake and hard to prove. There, TLDR. We still have a metric for good taste, and it is $. Solve a problem that people care about? They give you $. Solve problem no one care about? No $. It is not perfect, but I challenge you to find a better metric that is as effective and simple.

I think it's a pretty good direction to go down. I wonder if we can add a little more accounting to it. Cheap shoes solve an immediate problem but you pay more long term versus expensive well built ones. How much $ (in dev time + tokens) was spent in incidents and/or fixing code later. Credits and debits. Weigh money earned (somehow) against money spent.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#166

Post by jdanford »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #100

Speaking of taste the author basically tells me not to read the article immediately as soon as I hit the page because the commenters on this site (HN) have made them feel so bad about it I’m pretty sure it was not technology that killed the web it was the kind of toxic crap like that, that we’re seeing from communities and that’s nothing new

It’s because the writing reads like AI slop, and the author’s note about how it’s not AI slop ALSO reads like AI slop

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#167

Post by deathanatos »

notashelf wrote: post #152
SCLeo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? To quote the parent commenter: > They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but not long term

But that means they're good enough for the short them. This is why I find it such an interesting question to wield, but also, it is why my wording was poor in the post.

Short term can, IME, be very short. I've seen people generate, say, a bash script with an LLM. It's generated: short term, the problem is "solved": we've generated a bash script.

… but does it work? Someone comes along, reviews it, "this is garbage, and does not do what it says it purports to do". Perhaps it even gave an output: the script computed … something, but it's just GIGO.

But that "check if this works" friction is the same friction that is what people try to avoid by generating it with an LLM in the first place. If you're too lazy to write the script, you're practically by definition too lazy to verify it.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#168

Post by Krei-se »

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.

Name them. Just 2! Any example would be enough.

Or well better than 0 and just a claim.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#169

Post by akoboldfrying »

notashelf wrote: post #141
akoboldfrying wrote: post #139

I think the "taste" described here actually can be formulated as a measurable quantity, just one that can't be accurately measured in practice . According to James Shore's 2006 essay "Quality With a Name" [0], "good design" amounts to nothing more or less than minimising the expected engineering time needed to create a good enough product over the space of changes that are likely to be needed during its lifetime (I'm…

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to conclude AI can acquire what I have described, and would continue to defend as taste. The real question, then, could be whether its acquired taste renders you obsolete? So what if you can be replaced, what then? A question that popped into my mind is whether taste, as immeasurable as a metric as it is, would be what keeps you relevant just enough to matter.

Unpleasant as it would be, I think it may well render us obsolete in the main. There will probably always be a handful of paid human programmers around, just as there will probably always be a handful of people paid to make buggy whips, but the history of capitalism shows that most buyers don't care enough about how their goods and services get made to pay the premium that would keep "handmade" items economically viable for sellers. So I don't yet see a compelling reason why ~all of us programmers (and all other white collar workers in their turn) won't be replaced by LLMs.

The only difference I see between what happened to master craftsmen during the Industrial Revolution and what is happening to programmers today is that I belong to the latter group, so for the first time, the coming employment crisis feels personal.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#170

Post by timacles »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #160
SCLeo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? To quote the parent commenter: > They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but not long term

Breaking down long term problems into small shorter problems we can solve one after another until the long term problem is solved is the essence of engineering.

No, the "essence" of engineering is having a cohesive vision for a larger plan.

No quality large scale project can exist without it. And any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.

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