Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You Had No Taste Before AI

matthewsanabria.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 201 posts

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#171

Post by ndriscoll »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #38
StilesCrisis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe by the textbook definition, sure. Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

How do consumers discover new products and services if not through advertising? A product on a shelf at a store is also a form of advertising proven by how much money is spent on packaging. Word of mouth is also one of the most effective forms of advertising.

Consider "advertising" as shorthand for "paid promotion" i.e. "lying". Why would product or service discovery require the people making recommendations to take money from the producers they're recommending? How could that ever result in a world where customers receive anything but the worst possible recommendations?

Word of mouth: fine

Product on a shelf: fine unless you made a deal with the manufacturer/distributor to put it prominently rather than believing it deserves to be there

Taking money to give an endorsement: Bad. That makes you a liar.

It's the dishonesty at the heart of almost all advertising that makes it bad (well that and the often accompanying implicit push for people to frivolously consume).

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#172

Post by red-iron-pine »

bluGill wrote: post #129
watwut wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the only objective sign that it provides is that you objectively have a lot of money.

if I inherit $44 million dollars because I happened to fall out of the right vagina the only thing it symbolizes is that I got lucky -- I could be a fat, degenerate bastard underserving of anything.

ditto for lottery winners.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#173

Post by red-iron-pine »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #164
tsunamifury wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late stage yes. But design has created the most valuable and profitable products and companies in the world. 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.

Monopoly profits are the allure of innovation. Its the same reason those life-saving medicines get developed (patents). Why is this a bad thing? Personally Id rather have an Apple monopoly than MSFT for instance. I really love using my Apple products. I never enjoyed using a single MSFT product.

u/rhetocj23 is a one day old account made of random characters that is actively advocating for an Apple monopoly and talking shit about MSFT in multiple posts.

remember folks 20-40% of social media is bots -- this is just a low-hanging fruit

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#174

Post by tsunamifury »

pxc wrote: post #155
tsunamifury wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea coherent systems are satisfying. Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.

I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.

First, I would suggest your mentality is a bit... funny as you're saying you want to learn but NOT LIKE THAT.

But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness"

So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#175

Post by kjkjadksj »

b112 wrote: post #92
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #20

As someone who works with a lot of creatives, I've noticed people tend to get really defensive and self-righteous anytime "taste" comes up, on both sides - the haute designer-types vs. the scrappy I-can-do-it types. So I won't be surprised if this post is controversial. But it's insightful. Having poor taste (or more charitably, having no taste) can be covered up or ignored by the ability to choose from a pre-curated…

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…

Horrid is just what dramatic people say. Old styles were and are still great. You have to see things for what they were to really understand them. Anything with a good amount of thought put into it is great no matter the time or place. This is why fashions are cyclical: it was always a good idea just one that became too familiar at one point and had to be forgotten and rediscovered. A sort of wanderlust situation.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#176

Post by serf »

btbuildem wrote: post #4

Having taste is one thing, having the standards to hold yourself to a certain level of quality, that's another thing altogether. Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts. The paradox is baked in, and some of us do our best to navigate it.

>Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.

Speak for yourself, not everyone works for the paycheck.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#177

Post by serf »

NackerHughes wrote: post #8

“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.

'detect AI' is such a stupid goalpost given the different caliber of output one individual may have from another when coding with an LLM.

do these people detect all AI? Of course not, they detect crap.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#178

Post by rhetocj23 »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #173
rhetocj23 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly profits are the allure of innovation. Its the same reason those life-saving medicines get developed (patents). Why is this a bad thing? Personally Id rather have an Apple monopoly than MSFT for instance. I really love using my Apple products. I never enjoyed using a single MSFT product.

u/rhetocj23 is a one day old account made of random characters that is actively advocating for an Apple monopoly and talking shit about MSFT in multiple posts. remember folks 20-40% of social media is bots -- this is just a low-hanging fruit

you sound like a cry baby.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#179

Post by serf »

allovertheworld wrote: post #58

AI still a mind virus, vibe coding hasn’t taught me anything. It just allowed me to ship microservices that I dont understand. In the past I would’ve had to learn it through tutorials and docs, and in the end I would be in a better place with my new found knowledge. But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer.

>But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer.

No. I think you're wrong.

'Vibe coding' (a phrase I hate) introduced me to so many different software packages that I didn't even knew existed. Now, with no LLM subscription, I still use many of the software packages that I discovered via LLMs in my own work.

Like any other media, whether or not you use it as a springboard for learning is up to you. Literally every other store of knowledge had critics like you with that same exact opinion (boob-tube, brain-drain, couch-potatos, book-worms) -- and every single one of those forms of media ended up tremendously useful for us.

When you watch YouTube you don't have to go watch the most popular asinine shorts; you could use it to learn a language or perhaps some history or a math lesson.

Is it bad because a lazy person can be tempted into skipping the work and making the LLM do it? That's because a lazy person is involved -- not because the technology 'is a mind virus'.

P.S. 'mind virus' is the stupidest nu-speak crap term I have heard in years. In fact the whole "I don't like the thing so i'm going to give it a scary name" concept has become so tired in recent years that I have a hard time keeping up with the new dictionary -- is this what getting old is like in every era or is this special?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...

Don't go blaming Dawkins, no one said that shit until recently. As with much crap nu-speak it looks like Musk was the one that set it off. Figures.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#180

Post by non_aligned »

privatelypublic wrote: post #156
tsunamifury wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More examples: look up Dieter Rams (a person). Ran into the name a while back, and man- he made a record player 50yrs+ ago and it was never meant to be in fashion. It sure would still fit in as "simple device that does X" in the 2020's.

I really don't think that's a good example. That's someone who designers hold in high esteem. Most people today would not buy products with these aesthetics.

Granted, I does hold up better than most, but I don't think it's an example of some immutable, objective principles of fashion.

Post reply on HN