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You Had No Taste Before AI

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Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#181

Post by cwnyth »

bluGill wrote: post #127
cwnyth wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to bet on whether the critical consensus or some random person on HN had no taste, I would certainly bet on the latter. This post reeks of "Am I wrong? No! It is the artists, critics, collectors, and community who are wrong!"

There is no objective measure here. What i call good and bad is right for me and doesn't apply to anyone else- wait - I though I was arguing for consensus here and everyone else was calling me wrong

Did I mix that up? Regardless of whoever it may be, taste is indeed subjective (de gustibus and all that jazz).

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#182

Post by sings »

saulpw wrote: post #154
non_aligned wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The short answer to your question is "no". The long answer is "read Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance".

This thread also makes me think of Susan Sontag’s essay On Style.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#183

Post by anal_reactor »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #16

Most people equate "having taste" to "having good taste," but this article nicely illustrates that this is a false equivalence. "Having taste" simply means valuing forming one's opinions autonomously. As the author writes: Tasteless content [manifests] as the following: — Copying and pasting code without understanding it. — Designing websites that look exactly like every other company’s website. — Regurgitating conte…

I'd like to argue that most people are tasteless and that's actually a good thing.

1. Attention is finite. You can't be tasteful in everything you do. If I dedicate my attention to making tasteful home design, I just don't have the attention to take tasteful photos, and it makes sense that instead I'll just look at photos that someone else prepared. In this scenario, I'm very tasteful in home design, I'm completely tasteless in photography. And that's great. Because the alternative is to be mediocre in everything.

2. It just makes sense that for any given problem, the society would dedicate a small group of individuals to find a tasteful solution, and then apply said solution across the whole population. Most tasteful people are far deep into the territory of diminishing returns, and the attitude of everyone being tasteful simply won't work at the scale of entire society. This means that it's an expectation that most people would be tasteless in most situations, and just follow tasteful people's suggestions - after all, are you going to argue against your doctor, or are you going to just take the prescribed pills, even if theoretically you could improve your treatment by 2%?

> Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be perceived as having "good taste."

That's exactly the most common scenario. Blindly following latest trends will usually result in others perceiving you positively.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#184

Post by pxc »

tsunamifury wrote: post #174
pxc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do expect for my tastes to change if I study HCI, and to begin to notice things that I didn't notice before. And I'm interested in good heuristics for designing user interfaces for general audiences.

But I've been visually impaired my entire life, I'm colorblind, my colorblindness is progressive, and I'm going blind (timeline unknown). So my worries that HCI might not be "for me" come from a few places:

1. (This is the element you've perhaps picked up on.) Vision is generally the least compelling aesthetic dimension to me. I love music and poetry, but visual art virtually never moves me. Visual experiences generally lack spiritual depth for me, to the point that I sometimes find the way some people talk about visual art ridiculous or irritating. This is what I mean about not fitting in with people who are passionate about visual design.

2. Because of my vision, a lot of common assumptions about user interface design, especially about what is easy, natural, difficult, or awkward probably don't apply to me on a physical level. For instance:

  - I often have to use full screen magnification, which violates the assumption that an entire application is visible to me at once
  - gaze detection data can't even be collected for people with eyes like mine because our acuity problems are *worse* in the central visual field to the point that in advanced cases people have to read text exclusively using their peripheral vision
  - sometimes it seems I have visual processing difficulties to the point of being unable to tell what a picture is even an image of, like if there are any objects in the image and what they are
  - visually recognizing things takes me a lot of time and effort relative to other people, even when I can reliably do it
  - although I am significantly and untreatably visually impaired, I do not yet use a screen reader in any capacity and I don't know Braille at all
I'm interested in HCI broadly— both for users like me and users unlike me. But I don't want to put a ton of energy into things that feel inordinately difficult or basically meaningless to me, either.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#185

Post by bluGill »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #172
bluGill wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there is always luck. For most we are not talking about such luck and can just say money is a result of hard work. So if/how you choose to spend it matters.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#186

Post by Loughla »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #148
Loughla wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You laugh, but I'm seen as a local/regional expert at prompt engineering in my field because of my background in technical and creative writing learned as an English major. People pay me to help them understand these tools and how to use them in their work. All I'm doing with them is logic and communication. I have zero idea how the tools work, I'm just really good at communicating in a clear and concise manner when…

Honest go god, if I laugh in this instance, it is because a good thing is happening for relatively dumb reasons ( it is the same thing with documentation -- all of a sudden, good documentation is required so that AI can go through it ).

Correct. Is very nice for me for a Very Stupid© reasons.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#187

Post by lazide »

esseph wrote: post #102
lazide wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes sure, but more often than not they ‘realize’ they need x thing because recently they were told they need x thing. It’s a big oroborous.

TBF trying to sell me on anything with a commercial, print advertisement, video ad, cold call, or anything else is an exercise in frustration.

Do you buy…. Paper towels? Most soaps? Specific brands of meat? Go on vacations to specific places?

Chances are, you found out at least some of those due to advertisers. No man is an island.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#188

Post by davidivadavid »

pxc wrote: post #136
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…

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…

If it was designed, it was designed by a designer. That that designer also happened to play other roles, or that it's a CLI and not a GUI is immaterial. You're clearly confused about what designers do and who they are.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#189

Post by davidivadavid »

pxc wrote: post #184
tsunamifury wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do expect for my tastes to change if I study HCI, and to begin to notice things that I didn't notice before. And I'm interested in good heuristics for designing user interfaces for general audiences. But I've been visually impaired my entire life, I'm colorblind, my colorblindness is progressive, and I'm going blind (timeline unknown). So my worries that HCI might not be "for me" come from a few places: 1. (This is…

You can't be unaware of the existence of the field of accessibility in design? It's literally one of the trendiest things in design, probably trendy enough for you to specialize in it entirely if you wanted to.

Re: You Had No Taste Before AI

#190

Post by esseph »

lazide wrote: post #187
esseph wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF trying to sell me on anything with a commercial, print advertisement, video ad, cold call, or anything else is an exercise in frustration.

Do you buy…. Paper towels? Most soaps? Specific brands of meat? Go on vacations to specific places? Chances are, you found out at least some of those due to advertisers. No man is an island.

No, I'm pretty much a fucking island. The paper towels I'd probably change if they weren't on a grocery subscription. Soap I just rotate between a few I smelled at the store. Not to say I don't CONSUME, of course I do! I... probably don't in what seems like the ways a lot of people seem to?
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