The best object for comparison you all are missing here are camera lenses.
Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
181–190 of 396 posts
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#182I've spent an inordinate time tuning my home nas to what I want to do. e.g. NPM reverse proxy with all kinds of docker apps and configuring it securely made me appreciate how tough cyber security is. My latest venture was to create several docker images for whatever environment I want: VsCode Remote SSH server, a docker image with a custom LLM, sync thing for obsidian notes across all devices
My goal is to de Google with home nas hosting a bunch of services. I want to take all my Dropbox photos and recreate what Google memories does using off the shelf AI tools on my nas. Then email and finally maps with great PoI data.
Probably not all of what I did is a differentiator that put my learning beyond mediocrity. But a good yard stick is if what I built is useful to someone and even better if one would pay me for something.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently tried to play a bit of tennis, which I've already stopped. My friend was appalled when I proudly announced that my tennis racket costed $15. "But we are in tech!" he cried. But for a couple of games, I know I won't be able to tell the difference between a $15 one and a $150 one (I know because I've played tennis in the past). And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I do…
Yeah, I played with a $15 racket for years. I only got a $150 one when I could tell the difference between them.
This is how I have it with my guitar. It's a simple Ibanez Gio from a starter kit, probably coming in at 150 Euros - 200 Euros or so, with another 40 Euros spent on a guitar tech to set it up properly.
I'll replace it once I know how it is holding me back. At least that's the plan I've had for the last 4-5 years. But it has low action, fairly low-noise pickups, holds tuning. So no need so far.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#184Unpopular opinion here probably but:
Tinkering is also a great habit to be disappointed and unhappy.
I love software and programming, but the apologetic requirements that can come from users mean adding a lot of complexity to software, that leads to many bugs and very slow programs. Everything has a cost attached.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have to “aestheticize” the cheap stuff in a way that doesn’t add value purely on price. In other words, you aren’t just picking the absolute best quality of a thing, you’re picking it for some specific aesthetic reason that puts it above the more expensive one. To put that into more concrete terms: I really like dark roast black coffee. There’s something about the bitterness and presentation that reminds…
I think it's possible to get a careful dark roast, but often "dark roast" coffee mainly tastes like burned toast. It's still warm and caffeinated, but it's not really that enjoyable. There's a reason so many people make this kind of coffee very watered down or drown it in cream and sugar. Maybe it feels historically connected to cowboys brewing coffee in a sock over a campfire or whatever, but is that connection real…
I just prefer the taste and it reminds me more of Turkish coffee, which is my favorite way of preparation. And also black coffee reminds me of various cultural things like diners, detective fiction, etc. Like this quote from Phoenix Wright, the game:
“Blacker than a moonless night. Hotter and more bitter than hell itself… that is coffee.”
Lighter roast coffee just isn’t a thing I generally enjoy, to me it feels like a different drink, an over-complicated consumer product, not the kind of thing one would write quotes like the one above about.
A bit like grilling vs. sous vide with meat. Grilling has a whole culture to it, whereas sous vide feels soulless and overly technical, even if it produces great flavors.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#186> Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game? Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.
That's just OCD, not taste.
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#187Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…
You're describing the hedonic treadmill. But I think you are missing something.
The thing is it does feel good to fix things and upgrade. The treadmill just says your baseline reverts back to where it was. So yeah you're just as happy with the expensive TV as you were with the shitty one, but it did feel good to upgrade, if only for a little while.
So the key is to introduce tiny upgrades and often. If you blow your budget for the whole year on a TV then you only get to be happier once. If you tinker and introduce tiny, sustainable upgrades you can be happier every day.
The sustainable part is important. You can only afford something if you can buy it twice. Don't ever take out a loan to buy anything (apart from a house).
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or intere…
Distinctive style is actually bad. You want your code to be uniform, readers should not be unable to tell who wrote what. Otherwise you run into the danger of having parts that are peculiar and or obscure to everyone except the one who wrote them. That's if you are lucky, if you are unlucky the person who wrote them won't be able to decode them either.
Within a module, yes. But it's ok for one module to be different from another because, you know, they are different modules that do different things (the difficult part is deciding what level your modules are split at, of course).
Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#189Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…
I recently tried to play a bit of tennis, which I've already stopped. My friend was appalled when I proudly announced that my tennis racket costed $15. "But we are in tech!" he cried. But for a couple of games, I know I won't be able to tell the difference between a $15 one and a $150 one (I know because I've played tennis in the past). And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I do…
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Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, a part of becoming an expert in some field should be getting to be _realistic_. Learn not to deceive yourself. I can give you an example from my experience. I got annoyed by my dull knives, so at first I went and bought really expensive knives, the ones made of hardened high-carbon steel that start rusting if you look at them dirtily. And I spent hours reading reviews before buying them. That's pro…
Knives are a great example. Any chance it was this guy? https://youtu.be/pagPuiuA9cY I've watched like 3 hours of his videos on sharpening because he's pragmatic, approachable, and scientific, and now I actually understand how to sharpen a knife and why it works.
Yup, this guy. I highly recommend this channel to anyone who wants to learn to sharpen the knives.
It's not at all hard once you understand the idea!