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No Skill. No Taste

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Re: No Skill. No Taste

#201

Post by zoogeny »

selridge wrote: post #199
zoogeny wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just skimming the Wikipedia article [1] and it is appears Bourdieu's argument is bit more nuanced than status and money. It is a bit laden with Marxist jargon, but at least the abstract seems to place the heavy burden on "cultural capital" which is a more precise term than what I chose (status) but close enough to my meaning. Whether or not economic capital is actually transferrable to cultural capital seems to be an…

Oh it's a bit laden for you? Was the plot summary on wikipedia taxing? c'mon. Are you really going to tell me "ahem dear sir, I found out that this Mr Bourdieu likes him some nuance!" His most famous book is essentially an article ballooned into a monograph via nuance.

No counter argument? Ad hominin? I was politely saying you were wrong and your attempt to muddy the water with "They are both intertwined" was a poor deflection based on the source you provided. But now I see you are a troll and I was lured.

Your source does not support your position.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#202

Post by ludston »

fluoridation wrote: post #97
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'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines. Okay, but so what? "Taste is subjective" is meant to defend the existence of some thing. "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist (or shouldn't be the way it is)." Are you therefore saying the opposite? "…

It probably depends on who likes it and why.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#203

Post by computerthings »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #166
ianbutler wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#204

Post by selridge »

zoogeny wrote: post #201
selridge wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it's a bit laden for you? Was the plot summary on wikipedia taxing? c'mon. Are you really going to tell me "ahem dear sir, I found out that this Mr Bourdieu likes him some nuance!" His most famous book is essentially an article ballooned into a monograph via nuance.

No counter argument? Ad hominin? I was politely saying you were wrong and your attempt to muddy the water with "They are both intertwined" was a poor deflection based on the source you provided. But now I see you are a troll and I was lured. Your source does not support your position.

You didn't read it, how would you know?

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#205

Post by zoogeny »

selridge wrote: post #204
zoogeny wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No counter argument? Ad hominin? I was politely saying you were wrong and your attempt to muddy the water with "They are both intertwined" was a poor deflection based on the source you provided. But now I see you are a troll and I was lured. Your source does not support your position.

You didn't read it, how would you know?

I'm happy to wait for any argument you can provide that cultural capital and economic capital are "intertwined, often strategically" instead of bowing to the authority of a source that in abstract clearly argues for the predominance of cultural authority in the constitution of taste.

But we aren't here to discuss apparently.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#206

Post by mmarvin »

vunderba wrote: post #76
cgriswald wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LLMs in my fiction writing; and before the wolves come out to shred me to pieces: The LLM never gets to see my writing and doesn't do any of the writing for me. I use LLMs in other ways. One of the first uses I discovered was to have it identify my own blandness. I'll give it a general scenario from my writing and ask it for ten resolutions to that scenario. If my own resolution appears, I realize at best my re…

This is eerily similar to something I do with Hacker News stories that hit the front page. I run the post against a couple of LLMs (Mixtral, GPT-OSS, Qwen3, etc.) with the directive to produce a set of 20 of the most likely top-level replies . I then wait a few days, and then use a couple of systems (embeddings, deBERTa, etc.) to rank comments by novelty against the LLM-produced replies.

why?

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#207

Post by amunozo »

Good read, but I have to disagree with the fact that skill and taste are correlated. It's true that learning skill gives you a more nuanced view of the craft that refines your skill. But software is not only for those who have skill in it, but for everybody. Lots of amazing engineers have an awful taste (really, really awful) in everything that is not their immediate field of knowledge or interest, with the aggravation that their skill makes them arrogant.

On the contrary, a lower barrier for skill could bring people from other disciplines with excellent taste to make beautiful, even if technical imperfect, pieces of craft.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#208

Post by Kirth »

amunozo wrote: post #207

Good read, but I have to disagree with the fact that skill and taste are correlated. It's true that learning skill gives you a more nuanced view of the craft that refines your skill. But software is not only for those who have skill in it, but for everybody. Lots of amazing engineers have an awful taste (really, really awful) in everything that is not their immediate field of knowledge or interest, with the aggravati…

> disagree with the fact that skill and taste are correlated

> lots of amazing engineers have an awful taste in everything that is not their immediate field of knowledge or interest

which one is it?

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#209

Post by altmanaltman »

skydhash wrote: post #194
altmanaltman wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, all of those are metaphors that describe a feeling and not anything concrete. Like what makes a codebase feel like "strolling through a well-tended garden"--there has to be some objective measures for that, right? Some things like "it's easier to maintain" or "it has really good readability," etc? Why are we not talking specifics of this "taste" instead of using The Karate Kid wax-on wax-off type metaphors? An…

As I said, the computer does not care, neither would a robot care about a garden or a garbage dump as long as it can cross it. But we interact with the world through our senses and we categorize things with epithets like pleasant, disagreeable,… And when we can present things to others would generally find enjoyable and pleasing, we are deemed to have good taste. So the act of presenting and the judgement by others a…

What are the criterion for taste in code is my question and I'm yet to see a valid answer that objectively breaks it down. "Other people will judge your code and decide if it has taste" is still vague and still meaningless sorry.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#210

Post by gravifer »

yoz-y wrote: post #191
satvikpendem wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that in the future, apps will be like these blogs: most people will have them Most people don't have blogs though.

Average person only knows formulas for Olivine and one or two Feldspars.

Really glad to have recently passed that bar
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