411–420 of 573 posts
Previously:
Taste in the age of AI and LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241
You Had No Taste Before AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft was superior in both in the windows 95-2000 era, and with Metro (on phone, on desktop it was half-assed). The problem was when they started to try matching Apple, instead of staying true to the core of their own aesthetics. Both the Fisher-Price XP style which was bot zeitgeist, and an attempt to answer for the skeumorphic tragedy apple was pursuing, and the recent floats, spacings, central taskbar mimichki…
I'm not really convinced Metro was better than anything Apple at the time, even though it was refreshing and interesting. Was it actually easier to use? I didn't really find that nor see it with others.
Version 7 and 8 were great UX-wise, I have mixed memories about 10, mostly performance regressions bugged me, but was still faster than most non-flagship androids of the time... yet sometimes it felt sluggish to WP7 on potato hardware. The typography based UI was both fast and very readable and focused for well thought out apps. The standardized navigation buttons (on android button order may vary be vendor/model), and the clear gesture based navigation instead of hidden intearctions everywhere (long press, 3d press, app switching gestures etc), but using gestures for in-app navigaton were all easy to understand and grasp even by the elderly.
It was readable, well organized, nobullshit, but that is not what the masses crave. Metro was like how a "dumb smartphone" should be, in my opinion.
On desktop ot didn't work well. The live tiles were still a good idea, and if the taskbar supported them, it might have been a good idea (or not, was not tried, but could have be a bit like the old NeXT style refined, not stagnated and skeumorphized like on the mac).
Is taste really the one thing LLMs can't take away or do we talk about taste because judging has become the cheapest move available? I think focusing too much on taste is how we lose focus on the two questions that actually matter: what do I actually care about, and why do I make things at all.
The idea is this: the commodification of intelligence requires the codification of domain expertise to function reliably, and proper governance to scale.
Taste, in my opinion, is a fill-in for absent function and lack of utility. Systems function; they don't require taste. Taste is why PG put Sam Altman where he did — not a system of merit, not evidence. Taste is why DJT can do no wrong in the eyes of his base. It is unprovable and has no true measure, and that is exactly why it gets leaned on so heavily: it lets you claim superiority no matter what slop your system produces.
You say the box moved taste up a level. Out of the making and into decision layer. That relocation is a smell. Your unfalsifiable thing conveniently gets moved to the one place it still can't be checked, at precisely the moment the making became checkable. Just like: Iran/Strait of Hormus, AI curing diseases and all of the other bold promises made by people who claim to be "taste makers" but in the end its all the same. Bullshit! Because thats what taste is a euphemism for in this context. Convincing others that you are correct in some way with no actual proof to back it up.
The vector here should not be "taste"; it's tolerances: written down, measured, enforced. The judgment gets encoded into a spec, and the spec is what survives the person who had it. That is codification; not "taste".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting ideas about how to build things. It is a possibility. But I also think we're underestimating the human need to create cool, unique things. Like yes most of the projects in this situation will have "average taste" but most of the proj…
I also don't think it will kill creativity in the space, although my phrasing might have suggested that, just that it might diminish it and make implementation styles more conformative. On the other hand, we might trade that for creativity in other more high level designs where things like coding style is an unimportant detail for the experiment. For example, I have started playing around with microcontrollers becaus…
On the other hand, I did that in pursuit of a goal, and LLM's take me further, faster, toward that goal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An important feature of taste is also that it is highly variable between people, and because there is no system or proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's taste is objectively better than another's. This is what causes one person to build a large software system in a classical OOP language while another builds almost the same system in a typed functional language, each following their own internal…
I wrestle with this also. A colleague pointed out that LLMs reduce language choice to an implementation detail… don’t have to know assembly to write python, and now you don’t have to know python to write a functional app. So why stick with python when rust might be better? Leave that to the LLM and let your engineering effort go toward designing the app instead of operating a programming language. In which case yeah,…
For those keeping track, this is now (at least) the third wholly or partially AI-generated article on the theme of "taste" as enduring source of human comparative advantage to hit the HN front page. Previously: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241 You Had No Taste Before AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551
I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…
But then, once it’s passed the first human it should be considered human-to-human communication rather than LLM-to-human communication, and the long, winding, and often repeated justifications can be significantly condensed.
Also you can’t let it run loose with unit tests unless you want to be blasted in the face with hundreds of lines of absurd test fixture preparation.