I despise the word "taste" for preferring specific software and workflows. Why are you selecting for aesthetic experience over usefulness?
I do get satisfaction from the results of my work, not through the mechanical process of arriving there. Tools are useful or not and this is the category by which I decide to use them or not.
It sent me back in time, very nostalgic. I even took a few minutes to sit and enjoy the moment and remember what it was like to explore the internet on a pixelated CRT in the 90s.
Once one gets over the infatuation phase one realizes how subjective taste really is. I thihk there are some common points though that one can tell someone has refined taste without necessarily liking it
I don't think "taste" in UI-adjacent things is important.
Tinkering habit is kind of important as even small interactions help to build an internal model of how things work, how to operate them, etc. And this model might generalize.
If anyone's wondering, author makes no attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the title, he just talks about being a tinkerer and why it's important to have taste nowadays, and lets the reader make the connection.
edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.
What exactly does "taste" mean in this context? Taste is about artistic quality. Aesthetics is generally a tertiary concern when it comes to software or hardware tinkering. That assumes it's a concern at all.
And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.
I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it:
"Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things.
When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities.
The more I thought about it, the more that applies everywhere: Food, wine, clothes, architecture, software design, etc.
I think a distinction can be made between bad taste and different tastes.
One of the greatest developers I've worked with, who I learned a lot from and respect immensely, has extremely different tastes in software from me. To the point where I wouldn't say I think he has good taste.
But, his work still has a distinct style and intention. I can tell anytime I come across libraries he had a hand in. I understand what the code is doing and why is is correct, even when I disagree with it.
And I think that is what is important. When working with more junior people, I'll ask them why they did things a certain way and will generally me be with a "well, idk" of some variant of path dependence.
I think developing that intentionality as a developer is important. Which does come with some amount of aesthetic, and I think taste is a defensible metaphor.
Absolute aesthetic relativism is the complete opposite of "thinking about", it's giving up to the cult of modernity, an intellectual shortcut to avoid the complicated and controversial question of "I instinctively know that objective good/bad exists but what is it, to what extent can it be formalized and separated from my opinion, how does it interact with subjective qualities?".
That shortcut leads to a dead end that only contains the rotting corpse of truth and integrity.
I actually see no difference in the two definitions unless you also slide in the idea that things are more relative and less clearly good/bad with the second. That seems to be the natural implication and the real difference, more so than the shift to "valuing."
- a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality
- the degree to which two people value the same things
If we don't also accept that implication, then its just the same thing. People thinking good things are good vs people thinking bad things are good.
That's not true. The best evidence that somebody has taste is that they introduce something to you (a band, a movie, etc.) that you've never encountered, but they are correct that you love it. But whatever they chose to share might not be their favorite work of art. They just knew that you would like it, because not only do they have a well formed sense of what they like and why, they can read other people the same way. They can find enjoyment in a huge range of art, because they can tap into what about it is enjoyable rather than reflexively labeling things good or bad. That is the definition of people with taste.
I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.
Fonts are like my dotfiles, I fucked with fonts.conf a decade+ ago and have just lived with that since then.
So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that.
I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol
I maintain a personal dotfiles repo on github, and when I start at a new job etc, I just git clone my dotfiles repo and then run ./setup.sh and everything is set up nicely with my fonts, colors, and stuff. It didn't take much effort at all and I get to use what I like. And I haven't tweaked my dotfile in years.
Feeling the same. I used to have a highly customised Liunx setup, then I got a macbook from work and hated everything that was different from what my linux desktop did. But eventually you just get over it and realise it's all fine and works. Being unfamiliar with something is different from it being bad.
It's hard to take seriously anyone who unironically says "there are two kinds of people".
That, and the judgmental humblebrag tone leads me to believe the author is young. I suggest they focus more on learning than writing these vapid articles.
Agreed, although I'd characterize it as more closely related to curiosity. Some people can select particular items that make themselves look good or are high-quality for example, but are surprisingly some of the least curious people, whereas I don't think the same can be said of tinkerers. People lacking this type of curiosity get frustrated easily if you want to discuss ideas or hypotheticals, nebulous intangible problem solving etc..; they want the right answer and an authority to point to. People with this type of curiosity want to discover why it might or might not be true regardless of whether it's a solved problem for others. The former type of person wants to look up what the viewpoints are like before they agree to go on a hike, getting frustrated when they're not there yet, and the latter just wants to hike and see what it's all about, enjoying the process.
Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss.
Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation.
Incurious people seem like they're the typical tourist or the consumer, eliminating as much inconvenience as possible but not necessarily interested the exploration of the what or why of either the problem or solution, making it hard to identify where the depth is. Good at delegating, but terrible managers.
If you're going to make changes, make big changes. Learn to squat 100kg. Finish a triathlon. Learn intermediate Chinese. These are all impactful goals you can hit in a year, worth way more than colors and fonts.
I love tinkering but I'm very minimalist as far as tooling is concerned. I don't like to use too many tools. I only use tools to automate activities that I do frequently. I don't try to micromanage and automate every aspect of my existence. Some stuff is better left uncounted and unplanned.
A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.
As a person who doesn't do much tinkering the thing I dislike about this article is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either. Not saying that the article is bad but I was curious about the author's mindset and felt he didn't talk more about the appeal of tinkering.
> GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least)
I keep hearing this same "GitHub Desktop bad, git cli good" take, but I just don't see how the cli can compete terms of things like being able to go through each changed file, see a clean visual representation of all my changes, and to choose exactly what lines I want to commit just by clicking on them.
You don't have interesting taste if you write articles like this.
People are just figuring out taste matters for product, so at this pace in 10 years they'll figure out that having novel tastes that aren't just a distillation of the echo chamber you live in matters just as much.
Decades 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."
That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
Honestly that sounds like a personal issue. I’ve gf the opposite experience - trying the high quality version of a thing has allowed me to find more intentional appreciation of the low quality version. I like shitty wines better now that I know what a good wine is, because I know what I’m paying for. “This isn’t great but it was like $8” and “this is great and well-worth $40” are better together than just “this is cheap and I dont mind it” in my book.
Then again I’ve never understood the appeal of ‘ignorance is bliss’
It's possible to be exposed to, and understand, high end things. I've had $2000+ bottles of wine, listened to music on $100k+ speakers, driven $500k+ cars, seen Keith Jarrett Trio at Montreux, had cat-shit coffee, etc.
And I'm perfectly happy listening to Toxic by Britney Spears on phone speakers while drinking Miller High Life on a sunny day in the park, hopping in a banged up Miata to rip a donut in a parking lot.
Don't let fear of "spoiling" things keep you from ever growing your experiences. People tend to have a gravity for the things that matter to them.
And don't let knowledge of fancy things keep you from finding joy in the basics.
yeah but you can't tell what good is because you was not exposed to enough good TV. Taste and perception is much more of a developed skill than people realize.
Most often, people deliberately choose not to pursue a special interests area because of limited time / budget rather than a lack of perception for what is "good".
Ignorance is bliss and cheap taste is the best one. This is the reason why I have been reluctant to learn about wines. I am satisfied with cheap wines and I would like to keep that way
I deliberately avoided fancy coffee because I didn't want to raise that bar and add a chore to my mornings, but last year I finally caved in. A friend asked incredulously "why wouldn't you want to enjoy something more?"
In hindsight it was dumb. I love the little ritual of making coffee. I finally notice coffee, the same way I notice good carpentry and art. It added another layer of understanding and appreciation to life.
Art is all about the shortcuts you choose to take to represent reality on a canvas. I think that life is the opposite. It's all about what you choose to complicate, to be deliberate about.
Reminds me of the Steve Jobs biography. He was a notorious tinkerer. He obsessed over the design of Macintosh, the NeXT step cube, and a bunch of other products.
> In fact, the last meaningful change to my config was 6 months ago.
I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 88.0 ms ] threadI do get satisfaction from the results of my work, not through the mechanical process of arriving there. Tools are useful or not and this is the category by which I decide to use them or not.
Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.
I suspect it's a generational gap.
Tinkering habit is kind of important as even small interactions help to build an internal model of how things work, how to operate them, etc. And this model might generalize.
edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.
And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.
"Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things.
When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities.
The more I thought about it, the more that applies everywhere: Food, wine, clothes, architecture, software design, etc.
One of the greatest developers I've worked with, who I learned a lot from and respect immensely, has extremely different tastes in software from me. To the point where I wouldn't say I think he has good taste.
But, his work still has a distinct style and intention. I can tell anytime I come across libraries he had a hand in. I understand what the code is doing and why is is correct, even when I disagree with it.
And I think that is what is important. When working with more junior people, I'll ask them why they did things a certain way and will generally me be with a "well, idk" of some variant of path dependence.
I think developing that intentionality as a developer is important. Which does come with some amount of aesthetic, and I think taste is a defensible metaphor.
That shortcut leads to a dead end that only contains the rotting corpse of truth and integrity.
- a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality
- the degree to which two people value the same things
If we don't also accept that implication, then its just the same thing. People thinking good things are good vs people thinking bad things are good.
tinkering is good when you're < 30 or maybe even < 25
So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that.
I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol
That, and the judgmental humblebrag tone leads me to believe the author is young. I suggest they focus more on learning than writing these vapid articles.
Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss.
Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation.
Incurious people seem like they're the typical tourist or the consumer, eliminating as much inconvenience as possible but not necessarily interested the exploration of the what or why of either the problem or solution, making it hard to identify where the depth is. Good at delegating, but terrible managers.
A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.
I keep hearing this same "GitHub Desktop bad, git cli good" take, but I just don't see how the cli can compete terms of things like being able to go through each changed file, see a clean visual representation of all my changes, and to choose exactly what lines I want to commit just by clicking on them.
People are just figuring out taste matters for product, so at this pace in 10 years they'll figure out that having novel tastes that aren't just a distillation of the echo chamber you live in matters just as much.
That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
Then again I’ve never understood the appeal of ‘ignorance is bliss’
And I'm perfectly happy listening to Toxic by Britney Spears on phone speakers while drinking Miller High Life on a sunny day in the park, hopping in a banged up Miata to rip a donut in a parking lot.
Don't let fear of "spoiling" things keep you from ever growing your experiences. People tend to have a gravity for the things that matter to them.
And don't let knowledge of fancy things keep you from finding joy in the basics.
Most often, people deliberately choose not to pursue a special interests area because of limited time / budget rather than a lack of perception for what is "good".
In hindsight it was dumb. I love the little ritual of making coffee. I finally notice coffee, the same way I notice good carpentry and art. It added another layer of understanding and appreciation to life.
Art is all about the shortcuts you choose to take to represent reality on a canvas. I think that life is the opposite. It's all about what you choose to complicate, to be deliberate about.
I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.