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.
At some point I think there's almost an inverse relationship with how much time you spend researching a product and how much you enjoy it. I fell in to this hole with gaming monitors. At the top end, no product has it all, no product is without flaws. So then you start getting frustrated that you can't find one that has the right HDMI version, freesync, 240hz, 4k, USB-C with decent power delivery, etc. And what you buy is something quite expensive but every flaw frustraights you.
While if you just ignore most of that and buy something mid tier, you feel quite happy because it works pretty well and you didn't spend too much on it. The moment you start scrolling the subreddit for the product you've gone too far and need to disengage.
This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun.
I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll start caring about stuff I don't want to care about.
Now computers, I've learned a million ways to hate them, and learn new ways to hate them every day. Not with bikes, though :)
Lucky you! You didn’t fall into that trap and just enjoy the best experience you could get without overoptimizing for it. I fell into the musical instruments trap for a bit but luckily I got out of it and play with what I have.
I'm with you with the TV - HD is usually enough, but audio needs to be at least reasonable. $20 headphones is too cheap, even from a longevity perspective.
Work gave me a 5k monitor to use at home. I set it up dual monitor with my cheap-o monitor. Had to upgrade that as it looked awful. But now maybe better for my eyes?
> 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.
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 would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences.
A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song."
A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they like and dislike particular music.
One is a boneheaded consumer, one is a fanatic.
Similarly with wine, you can't claim you've got taste when you've been drinking only red your whole life.
I struggle with the music one. I listen to a lot of different music, used see live music at least once a week, and have some strong opinions. I still struggle to explain music to others or why I enjoy certain artists/songs.
It is like the details don't register in a usable way, where one of my good friends will tell me he likes a band because of the guitar tone or the drummer's technique or something else that I struggle to explain or even pick out of the music. I wish I could explain my preference better.
I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. It’s not “good taste” it’s just “some taste”. IMO there are many ways to express taste that are not tinkering, such as preferentially selecting things and my personal favourite, complaining :) Nevertheless I think he means opinions rather than some universally good taste.
> 2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
Combining these two ideas: Taste is the ability to understand the topic/craft/medium well enough to have a strong opinion about what good is, and usually that opinion is similar to other well experienced practitioners.
In software engineering it's the ability to recognize an elegant solution that avoids pitfalls that the observer may have experienced in the past.
In other fields it might be that someone with good taste can better understand and appreciate the process or journey to get to whatever $thing is being evaluated, and they appreciate the $thing more because they can empathize more fully with the creator, compared to a layman.
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.
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.
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.
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 wish this viewpoint were more common/well-known. Somehow people get it in their head that people are tinkering with all their stuff constantly and never working, but just as TFA says, you'll have configs that haven't changed in over 6 months and are customized to your liking so you can work more efficiently and comfortably. Get a new PC? rsync configs over, or git clone your dotfiles repo or whatever. The work you put in doesn't disappear.
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.
If you don't want to tinker, don't! But it's absurd to suggest that it's only something for children to enjoy. (30 should not be considered near the end of your life btw.) Please don't tell others they should feel bad about learning for fun because they're adults.
Tinkering with fonts is the only way to get fonts that improve legibility by replacing ambiguous glyphs with unabiguoius. ie programmer fonts. Every day it boggles my mind that password managers use fonts that don't distinguish 1Il| 0O etc. cut & paste does not help when you need to speak them into a phone or type them into some other device. Same applies to simple part numbers, serial numbers etc, just all data.
Something I say about complainers applies here:
In the entire history of the world not one thing has ever gotten better by accepting something as it is.
Go ahead and never tinker, but don't delude yourslef it's a virtue. It's merely something you're free to do because it doesn't actively harm anyone else.
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.
> is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either
It's literally stated in the second paragraph: "It’s how I learn." You can learn how the things around you work by tinkering with them.
Of course, you can then ask why someone would want to learn things, or why they enjoy learning, and I honestly don't know how to explain that, but I feel like it's the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be asked.
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.
I love it too. Appears to be accomplished with this CSS, which you can tinker with by finding the :after element at the bottom of the <body> tag in browser devtools:
i figured that's what it was, but i didnt know how to find it in the browser tools but i missed the "after" part, so yeah it's in the "pseudo-elements". nice!
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
The fact that the author went out his way and styled it very uniquely displays that he does have taste :) It is just that your taste is different. Like another commenter pointed out, I liked the style (though I hated the pixelated font to begin with)
Funny part is he points out at the end that it's highly subjective...
I actually really liked the look of the blog. It gave me a retro vibe, which is obviously what he was going for. But I'm also reading on my phone. Maybe the choice was more annoying on a larger screen.
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 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.
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 know everyone is busy but the author provides the definition explicitly:
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.
Concisely, discernment.
So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your ends sentence It seems you equate “artistic quality” to aesthetics , and I don’t think that’s what the author intended.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Is the author doing that over usefulness or doing that in addition to usefulness? Some people would also enjoy the journey with the tool, along with the results. Just because someone enjoys the 'taste' of the tool doesn't mean that they don't care about usefulness.
Also usefulness is very subjective too depending on the context and scope.
Can the aesthetic experience improve usefulness? A million years ago I had an MP3 player with all of my mp3s on it. I listened to it every now and then. But when the iPod came out, and I put my same MP3 library on there, I listened to it all the time because it was super nice to use and interact with
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.
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.
At some point I think there's almost an inverse relationship with how much time you spend researching a product and how much you enjoy it. I fell in to this hole with gaming monitors. At the top end, no product has it all, no product is without flaws. So then you start getting frustrated that you can't find one that has the right HDMI version, freesync, 240hz, 4k, USB-C with decent power delivery, etc. And what you buy is something quite expensive but every flaw frustraights you.
While if you just ignore most of that and buy something mid tier, you feel quite happy because it works pretty well and you didn't spend too much on it. The moment you start scrolling the subreddit for the product you've gone too far and need to disengage.
Yep, the traveller's curse.
This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun.
I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll start caring about stuff I don't want to care about.
Now computers, I've learned a million ways to hate them, and learn new ways to hate them every day. Not with bikes, though :)
Lucky you! You didn’t fall into that trap and just enjoy the best experience you could get without overoptimizing for it. I fell into the musical instruments trap for a bit but luckily I got out of it and play with what I have.
I'm with you with the TV - HD is usually enough, but audio needs to be at least reasonable. $20 headphones is too cheap, even from a longevity perspective.
I don't mind buying new $20 headphones every two years! I guess the latest SoundPeats I got were around $40, though.
Work gave me a 5k monitor to use at home. I set it up dual monitor with my cheap-o monitor. Had to upgrade that as it looked awful. But now maybe better for my eyes?
> 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.
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 would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences.
A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song."
A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they like and dislike particular music.
One is a boneheaded consumer, one is a fanatic.
Similarly with wine, you can't claim you've got taste when you've been drinking only red your whole life.
I struggle with the music one. I listen to a lot of different music, used see live music at least once a week, and have some strong opinions. I still struggle to explain music to others or why I enjoy certain artists/songs.
It is like the details don't register in a usable way, where one of my good friends will tell me he likes a band because of the guitar tone or the drummer's technique or something else that I struggle to explain or even pick out of the music. I wish I could explain my preference better.
There are two definitions of taste:
1. How good or bad something is relative to some standard.
2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
I agree with you. But taste is a skill that should be learned. People who have better taste can select better stuff by their skill.
I feel this is kind of missing the point that was being made. “Better” is subjective.
If taste is being learned, who is the teacher? Are you learning about your own tastes or adopting the tastes of the teacher?
Who has better taste, the user of spaces or tabs? There is no right answer, just those who agree with you and those who don’t.
I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. It’s not “good taste” it’s just “some taste”. IMO there are many ways to express taste that are not tinkering, such as preferentially selecting things and my personal favourite, complaining :) Nevertheless I think he means opinions rather than some universally good taste.
Haha, "complaining" reminded me of someth that made me laugh a few years back, along the lines of:
I'd like to refine this a bit because I agree, but in a slightly different way.
> I understood “taste” here to mean opinions.
Good taste is the ability to have nuanced and specific opinions.
This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 said it well:
> 2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
Combining these two ideas: Taste is the ability to understand the topic/craft/medium well enough to have a strong opinion about what good is, and usually that opinion is similar to other well experienced practitioners.
In software engineering it's the ability to recognize an elegant solution that avoids pitfalls that the observer may have experienced in the past.
In other fields it might be that someone with good taste can better understand and appreciate the process or journey to get to whatever $thing is being evaluated, and they appreciate the $thing more because they can empathize more fully with the creator, compared to a layman.
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.
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.
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.
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 wish this viewpoint were more common/well-known. Somehow people get it in their head that people are tinkering with all their stuff constantly and never working, but just as TFA says, you'll have configs that haven't changed in over 6 months and are customized to your liking so you can work more efficiently and comfortably. Get a new PC? rsync configs over, or git clone your dotfiles repo or whatever. The work you put in doesn't disappear.
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.
I wish I could tinker with the font on this website. It flickers as it scrolls and does my head in!
It's the scanline effect, here's three lines of JS to disable it from the developer console
And from an accessibility standpoint, default fonts and colors are very safe as well. They tend to be easier to see and process.
I still tinker as I get older, except instead of fonts I'm buying a dual monitor setup with a 6-foot standing desk.
^^^ this, with life coming more to the ending part you start to value your time that you got left
tinkering is good when you're < 30 or maybe even < 25
> No time spent learning, is time wasted.
From TFA.
If you don't want to tinker, don't! But it's absurd to suggest that it's only something for children to enjoy. (30 should not be considered near the end of your life btw.) Please don't tell others they should feel bad about learning for fun because they're adults.
Or in this case, tinkering with fonts simply reduces legibility.
Tinkering with fonts is the only way to get fonts that improve legibility by replacing ambiguous glyphs with unabiguoius. ie programmer fonts. Every day it boggles my mind that password managers use fonts that don't distinguish 1Il| 0O etc. cut & paste does not help when you need to speak them into a phone or type them into some other device. Same applies to simple part numbers, serial numbers etc, just all data.
Something I say about complainers applies here:
In the entire history of the world not one thing has ever gotten better by accepting something as it is.
Go ahead and never tinker, but don't delude yourslef it's a virtue. It's merely something you're free to do because it doesn't actively harm anyone else.
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.
> is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either
It's literally stated in the second paragraph: "It’s how I learn." You can learn how the things around you work by tinkering with them.
Of course, you can then ask why someone would want to learn things, or why they enjoy learning, and I honestly don't know how to explain that, but I feel like it's the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be asked.
I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?
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.
I suspect it's a generational gap.
I’m in my mid 40’s, and have been using computers since the mid ‘80s. What generation are you from?
Not gonna lie, but I liked the vibe, maybe that's what author meant by different tastes :p
I imagine the intent is to simulate the look of an old CRT monitor
the entire page has horizontal lines washed over it
At the wrong refresh rate so did my monitor at one point.
i am fascinated with that effect and turned off every CSS rule on the page I could find but did not identify how you make that effect
I love it too. Appears to be accomplished with this CSS, which you can tinker with by finding the :after element at the bottom of the <body> tag in browser devtools:
i figured that's what it was, but i didnt know how to find it in the browser tools but i missed the "after" part, so yeah it's in the "pseudo-elements". nice!
The irony of an article about taste displaying little of it.
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
The fact that the author went out his way and styled it very uniquely displays that he does have taste :) It is just that your taste is different. Like another commenter pointed out, I liked the style (though I hated the pixelated font to begin with)
Funny part is he points out at the end that it's highly subjective...
I actually really liked the look of the blog. It gave me a retro vibe, which is obviously what he was going for. But I'm also reading on my phone. Maybe the choice was more annoying on a larger screen.
I just came here to say I think the blog design had a really cool look, it brought me back to my early days plugging away on old Apple IIes and IBMs.
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.
Web designers with good taste in colors and fonts often make more money than weightlifters, triathletes, and the average Chinese speaker.
Nobody who is raising children is able to do those things in a year.
Millions of people with children do those things every year.
Raising a child well is also an impactful goal.
Increasingly many aren't raising children either. I'm trying to move to a saner country.
This applies to fashion as well. Hackers should tinker with their clothes and jewelry more.
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.
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 know everyone is busy but the author provides the definition explicitly:
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.
Concisely, discernment.
So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your ends sentence It seems you equate “artistic quality” to aesthetics , and I don’t think that’s what the author intended.
That's on me, I missed that.
If you could indulge me a bit, the author in me wants to be pedantic about this. :)
In my defense, changing the definition of a term at the end of the article is begging to be misunderstood.
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.
Ah yes, time for the daily article of the form "If you don't do <thing I frequently do>, you aren't <a good person>"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Is the author doing that over usefulness or doing that in addition to usefulness? Some people would also enjoy the journey with the tool, along with the results. Just because someone enjoys the 'taste' of the tool doesn't mean that they don't care about usefulness.
Also usefulness is very subjective too depending on the context and scope.
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, …
It is not about aesthetics , from my reading. You brought that connotation into the conversation.
Can the aesthetic experience improve usefulness? A million years ago I had an MP3 player with all of my mp3s on it. I listened to it every now and then. But when the iPod came out, and I put my same MP3 library on there, I listened to it all the time because it was super nice to use and interact with
Not only that but a tool is only useful in a specific context
Good for you, some people enjoy the journey.
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.
> Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game?
Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.
Maybe tinkering is a necessary but insufficient condition for taste
Do you think it is?
If you have to wtite blog post about how you have taste and other don't, you clearly haven't got it either.