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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI You Had No Taste Before AI
hbarka wrote 6 min ago:
There must be a German word out there that better conveys this
âtasteâ thing. Someone socialized the term just like Karpathy
socialized the term âvibe codingâ. Someone needed to express a
trait only a human could have and separates us from AI. Surely AI could
not have any notion of beauty or good taste.
kingkongjaffa wrote 17 min ago:
Not without irony that the author finishes with:
> The people succeeding with AI arenât the ones who suddenly
discovered taste. Theyâre the ones who already had it and simply
adapted their standards to a new tool.
Which is just about the most blatant âitâs not about x itâs about
yâ tropes that AI writing is drowning in.
I do appreciate that they gave some concrete advice on how to curate
tasteâ¦
brilee wrote 24 min ago:
Taste is the field behind the goalposts, and we as humans are
constantly expanding that field by "having taste" and developing taste
as a community.
URI [1]: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/taste/
analog8374 wrote 32 min ago:
By taste we mean distinguishing pretty from ugly (or more subtly,
distinguishing patterns related to that.)
Yes, there is an objective reality there. That's basically why some of
us are artists and some aren't (that and self-confidence I guess).
It's what guides us when there aren't any obvious signposts around.
Good artists, scientists and engineers use this faculty all the time.
Those who lack the faculty just stick to areas with lots of sign posts.
georgestrakhov wrote 33 min ago:
First we shape our tools, then our tools shape our taste.
That's the interesting part I think. To the next generation of humans
the smell of chatgpt text _may_ actually be the smell of good writing.
Wouldn't that be a really interesting tragedy of the commons 2.0?
Peritract wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
A common trend I have noticed in people who are very pro-AI is that
they project their own limitations on others and pretend that they are
global concerns.
jakebasile wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
So much AI propaganda, like this article, is both AI slop itself while
being so weirdly aggressive.
You could say that propaganda authors had more taste back in my day.
lucideer wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
Excellent, excellent article. I do have one (odd) question though.
Perhaps I'm in a bubble (or outside of a bubble), but I don't know what
the opening premise of this article is talking about. Namely:
> Thereâs been an influx of people telling others to develop taste to
use AI. Designers. Marketers. Developers. All of them touting the same
message.
I have not seen this influx. I have never heard anyone telling others
to "develop taste to use AI". I work with & talk to a lot of
developers, designers, marketers across a span of areas so this seems
surprising to me. I've talked to outright skeptics, blind fanatics &
some in between - the discussions with those "in betweeners" tend to
centre more around functional contributions of AI as an aid rather than
it's "creative output" & our judgements of same. I have yet to
encounter anyone who has strong thoughts on taste w.r.t. AI beyond the
polar extremes of "AI can do my creativity for me" & "only use AI for
explicitly functional non-taste-related tasks".
Am I the only one missing this influx?
Havoc wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
One more thing to add to the list of tasteless: telling other theyâre
not doing AI right.
jihadjihad wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
De gustibus non est disputandum.
milicat wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
Ironically this article reads like it was written by AI.
grebc wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
To be fair to early comparison between cooking and chefs. Most chefs
are largely mediocre, and the ones that are glorified are fine in their
restaurant but do not try their recipes at home either - overly
complicated with 50 ingredients for a 30 minute dinner and too much
technique for it to be practical.
criley2 wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
A lot of people are picking apart the many problematic parts of this,
but I'll choose to target "Regurgitating content from the trending
influencer of the week."
This is fundamentally how humans work. Our civilization is far too
large and complex for you to be a bona fide expert in everything. And
even worse, the more time you spend dedicated to expertise in one
thing, the less well rounded you are in the ~infinity other things.
So what do you do if you cannot have authentic "taste" in everything?
You trust people. You find "influencers" that seem to succeed and have
knowledge and you trust their opinion.
In practice, the vast majority of everything we think and do are not
because of our personal expertise, but because of our un-expert belief
in other people who do these things. Taste isn't just a measure of your
personal expertise, but a measure of your ability to find and listen to
experts.
So to call this out as a negative is harmful. You need to assemble a
group of influencers not just professionally, but in every part of your
life, who themselves are experts and can lend you their taste so you
can make decisions without the paralysis of needing personal expertise
in all things. That, or you need infinite time to become an infinite
expert.
allovertheworld wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
AI still a mind virus, vibe coding hasnât taught me anything. It just
allowed me to ship microservices that I dont understand. In the past I
wouldâve had to learn it through tutorials and docs, and in the end I
would be in a better place with my new found knowledge.
But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer.
jmeaden wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
This "taste" concept has overlap with conscientiousness, a trait that
companies look for when hiring. But, it is hard to develop.
spacecadet wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
fomo is not taste.
ricardo81 wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
I wonder if unknown /s powers persuaded us to homogenise things which
ultimately suited AI training for AI to be viable.
- search engine algorithms used be be the main place of information
discovery. Before 200x it would involve not using javascript for any
text you wanted to be readable by a bot
- "best viewed in x browser" which happened in the late 90s and early
00s. If a website looked crap, use the other browser.
- social graph metadata. Have a better image, title, description for
people who see a snippet of your page on a social network
Nowadays everything is best viewed in Chrome/Safari, Firefox does have
some issues.
Google owns the majority of the search market.
Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin at least in the Western world drive most
social traffic.
I would guess the 'taste' of AI has been predetermined by these strong
factors on the web.
An alternative could be a DMOZ like directory with cohorts voting on
the value of things, maybe with the help of AI. It does seem like the
web has been 'shaped' for the past 15 years or so.
rhetocj23 wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
Lol youre giving too much credit to certain people.
People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20
years...
ricardo81 wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
What certain people do you mean?
To me it's undeniable that the web has become more centralised,
more homogenised, and certain agents find that very convenient.
even wiki(pedia|data) is very convenient for large scale training,
and most of their sources are from the 'open' web.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
Just because you like something very few people like, doesn't mean you
have better/more taste than them.
strken wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
I had taste before AI and I have taste now. I am not convinced by
arguments like "I have noticed that people who [belief that applies to
the majority of the population being discussed] also do [negative thing
that is also incredibly common]" because I have taste.
oftenwrong wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
I have been struggling with some team members who don't have taste, and
amplify that via this sort of uncritical application of AI. The issue
for one if them seems to be that they think the AI is perfect. They
think: "If it comes up with it, it must be good/correct. If people are
not using it for everything, they are wasting time doing something that
the AI could do." It's frustrating to work with people like this
because they rapidly produce bad results. I find it disrespectful to
generate a large design document in one go, probably without even
reading it, and then put it up for review, wasting the reviewers' time
picking it apart. Someone "with taste" could produce something decent
to begin with.
akoboldfrying wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
The whole concept of "taste" being important bothers me, frankly. It's
often implied that it's some objective thing, when it's really purely
subjective. I accept that it's important socially to present as someone
"with good taste", but I genuinely feel any effort in this direction is
really just a huge waste of time.
Why not just enjoy the things you enjoy? And if the things you enjoy
drift over time as you experience more and notice more patterns then
fine, but this does not mean the new enjoyable thing is in any
objective sense better then the old.
Finally, I'm completely fine with a website that looks "exactly like
every other website".
rhetocj23 wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
Is it subjective to say that Apple had more taste in producing the
Mac OS than Microsoft when they produced Windows XP?
Its not as subjective.
tropicalfruit wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
AI just lets us do the same things but faster
if you had bad taste, your taste is just badder faster
i think this is why so far there hasnt been any real moment of
innovation from AI
because its not doing anything new. same crap as before just faster
topaz0 wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
Faster is the enemy of taste
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Yeah.
I mean another way to think about it is - eating artificially
produced food.
What happens when you consume it? Your taste for good stuff is eroded
away - somehow, the artificial crap is acceptable. Most notably
because of its lower price.
The same phenonomon with food, will prevail with information.
Tewboo wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
AI has fundamentally changed the landscape, making even the most basic
tech feel like a quantum leap from the past.
Isamu wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Well thatâs true especially with generative art, mashups are
generally without regard to taste or aesthetics.
On the other hand deliberately tasteless art is a thing, itâs a bit
in the eye of the beholder.
Itâs true that many musicians cater to people who donât really like
music, they want to hear a good story with a beat. And thatâs fine.
To have taste is to have developed a point of view, itâs not a
mystical gift, itâs something you can develop over time. And not
everyone needs that.
meindnoch wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
As I get older, I'm more and more convinced that most people are just
bad persons. I'm not joking.
jayd16 wrote 23 min ago:
I think especially in the US, we've really normalized and to a degree
even celebrate and rewarded being a tactless jerk who cuts corners or
worse as long as they get what they want (usually money).
Doing hard work for better(quality, moral etc) results is very out of
fashion.
milicat wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
Our societies incentivize a bunch of bad behaviors, especially when
it comes to projecting the appearance of productivity. So I find that
unsurprising.
Fricken wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
I'm not Catholic, but I recognize the seven deadly sins as valid
moral precepts by any measure. Capitalism advocates for all of them
excepting sloth. Get to work.
CGMthrowaway wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
As someone who works with a lot of creatives, I've noticed people tend
to get really defensive and self-righteous anytime "taste" comes up, on
both sides - the haute designer-types vs. the scrappy I-can-do-it
types. So I won't be surprised if this post is controversial. But it's
insightful.
Having poor taste (or more charitably, having no taste) can be covered
up or ignored by the ability to choose from a pre-curated tasteful menu
of options. This is what happens when people who "hate shopping" pick a
mainstream clothing brand and stick with it. Or pick a car (most of
them). Or a frying pan. I've never seen an offensively ugly frying pan.
You could pick one out blindfolded and end up OK 100% of the time.
But when you put a tool like generative AI into this person's hands,
they are exposed. The palette of possibilities is open. The curation
is on you. And if someone with taste isn't in the mix, it will
ultimately become apparent when you share your creation with the world.
bbarnett wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's
tastes.
If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design
choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be
seen as horrid to our descendants.
So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social,
then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste.
And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated
options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys
social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means
success" but "this style means you have good taste".
Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing.
Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they
were "tasteful".
Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more
corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim.
It's all peer pressure, all social status.
nothrabannosir wrote 8 min ago:
Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common
misconception in conversations about taste: âsome of it is
subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and
meaninglessâ. Yet when this comes round to something youâre
good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, â¦) you
immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements.
Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective only by
those who cannot see it.
Elements of taste are subjective. Not all of it. You recognize this
yourself in your own area of skill. Everyone has one area where
suddenly they agree not every opinion has equal merit, and can
articulate why.
But move out of that subject and into one of their blind spots, and
weâre right back to âthatâs just taste, taste is subjective,
taste changes over time.â
Subjectivity is the refuge of the tasteless, who can afford to let
others do our thinking for us. GP was right on point in that
regard.
dgfitz wrote 15 min ago:
I had taste before it was cool!
> It's all peer pressure, all social status.
You nailed it here. having 'taste' is a completely subjective
concept driven mostly by the 'market-makers' of whatever industry.
Your 'taste' is determined by the judgment of others.
paulryanrogers wrote 16 min ago:
There seems to be an element of familiarity too. What was
considered 'cool' when one is a teenager becomes an anchor of
sorts. Even if society moves on, there will be a cohort who holds
on to the era which made the deepest impression on them.
ivape wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings.
Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even
know theyâve lost taste for a significant amount of time.
literalAardvark wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
Case in point: unusable grey on grey UI designed by colourblind
designers.
Maybe let someone who can see colours pick something usable? You
don't have to drag everyone to your level in the name of
accessibility.
squigz wrote 13 min ago:
In what world are colourblind designers making grey-on-grey UIs?
This is a wild statement, and this phrasing...
> You don't have to drag everyone to your level in the name of
accessibility.
is gross.
Aerroon wrote 26 min ago:
The grey UI aspect gets even worse when you use it on certain
monitors. It's not that the greys even blend together, no, they
are the same color. Looking at you, light mode discord.
MisterTea wrote 57 min ago:
As someone who is colorblind and has some vision issues I take
offense to that as I struggle with those design choices. It's
clear someone with the ability to distinguish color and clarity
designs those sites with no consideration for others.
watwut wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
Colorblind have more issues distinguishing shades including
shades of grade. These are made by people who see colors too
well.
bbarnett wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
Or people who turn the brightness up on their monitor to "make
the sun look dim in comparison".
My TV has its backlight set to '0' (OLED, and a non-real
property to set as no 'backlight', but still a metric). If I
set it to 100 my eyes bleed. My current monitor with a real
backlight has it set to 5. Yes, 5 out of 100.
I think grey on grey works, if the very walls behind you are
being bleached by the intensity of the light coming off the
monitor.
whstl wrote 14 min ago:
And those monitors aren't any monitors, they're glossy
expensive Apple monitors.
titzer wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
The most accessible design is not picking colors at all, but
letting users or user agents pick the color scheme and only
providing the content.
hypertele-Xii wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
Deferring such decisions to the end user is an ABSENCE of
design.
chiffre01 wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
Seems like most of the 'tasteless' habits in the article are also just
laziness.
philipp-gayret wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
I very often hear from developers at clients I work with that code they
(not me) generate with AI is not of enough "quality".
So I ask them what quality means. So far, I only get the most basic
feedback: it should be in X style, pass Y linter, have N% coverage,
have documentation...
At the same time, most, if not all manually written repositories do not
pass the newfound quality metrics that must apply to AI code to be
quality. I'm glad people are thinking about it at least, but let's not
pretend like we cared before when it took manual labour. I'm even more
glad we are in an age where quality standards can be fully automated.
OtherShrezzing wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
>So I ask them what quality means. So far, I only get the most basic
feedback: it should be in X style, pass Y linter, have N% coverage,
have documentation... I'm glad people are thinking about it at least,
but let's not pretend like we cared before when it took manual labour
I don't think I've ever worked anywhere that'd accept a PR which
introduced untested & undocumented features, in which the code
doesn't even pass the company's internal linter.
Those feel like very low bars for your colleagues & clients to set.
hannasanarion wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
> At the same time, most, if not all manually written repositories do
not pass the newfound quality metrics that must apply to AI code to
be quality.
That's because I trust the code that I write to have quality, because
I wrote it, which means I understand it. I may choose not to test
something because I am certain that nothing can go wrong with it.
When your repository is thousands of lines of code written by an AI
with tendencies to forget critical components, duplicate work, make
bonkers editing errors that shuffles everything around to all the
wrong places, and invent packages out of thin air, you need a system
of accountability.
k__ wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
" I only get the most basic feedback: it should be in X style, pass Y
linter, have N% coverage, have documentation"
Those are things that AIs can check by themselves.
What AIs are lacking is common sense.
They have no problem to inline everything they do which makes the
codebase unmaintainable for humans
If you tell them to refactor, you get useless abstractions, like
functions that get called in random places with no sense of
structure.
StilesCrisis wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
Most manually written repositories are hobby projects where 0% test
coverage is fine because it doesnât matter.
MontyCarloHall wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
Most people equate "having taste" to "having good taste," but this
article nicely illustrates that this is a false equivalence. "Having
taste" simply means valuing forming one's opinions autonomously. As the
author writes:
Tasteless content [manifests] as the following:
â Copying and pasting code without understanding it.
â Designing websites that look exactly like every other
companyâs website.
â Regurgitating content from the trending influencer of the week.
Whereâs the taste here? Whereâs the critical judgment,
discernment, or appreciation of aesthetic quality that separates
mediocrity from excellence?
Good taste/bad taste is a subjective function of societal consensus,
but having taste/not having taste is objective: you either think for
yourself or you don't. Furthermore, the two are uncorrelated: one can
have a very strong sense of taste but have it commonly regarded as "bad
taste." Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of
taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be
perceived as having "good taste."
jsharpe wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
> Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste
and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be
perceived as having "good taste."
Not only possible, but exactly what AI does. :)
qsort wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
Eh, kind of.
In a way, AI does not change at all the problem of having taste. There
are more books you'll ever read, movies you'll ever watch, games you'll
ever play, software you'll ever use. I remain completely unconvinced
that "dead internet/dead youtube" is a problem: you had to filter
before, you have to filter now.
What AI does, being highly weird technology, is that it destroys
heuristics. Good English used to be one. It used to take effort to
write coherent sentences, that's now gone. Code even just compiling
used to be evidence that someone at least made the effort to satisfy
the type checker. That's gone as well.
I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good
"bullshit detector" are now more important than ever.
dsign wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
>> Good English used to be one.
There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write
this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common
consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful
enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those
parameters :-) .
Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of
saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often,
that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.
I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude
in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms
your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and
uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing
(financially) is good marketing.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
<< I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good
"bullshit detector" are now more important than ever.
Yes. Oddly, for once, English majors may actually benefit, because
they may be better prepared than most to prepare prompts for the jobs
of tomorrow ( mild sarcasm, coffee didn't kick in yet ).
Loughla wrote 45 min ago:
You laugh, but I'm seen as a local/regional expert at prompt
engineering in my field because of my background in technical and
creative writing learned as an English major. People pay me to help
them understand these tools and how to use them in their work. All
I'm doing with them is logic and communication.
I have zero idea how the tools work, I'm just really good at
communicating in a clear and concise manner when I need to.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
I remain convinced that it is those who studied/have a passion for
the humanities and liberal arts that will be leading the charge of
future product innovation.
With all due respect with pure technologists, they just dont
understand people, what they need, and how to envision/communicate
the benefits.
gdulli wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
It feels like piling on to impugn the taste of the community that went
ape for NFT profile pics just a few years ago.
AndrewKemendo wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
> Thereâs been an influx of people telling others to develop taste to
use AI.
Can someone point out where this influx is happening?
The author doesnât provide any references to this trend so Iâm a
bit confused why this is a big issue, as itâs literally the first
time Iâve ever heard of it
kachapopopow wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
I read almost half of it before just stopping and clicking away since
this article is extremely surface level, but pretends not to by
referring to AI usage as 'taste'. Might have missed something in the
other half, but doubt it.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
While I am not sure I actually agree with the author, I think he
touched on something interesting. LLM is probably the first tool, where
I consciously adapted to using it. For better or worse, it can change
you and you get to pick direction of that change.
edit: As I am thinking about it more, it may be function of age. I am
picking up some additional hobbies now and my whole approach has become
much more intentional in general.
kraftman wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
did you not adapt to google search by just typing keywords you know
will get results instead of typing full sentences about what you're
searching for?
StilesCrisis wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
Agree, I think OP doesnât remember learning to ride a bicycle
either.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Fair point, but I did not attempt to integrate google search into
my processes or workflow ( shows what I know about future
predictions ), because while it was useful and did provide access
to information, it was obviously limited in a sense that it could
only take a mule like me to the water.
I don't want to delve into specifics, because it is a public forum.
But the difference between learning google syntax and llm handling
( which I suppose would include prompt engineering ) should not be
understated.
NackerHughes wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
âThe loudest voices preaching about taste and AI are often the ones
who never demonstrated taste before AI.â
Yes, and if even these people can tell that AI generated stuff is
godawful and tasteless, that tells you everything you need to know
about AI.
Aerroon wrote 19 min ago:
I don't think it's really true. If you look at something like Pixiv
you'll see it absolutely full of AI generated works and they are very
popular.
bgwalter wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
The quoted part is really amazing. The author of the article just
makes claims and clearly hasn't been exposed to any real art or music
education. I suppose to some extent he means taste in programming,
but anyone who is writing such an article does not have that either.
We can also talk about taste in articles, which seems to have
degenerated to "any pro-AI article will be voted up and defended".
raincole wrote 22 min ago:
I'm not sure if this counts as a pro-AI article, but I agree. It's
void of substance.
The most ironic part:
> When someone preaches about AI taste, ask them to show you their
work from before AI. If they canât demonstrate taste in their
pre-AI work, theyâre not qualified to lecture you about it now.
Talking about the lack of self-awareness...
AnimalMuppet wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
AI stuff is tasteless in a different sense: It's like food that has
no flavor. It "lacks salt" in some non-literal sense.
And I think that is not all that surprising, because much of what it
was trained on was corporate-speak, which has the same problem.
paulpauper wrote 27 min ago:
OTOH I read the success rate is only 50-50 at detecting it. AI text
does leave some clues, like those infamous em dashes, but those can
be patched with some simple edits. AI images are more obvious
because many are intentionally overwrought.
Aerroon wrote 21 min ago:
It depends on what the AI is trying to do. If you write a novel
and ask the AI to improve the prose it becomes very obvious if
you've dealt with AI prose before.
Fricken wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
I would argue the opposite, most of the AI slop is gaudy and
overwrought, the result of too much flavour carelessly applied.
edu wrote 15 min ago:
I agree. To me it feels like food with too many additives, like
fast food.
paulpauper wrote 26 min ago:
airplane meme: that is only what you notice
t0lo wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
I'm not a fan of this clickbaity trend where the author pretends
everyone else is as insufferably boring as they are in order to have an
argument.
add-sub-mul-div wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
I read it again but I can't figure out what you mean here.
freejazz wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
One thing to lack taste, but awareness? woof.
BolexNOLA wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
Just like with Youtubers, people will stop these practices when
people stop clicking on them.
Itâs very easy for us to tell people to just not do that stuff, but
I can tell you from my podcast production days that these annoying
trends are often the difference between a 20% rise and a 20% drop in
audience. No different than a clever book title turning heads.
To be clear, I find most of these trends incredibly obnoxious and I
hated indulging them.
thenanyu wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
Yeah itâs a lot of projection.
btbuildem wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
Having taste is one thing, having the standards to hold yourself to a
certain level of quality, that's another thing altogether.
Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet
it underpins all of our professional efforts.
The paradox is baked in, and some of us do our best to navigate it.
Aerroon wrote 24 min ago:
>Having taste is one thing, having the standards to hold yourself to
a certain level of quality, that's another thing altogether.
This is a mixup that the author of the article makes as well:
>Copying and pasting code without understanding it.
>Sending resumes and emails that arenât proofread and edited.
>Asking others to review code without giving it a self review.
>Noticing a quality issue and failing to document or fix it.
These are not issues of taste.
CGMthrowaway wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
OK, Banksy.
boringg wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
Pretty good comment. It's a spectrum right? So if you went all in
on profits you are likely all in on tastelessness. If you profit a
small amount your probably only shedding a bit of your taste.
However I would wager the argument many people have is that they view
their professional life as not utilizing their taste and that is
reserved for decisions in their private lives (for those who still
keep the two relatively distinct). For those who have truly merged
professional and personal and gone all in profit -- original point
probably stands. Thats pretty tasteless!
9rx wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do
Why's that? Profit, of course, is just the measure of how much trade
is undelivered.
The old: I give you my corn to feed your chickens, and at some point
in the future you will give me chickens in return once they are fed
and grown. The amount of undelivered chickens are my profit. But
eventually you will provide the chickens as promised, theoretically.
Fair trade doesn't seem tasteless.
And if I forever hold on to that profit and never expect you to give
me the chickens in the future as you originally promised, then I
literally gave you the corn for free. How could it be tasteless to
help someone out by giving them something for free?
Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory
capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that
becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular
loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional
efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all
the insane laws that surround it.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
Hang on, it depends on the intent.
Should an entity strive to be profitable? of course. How else will it
be self sustaining?
The problem arises when entities maximize for profit with no
non-financial values that underpin their decision making.
philipallstar wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do,
yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
This needs some justification. Profits are what you get when you can
do something for less than you charge for it, and be competitive. To
not be good enough to make profit you need to be able to force money
out of people e.g. with taxes.
mattgreenrocks wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do,
yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
Absolutely not. Profit simply means other people find it valuable
enough to compensate you to use whatever youâve made.
Art is rarely profitable for its own sake, but that doesnât mean
everything that is profitable is intrinsically devoid of taste.
yoyohello13 wrote 1 min ago:
A lot of open source developer don't get paid for their work, but
their stuff is often used by everyone. There has to be a 'will to
make it profitable'.
rightbyte wrote 7 min ago:
> Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to
compensate you to use whatever youâve made.
In the spherical cow in vacuum market maybe. In practice there is
rent seeking, profiteering, corruption, nepotism, etc ...
kingkongjaffa wrote 19 min ago:
Taste in this context is more referring to design rather than art
though.
apwell23 wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
yes bedrotting watching reels all day is a valuable product. So is
heroine. So eating junk food.
Great logic.
fssys wrote 1 hour 25 min ago:
in order for anything to become truly profitable its uniqueness
must be quantified and integrated into existing power structures,
it must be expressly oriented towards fulfilling the needs/desires
of the largest amount of people for the least amount of
expenditure. Profitability IS intrinsically distasteful. Market
forces, online ecosystems etc, quickly strip away any idiosyncratic
features present in a viral trend, they aggressively select for
sticking power, everything tends toward uniformity. This is closely
linked with the process of reification.
banannaise wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
Rephrased: Any artistic direction done in the interest of creating
or increasing profits is overwhelmingly likely to be tasteless.
I don't think that's particularly controversial. Profitability
doesn't imply tastelessness, but profit motive certainly does.
bluGill wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
I would argue that if you can't make a profit you have shown you
are tasteless. If other people don't enjoy it enough to pay you,
that says a lot about how out of step you are.
dingaling wrote 4 min ago:
Profit is surplus revenue, which means money that people paid
you but which you didn't spend on improving your product,
paying your staff better etc.
That's why making profit is sometimes seen as greedy, because
it's money that could have been reinvested in the product.
Amazon in its early expansion phase never made a profit,
because every cent was reinvested. And they didn't need to pay
a cent of tax for that reason.
muststopmyths wrote 37 min ago:
aren't you then equating taste with popularity ?
not sure if that's a popular opinion. In which case it would be
tasteless.
bluGill wrote 30 min ago:
There is no objective measure of taste. Popularity says that
at least a lot of other people agree there is taste here.
saubeidl wrote 59 min ago:
A true artist is ahead of the tastes of the common rabble.
watwut wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
The "only thing that matters are money" ideology at its peak.
bluGill wrote 8 min ago:
Money isn't all that matters but it is one of the few
objective signs we have.
i80and wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
This would make a number of great artists of history
"tasteless".
bluGill wrote 28 min ago:
A would agree with that for a number of well known artists
often called great.
cwnyth wrote 17 min ago:
If I were to bet on whether the critical consensus or some
random person on HN had no taste, I would certainly bet on
the latter. This post reeks of "Am I wrong? No! It is the
artists, critics, collectors, and community who are wrong!"
bluGill wrote 14 min ago:
There is no objective measure here. What i call good and
bad is right for me and doesn't apply to anyone else-
wait - I though I was arguing for consensus here and
everyone else was calling me wrong
yifanl wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
Making profit with art and making art for profit are
tangentially related topics at best.
StilesCrisis wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
Maybe by the textbook definition, sure.
Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet itâs the
focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage
capitalism.
sdsd wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
>Welcome to late-stage capitalism
That phrase has always seemed a bit wishful to me, like when
Christians describe our era as the end times or when crypto
people say "it's still early days".
FuriouslyAdrift wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
Advertising and public relations has always been applied
psychology. The contemporary interation was originally developed
by Freuds nephew (Edward Bernays). [1] I highly recommend The
Century of the Self for a great documentary on the subject.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
tpoacher wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Only for modern definitions of advertising, mind you, which are
all about dark patterns and invasive marketing, rather than
putting a descrption of your product out there that can be
searched by interested parties looking to buy a product like
yours.
There were times were advertising was useful and desirable, e.g.
Small Ads pages.
There was also a time when ads were a single unintrusive
scrolling line, curated by the website owner so as to be relevant
to their audience. Those were fine.
grafmax wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
And yet itâs the profit motive that has driven the shift to
widespread usage of dark patterns and invasive marketing.
literalAardvark wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
Many people find advertising valuable.
It's tracking, micro targeting, retargeting, and trying to sell
me a fridge that I literally just bought while I'm off reading
about sailboats that's intrusive.
Advertise shoes, cleats, sails, and charters in the Bahamas while
I'm doing that, not singles near me and bicycles because I posted
in a Facebook group.
tonyedgecombe wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
>Many people find advertising valuable.
Presumably the advertisers do.
phyzix5761 wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
How do consumers discover new products and services if not
through advertising? A product on a shelf at a store is also a
form of advertising proven by how much money is spent on
packaging. Word of mouth is also one of the most effective forms
of advertising.
esseph wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
> How do consumers discover new products
By looking them up when they need them
lazide wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
Sometimes sure, but more often than not they ârealizeâ
they need x thing because recently they were told they need x
thing. Itâs a big oroborous.
esseph wrote 48 min ago:
TBF trying to sell me on anything with a commercial, print
advertisement, video ad, cold call, or anything else is an
exercise in frustration.
kraftman wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
I think this really underpins the difference between the people that
say AI is useless and those that say it's enhanced many aspects of
their day to day lives.
rhetocj23 wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
Yes. The people who had low standards in the first place find it
transformative.
If you have high standards, its regurgitating info in an ill
disciplined fashion. Because its input isn't really of the highest
standard upon which the model is trained on.
kraftman wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
It regurgitates info in a way that is very specific to what and how
you requested it. If you ask it a question already having an
estimate of how accurate its answers will be, you can get a lot of
value from it.
rhetocj23 wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
Nope, Ive tested its understanding on things like corporate
finance which I know very deeply.
It touches surface level stuff - which makes sense, most stuff on
the internet is surface level. Good enough to pass an exam (since
exams are essentially memorisation and regurigation of that
nowadays) but not enough depth of understanding to be able to
apply it in a wide range of contexts.
The application is where all the value is in the real world.
kraftman wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
Surface level is where you can find the most day to day value.
Just today I've used it to get advice about putting up a
treehouse, rough price ranges and differences between fridges,
common fridge widths, adding second accounts to microG, command
flags to identify slow tests, poe support for my wifi router,
differences in laser measurement devices, french translation,
medication storage, different types of olive, and drafting 3
emails in another language. All of this would have taken me way
longer without these tools, I'm confident it gave good results
because I know that the information exists and is common.
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