Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

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 :)

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?

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.

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 curve of mastery.

I think there's a saying that you learn decades of music so that you can forget it and just play - fairly similar things here

You learn things to the point of mastery. Mastery proves all the ways things won't work, leaving you with what will.

And often what will work are the fundamentals.

I deliberately avoided cultivating a taste in coffee and wine after having acquired a taste for good whisky. For exactly the same reason you mention: I knew my utility from drinking coffee/wine would stay constant, but the time and money cost of acquiring them would significantly increase.

On the other hand, a part of becoming an expert in some field should be getting to be _realistic_. Learn not to deceive yourself.

I can give you an example from my experience. I got annoyed by my dull knives, so at first I went and bought really expensive knives, the ones made of hardened high-carbon steel that start rusting if you look at them dirtily. And I spent hours reading reviews before buying them. That's probably the "most expensive cup of coffee" stage.

Then I stumbled upon a Youtube channel that explained how to sharpen knives properly. So I bought $70 worth of diamond sharpening stones and re-sharpened my old IKEA knives. And they started working almost as well as my set of ultra-expensive knives, but they are far more practical. The expensive knife set is now a display piece in my kitchen.

Another revelation for me was that past a certain point, there's really not that much difference in the quality of sushi. It's just rice and sliced fish. Sure, there are individual variations between chefs in rice-to-fish ratio, maybe some special soy sauce here and there, but these are all just matters of personal taste. So I now just enjoy sushi for its taste. And instead of a looking for reservations in expensive restaurants, I just drop by my local sushi place and just ask the chef to add a bit more wasabi to the rice.

I imagine your friend is talking about specific coffee preparations like "espresso" because, for example, there are hundreds of years of traditional Arabic coffee that continue to be appreciated for generations. Your friend reminds me of this movie scene in Mulholland Drive[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVI-Jew-iHo

There must have been something that drove him to coffee expert level.

For me, I get dissatisfied and then reach for something nicer and nicer until I hit a limit. I'm just very skeptical he'd still love cheap instant coffee. He was climbing a sort of dopamine ladder. Then he ran out of rungs to climb. Now he has to move to a new thing. Life is almost nothing but impermanence and dissatisfaction. Its a little odd to think you could somehow beat the system. The person who finishes the dopamine ladder would never have been happy staying at the most bottom rung, which was disintegrating for them hence pushing them along to the highest rung. Short of becoming a very serious practitioner in things like meditation and other monastic-type things to fight these urges, this is just a really tough thing to get away from.

Now job, new book, new video game, new movie, new friend, etc. We're almost always doing this in some way.

Maybe those examples are things you don't have good discernment with. For me, I can instantly tell when I have quality headphone speakers. I can hear a fuller range of music than cheap ones. Its almost always obvious and cheap ones are almost always annoying. I have yet to go deeper into audiophone territory and I might never, but I have affordable headphones with really nice speakers inside and I wont go any less quality than this. So maybe for you, you can't tell or don't value it, but there are probably other things you do focus on.

If your friend keeps mastering coffee he'll learn to appreciate what Folgers or Starbucks is doing again. He'll also learn to suggest the coffee that will make someone happiest, or help them the most, in a wider variety of situations. It's nice to retain youthful oblivious in some categories, though. We can't learn everything anyway. It's often enough just to know how to avoid expensive mistakes.

For coffee, I get beans from a local roaster, like $14 per pound nowadays. I like the taste and it is nice to support someone local. Then I put it through a ~$200 Flair espresso machine. It is a manual press, so it has become a fun project/ritual. Plus, Americano is or espresso tastes better than coffee (and IMO mine is better than the coffee shop… a lot cheaper at this point I guess, too).

I never enjoyed shitty coffee. I never enjoyed shitty chocolate or chocolate flavored things like cakes.

Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate.

Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things.

Same even more so for chocolate. 99% of chocolate products you come into contact with are garbage. Actual chocolate is like an entirely different product. It's not a better version of the usual thing. I ate it and thought "Oh. Ok THIS must be why chocolate ever became this huge thing in the first place. Hundreds of years ago before all the industrial process and market forces produced all the "chocolate" I ever tasted in my life, what they had was this, actual chocolate. Of course they loved it."

To restate the point, I was never happy with the regular version in the first place. I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. Turns out I love them both.

And it's possible to continue to enjoy the results of having discovered and grown some taste in some area indefinitely without diminishing returns or anything like that. I'm not much of a sweets person so I still don't buy a lot of chocolate or chocolate things like cookies etc, but we have a Trade subscription and get a new and different bag from some random indipendant roaster every 2 or 3 weeks and it's great. I don't love every single bag but I at least find them all interesting and I do love the overall high level of quality basically all the time. I'm not now overall poorer for having discovered good coffee. Life is better. And what else is there?

There are certainly diminishing returns but good coffee is objectively better than some pre ground supermarket stuff. Part of it is recognizing what's a good value more than what's the best and most expensive.

I too have this fear sometimes, and for example never want to learn anything about wine, but it's not always the case.

A friend and I have bonded over appreciating the "shit" things, like white bread toast and hotel coffee and I think that's quite a good habit to instill. I love coffee and will hunt out the best spots in any city for a single-origin V60 on ice, but I am equally content in a diner when the only option is literally just "coffee".

Also studying art & practicing photography has made the world a much more beautiful place. Some of my best pictures have been taken in places that are usually considered unphotogenic.

To quote Reggie Watts:

Listen, invest two hundred dollars in a pair of good headphones Take care of ′em, put 'em in your ears, listen to the music Listen to how it′s supposed to be recorded You're missing, I swear to God, forty to fifty percent Of the music that's in there in the first place So if you wanna go back and listen to The shit that you thought you liked You might even like it more, motherf*er

This did inspire me to get better headphones and I have no regrets! I think some parts of the aversion to getting too fancy come from the reasonable ideas of: not wanting to lower your floor, avoiding the hedonic treadmill, and not wanting to increase your burn. This kind of does make sense for coffee: a lot of coffees you get will be out of your control and increasing the fanciness of your coffee is an ongoing expense. For headphones though they're all moot. I can't remember the last time I wore someone else's headphones, and it's just a pretty small once off payment (these have lasted me 5 years). I would strongly recommend upgrading in this department.

As for TVs, I rewatched Alien on my friend's new LG OLED and it was absolutely stunning. I am looking forward to getting a new place and having a nice set up like that. Again just a once off thing.

And just for balance, my computer monitor which I use all the time has an annoying flickering issue that I have just been putting up with for a long time.

I am in the 20$ dollars headphones and 200$ TV bucket too. But for different reasons.

The point of the video/movie/song etc. is the content not the fidelity, there is a level of fidelity that allows 99 per cent of the enjoyment of the content. That level of fidelity typically costs 20$ for headphones and 200$ for tvs.

1080p and mp3s are good enough. The point is to see what's happening on the screen and to hear without noise.

I recently tried to play a bit of tennis, which I've already stopped. My friend was appalled when I proudly announced that my tennis racket costed $15. "But we are in tech!" he cried. But for a couple of games, I know I won't be able to tell the difference between a $15 one and a $150 one (I know because I've played tennis in the past).

And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I don't know the name for this, but the fact that I avoided wasting $150 and only "wasted" $15 into something I knew might be temporary also feels very satisfying.

I'll offer a counter-anecdote and suggest this advice isn't necessarily ironclad. I've used the same pair of $20 headphones for decades (replacing them with the same model when they die), or else laptop/TV speakers. A couple of years ago I got $200 headphones included with a new phone purchase. The $200 headphones were amazing. I got to listen to all of my favorite music with a new perspective. But I still use the $20 ones on a daily basis because the $200 ones hurt my ears with prolonged usage. The $20 ones are fine. The nice ones didn't diminish my enjoyment of them at all. And every now and then I break out the $200 ones for a treat.

Just don't become a snob. I think people tie their identity to the expensive junk they purchase and develop a sense of ego around it, of being better than the peasants, and that's why they become unable to enjoy the "lesser" experience.

I think you have to “aestheticize” the cheap stuff in a way that doesn’t add value purely on price. In other words, you aren’t just picking the absolute best quality of a thing, you’re picking it for some specific aesthetic reason that puts it above the more expensive one.

To put that into more concrete terms: I really like dark roast black coffee. There’s something about the bitterness and presentation that reminds me of coffee’s history, the variety of people drinking it, etc. and thus it is more appealing to me than the “high quality” light roasts with subtle flavors available in the expensive cafes.

Another example are diners. If you become such a gourmand that you only eat at Michelin restaurants and disparage anywhere “normal”, I think you miss out on the real culture and quality of diner food, which is a unique phenomenon.

Hopefully that made sense.

You're describing the hedonic treadmill. But I think you are missing something.

The thing is it does feel good to fix things and upgrade. The treadmill just says your baseline reverts back to where it was. So yeah you're just as happy with the expensive TV as you were with the shitty one, but it did feel good to upgrade, if only for a little while.

So the key is to introduce tiny upgrades and often. If you blow your budget for the whole year on a TV then you only get to be happier once. If you tinker and introduce tiny, sustainable upgrades you can be happier every day.

The sustainable part is important. You can only afford something if you can buy it twice. Don't ever take out a loan to buy anything (apart from a house).

> 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.

Thank you for sharing this observation. It resonated with me in a surprising way. Finding something that's "good enough" is such a blessing.

I think that's mostly true above a certain threshold, but where that threshold lies, is probably different for different people.

The <1$ earphones you get on an airplane sound terrible. I can understand what the actors in movies are saying but that's about it. I can't hear or experience the music.

The $20 headphones my kids have are a good step up. For me headphones/speakers in the $100 range make me _feel_ more when listening to music. But I don't need to go more expensive. That's where my threshold is for music.

Not to criticize your friend, but it isn't as if things following his path is sn inevitable law of nature.

Coincidentally I went from being an Audio consumer to a person that developes audio hard- and software, and mixes music in my spare time and deals with live sound in acoustically challenging rooms in my work (to keep things short, I do/did even more).

While I certainly spent some money on audio equipment, I can't say that you need infinitly expensive stuff to enjoy it. For me it went exactly the opposite way. Where as a teenager I thought you need all that expensive stuff to make and listen to music on a high level, I now know what matters and what doesn't.

There is a point beyond which things don't matter factually, because they are beyond the limits of human perception. Audiophiles then trick themselves into hearing the atoms that make up the wire, when every measurement doesn't show anything.

One of my mics I prefer most on floor drums is a modified Pyle Karaoke mic I got from Amazon for 30 bucks and added a cheap transformer into. My headphones are maybe 200 bucks (and half of that was paid for reliability, not for sound quality). I got a second pair for closer to 1200 bicks, but thst is just for retouche work where I need to hear the faintest background noises, I actually prefer the sound of the cheaper ones.

I am still amazed by most recordings I was amazed by when I started on my journey. In fact more so now.

We don't need to inevitably turn everything into a stage to show off our own mental superiority. Especially in the audiophile realm these people claim to hear things that they wouldn't be able to pick out reliably in a properly conducted double-randomized blind test. And everything else is basically worthless since you then just measure a persons ability to fool themselves.

Recently my assistant who just started out in the field came for advice. She wanted to spend some money on a mic and audio interface. And I recommended her one for a quarter of the price she planned on spending since it basically had the same measurements and better software support. As for mics I told her to test my mics with that interface and she should use that test to figure out what she wants. Originally she wanted to spend good money on getting an expensive studio mic, in the test my old dynamic Sennheiser MD21 that I got from ebay won. She got the same for cheap from there as well.

Don't get me wrong, I will be the first to hear bad acoustics, missaligned speakers, a dying loudspeaker suspension, a overdriven amplification system, a missed buffer deadline, a bad mix, a bad recording, phase issues, etc. It is my job to notice. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the music running over such a system as much as I did before I knew all that. In fact I might even enjoy it more.

What I love about learning a topic thoroughly is that I can then pick apart the "expert wisdom" into what actually matters. That usually results in me getting better but very pragmatic results.

Coffee is a great example, I worked through the whole stack, tried everything I had access to until eventually I weeded out what matters most to me.

Good beans, good milk, and just enough prep. I tried no prep, all the prep, and then just enough prep. Good beans not perfect beans. Good milk but whatever is available.

I do the same with everything, cars, bicycles, sim racing equipment, computers, software etc.

Yeah, that's a horrible way to enjoy life. By your reasoning, you should subsist on protein blocks and watch paint dry for entertainment. By lowering the bar to the absolute lowest threshold, you'll classify everything as enjoyable.

The pareto principle holds strong. Just put 20% of the effort in and you reap 80% of the results.

It changes. Previously, I wouldn’t watch h264 videos that had wrong encoding settings (bad deblock, 2pass, bad crf). Now I don’t really care.

When I cared, I cared about movies as well. It’s just the energy of caring. Now I don’t find movies interesting at all.

A fun thing to do is remember why you liked the low end, for me and coffee it was instant coffee with too much sugar, in a big mug, on a building site. It hits totally different to a fancy coffee. I can still drink that now and enjoy it as it is associated with happy memories (and hot sweet coffee is great).

Another is to look at what the low end are trying to do, with wine it is generally appeal to as many people as possible, buying things like the supermarkets own brand of a variety of you like is a good way to get a great bottle.

If you can’t appreciate why the simple / cheap stuff is loved by the masses I wouldn’t think anyone is a true expert in their field. Feels like a well worn path for chefs.

I think there's an unfinished journey whenever I hear such a story. Like someone who learns just enough about music that they "feel like" Bach is better than Taylor Swift, but then never move to the other side to use their newly acquired competence to understand what's nice about Taylor Swift's music as well.

E.g. a great designer will be able to design houses in very different styles, because they can understand what gives each of those styles its own specific beauty.

There's a lot to say about this, but I think your coffee friend never passed the snob-like point, which is a point I think most people reach when they learn just enough about something and that makes them feel superior. But if you keep going, then you start to understand what makes Italian coffee great as well, for example.

Wrt to coffee, I speak from experience, after going through very expensive equipment, I have learned to enjoy very different styles of roasts, coffees, etc. I still have preferences, I'm just far less judgmental.

Applies to most of my hobbies, I've seen this trajectory very often.

I think that's a shame - I take a different approach that means the article resonates with me a lot more.

It's about learning enough to be able to appreciate something beyond surface level. You struck a chord with coffee and headphones - yes, I've gone deep on both, but rather than suck the enjoyment out of cheaper options it's given me an appreciation across the segment. I can now buy a cheap coffee and make it taste excellent - I can appreciate a well tuned headphone regardless of cost or lack of technicalities.

When headphones reach $2k+ and coffee starts costing $50 for 100g, rather than get universally better they tend to get opinionated - a different flavor of weird as a friend once said.

So I would suggest that it's fine to go deep on something, but make sure you're doing it to get to a deeper true/understanding.

novice -> informed -> asshole

I strive to be at the informed part of the spectrum.

Wine example:

- Novice: "I'd like any red wine" -> waiter brings you something you don't like

- Informed: "I'd like a red wine that is dry, not st" -> waiter brings you something you are quite likely to like

- Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences

*edit formatting

There's some music that simply can't be enjoyed as intended without a proper system. Like early Swans, for example.

I've used the "Harbor Freight" principle for years when purchasing tools for either professional or personal use. I'll buy something I need at a discount store like Harbor Freight and use it for as many jobs as it lasts. If it breaks and I still need it, I'll upgrade to a better version. If it doesn't break then all the better.

The logical fallacy here is that the most expensive thing is the best, which can be the case sometimes but not all that often in my experience.

I don't need any more hobbies. I already have too little time.

Also, shitty coffee ensures I don't drink even more. I failed with beer, so I am probably what some call a connaisseur. I learned a bit about whiskey, and once every 3 years I buy one I like, but I don't need an expensive hobby.

I used to build my own computers. Learned a lot, was fun. Now I exclusively use hand-me-downs. Understanding how I can get the same (perhaps more!) done within a smaller envelop is kind of it's own hobby.

I have a TV with a row of dead pixels. I don't need to watch even more.

The money saved this way is just a happy by product.

The lesson is to learn enough from first principles and then optimise pragmatically for fun and comfort, and only go really nerdy/taste-oriented on a few things at a time.

I use secondhand laptops/phones/tablets, plain wired airbuds insead of airpods etc., because I know what good enough is, for the purposes I have in mind. (I also know that most of the music industry still practises what Phil Spector preached about bad radios.)

I know a tiny bit about coffee and I like it, but I optimise for pragmatic fun. I know enough to know that the grind makes most of the difference, but a cheap contemporary stainless steel burr hand grinder makes really enough of that difference. I know enough to know that the Aeropress is not a toy, that the flow control cap accessory is helpful, a simple process, and I know enough not to over-optimise that process because it won't be fun. I do have a scale; I use it only if I feel the process can't be eyeballed and guesstimated.

I own a 3D printer: I bought the cheapest properly viable, just-about-big enough model. Here I am going much more deeply into the nerding, but in phases; I've owned it three years and I am only now doing the Klipper upgrade (from Marlin/Octoprint). I know I need a bigger printer but I also know this smaller printer will teach me things I need to know. The most important thing is not to optimise the printer: it is to learn CAD properly to express my ideas.

In my day job, I know enough to reduce my code dependencies but not to roll all of them myself. I know enough to know that in my specific job, spending my time optimising Docker containers is unlikely to provide any meaningful reward over roughly configuring more complete VMs, etc.; I know enough to know that AI is a rabbit-hole that other people can go down and I am probably not missing out by not adopting early.

Is any of the above wrong or misguided? I am sure some is. Not enough to matter though: I'm over fifty and in the grand scheme of things I am going to die soon.

I can't remember where I read this, but I read a very similar sentiment: "If you can only afford $2 pizza on a regular basis, never buy a $20 pizza, because it will just ruin the $2 pizza for you."

Another aspect of this which doesn't depend on price, is when I get attached to some regional variety, and then I move. That's always a bit painful.

Or sometimes they just stop making it. Or they change the formulation!

Attachment is the root of suffering...

Oh dear. Years ago I had the ‘misfortune’ to taste some of the greatest first and second growth Bordeaux wines—the 1945s, Margeaux, Lafite, etc. Now my palate lies in ruins, ordinary wine is essentially undrinkable, and even good wine only draws comparisons with those Greats, enjoyment for their own sake is thus reduced or lost.

To make matters worse, those great Bordeaux wines and Burgundy's Grand crus such as Romanée-Conti, Grands Échezeaux etc. have in resent years reached truly dizzying heights, only multimillionaires and lottery winners can now afford to drink them. Unless one’s in either of those categories, paying a $1,000, $10,000 and upward per bottle is even an outrageous notion to contemplate.

Lesson: getting spoiled on the very best—especially early on—depreciates one’s appreciation for not only the mundane but also things that by most other criteria are deemed very good.

Same. This is a surprisingly simple recipe for a happy life and helps prevent lifestyle inflation. It reminds me of PG's "Keep your identify small" (https://paulgraham.com/identity.html).

I don’t know if it’s a counterpoint or not, but I both know and appreciate a lot about coffee and enjoy instant or—especially—that black tarry sludge at the bottom of the gas station carafe, the sort that’s getting ever harder to find. One doesn’t diminish the other, they’re different things.

Similarly consider the people who build world-class systems in their day jobs, yet spend their weekends running Doom on potatoes or battling janky bots to the death.

Cultivating taste doesn’t have to be the same thing as developing snobbery or becoming jaded.

It sounds to me you're describing the feeling of being content, rather than having the least taste.

I prefer to look at things that way rather than not having taste. Some people really enjoy $600 headphones, while others don't really care.

I think everyone has some "taste" though, you don't really realize it until you compare experiences.

For me personally, having taste doesn't ruin my experience for anything - it just add more to things. And I still like the things I like, even if there is "less".

Using more expensive headphones and hearing instruments I've never heard before makes it fun and using $20 headphones is still fun because I'm still listening to music I like.

How your friend enjoys coffee does not predict how you'll enjoy music? Getting wider ranges of experiences often is fun and worthwhile. Avoiding that to save a couple hundred bucks doesn't seem rational.

tldr ignorance is bliss

No shade! I have found the exact same thing.

it's stochastic, our tastes grow as we do, a stale mars bar is sufficient for a child, where a small square of 80+% dark single origin might be the evolution of that taste over thirty more years.

I was raised a snob by chefs, my snobbery extends to all areas of my life in the hope that I might find reason enough to stay.

> 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.

It's the same argument as "why do you spend so much time and money on food, it's going to become shit anyway".

No, just no. You can close your eyes, chant lalala with plugged ears and inhale all sorts of copium, but listening uncompressed music and movies on expensive equipment is a completely different experience, period. You can't say that you enjoy it as much as they do, because you are you and they are they.

Here's a handy recipe for your friend: go to a blind tasting. This way, they will probably find out that they really can't tell a $15 coffee from a $150, or a $500 machine from a $ 5,000 one.

Works like a charm with wine: I know a lot about it, can maintain a conversation for hours, but will never buy anything above $50/bottle except for a gift.

Yup. A few years a go a friend of mine made me notice my cheap third-hand thinkpad t440 had screen tearing issues i had never noticed. I couldn't unsee them after that.

It sounds like you're choosing to live in ignorance and lead a mediocre life. That's your choice to make but to me that seems sad. Expanding experiences beyond mediocrity is what makes life interesting.

You don't need to have full knowledge or the best, most expensive thing to rise above. The 80/20 rule applies.

You can spend thousands on coffee equipment and hundreds of hours in understanding it. Or you can spend $15 on a pour over cone, $15 on a bag of beans, and $20 on a hand grinder to get 80% of the way there. The coffee you make with this minor investment will be night and day better than the swill you make with cheap grocery store beans and a cheap auto drip brewer.

Strive to be better than average rather than the best.

The Allegory of the Cave

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.

I wonder what they are doing now because specialty coffee was just starting to get traction 15 years ago, the scene is still evolving now.

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.

Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or interest in deep understanding.

As a concrete example I just reviewed a PR for a feature that someone wanted to add to a flask app. It had a ton of terraform code, an aws api gateway, a lambda, etc. then on the flask app frontend they added a page with a call to this new API. I asked why they didn’t just add a route to the flask app. Blank stare response.

Mostly unrelated, but XKCD is relevant here I think [0]. Taste doesn't just require a broad perspective; a broad view of a category produces taste.

[0] https://xkcd.com/915/

Exactly. The best writers all have one thing in common: they’re voracious readers.

> When anyone can vibe code, it is the ones with "good taste" in the design of systems that will thrive. Anyone can use an agent and code fast; few will be able to do it fast and well and build systems that do not eventually collapse under the weight of their own tangled mess.

This.

I absolutely agree.

If you look at my github, you might think I don't program all that much.

If you look at my ~/Code folder on my PC, you might think I program too much.

Tinkering with fun little projects has made me a better programmer and understand my language (Ruby) much 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.

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 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 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 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.

> Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.

Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.

Spot on! The real difference between having great taste and just thinking you do lies in understanding the user's needs deeply. Good design isn’t just about looking pretty; it’s about nailing that value. And yeah, it’s no walk in the park!

> Coding for others is not art.

It absolutely is, and I think it's what separates good from bad and junior from senior devs.

Most devs can produce an artifact that more or less works. But one that has an internal consistency others can understand and extend, one which accurately captures the problem as it exists and ways it will likely change, is much more of an art form.

A big part of that is knowing which situations are worth making a stand. Every you write code or leave feedback, your doing it for your team current and future.

> For example disassembling a microwave

Getting this wrong will not be a learning experience, because it will kill you. This is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and should only be done by people who already know what they're doing.

That's not just a tangential tidbit -- you don't learn well when you are completely out of your depth. You learn well when you are right at the edge of your ability and understanding. That involves risk of failure, but the failure isn't the important part, operating on the boundary is.

the entire page has horizontal lines washed over it

I imagine the intent is to simulate the look of an old CRT monitor

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

Not gonna lie, but I liked the vibe, maybe that's what author meant by different tastes :p

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 am the author! apologies, i will be adding a toggle to disable the scanline effect

Yeah I'm not finding it compelling to listen to someone's ideas about "taste" when they think that font is tasty.

the real tinkerers skim through that shit in text-based browsers - using their choice of a font and a color theme.

I adore the font and the vibe. Maybe age or something but I love it.

This has sometimes been my problem.

Most notably, for example, instead of having fun playing video games, I spent time benchmarking my hardware, making charts and graphs comparing the different hardware I owned. (There's a place for that, but I was no Anandtech!) And then I'd buy a new video card, run benchmarks for a week, and then forget to play any games.

I also spent a LOT of time making a French cleat wall in my workshop. And building a workbench. And making a mobile table for my miter saw. The tools all saw more use making the workshop than they did building the things.

On the other hand... when my spouse said "could you build a bed frame for our mastiff?" I made a beautiful, very functional, perfectly fitted bed frame with a latching gate over the course of a few hours, assembled and in use. I was ready. I had tinkered so much I was pretty good at the final pursuit. (For deeper context for those that care, we would totally let our mastiff sleep in our bed, but she kicks while she dreams. Without the fencing / gate on her personal Twin XL bed, she would just hop in the bed as soon as we fell asleep, and we'd wake up to her sitting on us or kicking us. She happily goes into her personal bed space at night when she's ready to move from sleeping somewhere else to sleeping in her bed for the night.)

For many things, tinkering is a hobby. Obsidian note keeping strategy is another one I see a lot. No thanks. I'll just brain dump into files in a flat directory and use search if I ever need to. Do whatever works for you but I'm not going to take notes in a way where my ability to take notes requires maintenance.

> 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.

And from an accessibility standpoint, default fonts and colors are very safe as well. They tend to be easier to see and process.

Or in this case, tinkering with fonts simply reduces legibility.

^^^ 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

I still tinker as I get older, except instead of fonts I'm buying a dual monitor setup with a 6-foot standing desk.

I wish I could tinker with the font on this website. It flickers as it scrolls and does my head in!

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.

My life hack for switching fonts - buy a Berkeley Mono license so I cannot possibly use any other font bc I’d be wasting money. Nice font too.

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.

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)

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

If you dislike the terminal or aren’t comfortable there, you should try using the vim keybinds for VSCode. They’ll get you most of the way there, and the rest is a lot of customization to get things how you like. The vim motions are the best part! They take a while to get used to, but they’re incredibly convenient.

Most of the things I do with Neovim I could probably also do with VS Code (not sure about autocommands and macros though, I haven't used Code in years). I don't use a mouse much, I have a very keyboard-centric workflow. I was a Code user for years, but did most everything else in the terminal. I figured I would give it a try and I ended up just liking it. I like to tinker. I like to tweak my configuration. I like how I can set autocommands for things, pipe text into Vim and manipulate it, or record a quick macro for some repetitive task. I like that there are "Vim keymap" plugins for things like Firefox, so learning basic Vim keys has helped me outside of Vim. I like that I keep discovering new things Vim can do (and then promptly forgetting them most of the time, but still). I also like to spend 2 hours writing something to automate something that saves me two seconds.

It's absolutely not for everyone, though it looks like some of the pre-built configs (NvChad, LaZyVim, etc.) are decent enough of the box now that you don't need to go on the endless-customization journey if you don't want to. To me though, that's the appeal: tinkering, tweaking, refining. Generally when people ask if they should use Vim, I tell them probably not but try it for a few weeks and see if it clicks in your brain. I had a great VSCode setup, everything worked great, I was productive, but something about Vim just made more sense to me once I got over the hump of modes and all the keymaps you need to turn into muscle memory.

Edit: I also like that I can do abominations like:

("def" @keyword (#set! conceal "ƒ"))

("if" @keyword (#set! conceal "?"))

("unless" @keyword (#set! conceal "¿"))

("else" @keyword (#set! conceal "∶"))

("elsif" @keyword (#set! conceal "⁇"))

("case" @keyword (#set! conceal "⟨?"))

("when" @keyword (#set! conceal "→"))

("begin" @keyword (#set! conceal "⌊"))

to make Ruby look absolutely insane. Is it useful? No. Do people hate it when I share my screen? Yes.

For one, you don't have to figure out how to remove whatever random AI UI element and integration MS decided to introduce and turn on by default every update.

Used to use VSCode. There was a point in time where it felt clunky on Wayland due to electron.

Neovim worked the same just about everywhere and I could choose my terminal. Especially with tiling, for me it's just feels better.

In the end, it's still just a text editor. Don't expect that you will get things done n times faster than in vscode without extra effort added.

  > I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability

I think it's more customizable than vscode, but you need to learn some lua or vimscript to customize it. Back then I tried to create some custom keybindings in vscode and realized you can't add new ones, only modify what exists. While (n)vim provides you with out-of-the-box flexibility and more if you use something like LazyVim.

  > Is it because it's faster?

What I retroactively like about (n)vim is that, after the initial learning cost, it turns out the default nvim keybindings are transferable to many UNIX tools (less/more, man, journalctl, etc). It feels much more comfortable to write some code in nvim, open up a terminal, and then `man X` without mentally switching the keybindings.

  > Maybe it's because it's an editor you can easily use while ssh'd into a remote machine?

Actually, rather than nvim itself, it's more like vim is already preinstalled in many popular server distros. It's sometimes a huge time saver in cases where you're unable to install additional packages to edit some config/code/text files, just type `vim`/`vi` and you're good to go.

I did convert myself from a minimal vscode setup (disabled everything & only LSP extensions) to LazyVim nvim a few months ago. I had to tweak my .config/nvim, relearn Lua again, and read the manual. It took me about a week to settle things down and get used to basic nvim bindings.

After another week of suffering trying to fix JDTLS (Java LSP) integration, I'm enjoying my nvim setup. Unlike vscode sync which requires you to login, I could just git clone my `.config/nvim` and I'm good to go.

I don't want to sound like "advising", because long-term recommendations often carry the personal weight with them- whatever I tell you worked (or didn't) for me had an effect on me - it's never guaranteed to have any implications on someone else's life.

But here's what I learned after a long time trying different things and what's worked.

Don't try to find objective reasons for making big shifts in your workflow - be that a change of your major tool, language, technique, or paradigm. What I mean is: don't try to decide if any concrete tool would be good for you. Instead, try to understand the big underlying idea behind the tool. Once you comprehend the abstraction, choosing a concrete implementation of that idea wouldn't really matter - you can carry the big idea with you regardless of one concrete implementation.

In practice, here's what I mean: the idea of vim-navigation is absolutely beautiful, pragmatic, and fantastic, and it's positively worth every minute of the initial learning curve. It's really not that hard - it only requires just a bit of dedication and discipline. I honestly don't understand programmers who choose to be in this field, yet outright reject the mere idea of it after trying it for like six minutes.

Just go with it - you probably will hate me, everyone else in this thread, and yourself for a few days, but then it will grok. Once you have a good understanding of its tenets, you could easily take it to whichever medium you choose to stay in and it doesn't even have to be neovim.

Neovim might be great for you, and maybe not even as a concrete tool to achieve defined goals, but even as a head-start medium to understand the 'big idea' of vim-navigation.

Finally, whenever picking up a new thing, maybe don't try to find elevator pitches. After the initial acquaintance - Wikipedia, GitHub pages, etc. - google instead: "Why does [that thing] suck..." and maybe try instead to find compelling reasons to remain skeptical. Trying to remain unconvinced may help you find perspectives for why a certain idea is a matter of fact might be a good one to have in your pocket.

I used vim for decades and the sensation is that I can hold the code in my hands and manipulate it directly. Other editors feel like I’m wearing thick gloves, can’t move correctly.

but it’s like learning to play the piano, it only feels natural after years of practice

nowadays I’m faster with Cursor so it doesn’t matter as much

If you like using VSCode and are productive in it, keep on using it.

The big advantage of vim/neovim is that you can do everything in the keyboard and it can be very efficient. It is also lightweight.

However the learning curve is massive IME. I don't like either and pay for Jetbrains tooling.

When using vscode or its derivatives, I find the customizability is very limited. You have a couple of settings, but any new functionality basically requires writing a whole new extension and nobody really does that.

Meanwhile with vim I often add one or two lines to a local vimrc script which adds some project-specific command or keybind. For example - take ioctl name under the cursor, translate to the handler function name and open corresponding driver file in split view. It only saves a couple seconds but makes it so much more natural to analyze code. I have no clue how I would go about doing that in vscode.

Nobody who is raising children is able to do those things in a year.

Web designers with good taste in colors and fonts often make more money than weightlifters, triathletes, and the average Chinese speaker.

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.

This is not what a Japanese swordsmith or any craftman does, they obsess over the end result, polishing it until it reaches perfection.

Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will.

If it did, world would be full of polished, high quality software, what instead we have is endless sea of garbage produced by these cough, cough "craftsmen" - that obsess about everything else, but the actual end product.

Wrong. ;P

agreed, tinkering in my experience is either understanding how something works, or fixing something that is broken, or, building something new entirely (and in my mind all of these are hardware based) and usually involves disassembling things into their constituent components, whether or not you're supposed to. I also don't think tinkering is required for taste, I think being exposed to things, exploring things you're interested in, and questioning things is how you develop taste, which is also highly subjective.

My coworkers are shocked and confused that I own/use a sewing machine and see at as some legacy old timey thing. It's true that you certainly don't need to own one anymore and you won't save any money making your own clothes. But you can modify and make loads of custom cool stuff that are impossible to buy new.

I've got a few things I made that just bring a lot of joy knowing it's the exact thing I wanted which you can't buy, and couldn't justify paying someone else to make either.

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>"

He also valued taste a lot. It seemed like the worst insult Jobs could have for someone was to say they had no taste. Other insults may have used stronger language, but it always felt that him saying someone had no taste was to say they were worthless and he had no respect for them as a human being.

I don’t think he tinkered much himself. He let others tinker until their output met his vision.

In what’s becoming a monoculture world because of the internet, that seems like a good thing.

Just noticed that as well. Isn't this strictly against the rules here? It has a completely different meaning from the original title and actual article content.

Not only that but a tool is only useful in a specific context

Good for you, some people enjoy the journey.

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

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.

Maybe tinkering is a necessary but insufficient condition for taste

That's just OCD, not taste.