Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

Posted by jxmorris12 4 days ago

Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste(seated.ro)

466 points | 381 commentspage 4

citruscomputing 4 days ago|

This applies to fashion as well. Hackers should tinker with their clothes and jewelry more.

SchemaLoad 4 days ago|

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.

___POTATOES___ 2 days ago||

This sounds nice, but I'm busy trying to escape the permanent underclass. Perhaps I messed up by not tinkering more earlier in my life.

tambourine_man 4 days ago||

> In fact, the last meaningful change to my config was 6 months ago.

I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.

ambicapter 4 days ago||

If anyone's wondering, author makes no attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the title, he just talks about being a tinkerer and why it's important to have taste nowadays, and lets the reader make the connection.

edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.

johnfn 4 days ago|

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>"

gnarlouse 4 days ago||

Reminds me of the Steve Jobs biography. He was a notorious tinkerer. He obsessed over the design of Macintosh, the NeXT step cube, and a bunch of other products.

al_borland 4 days ago||

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.

layer8 4 days ago||

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

gnarlouse 3 days ago||

No he definitely tinkered. Yes, his primary tinkering mechanism was "having others execute his vision," but like if that's not tinkering then neither is editing config files like the article author mentions, because you're directing other peoples code into configuration.

There's one story from Macintosh era where he spent weeks harassing one engineer over the calculator app: "it looks too bloated, it looks afwul, these lines are terrible.." until the engineer got fed up and said "here this is the Macintosh Calculator App: Steve Edition. You get to pick your font, your layout, your color theme." And Steve sat there for hours literally tinkering on a calculator app until he got what he wanted.

He tried to get Paul Rand to change the colors on the NeXT logo--who promptly directed Steve to go have s*x with himself.

There was one point in the Apple Store's inception where they had basically reached done, and Steve decides that he didn't like a certain aspect of it, which was essentially going to require them to redo the entire thing. So he did, and they started from scratch. I think it might have been the Carrara marble floors but I can't remember for certain.

I'm not saying I have immense respect for the guy as a human being, but he was absolutely a notorious tinkerer--a complete menace of one.

bbminner 4 days ago||

I'd make a weaker statement - tinkering helps aquire (your personal) taste - not necessarily a good one.

gandalfgreybeer 1 day ago|

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

burner420042 3 days ago||

The best object for comparison you all are missing here are camera lenses.

nonethewiser 3 days ago||

The author gives several examples of tinkering. Tweaking mouse sensitivity in FPS, installing a linux distro, experimenting with windows managers, changing mechanical keyboard caps etc.

Then he looks at one specific example of tinkering, the IDE, and sorts people as tinkerers based on that.

>There are plenty of people who still use the VSCode terminal as their default terminal, do not know what vim bindings are, GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least). I’m not saying these are bad things necessarily, just that this should be the minimum, not the median.

Couldn't someone not tinker with an IDE and still tinker with other things? I mean clearly you dont have to tinker with everything that can possibly be tinkered with, right? What is it about the IDE that makes it necessary to tinker with?

It seems like this was the main motivation for the article and then it got a bit over-abstracted.

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