> 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.

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.

can one really formulate a consistent philosophy of whether to get the mass market thing that "just works" or the power user thing that the author of this article describes as the path to good taste?

(and by "just works" - i mean about 80% of the time)

some of these are even represented in the hacker news front page: iphone vs fairphone, tesla vs corolla, macbook vs framework, vscode or helix, sora vs comfyui etc etc

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.

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.

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

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

Agreed, although I'd characterize it as more closely related to curiosity. Some people can select particular items that make themselves look good or are high-quality for example, but are surprisingly some of the least curious people, whereas I don't think the same can be said of tinkerers. People lacking this type of curiosity get frustrated easily if you want to discuss ideas or hypotheticals, nebulous intangible problem solving etc..; they want the right answer and an authority to point to. People with this type of curiosity want to discover why it might or might not be true regardless of whether it's a solved problem for others. The former type of person wants to look up what the viewpoints are like before they agree to go on a hike, getting frustrated when they're not there yet, and the latter just wants to hike and see what it's all about, enjoying the process.

Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss.

Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation.

Incurious people seem like they're the typical tourist or the consumer, eliminating as much inconvenience as possible but not necessarily interested the exploration of the what or why of either the problem or solution, making it hard to identify where the depth is. Good at delegating, but terrible managers.