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.

It's hard to take seriously anyone who unironically says "there are two kinds of people".

That, and the judgmental humblebrag tone leads me to believe the author is young. I suggest they focus more on learning than writing these vapid articles.

Except "taste before skill" is a well known issue and source of frustration for starting artists: They can already see what's good and they know what they want to do, but they don't yet have skill in measure with their taste and get locked in a feeling of inadequacy. They resolve that if they stick with it. So, taste looong before skill.

So...

> If you don't tinker, you don't have taste

> Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste.

No. That's not how it works.

Why was the title of this changed?

Unpopular opinion here probably but: Tinkering is also a great habit to be disappointed and unhappy. I love software and programming, but the apologetic requirements that can come from users mean adding a lot of complexity to software, that leads to many bugs and very slow programs. Everything has a cost attached.

I feel like this is true as ever, yet the current environment seems to be going towards the opposite, I.e. not about taste but just doing as much as possible, as much hours, as many responsibilities, just shipping out slop as fast as you can, don't waste time on stuff, all about being a 1000x AI engineer etc..

I'm tired boss

I despise the word "taste" for preferring specific software and workflows. Why are you selecting for aesthetic experience over usefulness?

I do get satisfaction from the results of my work, not through the mechanical process of arriving there. Tools are useful or not and this is the category by which I decide to use them or not.

> Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game?

Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.

the dabbler's expertise