There's a lot here that I enjoy muddling on. And I think taste is very vital. Taste, ambition, seeing possibility: these resonate to me, long resonate, as what I've wanted to see.

And honestly: I've been tired of an age of engineers that are beat down, that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious. It often is still very sensible and practical and what you should shoot for! But there are also people wandering around now trying much harder! And I am excited for those frontiers! I think it will challenge and shake the foundations that we've accepted as true, as There Is No Alternative, in exciting bold and fun ways.

I am however pretty unconvinced by the article. There's a lot that doesn't quite work for me, that isn't building the case I'd like, whose takes are off from my read.

> The output is good enough—that is the problem. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output.

Agreed about the rationing of output. I do think that the article though continues to show a magical thinking. That we have these things now and they autonomously do the thing. That the LLM's have solved it all.

The article itself goes on at length about how nebulous and abstract taste is:

> Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument

But this contrasts so distinctly to me against "the output is good enough". Is it? That depends. That depends on your taste. The proximate first results come quick. But the technics underneath? Those themselves, in my view, rely enormously on engineering taste to support and advance. I think we see a very similar sort of magical delivery thinking, very clearly on display here:

> When the factories came, they could suddenly make everything—cheaply, uniformly, by the thousand.

As if there was some magical "good enough" transition where suddenly the aliens came and gave us this box that just does the thing. As if we discovered the right formulas and math and now: we had production. Again I think there's just an enormous amount of work and taste that is still actively required inside the factory box, that building the industrial processes is incredibly intense & difficult, even though we have reliable industry-line production and now robots doing the labor.

There's still so many gems, so much lovely material for thought. I love the provocations here, and I think there's a lot of great calibration.

> The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum.

Makes me think of yesterdays @apenwarr banger,

> Every slow prototype started out as a fast prototype, I think that’s how it goes https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca/post/3msemlo4rds2h

Taste Is All That's Left