4 ms·

Yeah, every single component, it's shape, material, color, has been deliberately chosen to do it's required job as best as possible. What judges that? The marke

Yeah, every single component, it's shape, material, color, has been deliberately chosen to do it's required job as best as possible. What judges that? The market. Or physics...

WalterBright 4y ago
Think about airplanes. Beautiful airplanes tend to fly well. Ugly ones, not so well. It's hard to believe there isn't a connection.
- taneq 4y ago
  Our aesthetic sense is a finely tuned heuristic for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of systems. It’s less that beautiful aeroplanes fly well and more that high performance designs are inherently beautiful.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Our esthetic sense evolves along behind designs. What is efficient comes to seem beautiful to the next generation. Once the Ford Edsel was the pinnacle of automotive beauty. The P-51 or Spitfire would lose to a T-28 or F8F, but the former look better to us. We are attuned now to designs like the Su-57 and F-22, so are less sensitive to the merits of systems that work a different regime.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      It's hard to describe how the beauty of a P-51 or a Spit affects me. It's a visceral thrill I feel in my whole body. It's hard to believe that they were designed to be deadly killing machines rather than ultimate beauties. Or maybe not so surprising. I had an eagle fly by me once at about arm's length, and at shoulder height. I was stunned by its deadly beauty. Right then I knew why so many countries adopt the eagle as their mascot.
    - erosenbe0 4y ago
      Correct, one does not compare a top-of-the-line Amish buggy to a Tesla even though both are wheeled personal passenger transports.
      - taneq 4y ago
        But even knowing nothing about buggies, looking at either one, you kinda know it’s good though.
      - abudabi123 4y ago
        There is a picture of two vehicles side-by-side at Nasa's website on the history of the Space Shuttle. If you see it you decide which of the two was built by the faceless bureaucratic procurement-contractor process.
    - LBJsPNS 4y ago
      "Once the Ford Edsel was the pinnacle of automotive beauty." Uhm...
- myself248 4y ago
  > And now, having spoken of the men born of the pilot's craft, I shall say something about the tool with which they work - the airplane. Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? > It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. > It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer. There is an ancient myth about the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor. The sculptor must himself feel that he is not so much inventing or shaping the curve of breast or shoulder as delivering the image from its prison. > In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work. In appearance, but only in appearance, they seem to be polishing surfaces and refining away angles, easing this joint or stabilizing that wing, rendering these parts invisible, so that in the end there is no longer a wing hooked to a framework but a form flawless in its perfection, completely disengaged from its matrix, a sort of spontaneous whole, its parts mysteriously fused together and resembling in their unity a poem. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _Wind, Sand, and Stars_
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Engineering sure was different. Now things are holonomically controlled, every behavior is arbitrary and computer generated, nothing arises from necessity if we can avoid it. With a spoon, anything you add will probably make it worse, you can sit and think and not find anything to change other than the material. If I give it adjustable length, the mechanism may be unsanitary. There's no long list of features to pick from, once you've decided you're not making a spork, there's no real question of what to include, so the feature set(Be spoon) feels perfect, since I have no alternate design to compare it to. Once you add a microcontroller you have so much possibility. Why can't my flashlight report battery level via Bluetooth and alert me when it's fully charged? A minor convenience, but it could be cheap enough I'd pay for it. The tradeoff is a bit more code and a cheap chip. And I'm sure there's a dozen other features that I'd like to have if they were cheap. Not only does the thought of a perfect harmony of only the necessary parts not always arise in a modern mindset.... but I wouldn't know how to recognize it if I saw it anyway. Is there a real engineering reason to leave out a feature? Did they not think of it? Or are they just appealing to love of simplicity for it's own sake? I don't know, I wasn't at the meeting, so I'll probably be annoyed and leave a comment saying they shouldn't have left this or that out. Now, simplicity feels more like another feature to include or exclude, it doesn't just arise from the desire for low cost and reliability, since we sometimes but not always can make insane complexity cheaply that lasts decades. The difference is that simplicity isn't compatible with a lot of other features, because it's almost like intentionally choosing to give up arbitrariness and holonomic control.

Yeah, every single component, it's shape, material, color, has been deliberately chosen to do it's required job as best as possible. What judges that? The market. Or physics...

WalterBright 4y ago

Think about airplanes. Beautiful airplanes tend to fly well. Ugly ones, not so well. It's hard to believe there isn't a connection.

taneq 4y ago
Our aesthetic sense is a finely tuned heuristic for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of systems. It’s less that beautiful aeroplanes fly well and more that high performance designs are inherently beautiful.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Our esthetic sense evolves along behind designs. What is efficient comes to seem beautiful to the next generation. Once the Ford Edsel was the pinnacle of automotive beauty. The P-51 or Spitfire would lose to a T-28 or F8F, but the former look better to us. We are attuned now to designs like the Su-57 and F-22, so are less sensitive to the merits of systems that work a different regime.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    It's hard to describe how the beauty of a P-51 or a Spit affects me. It's a visceral thrill I feel in my whole body. It's hard to believe that they were designed to be deadly killing machines rather than ultimate beauties. Or maybe not so surprising. I had an eagle fly by me once at about arm's length, and at shoulder height. I was stunned by its deadly beauty. Right then I knew why so many countries adopt the eagle as their mascot.
  - erosenbe0 4y ago
    Correct, one does not compare a top-of-the-line Amish buggy to a Tesla even though both are wheeled personal passenger transports.
    - taneq 4y ago
      But even knowing nothing about buggies, looking at either one, you kinda know it’s good though.
    - abudabi123 4y ago
      There is a picture of two vehicles side-by-side at Nasa's website on the history of the Space Shuttle. If you see it you decide which of the two was built by the faceless bureaucratic procurement-contractor process.
  - LBJsPNS 4y ago
    "Once the Ford Edsel was the pinnacle of automotive beauty." Uhm...
myself248 4y ago
> And now, having spoken of the men born of the pilot's craft, I shall say something about the tool with which they work - the airplane. Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? > It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. > It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer. There is an ancient myth about the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor. The sculptor must himself feel that he is not so much inventing or shaping the curve of breast or shoulder as delivering the image from its prison. > In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work. In appearance, but only in appearance, they seem to be polishing surfaces and refining away angles, easing this joint or stabilizing that wing, rendering these parts invisible, so that in the end there is no longer a wing hooked to a framework but a form flawless in its perfection, completely disengaged from its matrix, a sort of spontaneous whole, its parts mysteriously fused together and resembling in their unity a poem. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _Wind, Sand, and Stars_
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Engineering sure was different. Now things are holonomically controlled, every behavior is arbitrary and computer generated, nothing arises from necessity if we can avoid it. With a spoon, anything you add will probably make it worse, you can sit and think and not find anything to change other than the material. If I give it adjustable length, the mechanism may be unsanitary. There's no long list of features to pick from, once you've decided you're not making a spork, there's no real question of what to include, so the feature set(Be spoon) feels perfect, since I have no alternate design to compare it to. Once you add a microcontroller you have so much possibility. Why can't my flashlight report battery level via Bluetooth and alert me when it's fully charged? A minor convenience, but it could be cheap enough I'd pay for it. The tradeoff is a bit more code and a cheap chip. And I'm sure there's a dozen other features that I'd like to have if they were cheap. Not only does the thought of a perfect harmony of only the necessary parts not always arise in a modern mindset.... but I wouldn't know how to recognize it if I saw it anyway. Is there a real engineering reason to leave out a feature? Did they not think of it? Or are they just appealing to love of simplicity for it's own sake? I don't know, I wasn't at the meeting, so I'll probably be annoyed and leave a comment saying they shouldn't have left this or that out. Now, simplicity feels more like another feature to include or exclude, it doesn't just arise from the desire for low cost and reliability, since we sometimes but not always can make insane complexity cheaply that lasts decades. The difference is that simplicity isn't compatible with a lot of other features, because it's almost like intentionally choosing to give up arbitrariness and holonomic control.