There are several reasons why old docs work. First, release velocity approximated documentation velocity. If you only released once a year, your docs had time to be polished. Second, simplicity. Think of the length of the man page for ls in Seventh Edition UNIX vs today. The constraints of the time helped here in that writers needed to get their point across in one or two 72x24 screens, not two million pixels.
Since good documentation creates a consistent mental model in the reader, cultural affinity of the writer to both source (developer) and reader helps, and the old, much smaller, computer industry was able to pull that off. I sat two cubes from my doc writer and we shared the same cultural worldview with each other and our market. It's much easier to communicate in that milieu because so much can be left unsaid.
Its possible that we are entering a Golden Age of Text, where everyone realizes that they have to feed their AI with decent information in order to have any hope of it producing good answers (especially true for complex technical products and internal corporate processes). But I am not hopeful.
The Photoshop 2.5 manual (1992) is a thing of beauty. It is like an introductory course in digital imaging, well structured, put together with care and expertise, it provided to me a fascinating introduction to (at the time for me) mind-blowing concepts in digital artwork. It explained the fundamental concepts in digital imaging that have remained with me ever since.
It's a nice vibe history you've got going on here but unfortunately it has little to do with reality. I recommend starting with the disastrous reign of Alexios III who had drained Constantinople's treasury years before the Crusaders arrived to understand the bigger picture. Ransacking their own capital in the name of internal strife has been a Byzantine specialty since the Nika riots of 532.
"- Err, we have no money.
- Sigh. ok. Go and attack our rivals over there."
Strictly speaking, this is not what happened, and a gross oversimplification. The Byzantines were not exactly rivals of the Venetians.
The whole thing was quite bizarre in fact, Roger Crowley has a pretty good story of the events leading up to this in "City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire" if I'm not mistaken.
There's no good guys in this situation. The Byzantine Empire spent 1000 years doing the same kind of shit to other people. The little people, of course, suffered tremendously for it.
They justified it by religion but they really wanted to rob and mug. And this happened many times across history and will continue to happen: people claiming they are fighting for an ideal but really just wanting to gain power and money.
Yes and no. Downplaying “honest” convictions and other motivations unrelated to greed is flawed. Plenty of people in history did what they did because they truly believed in it (of course there were usually several motivations)
For instance the first Crusade was organized as a military relief expedition by the Byzantine emperor and the pope to save the empire from Turkish invasion and liberate the recently conquered Anatolia. Jerusalem was mostly an aspirational and symbolic goal.
Most people who joined did it because of sense of duty and various degrees of religion fanaticism. There was little prospect of profit and while the expedition was enormously more successful than anyone could have anticipated the overwhelming majority of initial participants were dead by the time they reached Jerusalem. Even those that survived to the end didn’t necessarily profit that much.
> make more money
> stop spending so much fucking money
I'm all in favor of this but part 1 has been made politically toxic for decades, and part 2 only seems to be taken seriously when the Other Guys are in power.
For example, in the US I simply cant take the Republican party's fiscal opinions seriously when they bleat about the debt on the one hand and yet dont blink when asked to fund another foreign war.
republicans are much much bigger spenders than democrats by miles. they are “anti socialism” publicly but are 2nd largest socialist party on the planet (behind china).
"Socialism is when the government gives tax breaks to the rich and destroys public institutions". And calling China "socialist" is rich when it's probably the most ruthlessly capitalistic nation on the planet, where worker unions are straight up illegal.
The West saw its golden age when redistributive taxation was maximum. We have to get back to that, or the country will continue to agonize under crumbling infrastructure and failing institutions.
lately I've been stuck by the similarities between the conversations workers are having now (we are toiling to increase someone else's capital, and need to reverse the imbalance of power) and the conversations people had in the 1920s and 30s.
With the benefit of hindsight we know that marxism didnt help, but I can see why the siren song was so attractive back then. Time to reread Eric Hobsbawm.
Look at social democratic European states for inspiration. High unionization (supported by the state), unemployment benefits, cheap or free higher education.
Companies can still do layoffs, but that’s how you manage the consequences at a societal level.
I know the unionization part is contested these days in Europe, too - but it is still much stronger than in the US.
And to think, if they could just take less, and be satisfied being billionaires, not tens of billionaires, this could all be avoided... people don't ask for much. Give them a little, you'll be fine.
Chuck Robbins is not a billionaire. Yes, he's still extremely wealthy, but I really feel it's important to understand that that labor-capital relations are not primarily defined by people being greedy and wanting Bad Wealth when they could be satisfied with Good Wealth.
It reminds me of Microsoft Recall in the sense that some portion of the screen is going to be continuously transmitted outside of the users control.
What happens when someone browses something very private (planning a surprise engagement. looking at medical data. planning a protest)? All that data gets slurped to google and subject to a warrant or discovery or building your advertising fingerprint.
Maybe the idea is that the data is sent to AI only when you right click, but that seems like a very thin firewall that a product manager will breach in the interests of delivering "predictive AI" via some kind of precomputed results.
At some point I hope that we will reach a point where these megacorps figure that running these things locally might be most cost effective. FWIW I think local models I run on my MacBook are good enough for most of the tasks that this kind of interaction may ask for.
i dont know that it's a modern phenomenon. For example law enforcement being used to attack strikers in West Virginia, cops from Los Angeles being sent to the CA border to attack Dust Bowl Okies, maybe other readers can think of others. For all the good that LE does, there has always been a strain of working for more extreme capitalist interests.
Cops (modern cops) grew out of capital trying to socialize the cost of protecting their interests. Whether it was slave patrols or dock warehouse security, central cops evolved to protect capital's interests.
Yes. Because, the incentives for companies are too big to ignore. The math being done right now is $10/hr for voice support in (say) the Phillipines is much more than $0.10/hr having an AI do it, even factoring in the cost of some customer churn. And the risk of the latter for some services can be discounted to zero if the user has no viable alternative.
Second, the best support line is one where no one calls in. So there are strong incentives to make it hard to do so, either positive (create good self service options) or bad (hide the number, hide emails, etc).
If you don't want this future then make sure you always ask for the human and constructively provide feedback that you will penalize any supplier that relies on it.
We are already in a K shaped economy wrt call centers. Being a very frequent Hilton hotel guest, say, gets you a separate call center number, US based live human support, people who can solve your problem, etc. Not being a Hilton member gets you the 45 minute wait and a bot.
There's always a viable alternative. But not for customers who are always looking for the cheapest viable products or services.
So those customers will spend too much time and frustration with bad customer service, because they think it's outrageous to consider a competitor who is a little bit more expensive.
Tell that to my insurance provider, the only insurance provider I am allowed to choose by my employer.
Or my doctor's office, the only doctors office that treats my ailment that my insurance provider calls in their network. They use AI customer support. They just fired 80% of their receptionists and replaced them with kiosks.
Or my pharmacy, where I get a choice of 3 whole local/mail-in pharmacies I can go to, but each one of them uses AI customer support.
I would consider anyone who's more expensive, if I were allowed to pay for it. Most of the time there is no options. I'm seeking a new employer in the hopes that some other insurance network will be better, but this seems to be the direction that all things are going: full corporate cartels squeezing the life out of everyone.
> the only insurance provider I am allowed to choose by my employer.
What? Do you mean the only insurance provider your employer will give you for free, or do you mean your employer can control your contracts with other parties? Are you in prison or on a slave plantation?
Why do you expect complete strangers to have knowledge of your financials?
I don't know if your employer is paying for health insurance as a benefit for you, in which case they are the customer and can choose whatever crap provider they want. Or if they are deducting this cost from your salary, in which case they are robbing you.
imho: because Microsoft fabulously, utterly dropped the ball. I suspect a combination of well-meaning intentions, Microsoft inanity, and their infamous internal politics helped.
- VB apps weren't great from the point of view of internationalization, accessibility. Nor were they easy to adapt to multiple screen sizes. Hard to retrofit the ecosystem to make that right it seemed.
- Microsoft decided to solve that problem by attacking a different one (symptomatic of their internal politics), by pushing .Net. That smelled to me of the victors of an internal battle (VB vs .Net) taking over the real estate of the VB ecosystem. However, the developers of VB apps got a vote, and they bailed.
Microsoft's timing was also not great in that the web and mobile revolution arrived just as they were wrangling with all this and made a lot of the discussion irrelevant. No one starting a new app today is going to reach for VB.Net, they're going to default to a web app. If desktop perf is the target, they'll grit their teeth and try to figure out what desktop tookit (WinForms, XAML, MAUI etc) they should be using...yet more friction compared to webapps.
It's a tragedy that scratch-your-own-itch desktop apps went away, but I can't say I am at all surprised.
There's a museum in New Orleans that has a Katrina display and it turns out that they did indeed call in Dutch experts to advise them. The Dutch gave them sensible ideas like building low elevation parks that could flood without issue and hold lots of water, instead of concrete spillways and drainage that just moves water fast until it fails catastrophically when inundated. Louisiana being Louisiana, it was all ignored.
The museum convinced me that New Orleans is doomed in so many ways. Everything from the Atchafalaya ORCS to the paving over of wetlands to build the city to the destruction of the Plaquemines marsh lands to the southeast of the city all seem to be maximally unhelpful for preventing storm damage.
The reality is that New Orleans is simply not important enough.
Even the biggest ultra conservative GOP voting redneck will have to admit that America can't survive without NYC which is why it will get it's seawall.
This is very fascinating from a cultural viewpoint. Some cities in Europe are important just for the history and not economy like Venice, or lesser extent Rome. When the Russian attack started, people moaned about the old buildings and the culture in Kyiv. (Ofcourse the attack itself was inmoral).
What I get is New Orleans has an unique culture and history. Most people in the US dont think it is worth to preserve?
When you look at who the rest of Louisiana voted for, they don't even want to preserve New Orleans. They're literally terrified of it and were elected on the promise to subjugate it.
I mean this is a sign of the flawed political process.
But even in a working democracy if people arent interested, politican mostly wont care. So Americans dont think New Orleans is worth to preserve?
I've been reading more about New Orleans situation this morning and my thinking is changing. It would be nice if we could preserve it, but I didn't really understand how bad the situation is. I don't think it's possible and spending should be focused on relocating people from the area.
New Orleans is probably going to be a fairly small island 20 miles offshore that gets drowned by hurricanes every few years.
Since good documentation creates a consistent mental model in the reader, cultural affinity of the writer to both source (developer) and reader helps, and the old, much smaller, computer industry was able to pull that off. I sat two cubes from my doc writer and we shared the same cultural worldview with each other and our market. It's much easier to communicate in that milieu because so much can be left unsaid.
Its possible that we are entering a Golden Age of Text, where everyone realizes that they have to feed their AI with decent information in order to have any hope of it producing good answers (especially true for complex technical products and internal corporate processes). But I am not hopeful.
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