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.

- let's go and reclaim Jerusalem from those non-Christian infidels!

- Sure. We're gonna need a bigger boat. Let's ask the Venetians.

- Here are your ships, guys.

- Err, we have no money.

- Sigh. ok. Go and attack our rivals over there.

- The byzantines in Constantinople? They're Christian.

- You want something to do, or not?

- Fine. let's kill them all, boys.

Result: Constantinople is ravaged. Byzantine Empire fatally weakened. Ottomans take the city 200 years later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

If I have made an accidental kimchi bomb then I will want to defuse it safely before I dispose of it. If I put it in the trash and leave it for the refuse collector there is risk that it blows up in their face without any warning. That's a much worse outcome. The root issue here is that this thermos design doesnt have a way to safely defuse it.

People die on Ben Nevis every few years because they think its not that cold. But Scottish cold in that part of the world is brutal, there's so much moisture in the air that freezes if you get wet and cant quickly get dry you will die fast.

Still, it's a beautiful part of the country.

The US periodically goes through periods of intense corruption, political instability and inequality. It seems like this era is worse because we are living through it right now, but talk to people who were young adults in, say, 1960 to 1975 and they will tell you that between avoiding nuclear war, a President being assassinated, his brother being murdered, a meat grinder war started in dubious circumstances, a powerful and implacable foreign adversary, cops beating the daylight out of people who just wanted their civil rights...it felt like a brutal end of times for America. The generation before then lived through the Depression, wars, scandals (Businessmen's plot), red scare, lavender scare, sputnik, similarly. Just ugh.

Concurrently with these periods the US also made huge strides in science, culture, technology, health, and civil rights. I imagine a very large part of the United States HN readership is here right now because of the 1965 immigration act, the work of ARPA, and so on. Progress is made even in dark times. (Personally, I would not look to (any) government as the creator of good times so much as the building of personal relationships in your community, whether physical or digital. The hippies of 1970 recognized this, as did the beat kids of 1960 - you can't wait for the state to make you happy.)

One question might be not, "can we get through this" but what sort of event will happen that will be the catalyst for moving past the current environment. Obviously one hopes, for example, that it will not take a war of national survival for Americans to get back together. Or a Black Death where so many people die that a new society simply must be born. I think we look at history as if there was a single such event but in reality it is more like a sequence of events over several years that history compresses into one thing.

I've lived here for several decades and I freely admit that the United States can be a violent, chaotic, wild place. But I also remember that it is full of incredible people who have never failed to lend a hand, think creatively, and be open to trying new things. So I would say that people who are discouraged by the current situation (of any political stripe) work on building individual, small scale relationships with people in their community and go from there.

OK, flame away.

[1] https://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/michaelochurch/wp/?p=881

Houston has excellent Vietnamese cuisine. I guess it's Southern Vietnamese style? (can't help but notice the ARVN veterans memorial on Bellaire Blvd.).

In the East, Falls Church in VA has excellent food. But I think the best would have to be Louisiana. No name places with a shrimp boat out back, on the coast, east of New Orleans. I'm told a lot of Vietnamese refugees were resettled there and went into the fishing industry, southern Louisiana and the Mississippi river delta being somewhat similar to Vietnam.

(Generally, tech seems to skate by on creating insanely complicated things, knowing that given enough pain, people will start blogging about their solutions, ie effectively outsourcing the cost and effort of doing something about it.)

[1] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media.

The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business.

[0] https://youtu.be/wdYzAAG2VXs

[1] https://youtu.be/vuPNBeWmuSk

I don't think it's regulation, btw. Starting and running my company in the UK pre Brexit was way easier than doing it in the US. Keeping the IRS happy is no joke.