@letterror That would be amazing. Otherwise, I fear I’ll have to find a means of reading this bad-boy, if indeed it’s not succumbed to bitrot.

Damn, seeing it again in that Vimeo video takes me back.

NCND looks stunning as well. 🙌

@middaparka @billgoats A bit more backstory on the NCND FAQ page:

https://letterror.com/ncnd/faq.html

@juliansgamble the “back rooms” of such shops remained a mystery to this day, where many mysterious PC ailments were fixed, with lord knows what mixture of sheer parts replacement — probably 99% — leaving us to wonder what kind of stash of incredible supplies they had back there

Because nobody knew where it all came from. Brands? No. Standards? Maybe, “you tell me” if you’re so clever. “If it doesn’t work, bring it back”, and sure enough, they replaced the meat in your sub sandwich until it was fine.

Occasionally an Aussie, with neither technical background nor an ability to communicate with people speaking English as a second language, would walk in the door — aware of very little, except that they needed their first computer, and they needed to come here to save money.

Unfortunately they would still carry the old-world assumption that a “retailer” was not just a sales rep but also a source of advice. Maybe they’d try to negotiate for a discount — the learning curve was too steep to climb — or more often, they’d come armed with a bunch of questions about “all these computers” and if they should get Windows.

They’d usually be happy when they understood Windows was just added for free — the first form of “activation” was not until Windows 95 — but if they wanted any manuals, let alone some kind of set up tutorial, they were going to walk out annoyed.

An Apple Store, this was not.

(Or “AppleCentre”, in Australia back then).

They could even threaten to walk 5 minutes to the next one — the Chinese computer shops were everywhere — but these weren’t “salesmen” they were dealing with. None of this stuff had margins built in. What was the point of asking for a discount, if it was all bare-bones naked robotic and generic already? Everybody was getting a good price, you just had to know the industry to see that.

If you were foolish enough to turn up with a copy of PC Magazine and point to a branded PC and ask “do you have this one?”, you should just be prepared to have something with equivalent specs made up in half an hour for a third of the price. It won’t look anything like the one in your photo of course. But you can have a different keyboard with differently bizarre shades of beige if you’re not happy?

(Apple was the lone wolf making keyboards that chose one color for every key … somehow. The list of trends that Apple birthed or stopped might never be completely written).

It may have been 30 years before most people said the word “Temu”, but for sure they were doing the same exact type of unbranded factory shipping.

Except there was no internet. It must have been phone calls to family back in China, right?

@juliansgamble Australia was selling 386, 486 and early Pentium beige box towers and mini-towers from a set of bodega-style shops that had spawned out of nowhere in the suburbs, either in less expensive retail along roadside strips, or tucked away in suburbs that used to have real bodegas or “corner shops” that once sold newspapers, lollies (chocolate drops, 1¢ each) and if you’re lucky, a chest freezer with Cornettos or ice blocks

This is before the era of 7/Eleven and well-lit neon signed “convenience store” franchises that had a machine making slurpees

The little computer shops were invariably unnamed, and run by a Chinese family with the minimum viable command of English to build you a PC like a Subway sandwich to order

@atpfm re: skill shortage and AI — I feel Marco had a really good point in there somewhere, even if John’s rebuttals were correct

I think an eye for history may help? I feel like I’ve seen this play out before because AI is a type of automation, and 20 years ago I was in the midst of a manager-led ferver for “automate everything!” and when we, the manual testers, started to report back CONCLUSIVELY about limitations, managers responded with “huh? don’t you WANT your job to be easier?”

Okay that feels familiar but with hindsight there was nuance. Automation had three outcomes:

1. Don’t bother: you hate the manual task, but this isn’t suitable to this new technology

2. That’s handy: you find a different task that was for a totally different job, and apply the technology. Depending on the corporate structure, this may produces smiles and 👍

3. New frontiers: There will be tasks that were previously out of the question, unreasonable to attempt. These are newly in scope. Someone may need to figure out why this helps anyone or anything.

My favourite metaphor — still liking it — is introducing calculators to mathematics classes.

1. Did it make arithmetic redundant? Err, no, I mean not really. If you don’t know what a right answer SHOULD look like, you’re still bad at this.

2. Did it help though? Oh sure, we find it really speeds things up while doing algebra. Better than a slide rule. But they’re the students who get a calculator. It’s not allowed for much younger classes.

3. Is it letting you do something new? For sure, we can experiment like never before, and check answers three ways when that’s an option — there used to be no time for that, and you had to be methodically perfect on the first go.

So with calculators, and then spreadsheets, did the amount of arithmetic being done reduce? Well sure on paper yes, but no, not REALLY. It went up. There was more to do.

This is why the Photoshop example was a bit down on the capitalism (let’s agree on a mixed mode economy … and dodge a flame war). Having mathematical tools proliferate with calculators and spreadsheets gave the power to small businesses and large businesses everywhere, and there was more “work” — more of it was being done. And it truly is better this way.

Not rooms full of scribes. Or typist pools.

Photoshop might feel like a disappointing example and rightly so if it’s putting out the flame of human creativity. So it’s probably not Photoshop but generative art? Or at least it’s a proper good debate. I’m making generative art for $0 that I wouldn’t buy for $5, but the true cost is closer to 10¢ so let’s hope the true economic value gets transparent soon. Don’t externalise costs — that’s bad for society (and capitalism).

And in the long view of history — was it ever thus?

It’s not just automation but all technology? Steam power put manual labor out of work and then created lots more work.

And so the point sounds really true: The proportion of assembly language coders may go down but the total number of coders goes through the roof. Just like spreadsheets did to “who is a mathematician?”

This ties in to one more historical trend: Specialisation scales with population.

AI, like many technologies before it, is going to allow (if not create) a lot more specialist roles. Or you could say that manual programming turns into one of those?

We only get to focus on what we love because the world is so large — and free trade is a key part of that, but I digress —

If everyone couldn’t specialise, and lean on others who specialise, then we’d all have to focus more time on the essentials of life. And for some that is fine, no sarcasm intended.

The lower the population goes, the more time or chance of more time you’d have to spend on food — cooking it, or gathering it. We can stay in touch with this reality but we don’t want to be limited to it.

I think Marco’s point about “expertise” is essentially right, and maybe John’s definition is subtly different. I still like my 2023 joke “AI stands for Average Intelligence” but the bar is still going up.

Experience yes, assessment no.

(Except when a harness is added … we’ve done it for programming: Where next? Are there limits?)