Woz gave a lecture in one of my classes years ago and I came away impressed. He was obviously a brilliant engineer. "Naivete" is generally used in a negative manner but he had just enough naivete to get through life happy. He talked about all the chips he redesigned as a teen and it did not sound like bragging at all. We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world.
It's not naive to try and be good and not exploit every situation to the best outcome for yourself, that's the whole point. How can people believe him to be so brilliant but also naive? Don't they see it? It doesn't take a smart man to see an apple and take it all for himself.
But what is the "best outcome" when you have your house paid off and ample savings? He got ripped off by Jobs early on, but Jobs also let him do the work he wanted -- it's rare to have someone as good as Woz was also understand marketing. Jobs is deified too much, but he did bring something to the table in their business relationship.
Anyways, he seems to have protected himself well later on, was able to do good (stories of him giving stock to ppl left out early on, that kind of thing) -- people hyperfocus on one very specific thing (Jobs ripping him off in the atari days) when it's a small point in a much larger life.
Woz would have been able to do the work he wanted regardless. We would likely live in a much more open source world hardware wise if Woz had just done what he was already doing.
Steve Jobs is the reason Wozniak could give away tens of millions and still have $10M and multiple houses. Otherwise he would have been a good engineer and lived a nice quiet life, but nothing like the world-touring adventure he got.
Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.
Tangential, but you don't need anywhere near millions to have a 'world-touring adventure'. The nice thing about the ability to earn money online now a days is that the cost of living in the overwhelming majority of the world is a small fraction of what you pay in the US/EU.
And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
Making that jump is obviously scary, but I think many people could find much greater contentedness (not a fan of seeking "happiness", as it's something that I think should be seen as liminal, not a desired constant state) if they only realized that the world is their oyster.
Reread the link, or even the title. He gave away all of his Apple money away, because "wealth and power are not what I live for... it was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness.. " Celebrity, in general, is awful. You never realize how pleasant it is to be able to go somewhere without being fawned over until you have that latter experience yourself, and then you proceed to avoid that place like the plague unless you have some specific engagement.
He had the privilege of giving away a fortune, to causes he cares about, largely thanks to Steve Jobs.
He's never worried about money and has millions in the bank and multiple houses, thanks to Steve Jobs.
Some people love their celebrity. I've met more than a few, including Wozniak. He seems to genuinely love it, which doesn't mean it doesn't also get tiring at times.
A man of Wozniak's talents would never worry about money in his life regardless of what he chose to do. Talent + intelligence + work ethic ensures success, regardless of one's path in life, which is mostly the point of my comment. Somebody could accumulate a bunch of money at a FAANG but not necessarily enjoy their life or work in the process. Or they could utilize the same talents to go on a globe trotting life of adventure where they may earn much less, but get the opportunity to live and enjoy life much more.
Woz stated he gave away his money because he felt it was corrupting, probably seeing what it did to people like Jobs - although it's more like Jobs was like that to begin with, and the money just made it worse. Woz has also spoken repeatedly about celebrity status. Here's [1] a nice older 'interview' of sorts where he hits on the topic extensively. He didn't want it and has no interest in it.
Interestingly something I didn't know, that's pertinent to our little thread here, is that after Woz left Apple, he became a 5th-9th grade teacher, and did so for a decade!
I've never been able to find that elusive "easy to find" online work people keep speaking of.
Am I being gaslighted or am I looking in the wrong places? In the EU in my entire 15 year carreer there have been exactly 0 companies or even vacancies offering fully remote.
You're definitely looking in the wrong places. A large number of companies are basically entirely remote at this point, for instance I know chess.com is, and they have vacancies at this very moment. You can also go indie or freelance. If you can think of something you would want to buy, somebody else probably would too. You might not make much off of it, but even a little is a lot in places outside the EU/US.
There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour, which is quite lucrative in most of the world, and you'll generally have less prep and other meta-issues to deal with.
Similarly you can also sell skills. For instance there's a huge market for chess coaching. And while I haven't tried this myself, I'm fairly certain there's some market out there for teaching/tutoring people in coding. Also if you excelled in mathematics or whatever, there's another possibility. And doing this stuff at a school, or even university, is also completely viable - in most places a bachelors is acceptable for teaching at a university.
This is really what I mean with the world being your oyster. There's so much out there but most people just don't realize these possibilities even exist.
>There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour
Hypothetically if someone was burnt out and willing to operate in the gray a bit, how much can you make (approximately) doing English lessons under the table?
Eg: I go to Thailand. I enter as a tourist. Ocassionally, I meet someone in a café and have a conversation with them. They value that enough to pay me.
One of my big pre-covid regrets is I didn't travel more... I had intended to, having been laid off just before it started but everything got locked down and I had a bit of a mental health episode, feeling trapped in interactions I didn't consent to as I spent money on rent I could have spent on hotels etc.
Right as COVID fell, I'd been researching doing the Moscow to Beijing train then exploring SE Asia... it's funny how much of the planned route is possibly bust... for example, I was going to skip mainland China and only visit HK since less visa issues, not sure if that's still possible...
I was speaking more of software, but in general the thing I find is that when people try to figure out what other people want - when they themselves don't necessarily want it, they have trouble remaining objective. Some friends are serial entrepreneurs and they keep coming up with these horrible ideas that they convince themselves others people would want. Maybe one day they'll be right, but in the mean time it looks pretty silly.
OTOH I think Amazon would have sounded like a horrible idea. A book store minus the ability to peruse the books, pick up a coffee, or browse in the same sort of way? I wonder if it really was a great idea, or it's just some weird butterfly effect that drove it up, up, and away.
I remember the Amazon rollout. The pitch was order a book from anywhere and get a biggest selection of books and price. Small book stores were getting eaten up by Chapters letting you read the entire book. Amazon's secret sauce was accessable affiliate marketing. They had and probably still have the biggest affiliate program and at first the only game on town.
Food/coffee came later when the in person business was declining.
I think GP makes it sound far easier than it really is, but there’s also clearly not “exactly zero” such roles. (I have team members based in EU working remotely. Retention is high and we get a lot of applicants when we open new roles. Those are good for the employer side but negative for individual applicants.)
In my experience, it's much easier as a freelancer. Usually what is meant to be a couple weeks gig turns out to be a couple months or year-long business relationship.
I've worked in 3 places that were fully 100% remote. I'm from Barcelona, ES. They are not the modt common but they do exist if you look for them and there are quite a lot.
//And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
What typed of jobs is this referring to, besides teaching English ?
The obvious one is definitely teaching, though not just English. For online teaching, English is a major lingua franca and any skill you might want to teach, from chess to calculus - there will be plenty of online students available in English, even if that may often not be their native tongue.
For in person teaching it's the same thing. Most countries have a system of bilingual schools, international schools, and then university type schools. And all of these offer English language instruction in everything from PE to Calculus. The major difference between a bilingual school and an international school is that the latter will generally pay much more and expect much more with certification a stated requirement, though in practice it often is not.
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Outside of that there's endless odd jobs available that are in need of English speakers. I have friends working in everything from marketing to rehab. A good idea there would be to pick a country you're interested, find the common job boards there (which LLMs may be excellent for, though I have not used them for this myself - yet) and simply search for 'English' or other such keywords. You'll be surprised.
Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil.
You clearly know nothing about the history of these two. Or, maybe even more likely, you want this to be true so you can feel better about your life being relatively unimportant in comparison to Steve Jobs' life. Seems to be very common.
Woz and Jobs were best friends as teenagers and loved each other. And like many good friends they had their issues but loved and respected each other until the end.
Woz wasn't doing a deal with the devil. He was co-founding a startup with his extremely ambitious and abrasive best friend.
Almost everyone that ever worked closely with Steve Jobs came away with enormous respect for him and deeply appreciated their time together. Yes, they also say that he was sometimes an asshole but that's how people are: complicated.
There's a very good chance more than a few people think you're an asshole at times.
Steve Jobs is the reason Apple, Next, and Pixar made their mark on history. No amount of envy and revisionist history can change this.
The way you have discounted Wozniak's talent, one can also discount Steve's ambition. There are thousands of people same or more ambitious than Jobs. Being ambitious doesn't guarantee anything, neither does being as good as wozniak only work when combined with ambition.
Steve Jobs brought a hell of a lot more to the table than just raw ambition.
I just meant to contrast the level of ambition between the two. Wozniak was extremely unambitious and Jobs pushed him into starting a company, with great difficulty.
Nothing is guaranteed in life but I've certainly met more than a few people that I predicted would be successful and then they were. There are character traits that incline people toward success.
I disagree. Woz was a rare talent that would have found great success in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Would he have been as famous as he is now? Maybe not. But here he is at the end telling us that happiness was the point, not fame or billions.
He’d have found great success by his own measures if HP just let do more of the things he found interesting. Those measures wouldn’t have shown up in his bank account, but I think he’d have been happy.
On the contrary, I know all about that. Wozniak's company was self-funded with his Apple money (thanks Steve Jobs). It was innovative but not terribly so and was a complete failure as a business.
Agreed. I think the point was that Woz was definitely less rich than Jobs(not poor though) and seems to have had a far happier life than Jobs. In some sense, Woz had what Jobs never had. Woz was blessed with having enough.
Yes that's what I don't understand about most of the ultra-rich. They keep wanting more despite having enough to spend millions every day for the rest of their lives. Tesla can't stop throwing tens of billions in bonuses at Musk. But what can he do with that money that he couldn't already?
I think the “wanting more” you describe is less driven by wanting more purchasing power but rather as an outcome of seeking the accomplishment of measurable goals. It becomes about the number rather than what the number represents.
Why does a track star strive to run faster when they can already easily a 4:00 mile and running a 3:42 would be of no practical difference in their life? It’s for the drive not the result.
Hmm yeah like gamification they put in everywhere these days. I don't really understand the attraction of that. I don't want my watch reminding me I'm halfway through my 'goal' which I only set because there was no way to activate the damn thing without setting one. Samsung also keeps switching notifications for it back on. Grrrr.
But in pursuit of these made up goals the industry ruins very real lives by widening the gap between the rich and poor :(
"Money is just a way of keeping score." - attributed to oil baron H. L. Hunt.
One might just as well ask why the person with the largest collection of toasters (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-c...) wants them since there's a limit to how much toast he can consume. Soime people have passions and they work to realize them, whether it's something silly toasters or something crass like as wealth and power.
It's a selection bias, the ones you're thinking about wouldn't be ultra-rich if their greed had an end. And at this level of wealth, money buys you power, not things.
Yeah you may not want that - Musk’s plan to get to mars involves, not necessarily _intentionally_ but with no attempt to avoid, ruining the earth for everyone else. He and his billionaire friends that want to colonize space have said they intend to do it by any means necessary, including by walking on the backs of us poors, if it means their progeny can outlast the rest of earth.
I used to believe he was a good person actually thinking about the best for humanity (although going to Mars is not the way to do that IMO). But then he turned full nazi so yeah...
These people end up changing the world. Often for the better sometimes not. There happiness isn’t found by being content with what they have but the desire for total domination.
As these people drive progress forward and most of us benefit from the side effects. Just don’t get too close.
It is about keeping score with the other billionaires. Bigger market cap and bigger yacht = more status. Personally, I think you have to be some sort of sociopath to prioritise your billionaire ranking over all the good you could do by giving some of that money to good causes. But I guess being a sociopath is probably helpful if you want to be a billionaire.
Especially when it was caught early on, and was one of the few variations of a horrible cancer type that could have been successfully treated at that stage, but that treatment plan was refused.
It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this. People do it all the time with Steve Jobs as if it's okay because he could be a jerk at times.
It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.
Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.
Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.
It's not blaming him to mention that an immediate surgery would have vastly increased his chances of survival.
And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors.
I'm also not blaming my beloved grandfather either when I mention that smoking likely killed him in the end and he knew that years before.
Jobs was a very smart guy with all the means to improve his situation but decided against it. For me it's a lesson to consider where my closely held beliefs could be wrong.
He waited 9 months to listen to his doctors -- or anyone -- by all accounts instead trying to cure it with diets and spiritual fads.
Genentech CEO (and PhD in Biochemistry) Art Levinson: he "pleaded every day" with Jobs and found it "enormously frustrating that [he] just couldn't connect with him"
Andy Grove: "Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy"
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Marc Andreessen: "Steve Jobs was 'one of the most disagreeable people in the history of humankind,' and that was part of his genius."
He was an obstinate man who thought he knew better than everyone else. Sometimes he did. This time he didn't.
Steve Jobs's entire job for thirty years was recruiting, listening, and working with experts in various fields. He never would have succeeded without being able to accept that other people knew more than him in certain areas. He worked with doctors very successfully most of the time.
My take is that he was scared and acting out of fear. Hoping against hope that his bullshit alternatives would work because he was so terrified of having his body "opened" and "violated" by a major surgery. Maybe that fear sometimes masqueraded as arrogance but that's still just fear.
Like many others, you seem excited to be able to judge Steve Jobs on this point. To judge and laugh at him for his arrogance killing him. When in reality you're judging and laughing at a pancreatic cancer patient for procrastinating on their surgery out of fear.
Steve Jobs found success by doing just the opposite: not accepting the status quo / accepted wisdom and disrupting it.
In this way Elon Musk is very similar. That gets you EVs where none existed and it gets you crappy self driving by eschewing LIDAR for cameras only. It gets you rockets that land themselves and it gets a flat concrete launchpad obliterated by the first Starship launch as others warned.
If you'd said merely "I think it was fear, more than arrogance" that could have been an interesting discussion, but instead you've been making it strangely personal throughout.
Frankly I dont care enough about Jobs to be "excited" or "laugh" or whatever accusations you are throwing around the thread -- they reflect more on you than on me.
You're the one judging a cancer patient's response to their diagnoses. I'm the one pointing out how wrong that is. So yes, it's about you personally and your actions. Not just you of course.
We are all flawed. I think Steve Jobs was less flawed than most of his critics. Maybe less flawed than myself. The difference is we know everything he did wrong in his entirely life because it's so well documented.
I don't know why you feel the need to white-knight the man, and I find it especially rich that you somehow think that he's "probably less flawed than his critics" whom you know nothing about, but statistically probably don't park in handicap spots, rip off business partners, or abandon their children during their formative years (his denialism about the paternity test seems to resemble that of the surgery).
I said his personality--the one that led him to rip off Wozniak along with his other actions (positive and negative)--likely led him to die [earlier]. But in your view the true moral failing was not in these acts which actually harmed other people, but in merely making an observation about how the man's personality likely ended up harming himself too.
It's not "morally repugnant" to tell the truth; that charge is what's morally repugnant.
From ChatGPT:
"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance of survival if he had pursued standard medical treatment sooner.
Jobs was diagnosed in 2003 with a rare type of pancreatic cancer — a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET) — which typically grows much more slowly than the common and far more lethal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. When caught early, pNETs can often be treated successfully with surgery and other conventional therapies.
Instead, Jobs initially delayed surgery for about nine months while trying alternative diets and other non-standard approaches. By the time he agreed to surgery in 2004, the disease had progressed, and although he lived for several more years, the delay may have reduced his overall odds."
"He said he had a curable cancer and he should have taken the treatment."
He never uttered this sentence. You're making it up (lying).
Supposedly, he did say "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"
Which shows a man struggling to come to terms with his diagnoses, desperate for alternatives, and eventually gathering the courage to undergo a major surgical operation.
>It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this.
No, it's rude and weird to chastise someone for rightfully advocating treatment. He didn't state that he didn't want to risk the horrors of treatment with the end result being the same -- he spread disinformation. It is good he died, because when others repeat his disinformation, we can point back at his death as evidence against his beliefs.
You weigh the feelings of a dead billionaire higher than the lives of young people with hopes and dreams.
It's very obvious that people, seeming you as well, take some delight in the idea that Steve Jobs killed himself with arrogance.
That is morally repugnant. He was a pancreatic cancer patient coping with his diagnoses the best he could manage. The fact that he was a "billionaire" has nothing to do with it. He was a human and all sentient life is sacred in my view.
You also do not actually know the facts of the case. He did not spread disinformation to anyone. He was intensely private during this entire period and very little information is known for a fact.
But by all means enjoy your mocking, judging, and condemnation of cancer patients. I'll continue to find it morally repugnant.
There's a lot more to fairly criticize about this. Mostly the system that allows it but also him for taking advantage of it.
And yet it's basic human instinct to do what's possible to survive. I admit that I would have done the same and I wouldn't believe most people who would claim otherwise.
I highly doubt any self-made billionaire who keeps pushing for more is actually pushing for more money specifically. It seems to me that more money is a side-effect of whatever they're addicted to doing.
I'm not sure I buy it. You don't get to be a billionaire by being net harmful, you do it by selling goods and services that people want, at scale, and capturing a portion of the wealth you created.
There's a pretty significant difference between the statements: "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because what Woz is ought to not be seen as naive" and "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because most other people wouldn't understand him as naive" and it's unclear to me which of those to statements you mean.
I too have been lucky enough to hear him speak, and he very much does have this naivete of youth in the way he speaks. He has this very simple and straight forward way to view his contribution, along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.
I don't think he's nearly as naive as he comes off, but I think he wants to be seen as naive, because his personal philosophy is one that places naivete in high regard. He wants to follow happiness, and happiness can oftentimes be a little naive.
I debated with myself on whether to use "naive" but it seems the most appropriate description. I barely know Woz outside of a 3-hour lecture but it appears that Jobs took advantage of his naivete, lying to him on multiple occasions. It worked out (financially) for Woz and he seems to have a great attitude about it, one of the reasons I admire him. He seems to successfully walk the line of not caring if people take advantage of him while not getting wrecked. I think it fair to consider that a facet of being naive.
I think "innocent" and "guileless" also bracket the sense you're going for, but they don't quite fit either.
Like, he doesn't see the malice in other people, but its not because he's innocent/naive of such intents, nor does he lack the skills to look for it (guileless), but because (as you say) he doesn't care if people take advantage of him, up to a limit.
I think “grounded” might be a better term vs being naive in this context. People can suck, sometimes a person who sucks is going to take advantage of you, and it’s a choice to handle it in a mindful, positive way. Monk vibes.
It’s not being unaware (naive) but rather a lack of cynicism. I think that’s an important distinction to make. It takes an extra dose of intelligence to avoid cynicism when you are at that level. Cynicism isn’t wisdom, and its absence isn’t naïveté.
The 3 ladders. People on the sociopaths (Elites) ladder think of everyone else – the clueless (educated gentry) and economic losers (labour) – as naive.
The clueless ladder comes off as most naive. Labour knows they're losing and focuses on their own thing. Sociopaths know they're winning and focus on power accumulation. The clueless don't notice any of this and focus on bettering the world or whatever.
Where does this need come from, to be skeptical or suspicious? Of someone so clearly above board?
Wozniak doesn't need to prove himself to anyone. Maybe he feels comfortable enough in his shoes to be very open about himself, and so motivate people to be true to themselves. At least that's my interpretation.
They're different dimensions. Naivety suggests a blindness (or maybe willingness to ignore) the true nature of people, hence why naive people are often taken advantage of, or seen as idealistic. You can be technologically brilliant and at the same time not dialled in to those kind of social/people dynamics.
Yeah, game theory is a great lens because fundamentally it's about understanding people's incentives. On top of that, you add in irrationality and you get behavioural economics which is basically this stuff playing out at scale.
I get what they mean by "naive". I think I would have used the word "child-like"? Even that is not right though. There is a kind of playground simplicity to his philosophy. I think Woz did though in fact bring enough for the whole class.
Unfortunately it's this attitude which perpetuates those kinds of actions. Of course it never starts off that way, it starts off as just wanting to protect yourself from harm, but you can eventually justify just about anything with the argument that its necessary for your "survival" (not literal survival, of course, but you get the idea).
"If I don't exploit this person's kindness now, I'll fall behind those who do and they'll use that leverage against me" gives you some idea
You only need to hang around toddlers or teens for less than a day to realize people do not start off kind.
People start off egocentric. Unaware or unable to take in to account the people around them are individuals with conflicting wants to you. Also unaware that we are egocentric BUT with social instinct built in to us: if we are surrounded by miserable people, or people angry at us, we don't feel good either.
So we learn that kindness, while sometimes initially painful or less opportunistic, in the long term leads to satisfaction.
How so? Babies will bite their mothers trying to get food - it's instinctive, but it's not kind. Kindness needs to be taught despite any natural propensity towards it.
It's a very difficult balance to strike imo. People do take niceness and humor as signs that you're not quite as "professional". Of course, other people don't make this mistake, but we don't live in a vacuum - sometimes the jellybrains have control over our promotions.
The difficulty is why it requires intelligence to achieve. It is easy to be mean, and easy to be kind to your own detriment. Being kind while still thriving yourself takes thought.
That's because niceness and humor are often just a mask for being unsure, inconcise, or at worst plain unkind. Being kind is much harder, it requires thoroughly judging the situation, including considering own interests, and then responding in a genuine manner.
It requires ones own mind to fell “taken advantage of” - if one is smart enough to be kind, one most remember to be kind to oneself as well, and not care about what the sad critters gets from the leftovers.
Stoicism promote exactly this virtue of understanding that you are in control of interpreting your own feelings.
On the other hand, your feelings don't exist in a vacuum, disconnected from your external state. If you genuinely feel taken advantage of, no amount of self-delusion is going to make you truly over it, until you acknowledge the source of it, and take steps to protect yourself against it in the future.
Very easy to over-extend stoicism to your own detriment, physically and mentally.
It's the sad reality of the society we live in. Money matters the most. Nothing else.
Kind people always get taken advantage of at work. Others take credit and then left abandoned once there's no more value to the company. I guess that's just capitalism.
Agreed. We call those people assholes. We try our best to avoid hiring those people and we weed them out of our company as fast as possible if they're discovered. We also try to have as flat a structure as possible so nobody is taking credit for anyone else's work and ideally many of us are working together so we all share the glory or frustration when something goes well or not.
I do think the flat hierarchy thing is commendable for many reasons.
That said, don't think that just because you (try to) have few bosses that there isn't some form of hierarchy in which people don't take credit for other people's work.
Sure, maybe there's no boss by title that people suck up to and take credit for stuff to look good to them. But there very definitely will be the "alphas" in the group that everyone looks up to and wants to look good to and the taking credit for stuff will be done to impress those people.
So, if you weed out this kind of stuff successfully well enough, again, I commend you. But I doubt it's as complete as you may want to think. It's just a different looking game of favours and sucking up to with less easily visible (can't just look at title to figure out who to suck up to) lines.
For some people this will be positive as they're good at figuring out who to suck up to in that situation while others may need the title to figure that out. I bet many socially awkward / socially less aware people find it easier to navigate titles they can read in an org chart than sniffing these out of the "sociosphere".
Never has a colleague taken credit for the work I've done. On the contrary, often in demos and other presentations they've thanked or acknowledged my support even when they didn't need to if they were the driver. I know the world can be harsh but my work life experience gives me no reason at all to be cynical.
No its not naive, its called not being a sociopath. Some of biggest movers if not all were and are such. Utter pieces of shit as human beings, to the last one. I dont think I need to name current big names, all of them fit this.
I like Woz, was never a fan of Jobs. And I mean that with regard to their personality — not their skillset.
My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example).
I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh.
It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components.
I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.
Good point. Perhaps you're suggesting he was finally just unwilling to dive in and layout the next Apple motherboard — allowing instead others straight from grad school to design the hardware.
Perhaps this was when he began drifting toward education.
> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed
It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it.
It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements.
Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64
Woz is extraordinary lucky that he has a legacy (and a lot of money). Clearly the bulk of the credit goes to Jobs. And it seems more than likely that if not Woz, Jobs would have found someone else.
At that point in his career, I'm not sure who else would have had Jobs ;-).
From the outside it looks like the opposite though: Jobs was latching on to everything Woz created — beginning with Blue boxes. (Well, not everything Woz created — Jobs seemed uninterested in his dial-a-joke project.)
Woz is indeed truly lucky that Jobs did partner with him. Jobs saw that it was worth going all in (financially) to push the Apple to the masses. Woz seems like the type that would have remained a hobbyist — perhaps doing a write-up about his "Apple" for Popular Electronics.
Jobs too was extraordinarily lucky he had a smart friend who was just on the cusp of the budding personal computer revolution.
A lot of "survivorship" bias too since there were plenty of also-rans at the time.
Woz is one of my favorite people ever, a lifelong hero for me.
I think it’s important to remember that he is the product of a very unique time in world history though.
He grew up in a time and place that was arguably the best time ever to be a human in all of history. He grew up in a society with extremely high social mobility, when a house in the bay was cheap, in a homogeneous society with high social trust, surrounded by the smartest people of his generation, in a place in the country which valued open mindedness and true progressive thinking. Things like going to college, buying a house, paying rent, or finding a mate were orders of magnitude easier than today.
Optimizing for happiness is a nice pursuit if this is the society that shapes your worldview, but today this is a luxury view that very few people can afford. The world is much more of a rat race, we have significantly lower social trust, basic survival is much harder to achieve than Woz’s time. So few people can go through life just trying to be happy instead of grinding to get ahead.
Great comment. This quote from Hunter S Thompson comes to mind (although he is referring to middle sixties so Woz would have been a teenager, not quite the 70s young adult)
> “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
This is spot on. Nicely written! I think many people forget what a great, unique, and exciting time those decades were. (Or many simply did not experience them).
There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.
As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.
> most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple.
I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.
What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.
Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
I tend to have a pretty open, kind, and respectful approach to others.
It’s frequently interpreted as weakness and naivety.
I’m actually a pretty hardboiled and cynical person on the inside, but choose not to approach life in that manner. There’s reasons. Long story for other venues.
It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not.
Kindness and generosity are not [necessarily] weakness.
more people need to be like Woz and we need more Jobs in the world. Jobs was a person who bullied through the ego centric system and paved a good single way forward.
Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it?
Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.
False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego.
Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence.
Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3
I met Jobs as a high schooler at Westfield Valley Fair with a "Programming in Objective-C for iPhone" book in hand during like the iPhone 3G era, and he refused to sign the book lol
> his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence
A story about Chuck Yeager. He did a stint as squadron commander in the Korean War. When he arrived at the airbase, he watched the squadron land. Afterwards, he called all the pilots together, got a bucket of paint, and marked off two lines across the runway.
He said the pilots were doing sloppy landings and would now land between the two lines. The pilots protested, saying that was impossible. So Yeager got in a jet, took off, circled the airfield, and touched down exactly at the midpoint between the lines.
The squadron pilots got the point.
Yeager wanted his pilots to survive combat, and that meant being perfect pilots every time. If I was a pilot, I'd be glad to have a squadron leader like that in command, even if he was a total asshole.
True, I'm not saying that. I'm sure without a big ego you won't succeed as a big businessman. I'm just saying he was a very typical narcissist and as such his ego would have been important to him (which is what the thread discussion was about). I didn't state any moral judgment there (though I do have one which I elaborated on elsewhere)
this is the right take. the world clearly needs more Steve Jobses or the world wouldn't remember this one so singularly. and i don't know what the number would be before the world didn't need any more Wozniaks. the problem is that the Wozniaks of the world nowadays, if they're not getting paid 9 figures by Zuck, are probably in a random room somewhere doing absolutely brilliant work that will take a decade to appreciate. and the more Wozes in the world, the more advantageous it is to be a Jobs. kind of a funny dynamic equilibrium.
When I was a student, we tried to get him to speak to at our school, but Woz wanted mucho $$$$ to speak. But it seems plenty people will pay what he asks. I guess if my job were to just go around talking about random shit I'm interested in, and I can make $10M doing that, I'd be the happiest person ever too. I don't think it's about naivete.
Edit to clarify: I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to get paid, I'm saying his being "the happiest person ever" is directly correlated to his ability to collect millions just shooting the shit in front of a fawning audience.
it's a bit of work and effort to give a talk. And he is rich enough to not need to do it for the money. Time is important. If he'd be doing it for free he'd probably get too many requests. Adding a high $ can simply help filter down to a reasonable thing.to only the largest locations and highest number of people.
I dont want to do contract work but people ask so I just quote an unreasonably high number and on occasion someone bites. I dont need the money so I need an easy filter.
A person whose every interest and opinion gets validated by the world would indeed be very happy. Imagine just talking about whatever the hell happens to interest you to people and everyone paying attention and even paying you good money for that.
It's a bit related to how billionaires tell everyone to "just work on whatever makes you happy and it's all going to be fine".
They absolutely 100% are trying to emulate Steve Jobs. But the version of Steve Jobs they have in their heads is a caricature.
Steve Jobs wanted the world to see him as some sort of artistic, cultured genius. The only aspects of Steve Jobs that today's crop of tech CEOs seem to emulate are his wealth and arrogance.
• Wojcicki admired Jobs while Youtube had the most depraved and moronic comment section on the internet
• Huffman admired Jobs while Reddit had a 'watch people die' subreddit
• Zuckerberg admired Jobs while nuts used Facebook to livestream the Christchurch massacre and Whatsapp to incite mobs to kill Rohingya
• Bezos admired Jobs while Amazon was promoting dollar-store junk on every page
• Musk admired Jobs while Grok was dubbing itself 'MechaHitler'
Those examples are embarrassing enough, though we could go on an on with more. There's no version of Steve Jobs who would allow such garbage to tarnish his image.
They aren't deifying jobs, Jobs was an asshole, but when you confabulate what you think is your tech god and then larp as that, you make a worse version of everything.
Taste is hard to cultivate. You have to care about things like art to cultivate it. As a result all of these dweebs are trying to ape Steve Jobs and they're just succeeding at his worst traits: arrogance and cruelty and a lack of empathy.
> The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
It seems the selected examples in your tendentious anaphora are entirely about justifying censorship and centralization. Strikes me as ironic, since the hacker ethos has been stridently libertarian, information wants to be free and all that. Now I hear more people like yourself, practically begging for restrictions and top down control. Reminds me of the covid hysteria over 'misinformation' around the lab leak theory and gain of function research. Many reasonable criticisms were censored by the big tech platforms. For example, lockdowns were immensely destructive and have never been recommended policy in response to epidemics, school closures caused significant harm to children who were at no real risk of the virus, Fauci admitted 6 feet of social distancing was arbitrary and not based on any science, and policies requiring cloth masks were not found to have any significant effect in preventing transmission, etc..
Steve Jobs didn't allow porn on the App Store. It wasn't the end of the world.
Besides, it would be easy to list 100 more examples of trashy practices (eg: preinstalled crapware, intrusive advertising, dark patterns, etc) for today's tech companies that have nothing to do with censorship.
Actually the world needs more Jobs too. More Jobs, more Woz. Brilliant engineers and hackers need to partner with some super egotistic, charismatic, bullying asshole visionaries to make a dent.
Remember how Jobs single handedly bullied Adobe Flash into its graveyard? Bullied record labels into selling individual songs instead of the whole CD? Cannot imagine Woz doing that. Elon is the next Jobs only even harder to stomach. I wouldn't want to work for these people but they, along with those who can work along side them, change the world.
I would prefer a world with less 'asshole visionaries'. If that means we get smart phones a few years later (or not at all) it would be worth it, for a kinder world.
Come on, your comments trail shows that you have a lot of experience. You know that being on a patent doesn't make one an inventor, just like being on a peer-reviewed paper doesn't make one a contributor. Yes Musk seems to be a deeply technical person, even Karpathy wrote it somewhere here after he resigned, but these credentials you're citing are not the proof.
Otherwise you'd have to believe he bungled his way into multiple fortunes creating engineering triumphs that outdid the established automakers and NASA.
You obviously don't need to be an actual engineer to pull this off.
Elon Musk provided the vision and the money to assemble a great team of engineers. However, I find it hard to believe he does actual electric car or spacecraft engineering, given he has no education in these fields.
"Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he'd borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts."
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 108
All three of those books are advanced engineering books (I have a copy of each).
So a biography says he borrowed some books. Do you want me to believe he suddenly became a genius rocket engineer over the course of a few months? With no prior track record or any indication of his supposedly extraordinary talent?
Hal Finney wouldn't show up for class at Caltech. He'd flip through the textbook at the end of the semester, and ace the final.
Yes, there are people like Hal. Not many, but they exist.
If you prefer to think that Elon bungled his way into inspiring top people to implement his ideas, and bungled his way into launching payload at 10% of the best cost NASA could do, feel free.
P.S. Buy those books, and look through them. They're the real deal.
There are certainly people like that! I just doubt that Musk is one of them.
First there are is no hard evidence for his supposedly engineering genius and second he has a long public track record of lying and gross hyperbole.
What I find more likely: Musk throws around wild ideas and his engineers figure out what might work or not. (After all, he also comes up with pretty dumb ideas.) This approach can be successful, but it doesn't make you an engineer yourself.
I am still confused why you would claim that Musk was better than many engineers you know, based on what little we actually know about his technical skills.
Woz was in the right place at the right time. Jobs would have found someone else and no one would ever have heard of Woz. Jobs gave us some of the most amazing products the world has ever seen.
by SteveWoz on Monday April 13, 2020 @09:13AM (#59940526) Attached to: Elon Musk Still Predicts 1 Million Tesla Robotaxis By the End of the Year
You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.
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Comment Die in your sleep... (Score 1) 213
by SteveWoz on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:30PM (#58807154) Attached to: People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway
At least Tesla respects our right to die in our sleep.
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Comment Re:Maybe they just realized (Score 1) 172
by SteveWoz on Friday June 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#54537213) Attached to: Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars
You meant to say 'great' cars with 'some' quality problems. Autocorrect can be a bitch...
I'm not familiar with his personality, what is he naive about? like the kind of person that ignores sort of political and business machinations and chases personal interests?
> we wouldn't be talking about Woz today if they had not paired up.
The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.
This is an odd thing to say when Steve Jobs achieved most of his success after parting ways with Woz. Jobs was the product guy at Apple. He laser focused on every detail to make sure that the experience was perfect.
Jobs wasn't an engineer, but there were plenty of talented engineers at Microsoft working for years on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone) because it was so unintuitive. By contrast, the original iPhone was a decade ahead of it's time in terms of design. It had pinch-to-zoom, a proximity sensor to prevent accidental touches during calls, a light sensor that adjusted brightness, and an accelerometer for landscape and portrait mode. These features were originally considered gimmicks, but it turned out to be indispensable.
It's not enough to have great engineers. Imagine a world where Bret Victor gets hired by MS and spends five years in Redmond.
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Wozniak was indispensible in the early days. They had to survive first, and then Jobs could have a chance to thrive, and having someone like Wozniak greatly increased his chance of survival - it's not easy to find someone like that. That he continued to add much more value than Wozniak could to the business is another matter. There maybe many Jobs who died without being known because they could not find a strong partner.
Eh, there's no way to know for sure but I would bet that there are a lot more people who could have been swapped out for Jobs with similar success than the reverse. It's generally thought to be harder to find a brilliant innovative technical person for a startup than a business one. I also see a lot more passable Jobs imitators around the industry than I do Woz imitators.
If you think there is anyone in tech today who is a passable Jobs imitator I'd suggest going back to watch some of his talks and Apple keynotes. He was not perfect (no one is), but he understood why we as humans use technology better than any one of his stature today.
Empirically, every Apple product you're using today was designed without Woz' involvement, and nearly every one of them still shows traces of Jobs' involvement.
Conversely, Woz started numerous companies after parting ways with Jobs, and I can't think of a single one that had a lasting impact.
It's not really a level playing field to compare Jobs running an established company with a devoted fan base, to Woz starting companies from nothing. One is much easier than the other.
When Jobs was fired by Apple, he started NeXT (platform where the web was developed) and Pixar. The Apple desktop platform, one of the existing products referenced, still has a lot of heritage from NeXT. I think Jobs was an asshole too but he did start outside companies that did well and still have a major lasting contribution today.
He put himself on the organ waiting list in multiple states when it became apparent that his quack medicine wasn't working to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer. He took a liver from someone out of state and died with it. They changed the law to prevent this happening again.
The guy lied and didn't register his car and handled his own sickness in a way you don't like? The horror!
Sure, complain about him forcing his way onto lists if we're willing to accept that all humans are truly equal (I'm fine with this concept), or being mean to others, but who CARES about the other stuff?
So? Who cares why he died? Is it wrong to die for a reason you disagree with? If the world is no worse off without him, then wasn't his judgement neutral at worst, and good at best?
It's weird how much he gets under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole, or at least definitely above the one guy they've ever seen a tell-all story on.
edit: it's almost like, in the current social meta of "doing no wrong is more important than doing good", there is a need to denigrate any approach that doesn't feel extra cozy and warm and loving. But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history. He had a helluva team and made things work. I gotta be honest, I don't really care if he said scary and mean things.
> It's weird how much he gets under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole, or at least definitely above the one guy they've ever seen a tell-all story on.
I'm not perfect but he was everything I strive not to be (I'm not always successful though). I strive to be kind, fair, generous, caring and inclusive. I'm not always those things but I do try. From what I 've seen about Jobs is that he didn't really share those values.
I understand that other people admire him a lot but I don't really, because I have other criteria.
And really to be honest I would not like 95% of successful corporate CEOs. It's not just Jobs. You have to be a certain type, an ambitious person with shark tactics who puts everything aside to get to the top. Otherwise someone else who is will beat you to it. Those are not qualities I consider good in a person.
However each person makes their own judgment and that's ok. My opinion doesn't really matter, but it is mine.
> under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole
I never understood this kind of thinking, and have always found it particularly heartless & puzzling, until one day I stumbled upon something I myself had no visceral reaction to but other people clearly did. It looked like they were being fake about it, either completely, or just in an exaggerating way.
Turned out no, I was just not in the headspace required. Which makes sense cause I mean, let's be honest: what do you think is more likely? The majority of people secretly and intentionally all just messing with you, or rather them just actually saying what they think, and then you just not being able to relate to it?
Nothing I’m saying implies I don’t think they’re speaking how they truly feel. I absolutely believe they genuinely believe them when they say he’s some kind of monster because he didn’t get chemo (???) and was rude to people and took up handicapped parking spaces.
I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick when something like 50% of CEOs already show psychopathic traits.
> Nothing I’m saying implies I don’t think they’re speaking how they truly feel.
Then how am I supposed to interpret "people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole"? You literally say people are pretending.
> when they say he’s some kind of monster because he didn’t get chemo (???) and was rude to people and took up handicapped parking spaces
I would 100% say he was "some kind of monster" for power abuse (verbal harassment), as well as for denying and neglecting his child, yes. The scrambling for an organ donor after his drug-addled delusions fell through thing doesn't sound too hot either.
Judgements are subjective. Usually people operate under shared assumptions, so one would just expect that their judgement would be widely shared - but this doesn't make them some universal truth.
This is how and why you end up in a circle when people describe things he's a bad person for, and then you just say "well I don't find those things to be bad". Great, we already know he's not a bad person for you, you said as much. People just disagree and see it different, and list things off for you to try and relate. And so you list off counterpoints to make them try and relate.
> I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick
Yes, well, being extremely "well known", along with his personality, despite never having met 99.999% of the people who "know" about him is pretty unrealistic / unnatural to begin with. This includes me of course.
I’m saying they’re pretending that they’re more moral than him. They aren’t, of course. Hell, for a tell-all book, it was extremely benign. Flouting minor laws, not taking care of his health, and being mean? Ahh!
And I’m not surprised that you think he’s some kinda monster. That’s the insane world we live in today, and why it’s such an obnoxious one. You’ve got nothing to balance any bad act on, besides “everything must be done with perfect kindness”, so even something as minor as being rude comes across as “some kind of monster”. You’ve artificially moved your Overton window to such a falsely soft world, you can no longer reasonably judge regular people.
If it's any consolation, I find today's world incredibly obnoxious as well. Although mostly from the exact opposite perspective, as you may imagine (though not quite the overdramatized way you describe).
Tried my best to be persuasive, but this is all I had in me. Let's see where our opinions take this world.
He would, if he were still alive. But he’s not. Most likely due to his own irrationality.
> But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history.
Do you really believe that life would have been particularly different if he had never existed? I don’t. I suppose if you’re some sort of Apple fanboy, you might feel that way, but from any broader perspective, I don’t see it.
>this was done so he could park in disabled spaces
That makes no sense to me. I can't think of a place Jobs would ever drive his car where it would matter if he could park at a disabled spot. He had his own spot at both Apple and his home, where else did he ever park often enough for that to matter?
Personally I believe the explanation that he did it to avoid the ugly license plate. It mirrors how he refused any stickers on the Mac, when all other PC makers had to put the "intel inside" on theirs.
That's pretty dumb. There are literally thousands upon thousands of companies you purchase from every single day where this happens or has happened. Why do you only care about Jobs?
Answer: because he was the only one brave enough to be this transparent. Literally all you're doing is encouraging everyone to hide this behavior as much as possible, and never EVER own up to it.
I give more bravery points (which are worthless of course) to a whistle blower or someone running into a burning building to rescue the world's most tragic orphan.
Because if the future household names don't want to be referred to as "not good" people forever, they ought not sacrifice being a good person for their fame and success.
Others may say it, but there's a difference between being annoyed that other people say something, and turning your comment in such a way that others saying it looks like you're being prevented from saying what you want.
"After Lisa was born, Jobs publicly denied paternity, which led to a legal case. Even after a DNA paternity test established him as her father, he maintained his position. The resolution of the legal case required him to provide Brennan with $385 per month and to reimburse the state for the money she had received from welfare. After Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire, he increased the payment to $500 a month."
"Despite the reconciliation between Jobs and Lisa their relationship remained difficult. In her autobiography, Lisa recounted many episodes of Jobs failing to be an appropriate parent. He remained mostly distant, cold and made her feel unwanted, and initially refused to pay her college fees."
Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person? Maybe he was a bad parent, maybe he was an overly demanding and overbearing boss, but it's not like he was killing people or selling weapons. He sold phones and mp3 players and computers. He almost certainly contributed to making the world a better place by many objective criteria. I don't know why he's labeled as a "bad person" when there are hordes of people who foment and profit from war and killing and don't contribute at all to human productivity, creativity, or wellbeing but are lauded.
He maintained the position that she was not his daughter, even after DNA test proved that claim wrong. Bad person. The worst. There can't be discussion about this. Unloving and neglectful are not even in the same category.
Speaking only for myself, when I call someone a "bad" person (I am wary of calling anyone "bad," but that is the language used in this conversation), I mean that they treat others poorly. They may contribute immensely to the world (as Steve Jobs did), but that is orthogonal to whether they are a good or bad person.
I know others have a different calculus, and I am not trying to convince anyone. Still, being a bad parent, especially after you have asked to reconcile, is... well... a person I would be hesitant to associate with regardless of how much I loved my iPhone 2G, or how cool the Lisa looked in the early 1980s.
> it's not like he was killing people or selling weapons.
Well, if your standard is that no one is a bad person until they are literally murdering people or selling war machines, then no, of course not.
But as a parent myself, I think it's fair to say that if you, as a multimillionaire, stoop to doing the bare legal minimum to support the child you created, who was at one point living in poverty because you failed to support her before, then yes: you are a bad person.
There are obviously many other ways in which Steve Jobs was a bad person! He kept obtaining temporary license plates because he wanted to park in handicapped spots without getting tickets. He orchestrated a salary-fixing cartel that artificially depressed wages for many thousands of engineers in Silicon Valley, all so that he and his other obscenely rich friends could get even richer. And he had his devices manufactured in China under horrendously exploitative conditions again, so that he and his shareholders could make an extra buck. (on top of the billions they already had)
But if your standard of being a "bad person" (not even evil!) is murder or complicity in it, then you could make a strong case that Steve Jobs was not a bad person, altogether.
There's always someone worse. That's whataboutism. You don't have to be Hitler to be a bad person.
Being a bad parent can damage a child for life. That's pretty bad in my book. I've seen it so much.
But in my view it's not black and white. He was certainly a bad parent. Also a pretty bad employer when I read the stories of how he treated people. But he was a good marketeer and a role model to many people. Definitely investors will think he was a good person lol
I think it's up to each of us to judge a person by the criteria we find important. Personally I don't think being a successful businessman is a virtue or admirable but creating beautiful things is. He did do some of that and I do admire that (that he sold millions of them and created value for shareholders is something I couldn't care less about though)
But being a kind and caring person is the most important criterium to me. For that reason I have to say that no, in my book he doesn't qualify as a good person. I'm sure that for many others he does and that's ok too. Everyone has their own metrics.
There was a Walter Isaacson-authored biography which was extremely open and honest. Jobs wanted everything fully exposed, to include how terrible he was to his children, how intimidating he was to his employees, and how overpowering he was in business meetings.
It regularly referred to a "distortion effect" he could create, by essentially "gaslighting" (to use a common turn-of-phrase) people into doing things they thought they couldn't - often at great emotional expense. Essentially, he was somehow able to become a target of hatred, causing his employees to team up together "against him". It was extremely effective, but created a lot of copycats who just ended up abusing the hell out of their employees without getting the desired effect.
Realistically, he's just the only person we're getting a truly honest tell-all from. I'm not sure he's really that much worse than most people, I think we're just all judging him much more surgically.
I encourage anyone who is fascinated by Jobs to study the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
There's a good argument that FLW was a supercharged version of Jobs - wildly charismatic, visionary, uncompromisingly obsessive about the most minute of details, and could be manipulative and cruel. What we see w/ Jobs and Lisa, FLW was even worse as in 1909 he just up and abandoned his family of 7, seemingly out of the blue, to travel through Europe w/ his mistress. This was a national scandal at the time.
In his houses, he did all decorations (including providing art from his large personal stash) and built all the furniture and would go on tirades against his clients if he found out if they moved or replaced anything after they moved in, usually cutting off all further ties if they did not give into his demands. Also a fun fact is FLW had an obsession w/ Japanese woodblocking, similar in a way to Job's thing w/ calligraphy.
On top of that, their life took a similar arc where each had incredible success early in life that eventually crumbled under their own ambition, spent a time out in the wilderness, then went through a resurgence toward the end that greatly eclipsed their early success. Regardless, throughout his lifetime he maintained he was the best architect in the world, perhaps in history.
FLW actually wrote an autobiography during his time in the 'wilderness' (basically running an architecture cult in the desert) in the early 30s, and much of it is fanciful bluster, a bunch of half truths and exaggerations, almost as a means to save his legacy. You read it and kinda feel sorry for the guy. Yet, five years later as he turned 70, he created Fallingwater which led to so much work, that the last 20 years of his life he produced over twice as many commissions than he had done to that point. In fact when he died he was in the middle of actively working on 60 projects, most notably overseeing the construction of the Guggenheim.
There's plenty of WTF things you'll find upon digging in, such as his partner and her children (and other friends) being axed to death by a servant at one of his early compounds, and his time in Japan building the Imperial Hotel to be earthquake resistant - only for it to be hit by a 7.9 on its opening day, and being one of the few structures to survive mostly intact in all of Tokyo.
And with Fallingwater, after lying to his client that the design was complete, the client basically said, “great, I’m coming over.” Wright hadn’t produced anything - it was all in his head. According to his assistants, he worked feverishly over the next couple hours, putting the design to paper with virtually no mistakes - floor plans, elevations, scale drawings, site modifications - so that by the time the client arrived, it looked fully realized. A project of that scope would normally take months of work and dozens of revisions, but Wright had spent the better part of a year building it entirely in his mind, mostly on site visits just staring at the waterfall for hours at a time.
His flaws were probably significant contributors to some of the traits that made him successful. He held some extreme opinions and was neither afraid to nor was unsuccessful in steamrolling others. This brought revolutionary ideas to market at a time when consensus was stacked against those ideas.
What's actually "nice"? Is it creating an industry and livelihoods for millions of people (directly or indirectly)?
Or is it smiling and making people in the room feel comfortable?
He was flawed, like all of humanity. We just aren't allowed to acknowledge his accomplishments anymore because he didn't personally engineer every Apple product or similar stupidity that is also used eg to diminish Musk.
I am specifically referring to their accomplishments, inane takes like "Musk isn't an engineer, he doesn't have anything to do with the success of SpaceX" or "Jobs doesn't deserve any of the credit for Apple's products" are common.
Don't be obtuse, while you aren't "prevented" you are certainly shouted down/shamed on social media
> inane takes like "Musk isn't an engineer, he doesn't have anything to do with the success of SpaceX" or "Jobs doesn't deserve any of the credit for Apple's products" are common
I haven't seen these things said, but apart from HN I don't do social media. I'll believe you that these claims are stated. They are of course shallow.
I bet it depends on how you present stuff. How you "sound". Or when you choose to present facts.
Here, for instance, it looked like you dismissed the criticisms towards those guys. You stated that these guys have their flaws like everybody. You diminish their issues and that's exactly what will make people strongly disagree with you. In many people's heads, those guys are huge assholes, really not comparable to your random person. You'll need to have this in mind when discussing this stuff. If you do it like this, people might not listen because you may sound like a guy who is a fan of two huge assholes at the same time to many of us (even if it's false).
Even if what you state is true, if it sounds like you take the defense of these billionaires whenever they are criticized for other things, I can certainly believe you will be shut down. They have / had a lot of power, it can seem way off to defend them, they really don't need your help.
There are good and bad timings, and effective ways to state facts and others, not.
I really hate to say it, but I had a different experience. Woz came to the fintech company where I work for a lecture and Q&A. I was super excited to see him, like a Little Leaguer meeting his favorite baseball player. However, Woz came off kinda rude, like "Everyone else is wrong. I'm right about everything." Maybe he was just having a bad day, or he didn't really wanna speak at my lame fintech company but somehow got roped into it. Or, maybe it's a case of "Never meet your heroes", but I was kinda disappointed. Woz and Kevin Mitnick were my two heroes as a young nerd.
I think the net effect of people like Jobs is a huge positive in this world. Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction. You think this could be related? Perhaps there is something unpleasant about the person that had some effect on his ability for greatness? Or do you think people are like a video game with knobs where you can turn down "don't be a jerk" without affecting anything else?
I don’t see human interactions having a “net effect”. If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.
Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.
Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”
> If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.
That's true! But neither does the 1% spoil the 99%, or make it unimportant. People are very bad at seeing the good and the bad in a person; they want to distill it down to one single data point of "he was good/bad". But that isn't remotely just, and it's worth pointing out whenever people skew too far towards glossing over flaws or refusing to acknowledge the good.
Right now, the zeitgeist is to refuse to acknowledge the good in someone if they did something the speaker considers bad enough. So, one has to frequently nudge people to not forget the good even as they acknowledge the bad.
But also: they are not weighted the same. Bad things are usually "more important" -- both practically, and for evolutionary reasons. So the bias -- and I agree the bias has gone too far in our current zeitgeist -- does have some foundation.
Everyone has some flaws, yet generally we remember the positive deeds that great people did in history. The positive deeds are usually exceptional, while the flaws are often commonly found in many humans (at least relative to the era when that person lived) that they're unremarkable. And we remember and celebrate the exceptional deeds instead of dwelling on the human flaws.
I'm talking about relationships you have with real people in your life. Avoiding large threats is evolutionarily more important than taking advantage of good opportunities. So if someone does something bad to you -- lies, steals, betrays, physically hurts -- that will generally make a bigger impact, and be remembered longer by you, than nice, helpful, or otherwise positive things they did.
I think you have in mind someone like Jobs, who was known for being an asshole but also for exceptional accomplishments, and in cases like that it is true that history will remember the accomplishments. But historical figures like Jobs are unbelievable statistical outliers. In your entire life you likely won't have substantial personal dealings with anyone of comparable historical legacy. And by the way, I'd guess that for most who had personal dealings with Jobs and were treated badly that the abuse will personally be a more salient memory than his success, even if they are able to acknowledge the greatness of his achievements.
I totally agree, but I thought we were basically talking about Jobs and other famous people?
I mean, there's no reason for somebody who hasn't had personal interaction with Jobs fixate on whether he was an asshole (which did not affect them) and ignore his accomplishments (which probably affected them to some degree)... but this seems to be the fashionable thing to do here.
I'm of two minds here. I agree there is something petty and unwholesome in the fixations of cancel culture, and by and large they don't spring from a virtuous place.
Otoh, it's more nuanced than just "did not affect them". Multiple things are happening here, and some have validity:
1. Such discussions are often serving (or people feel they are) as proxies for discussions about what the current rules should be. In that context, an insistence of calling Jobs or anyone else out serves as an insistence that such behavior not be allowed now. To me, it's silly that people can't separate these two things, but alas many can't.
2. There is a genuine issue of incentives. If people observe that success buys you a free pass for being a raging asshole, many of them will take note. Indeed, being able to get away with being an asshole can even become a special marker of success.
I don’t know about the FBI MLK files. But if I were to meet MLK or Ghandi or <insert widely recognized figure> and they were an asshole, I wouldn’t excuse or overlook their behavior.
The underlying ideas here are greatness and individuals ascribed to doing great things.
Without any evidence I suspect an extremely large majority of progress is done by normal individuals whose names we’ll never know.
Hard disagree, I think I here are great men and they drive history. Its nice to valorize the every day working man, and I'm likely such a person. I mean a lot to my family and maybe a handful of others but I won't shape history no matter how hard I try. I can only hope to make the world better by bringing up well adjusted children that contribute to society. And that's fine.
>Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction
Because I don't want to live in a world of things built by socially maladjusted misanthropes, I want to live in a world build by kind and social people they made with their own hands.
There is something incredibly servile and pathetic in the psychology of people who latch onto perceived great men instead of looking to their neighbor. Like the kind of people who spend their day on twitter hoping that Elon retweets them and gives them attention.
They are just tools. How society uses the tools is not the fault of the tool. A hammer is just a hammer and someone can use it to drive nails all day long or one person can smash skulls with it. It does not make the hammer a negative for society.
Just because theZuck and his ilk made apps that dominate the use of the tool does not make the tool bad. Being able to use maps the way we can now is definitely a positive. Having a single device that does that, plus allows communication with anyone you know, plus take very decent images/videos, allows for access to the whole internet all while fitting in your pocket is absolutely a net positive for society. It's those shitty apps that make you question it, and you should not confuse it with the net effect. The net negative are the shitty apps.
You can't ignore the responsibility of the tool's designers and sellers like this, and a phone cannot be likened to an utterly simple tool like a hammer.
Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them.
… This doesn't work very far.
This doesn't mean smartphones are useless or don't have positive points of course! :-)
It is not the iOS devs' fault that theZuck makes a shitty app designed to destroy people. It is not iOS that allows theZuck to do that. It is the algorithm created by theZuck's minions. It is the tracking that theZuck's minions have created that feed that algorithm. The iOS devs are playing cat&mouse games with theZuck's minions to not allow iOS to willingly participate in that data collection.
The modern mobile device is an amazing achievement. After all, theZuck came along well before these devices and he and his minions were already up to their shenanigans before their apps were released.
Also, I have none of theZuck's apps on my devices, and do not willingly participate in his shenanigans. I don't have Dorsey's Musky app either, or any of that social crap at all. This forum is the closest to theSocials as I get. My phone is definitely a net positive in my life. You will not convince me otherwise. Because other individuals have made poor choices in their use of the device does not make mine bad. I will agree that theSocials are a net negative for society. So if you want to "fix the glitch", remove theSocials and it'll be clear the devices are a net positive
Edit: Because you clearly edited yours. "Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them."
This is where we disagree. I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.
Of course you did and were able to. But I think you're wrong :-) you know I meant this.
I get your point but I think it is a bit naive.
> Because you clearly edited yours.
Yep, sorry, I can see how this impacted your answer. I notably removed the part were I said I think it's important that engineers and salespeople should take responsibility in what they do. I do think so.
> I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.
But I do 100% agree. That's my point.
Facebook is not innocent in the design of its apps.
The same way Apple is responsible for the design of the iPhone.
But it is not the iPhone that is the problem. It is theZuck's app. That's like saying that the telephone is evil because people use it to scam people. No, the scammers are evil. Quit victim blaming.
We seem to be focused on the iPhone, but what about a Pixel or a Galaxy? They're just devices. People use them for shitty things does not make the device shitty just for existing. You're throwing the baby out with the bath water here, and gleefully acknowledging it.
And the idea for a pixel or a galaxy came before the iPhone? Also what I was referring to was Steve Jobs general attitude to computers. Honestly if they were still the boring business machines the world would be a better place IMO
Disagree, almost of all the accomplishments in humanity are driven by people like Steve Jobs not Woz. Elon Musk could be said to be a second iteration, a technical person extremely good at sales that can pursue and sell a vision.
There are a lot of people who want to be happy. Let them be happy, but it's the relentless builders/dreamers who pushes through the entire journey of getting a product out there to the people.
Define "accomplishments". Based on Woz's message, I would say he's been the true achiever in the game of life. He found, what he genuinely believes, is happiness.
Personally, I'd take that over being the creator of something valuable.
If Elon Musk is being held up as a pinnacle of achievement, I don't want that.
In this day and age, most people are attracted to "influencing". For better (giving back to society, educational) or worse (pranksters, grifters, "manosphere").
One notorious case is "Zara Dar", a PhD dropout to OF creator. Seemed to have high potential in the industry then something just flipped (money? too difficult? not fond of the grind?) and decided to go to OF.
The new world, with its hypercapitalistic tendencies, take advantage of the worst of us. It's one of the reasons for the rise of kakistocratic administration in the United States.
I love seeing all the positive comments here on HN regarding Woz.
I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.
I personally always found that to be so far from the truth, and the root of it really was how much Apple people didn’t like him speaking open and freely about the company (failures, success, and everything between).
You're either talking about people who worked with him at least forty years ago and had a problem with him, or people who are talking out of their ass. No doubt about which this is, but I wonder why.
You must have worked in a very odd and isolated department. I never heard that rhetoric, even once, throughout my tenure. Nor have any of my old colleagues who still work there and are quite well known internally (notorious patents, features / tentpole DRI, etc).
I was there 2010-2015 and I corroborate. The ambitions PM types were always quite critical of Woz, because they were all
in on the Koolaid and he is not.
Woz bought 2 Model 3s thinking he would be able to rent them out as robotaxis. I'm sure he's a nice guy but I have no idea why he's (still) held up as some kind of tech guru.
Many of us grew up in the PLD era, k-maps, etc. Woz pushed early HW to the limit, with SW APIs that delivered real value. Woz made astute design trade-offs based on full stack knowledge that his peers lacked. The world’s moved on to the GPU (low precision, accelerated parallel compute?) era, but the Woz view point still holds. You can see it in the AI kernel optimizations, or rematerialization methods to push GPU HW to the new limits, and trade-offs need to be made. GPU HW for 4-bit QAT or even 2-bit will dramatically affect the SW (AI) of this era. What trade-offs do you make?
I saw Woz on Northbound 280 “driving” his cherry red Model S, using FSD. He was looking down at the screen the whole time I watched him. Swear he had ssh’d into it.
> I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.
Are you sure they werent talking about the other Steve? Are there any stories or examples from your co-workers? I've also only ever heard good things about him as a human and engineer.
And no one says Woz is not to be trusted or insane... so I was just curious about the stories you heard. Where as people have said insane and untrustworthy about Jobs.
I’m not sharing those stories for sake of privacy.
Also, I actually never heard any stories like that about Steve. Steve was more or less: don’t talk to him, don’t make eye contact with him, don’t take the same elevator as him.
Obviously, the public had their opinions and stories of Steve..but generally, I never experienced much commentary on Steve. Woz, meanwhile, always felt like a punching bag for Apple employees on the off chance his name came up in conversation.
> Woz, meanwhile, always felt like a punching bag for Apple employees on the off chance his name came up in conversation.
A little more context would make this interesting. Were people complaining about the legacy of his work for Apple which ended in the eighties, or something more contemporary about Woz's public life?
Maybe I'm not creative enough but I've tried this thought exercise with friends and it's a fun one.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?
I'm of the "only way to win is not to play" mind with this exercise. I would peel off 10-20 million to eliminate lifetime financial concerns for my circle, and immediately go MacKenzie Scott on the rest, trying to put it towards maximum societal benefit.
Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
I don't understand folks with these answers. I would want $1T or more. I could easily invest it.
- I want to build a human cloning startup to build whole-body, HLA-neutral, antigen-clean, headless clones. Taken to the extreme, this cures all cancers except brain and blood cancers, and it could expand the human lifespan/healthspan to be 200 years or more.
- I want to build directed energy systems to manipulate the weather and climate.
- I want to build an open source cloud, open source social layer, open source social media and actually get them real traction against the incumbents. Distributed media exchange layer that is P2P, not federated. Rewire the internet to be fault-tolerant and censorship immune.
- I want to train frontier AI models and make them open. I want to build massive amounts of high quality training data and make it all available (with a viral license).
- I want to build open source hardware. Tractors, automotive EVs, robots, stuff you can hack and own and exchange and print parts for.
- I want to build infra for my city.
I couldn't stop coming up with ideas for things to build.
But, alas, I'm still stuck here at the bottom wondering why a compound in Hawaii could be cooler than these things.
Upvoted for ambition. But some of the things you listed (e.g. cloning) are likely tech limitations rather than financial ones. It's not that money wouldn't be needed to develop the tech-- it absolutely is. But just anyone with a trillion to invest wouldn't automatically be able to develop it, or find the right people to develop it.
Building infra for your city would be great (I wish Denver had an actual metro system and not just half-assed light rail for large swaths of the area). But you're going to have to deal with the legality of that beyond simply budgetary concerns-- liability, at least, and also things like eminent domain against people who may not want to sell.
The OSS stuff already has people working on it and depends more on market share than technical know-how at this point. Depending on whether AI will actually prove monumental in long-term history, simply buying e.g. OpenAI and open-sourcing their stuff might be the most history-altering thing you could do with a trillion (or it could be a footnote, depending on how things play out).
Because your idea for spending $1T is to start six (massive) companies, hire tens/hundreds of thousands of people and basically become more powerful then most governments. Arguably it's not much different then Bezos and Musk starting rocket companies.
All of those things take massive investments in time, a compound in Hawaii does not.
i would do the same, except give every extra dime to dogs and cats (and other animals in need). i'd make sure none of my wealth would go to help other humans.
Saying you’d donate to pets is one thing but saying it will never go to a human is so out of touch with the world. I’m sure you have great intentions but I just don’t see how you can take that approach.
A large portion of aid goes to trying to help humans already. I see no reason to contribute more. Also, animals are completely innocent, most humans are not. (of course kids are though)
There's probably humans you're going to have to interact with in the course of donating to animals, who will benefit from you donating to animals (if not skimming off the top directly by way of being employed by the charity, etc). If you truly want to make sure none of it goes to any human, you'd basically just have to burn it (and maybe hope that does something bad to the economy to get back at the other humans).
> By assuming that "professional arm candy" must be of one gender
Didn't say that, you are projecting. I will assume now tho, HN has this untraveled suburban teenage male vibe when it comes to anything except code. That period when they discover Rand and are good a specific set of narrow problems.
Doesn't saying that "professional arm candy" is sexist imply that it is a term limited to only one gender?
Also, fyi, I'm 32, I was born in Paris, moved to Houston when I was 6, to London when I was 18, to Paris when I was 19, then Marseille, Grasse, and Lyon.
I'm currently writing this from the Stockholm airport, waiting for my flight home to France, and I've never read Ayn Rand, because her work seems to completely ignore the importance of cooperation, which I believe is the key to a happy and successful life :)
Maybe that's why? I know rich people (truly rich, not your upper middle class or rich as in I got a couple mils of net worth), in developed countries (West and Northern Europe) and to be honest your points, apart from being tangled and repetitive just so you can get 5, don't reflect their reality and are just a setup for your last politically charged line.
I'm sure with tens of millions of dollars in your hands, you'd wait for that 20 minute doctor's appointment for 3 months, then another 8 for your MRI. Especially when your kid gets sick god forbid.
sure but all of those are not that sustainable long term. Denmark made retirement age 70 and that will change in the future because your social economy is not sustainable. This also includes a lot of government things in USA.
$10M and more buys true freedom and reach to global travel and countries. All of those free things in Europe require certain level of native labor and population aging fast is not helpin that across globe.
Counter-argument, largely lifted from Graeber's _Debt, the first 5000 years_:
The US trade deficit isn't ever really meant to be repaid, it's basically the modern equivalent of the Roman Republic/Empire demanding tribute from weaker states with a thin veneer of "I'll pay you back" to make it more palatable.
Like the time the homeless dude living under a bridge near me asked to "borrow" 50€ from me :)
It also matters whether we are considering it a static $10 million or considering reality.
In reality, if you have $10 million, you put it in the S&P500 and make an average of 10% ($1 million) per year. Far more than inflation and more than enough to cover those things you're talking about unless you have a pretty extreme medical condition or very expensive hobbies.
I agree with this directionally, however I think you'll make more like 7.2% per year, and inflation will be about 2.5% per year. You'll also likely pay about 30% in federal and local taxes in the USA on it since you're actually selling it to live on it (more on taxes later). So you'll pay 2.2% in taxes. So on average you'll get 7.2 - (2.5 + 2.2) = 2.5% of income. If you have $10M, you can withdraw about 250K a year in today's dollars every year. i.e next year you can withdraw 256.3K or so, and keep doing this to keep your current standard of living. In down years you may want to adjust / tighten belt a tiny bit to not veer off track too much. And you can get cute with taxes but not recommended. That loan interest will add up over time, and when it's time to actually pay those loans, you'll still sell stock and pay taxes on it, unless your offspring inherit both.. and who knows what the laws will be then.
Agreed, but would caveat that the historical market returns happened as the world's dominant economic and technical powerhouse. The current trajectory is looking different, to put it mildly. The US is undermining nearly every advantage that led to such strong growth. Barring some massive pivot in the near future, medium term economic growth will most likely be lower.
despite some pretty amazing technical innovations
pocket calculator and microcomputer (Altair 8800), first email, pong, floppy disks (they were the standard for 20 years), VCR, cell phone (1973 Motorola), barcode scanners, rubiks cube, ...
Nominally S&P500 did 23% in the 70s, and 2.08% annualised, but financial returns are not just the stock prices, they're also dividends.
If you include and reinvest dividends, you'd have made 83% in the decade and 6.2% per year.
Its true inflation was high though, and an investment in Jan 1970 would've in real terms returned -1.1% a year after adjusting for inflation. If you continued investing equal amounts each year from 1970 to 1980, it'd actually be about -0.5%.
But no investment would've meant you lost half of all your money due to 7% average inflation, so investing would've been a pretty good idea, offsetting almost all inflation in the worst decade 50 years ago.
Also it's common knowledge to do a stock/bond split. Bond returns fared a bit better. -- and it should be said, the following decade inflation came way down and in nominal terms the S&P500 did +364% with dividends reinvested.
I do agree with your general point though, you can't just rely on a 10% annual average and spend that amount. The commonly referenced safe withdrawal rate (WR) of 4% is 2.5x less than the average S&P500 return for a good reason (based on a ton of monte carlo sims that indeed would lead to disastrous results at 10% WR in the 1970s).
Except the market is a bubble. It's going to pop within 10 years as the boomers retire and die. Thats assuming low inflation. With significant inflation the younger folks might afford to prop it up.
I assure you, if $10M doesn’t seem like it’s clearly enough for you, $100M won’t either. That worry doesn’t go away.
$10M generates a passive $400k per year (trinity study 4% rule yada yada). If you can’t manage on $400k/year, you might be what we call extremely out of touch.
Lifestyle is the only real issue past a few million, particularly if you own your home (and at 10m you certainly would). Beyond that its all status oriented which is where the "should be enough" bit comes in; if its status your after then theres never really enough.
after few million you start securing the retirement and few decades. like what if you live up to 100 or more? Anything below $3million means no retirement now or money has chance to be all spent in next 2-3 decades. After $10Million it's all enough
3 million invested means you can withdraw $100000 annual income with virtually no risk of ever going broke. That is financial independence. $10MM is way too high a bar.
I don't know if you intended this to be only spent selfishly. But if you look to how the old robber barons spent their money they did things like giving the US a large portion of it's public library system. I don't think it would be hard find things to do like this that make everyones lives better.
The fact you were able to get >$1B already made a lot of people's lives significantly worse. Charity is just a way to whitewash hoarding and exploitation.
Hmm. Doesn't include ongoing costs. The yacht for example will cost $1-4m a year simply to own it, and that's ongoing cost forever. The jet will have a similar figure. A $45m mansion isn't cheap to keep running either. Purchase these things and suddenly you're on an unsustainable financial path with a $1b completely liquid net worth. Forget about charitable giving. $20m of gifts annually put you deep in the red.
I'll bite. Private island, superyacht, G7, prime mansions in LA, NYC, London, Singapore, collection of old masters, part owner in an NFL team, establish a foundation and trusts for the kids/grandkids, trip to space. Easy
There was a movie from the 80s with this premise. When I mention this to people, I'm usually surprised to find out that I'm the only one in the group who's seen it:
This is crazy. I could easily spend a billion dollars without even thinking. That doesn't even get you a novel drug. Like, if I made $100b I have a shit ton of things I could attack with that.
Even a trillion dollars I could probably spend. I like sailboats so a yacht sounds nice, but I cannot believe it even a fraction of the satisfaction of developing some research, or of having the fundamental research itself done.
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
Easy: The largest ship in the world by area. (Goal - either 500m x 500m, or at least 0.25km^2 with the breadth >= 300m)
The current status quo for bulk carriers are the Valemax ships (360m x 65m), with each one costing around $100 million. (actual figure wildly varies, but sticks around that number)
The "number" is always part of a big debate. There's no right or wrong.
Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.
So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).
If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.
Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).
All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.
I mean, can I not just spend the money to buy a better society in which to live?
Museums. I love museums. They all need more support. Kids need more places to do field trips.
Libraries ... they are experiencing budget cuts everywhere now as cities prioritize police spending.
Parks.
Homes for people that can't afford them. Seriously, one of the most effective possible cures for homelessness is to set up a program that helps people cover their rent for a month or two if they get into trouble.
Health care. Like, there's got to be a pile of people that need urgent health care and can't afford it, right?
Education. Adult education, too.
Science and research.
And most, maybe all of these, aren't even things that necessarily need an entirely new organization to spearhead them, or some kind of dramatic social change. They are all things that exist right now and need more funding than anything else. You could hire a small team to just look up all kinds of programs all day long and write checks for them and it would be enormously impactful.
I just... the answer to this seems so blindingly obvious to me, and then I read the rest of the comments, and I really wonder when exactly the hacker ethos got co-opted by the crab mentality.
It seems like a lot then I think about how California’s EDD department gave 50 billion to criminals in 2020/2021 and then it feels less ginormous.
My answer because I don’t see it: climate change research. A billion isn’t much but if it can help save the planet that would be worth it to me personally.
The best part of this game is that it takes time to spend the money, if you can't manage to spend more than 4-5%/year then your wealth will actually be growing.
For reference, on $1bn that's $40M/year or about $100k/day in earnings if you just have the cash in a money market account.
Coming up with a list of things to buy isn't an interesting use of the money. Starting companies, using that money to pay people to do things, for, say, 10 years, for all industries you want to get involved in. A billion dollars, over ten years, for 1,000 people, is 100k. Which is fairly decent salary.
Make it 500 people and give them housing.
What to use those people for is left as an exercise for the reader.
It would seem that accumulating stuff is a waste of time at a point much lower than one billion. On the other hand, giving every Debian maintainer $500 a month is ~$5M a year. Add in Gentoo, Alpine, and other things I like and you're looking at probably double that total. Ivy admission for kids is a few million a year for 5-10 years... Retaking Artsakh would be north of $3 billion
That's only if you spend your money on stuff. I wouldn't spend it on stuff, I would fund things like ambitious art and architecture projects. If you can't think of ways to allocate $1B you're probably a very boring person, and if your first thought is "yachts" then you're definitely one.
That was an example - not what they’d choose to pick themselves. You misread their comment and then came down hatefully upon them for it. Shame on you.
The only real way to spend billions is to build many huge houses all over the world or ONE really big house. To spend hundreds of billions you would have to build something ridiculous like a mile high pyramid with a 1 square mile base.
That's quite a cynical point of view, and while all charities certainly have overhead to account for, and not all charities are created equal in that respect, organizations like Charity Watch can tell you a long list of organizations that use donations very efficiently - in the sense that almost all of the money actually goes towards the cause, not the people running the charity.
There was a long Reddit thread[1] a while ago that describes what people in various wealth tranches spend their money on. It's very long, but the TLDR is: They don't buy "things" so much as they buy Experiences, Access, Influence, Time, Political Power, and so on.
or just look at how many big yatcht Gabe newell owns and try to calculate cost of maintaining them for a year. That alone easily requires $1billion invested in somewhere so returns can maintain the ownership + trips. Also now he now owns shipyard too.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but all that stuff is personal spending on luxury goods, which is probably the least useful thing money can do. If your goal is something like "solve supply-side housing in my city" then you might need to build hundreds of high-rise apartment blocks, at which point you'll be able to burn through $1bn pretty quickly. And yeah, you'll eventually make your money back, but that's a side benefit.
Posts like these seem a bit silly to me because it's incredibly easy to spend billions of dollars as soon as you get away from a consumer mindset. The value in a billion dollars comes from being able to shape the future in whichever direction you want. I'm not interested in spending money just to make my own life marginally more comfortable, but in elevating the quality of life and overall experience of everyone around me.
Here's a few random frustrations I have:
Most modern hardware appliances are not easily repaired or hackable. I'd love to manufacture and sell open hardware appliances which prioritize repairability and maintainability, including sharing the CAD models and opening up the firmware.
Despite the years of effort that have gone into the Linux Desktop Experience, it still often lacks polish in various areas. You could afford to hire world class engineers and designers to fix up every minor annoyance and really provide the most deluxe desktop experience possible without compromising on the slightest detail. Not only that, you could contract companies to add Linux support for any essential tools and applications which aren't already supported.
And that's not even getting into the ability to fund the creation of really outstanding media. Most modern kid's entertainment treats them like morons while slapping them in the face with basic lessons. You could create some truly delightful kid shows without having to skimp on any aspect, and really lay the foundations for creating a brighter future. Embed lessons of every major topic as part of the show without being hamfisted about it, and when they start to encounter those challenging topics in school they will have some foundational models on which to build upon. A basic example: you can teach a kid the fundamentals of calculus from an intuitive perspective, and when they actually learn proper calculus in school it'll be much easier to ramp up.
Heck, you could fund the modernization of a ton of college level educational content with enough money. Buy the rights to any important textbooks, rewrite as needed, then make them freely available. Hire a team of world class artists, animators, and builders to help create supporting materials / content that cover any topic. Pair that with world class educators and experts. You put that all together and create the most powerful repository of high quality educational content that the world has ever seen. By doing this you're laying the foundations for the development of future generations and setting them up for success!
Those are just some quick thoughts which I'm willing to write up here... If I thought about it longer I'd probably be able to come up with more significant quality of life improvements that could be spread out if someone was willing to spend a few billion dollars into making them into a reality.
Oh here's a final quick one: funding maker spaces across the country. It's not clear how much potential could be unlocked if we had widely available maker spaces where people can ask for help with their projects and ideas. Sometimes all it takes is having someone who can point you to the right tools or people.
I hear what you are saying: consumables and normal luxury items are hard to spend a lot of money on (houses, cars, boats, planes, clothes, food, etc)... if you however were to choose to spend a lot of money on the R&D required to reducing human suffering you'll find that the money will go like its on fire. Build a new drug, create novel ai tech, driverless cars... $1B would feel like you need to clip coupons for the grocery store.
People don't talk about their losing art trades or the art they over paid for and are trying to sell in a completely illiquid market.
We were in a huge fine art bubble up to covid. This decade has been a much different story. It is a boring news story though compared to a Ken Griffin balling out last decade buying his favorite paintings for incredible sums of money.
Yachts and houses are boring. Can't you think of anything you'd rather do with your life than live in a house and go sailing? You can do that without money!
A million dollars is, roughly speaking, a person-year of dedicated professional services from a world-class professional of almost any profession. There are a few exceptions, like stockbrokers, surgeons, and some kinds of lawyers. But a billion dollars buys you, say, 1000 person-years of the best professionals.
For millions of dollars, you could have your own vaccination program, your own particle accelerator, your own web browser, your own steel mill, your own religious cult, your own pyramid, your own AI research lab, your own permaculture experiment station, your own rare book collection (which you could digitize), and so on.
That's leaving aside personal consumption of things like a diplomatic passport from a foreign country, a private doctor, a comfortable apartment in a former missile silo, and a helicopter to get to it with. Your yacht isn't going to do you much good if you get arrested in a foreign country on trumped-up charges because you unintentionally insulted the wrong guy's daughter, or if your cancer goes undiagnosed until stage 4.
I'd like to build something interesting so I want more. Some people want to buy homes, happiness, and family prosperity with their wealth. If that's the case then $10M is too much. That's multiple homes territory.
But if you want to build something for society and not die doing it then you might need more than $10M.
Isn’t that backwards? Most people need to build a business to make the $10M+ in the first place. Are you talking about a nonprofit or an airplane/movie business (both famous for turning large fortunes into small ones). Otherwise you probably should follow the advice from the “Producers”: never put your own money in the show.
I think you have conflated 'build something for society' with 'build a business' which is very hacker-news-core. My mind immediately went to building infrastructure and schools in rural Nepal, not building a b2b saas that raises customer acquisition rates by 8 %.
You might be right, but somehow GP’s comment didn’t come across that way to me. Does it take more than $10M in wealth before someone can build a school in rural Nepal? It just seemed like a convenient rationale for wanting to accumulate a lot of wealth, which is also very hacker-news-core.
You are exactly right. If you want to build something big from scratch you will likely need to control that thing, which in our system means ownership and wealth. If you don't own it, someone else will own/control it and you could lose your ability to execute on your vision.
> With $10 million in the bank, earning 4%, you'll see $400,000 a year, less taxes.
This isn't your point, but $400k puts you in a top tax bracket, so figure 30% of that goes to taxes. that brings your return down to 2.8%. The Fed wants to keep inflation at 2%, but it's usually a bit higher, leaving your real return at 0.3%. That's $30k per year.
> I think that $10 million is a great answer for "how much money is more than you'll ever need".
Years ago I lived on $40 per month, after building my own cabin in Oregon -- wood heat, kerosene lanterns. Then I bought an Apple II and things got more complicated (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...). But basically I agree with you. Most people will never have that much, or need it.
Citation needed, but also buying homes (that you don't intend to live in or actually use) is still hoarding, and is arguably even worse than hoarding wealth.
I would measure it in multiples of the median income. At 5-6x I imagine that you can buy anything you want but not everything. You are still somewhat price sensitive but rarely bothered by a setback or an expensive meal.
There's lots of things I'd like to do that would cost more than $10 million. Maybe if you're saying I personally only have $10m but control $1t?
Things I'd do if I didn't have to raise money, find investors, etc.
Bribe/payoff whoever I had to and then build a real transit system in LA,SF,Seattle as one example.
Consider making a museum/expo-center that's like the Lucas Museum (https://www.lucasmuseum.org/) but centered around Video Games and/or Interactive Digital Art.
Would buying a good chunk of land make you a "hoarder"? Depending on where you are 20 acres can be more than $10 million even before you build a house etc.
Definitions of wealth often exclude primary residence for this reason, it depends a lot on where you live, and it's also not very liquid. There are poor people who own large houses (but can't sell for whatever reason), and there are rich people who don't own any house at all.
Spending $10m to buy 20 acres is hardly a "need". I think people here are missing the point of the quote by throwing out a bunch of absurd technicalities.
Having more money than that is not for your personal expenses and comfort, but to finance projects at a large scale.
That's why they need more than $10 million for space exploration, or for setting up giant factories to make any kind of goods, for developing massive infrastructure, for warfare, etc etc.
So when you create $10,000,000 of economic value you should be forced at gunpoint to stop contributing to society and creating jobs.
Jeff Bezos has created many, many millions of jobs while selling essential goods at margins sometimes below 1%. If his reward was stolen after $10m, why would he have bothered slaving away?
Aside the blatant jealousy factor, it's economic suicide and contains shadows of economic systems which have led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
It’s so disappointing to constantly see this type of evil envy driven nonsense posted on HN. Capitalism has delivered humanity unbelievable prosperity and improvements in living conditions.
Anyone finding themselves agreeing with ideas like 100% marginal taxes needs to look deep into their own soul and understand where it originates from and then go back and learn history and read authors like Hayek, Mises, and Sowell.
Sowell - “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
And the worst part is that they don’t perceive the massive irony of posting these comments on this particular medium, the Internet, which was initially the product of a military-funded project of the most capitalistic country in history. A project which aimed to deliver a resilient communication network in case of all-out nuclear war!
Most of the people who comment like this most likely have lived since birth in a stable, western democracy with social and economic security and they don’t know anything else. They don’t know what living in a dictatorship is like, or under a fully corrupt government bureaucracy where only nepotism or favoritism gets you ahead. All they’ve known is their little, stable corner of the world, protected by the largest military and economic powerhouse in history, and they don’t appreciate it.
Hypocritically it is often extremely money focused people who put out opinions about taxing the greedy wealthy. Dressed up as caring for others but the underlying drive is selfish.
There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference and even worse nobody will be rich once you try take from them. That experiment has literally been tried dozens and dozens of times with 100% failure rate. Economies are organic organisms and your type of ideas as cyanide.
Please educate yourself and stop believing in fairy tales. Socialism is also extremely unethical and even evil from religious perspectives.
I’d be curious what educational system you went through that failed to teach the dark evil and catastrophic consequences of your 100% marginal tax rate type ideas.
> There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference
They could make a difference to some. Also consider the harm they do to the system through their politics. It's not just the wealth hoarding, it's the attacks on education and social safety nets.
I think in practice you want to take steps towards structural wealth equality. It's a problem when someone has their big ideas and step-functions a society into them. I have enough intellectual humility to admit that my conception of what policies and systems we need would most likely not work in practice. But changing a few things to be more socialist, measuring, then course correcting would be nice for once. Instead we get Capital and their purchased representation telling us what works and stepping towards what's good for them.
Also apologies but I won't read a 400 page book on your recommendation. But looking over the topics covered it seems to be about states that tried a command economy. To me a command economy is obviously foolish. How is a government, notorious a slow moving decision maker, going to replace the free market? As you said it's an organism. It's complicated with millions of actions happening in parallel. I want incentives to be changed - ideally with as few changes as possible.
> But changing a few things to be more socialist, measuring, then course correcting would be nice for once.
This is constantly happening actually and constantly failing.
> To me a command economy is obviously foolish.
And who exactly distributes or allocated your confiscated money from your 100% marginal tax rate?
> I want incentives to be changed - ideally with as few changes as possible.
Ask yourself why? is it because something is broken and you think this will fix it? that’s the classic empathy narrative which I guarantee is actually nothing but envy masquerading as empathy.
I agree. With $10 million I'd immediately buy a decent chunk of land in the middle of nowhere, build a modest home + a guest home or two, have a hobby farm, and retire with a solid $8 million or so left. Invest, live off interest, done.
I think the reason why so many of us look up to the Woz in the tech world is that he is genuine, in an industry where we see so much of the opposite regularly - and we want to be the same.
There's an interesting job interview question: do you want to be more like Woz or S. Jobs? Elon Musk's management style is very Jobs-like: Motivates via manipulation and wow-factor of cutting edge, has grand visions, yet knows what factories and the market can and can't handle, tries odd drugs, etc. However, Jobs rarely stuck his nose into politics; Jobs mostly just trolled about tech.
I'm definitely a Woz. I appreciate both Jobs and Musk despite their blemishes, but I must say where Musk has Jobs beat is vision. Jobs was content to give everyone a computer. Musk is trying to bring the optimistic future to life on all fronts.
As a younger millenial I am somewhat familiar with the legends of yore. But not as familiar as someone older that was around when the tech world was much smaller and more intimate. Where people casually met a wild Stallman at random conferences.
Given how much bigger the software and tech world has gotten, with how much time has passed, and how much things have changed, I wonder if people still see Wozniak as tech hero and as part of casual tech culture knowledge.
Dude. Yes we still see him that way 1000%. It's just that there are a lot of tech people on this planet and they all have different ages and experiences, so they don't all think the same.
I think there's 2 kinds of psychodelic oneshot. Woz & Jobs. Woz became content with all he had and Jobs turned into a psycopath. Both geniuses, both gave us a lot. I'd rather have someone like Woz be a trillionare and e/alt using his wealth for good than a money hungry monster.
This is a slight tangent, but I have not been on slashdot since the early aughts. I'm surprised that it fell into obscurity since technical forums like HN and reddit CS subreddits are thriving. Or maybe it still vibrant and I'm making assumptions?
I still check it out a few times a week, and the discussions have just fallen off a cliff, and that was the biggest draw to me as well. The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political - and I see the draw there, those posts are the only ones that can attract over 100 comments these days, when back in its heyday pretty much everything had around 200 comments on the front page.
And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger. On more than one occasion I have suspected bots have stolen accounts. Looking at post history on some particularly unhinged posts after the previous election, there was a pattern of people posting regularly in the 00s about only technical things and then going quiet for 5+ years and then only making comments about politics. It was fishy enough I sent some examples to the mods but never heard anything back.
It's a real shame, slashdot used to be a juggernaut, and it's just a shadow of its former self.
> The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political
I dunno, it must've been 15 years since I set my signature there to "remember, Slashdot is a tabloid", after I realized how the posts skewed towards... "engagement".
(signatures seem to have been lost in some redesign since)
> And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger.
I disagree. It's still 90% center left. But if you have a low tolerance for seeing conservative responses then sure maybe it feels more conservative. Those views rarely get modded up though.
I've noticed that on teamblind as well (started to use it only recently). I didn't realize there was such hate towards foreigners in the US, especially, in the tech world which I assumed was more educated/progressive. Don't know if it's fueled by Trump or the other way around, but it's pretty scary.
Something like 80% of blind posters are Indians on h1b. Absolutely no judgements here, just saying (source: polls asking some variation of Are you Indian? appear all the time there)
Slashdot refused to moderate comments in an effective manner. Comment section was always full of bad memes that became stale:
* Lot of rickrolling. but replace Rick Astley by Goatse, Tubgirl, or LemonParty.
* Frist post
* BSD is dying
* GNAA
* Nathalie Portman
* Robotic Overlord
* In Soviet Russia
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these memes
* etc.
Then it becames fixated on SCO and basically became Darl McBride News, for years...
However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system. You did not simply upvote or downvote, but needed to add a qualifier to it: +1 Informative, +1 Insightful, +1 Interesting, +1 Funny, -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic, -1 Flamebeat. I never seen such a system elsewhere.
> However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system
In the abstract, this seemed like a brilliant idea, and I don't understand why nobody else tries it, and I still don't see a good argument against it.
But in their specific implementation, if you deem that "funny" can redeem a post in and of itself (and you allow an open community to judge humour), well, you get what you measure. (And nowadays, "troll" is basically understood to mean the same thing as "flamebait", because nobody trolls the old-fashioned way — it's increasingly hard to distinguish yourself from people who are actually that clueless, and too many clueless people around to make it worthwhile to fake more.)
slashdot stopped allowing easy new user sign ups a while back. Now its the same folks over and over, very predictable. A number of those old memes have died out, mostly. They really limited ascii art which helped too. There do seem to be a lot of trolls/psyops in the comments.
I've never been on slashdot before. And what stands out to me is it's really hard to follow the UI. It's better than the classic forum layout but it's still just not easy to read, I just can't see myself using it. Though I have similar opinions on new reddit and it is pretty popular so I think I don't represent the possible new user.
What seems more relevant is that I didn't know about it at all which seems common with many older internet sites dying a slow dead of no new users as younger audiences are literally unable to discover the site.
Skimfeed, my entry point into HN, still indexes /. threads, so I still check it out from time to time. Definitely not what it was in the cmdrtaco days, but it has gems in there sometimes still.
I like the idea, although smaller communities I find now a days to be far less formal and respectful than the slashdot heydays. The ride or die fans of a given thing or community sometimes are strange folks. People greatly upset by differing opinions and so on.
I believe it, as old ossified communities go. I remember a few old vbulletin spots that went through an exodus and often the ones who stick around are trolls, spammers, or odd ducks and people addicted to snark.
Yeah, that was my take too. I used to be on it regularly 15-20 years ago, great nitty-gritty tech plus usually good-natured snarky techy humor; but haven't even visited in over a dozen years.
You know, I there aren't many celebrities, especially in tech, that I think "It would be cool to have a beer with them". Not Gates, not Jobs, probably not Musk. But Woz seems like a cool guy with great stories to tell.
I think Steve Ballmer would be pretty fun to hang out with for a bit. Maybe not a beer but lunch with Bill Gates would be alright, I'd love to pick his brain about his charity work.
I love the line they give Woz in the movie Steve Jobs. In the big final confrontation he says, "Your products are better than you are brother."
The movie is a fiction, but Woz apparently liked it a lot and thought that Seth Rogen did a phenomenal job playing him. So this attitude of his adds up.
> At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”
The most telling thing to me about Woz's personality was this walkthrough at the CHM. Note the section about the homebrew scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsB8Hxnb52o
Thanks - a very good video! The quick anecdote of how he talks about in his teens / high school he stumbled over the PDP-8 small computer handbook which lead him to sneaking into the Stanford linear accelerator libary on a slow Sunday with his friend and reading through their prized selection of industry computer magazines, filling out the trade cards and getting back manuals for minicomputers which often had very detailed information about practical computer architecture - where he would then shut himself in a room and design on paper his own computers in a game to make them to use less and less chips. He competed with himself. This is a key detail in how he was self taught that I'd never heard before!
another thing I heard but never thought of that was in the video, Woz said he based the Apple I off a terminal! In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
> He was designing a terminal to be used with DARPANet, the predecessor to the internet. He wanted an inexpensive way to use a keyboard and TV as the display for use as a computer terminal.
If you're engaging in philanthropy, dodging taxes is perfectly justified. The main thing to look out for is whether or not you are using the money better than the government would, which isn't that difficult.
I had gone to SFO to drop off my mom at the airport. After dropping her, I saw somebody who looked like Woz at the Delta First Class queue. I hung back to let him do his chat with the airline agents.
As soon as he was finished, he turned around and I was sure it was him. He had his trade-marked backpack full of electronics on his torso.
Approached him gingerly to ask, "Are you, umm, Mr Woz?"
If he seemed surprised / annoyed, he didn't show.
Then I got tongue-tied... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In a brief second, the entire history of Apple came flooding to me...
I blurted at him that he was a boyhood hero of mine and just thanked him for his contributions, etc. (which is true, I do admire him)
He seemed surprised. He said folks these days have sports heros, and was glad to hear what I said. Inquired about me / my work (also tech), my brief journey, etc. Exchanged a few pleasantries. That was it.
I didn't have any elevator pitch or anything. I came away genuinely happy having met him in person.
A key turning point in Woz's life was when he crashed his Beechcraft Bonanza, fully loaded with friends and luggage, from a runway that was too short for the aircraft load and air temperature (high temperatures require longer takeoff rolls). Woz also wasn't rated for the aircraft, but I'm not sure that really made much difference, compared to the allegedly skipped weight & balance calculation, which if performed would likely have predicted the outcome.
This accident is said to have changed Woz's outlook on life, but when I knew him years earlier he already seemed very focused on worthwhile things, like excellent hardware designs and little interest in accumulating money, compared for example to Steve Jobs.
When I heard that Woz quit Apple to become a schoolteacher in a small California town, I though to myself there aren't words of praise sufficient to describe that choice. Still think so.
About happiness in life, that only happens when the needs of the body and the needs of the soul are satisfied. Only then we can talk about happiness and piece of mind. Virtually no amount of Buddhist intention can overcome a hungry body and an empty soul.
That is not to bash on those like me that pursue this post-consumerist happiness state, only to say that you can't expect those that are hungry to overcome their state without help, as well as expect those that have their basic needs satisfied to feel guilty.
You can overcome a hungry body by asking for food, cooking food you find, hunting for food, or fishing for it. There's no such thing as an empty soul - just bad people. Do good and good things will follow. Happiness is a choice, a state of being, not an end-game.
I've been rich, I've been poor, I've been in mansions, I've been on the streets. Your life is a rollercoaster, the more risks you take, the more extreme the ride. I happen to like going upside down so I'm a risk taker.
Fair enough, forget the example. I'm saying that "just go find food" isn't possible when there is no food around, either because of a famine or because of deprivation, in the case of Gaza, or because you are past the point where you have enough energy to fetch and digest. So that argument doesn't hold not because of the example, but because your generalization doesn't account for the extremes of the human experience.
The only answer I can give you is never put yourself in a position to be taken advantage of by another. Whether that be your location. Your position. Your job. Or your ability to get food.
I sympathize. War is shit. I wish it wasn't but it is. Humans inflicting harm on humans makes no one happy. Keep your eyes open and your belly full.
> About happiness in life, that only happens when the needs of the body and the needs of the soul are satisfied. Only then we can talk about happiness and piece of mind. Virtually no amount of Buddhist intention can overcome a hungry body and an empty soul.
Could you elaborate on empty soul? It's easy to think what is meant by empty body (no food, water or oxygen). But one could, for example, believe that any amount of Buddhist intention is fulfilling for the soul?
But you presume that's not the case. Maybe you mean something different with soul than I do. So I'm curious on how you'd elaborate on it.
I'd never make justice to Need for Roots from Weil. What I'm saying is that while a very few can just detach from human contact and supposedly be fine with it, the majority if prevented from creating bonds with other human beings will develop severe psychosomatic problems. But it goes beyond just interacting and feeling like you belong. It's the need to have your identity, collective memory and ancestry preserved.
I love how someone took clips of Woz smiling his way through "Dancing with the Stars," and spliced them into a song about "doing it for fun," and for passion...
I suppose that depends on whether or not he did it to get a huge pay day or if he just did it because he genuinely thought it was a cool way to try to encourage energy efficiency (but didn't make bank off that backing). Selling out isn't the same thing as not always picking the right thing.
Here I thought you were about to link something genuinely bad, like a sexual allegation, and you link him creating a blockchain coin (that was probably indeed useless) in 2020 at a time when all anyone was talking about in tech was how the blockchain was going to change everything and EVERYONE was launching blockchain-based apps.
Do you really think he did this with bad intentions? He almost certainly just thought it was cool and maybe would be useful or profitable. There's no reason to frame this as if it's a reason to ignore everything else about him. Completely disingenuous. Honestly shame on you imo. As if everyone who bought into the blockchain hype is a bad person.
I hope by the time you're 75 you don't have people linking a single failure to sum up and dismiss your entire character and the work of your entire lifetime.
It's kind of nostalgic. Man, back in the day people would flip out on you if you used the wrong technology: "You fucking microserf!"
There's a strange sense of joy I feel about someone being upset that he made a blockchain app. In some parallel universe we're still in the old world of the '90s culturally and engineers go online to yell at each other for which data structure they use. "You asshole! Did you just use distributed hash tables?!"
Steve Wozniak is doing a great job funding other people's retirements. Half of all revenue collected by US federal govt in 2024 (totaling $2565 billion) was given to retirees. Mostly middle class and government retirees. That's $1500b for social security, $865b for medicare, $128b for retired feds, and $72b for retired military.
Unfortunately, he never got around to creating the floating point routines for the version of Basic he created for the 8-bit Apple computers which had unfortunate results:
Research suggests happiness often precedes success rather than following from it - Woz likely would have found joy in engineering and creation regardless of financial outcomes.
I heard Woz give a talk (or Q&A?) at a conference and it was very enjoyable, even for someone who doesn't know much about Apple's history.
If we are to believe his word about not selling out, then I must assume that https://www.efforce.io/company also brings him more smiles than frowns. I suppose if you change the definition of "sell out" you can conventionally sell out without meeting your own definition. That said, I am reluctantly open to being shown evidence that the company isn't a grift.
"I didn’t want to be corrupted, ever, in my life. I thought this out when I was 20 years old. A lot of basic ethics is truth and honesty, and I’m going to be an honest person. I’m not going to be corrupted to where I do things for the sake of money. I don’t want to be in that group (chasing power and wealth), I just want to have a nice life, a good life, maybe better than a typical engineer. But I gave away a lot of my money. I’m very comfortable with who I am, I’m not one of those private jet people.
Part of my philosophy was everything you do should have an element of fun in it. I came up with the formula for happiness, what life is about. Happiness to me is smiles minus frowns, H=S-F. Increase your smiles, do a lot of fun things, enjoy entertainment, talk with people, make jokes. That’s creativity."
-- The Guardian interview, 3 May 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2016/may/03/wisdom...
"My starting point was the desire to be a good person.
So, I came up with a lot of different values, largely based on truth being the most important thing of all, and the value of what's called ethics. And I just said, I want to be in the middle, where I can associate with the maximum number of people.
People are one of the most important parts of this life. Who you are, who your friends are, how you can talk to them—it was important to me because I was shy; I was an outsider. And I wanted to be in the middle, not one of these extreme "way up" people where you can only deal with other "way up" type people.
Part of my thinking, was to be open-spirited to people. Part of that was not to build a hierarchy. [..] I wanted to build a philosophy, not a hierarchy. Just say, "Hey, I'm going to present how I think," and if somebody else has a different way of thinking, they just have a different mind. They're not bad, they're just different. So I developed a lot of these different philosophies for life, including things like the desire to make the world better with technology and computers. So, I didn't forget who I was.
After a bit of success happened, it also goes to your head; you want to have more value and more money. That's good, that's fine. But I was just one who never sought those goals. I never wanted to be so above everybody else that I would kind of forget them and shove them aside. [..] I think more people should know who they are, decide who they are, think about it, and decide to be that person they want to be."
-- Encuentro Nacional Coparmex 2017 in Queretaro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZVPz3T-8JA
"Seth Rogen, who portrayed Woz in the 2015 movie Steve Jobs, described him to Variety as “immensely lovable,” “sweet, compassionate, caring” and “the kind of guy you want to give a hug to.”
Throughout his career – in numerous interviews and in iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon, his memoir written with Gina Smith – Wozniak has always been a fount of knowledge and wisdom, whether speaking on subjects like innovation and entrepreneurship, the importance of honesty, or Star Trek and The Big Bang Theory. Think of them as aphorisms by Woz or, as we like to think of them, Woz-isms."
3 Woz-isms:
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me – they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone – best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything revolutionary has ever been invented by committee. Because the committee would never agree on it!”
“You need to believe in yourself. Don’t waver. There will be people – and I’m talking about the vast majority of people, practically everybody you’ll ever meet – who just think in black-and-white terms. Most people see things the way the media sees them or the way their friends see them, and they think if they’re right, everyone else is wrong. So a new idea – a revolutionary new product or product feature – won’t be understandable to most people because they see things so black and white. Maybe they don’t get it because they can’t imagine it….Don’t let these people get you down.”
“Start out with tiny projects that aren’t worth any money in the world, but that’s how you develop your brain and that’s how you learn. Every project you work on in your life – I just look at my own life as an example – is the prior project and a little better and a little more. And every technique you come up with for doing things better you keep forever in your head.”
-–Interview with Prof. Alan Brown"
I don't like idolization of rich people. Yea, Woz was great for the contribution to computing.
He did sell out though, launching a billion dollar crypto ico which is now at a valuation of around million dollar. Sure anyone would be happiest person ever.
He also famously engineered a bomb hoax in highschool, down to building a ticking device that was heroically disabled by, iirc, the school principal. Today, such behavior would easily end in terrorism charges.
It is all laughing a fun, until you meet people whose futures were destroyed for doing far less in regards to fake weapons in schools.
My son accidentally brought a knife to school at age 12 -- maybe a 4 inch blade. When he realized that he had a knife in his backpack, he told his teacher. He was suspended from school for about 3 days and we had a fairly pleasant conversation with the principal after the suspension.
When I was at university, one of my classmates was a cop. He was petrified because that day, due to schedule issues, he had all his cop stuff locked in the trunk of his personal car. At the time, having that sort of weaponry on campus was a big deal. He would have been better off comming to class in full uniform (the exception for cops would not apply if he wasnt on duty or at least in uniform.) He knew what might happen if someone discovered his handgun/taser/mace was on campus.
I remember back in elementary school the YW in my class brought a huge kitchen knife with him in his backpack. He showed it to me. Later that day, he slightly cut himself with it in the toilet over a broken heart or something like that. Next day he was back to school. We called him sleeping bag because he was wearing his pants so low
> Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns
For me happiness is a terrible life goal. Sure it's nice to be happy, but its such a vapid meaningless emotion. If I were to optimize for "happiness" I would just cash out, abandon my family, move to Vietnam, play video games and eat Hot Pockets all day. It doesn't take much to ride out the rest of my years.
But the life I choose is hard because doing hard things is good and fulfilling. I often willfully forgo happiness because, you know, I'm an adult. Maybe I'm just stupid?
Happiness is a positive emotion, pleasure, or contentment. It tends to be episodic and reactive, arising from enjoyable experiences, satisfying desires, or reaching short-term goals.
I am "happy" watching Netflix (smile). I am not happy on a long vacation with screaming children (frown).
If you were to optimize for smile - frown, you would do more Netflix, less children. In fact childless people report themselves much happier than people with children.
I think you conflate happiness and pleasure. Maintaining a family surely not always pleasant, but for the most people it makes you happier than being alone.
Having a family is hard. For instance, people with children are consistently less "happy" than their childless peers, yet many choose to have children knowing that. If you optimize for happiness you may be optimizing for selfish empty shallow existence. I'm sure you can take a drug to make you "happy" but that seems foolish.
> If I were to optimize for "happiness" I would just cash out, abandon my family, move to Vietnam, play video games and eat Hot Pockets all day.
That sounds like hedonism, not happiness.
> But the life I choose is hard because doing hard things is good and fulfilling.
Fulfillment is a big component of happiness. Aristotle famously contrasted hedonism (seeking pleasure) and eudaimonia (meaning and fulfillment) in Ethics iirc and mostly agreed with you— happiness is found eudamonia, not hedonism.
I'll also mention, hedonism is most often associated with money, because pleasures can be bought, but eudaimonia is only achieved through meaning, wisdom, action, etc.
that is an upfront assumption about what happiness would look like, if you got a few months into that plan you would realize that meaning and fulfilment go farther with happiness
Woz gave a lecture in one of my classes years ago and I came away impressed. He was obviously a brilliant engineer. "Naivete" is generally used in a negative manner but he had just enough naivete to get through life happy. He talked about all the chips he redesigned as a teen and it did not sound like bragging at all. We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world.
It's not naive to try and be good and not exploit every situation to the best outcome for yourself, that's the whole point. How can people believe him to be so brilliant but also naive? Don't they see it? It doesn't take a smart man to see an apple and take it all for himself.
But what is the "best outcome" when you have your house paid off and ample savings? He got ripped off by Jobs early on, but Jobs also let him do the work he wanted -- it's rare to have someone as good as Woz was also understand marketing. Jobs is deified too much, but he did bring something to the table in their business relationship.
Anyways, he seems to have protected himself well later on, was able to do good (stories of him giving stock to ppl left out early on, that kind of thing) -- people hyperfocus on one very specific thing (Jobs ripping him off in the atari days) when it's a small point in a much larger life.
Woz would have been able to do the work he wanted regardless. We would likely live in a much more open source world hardware wise if Woz had just done what he was already doing.
And people say he's naïve...
He got (maybe) ripped off by Jobs, but at the end of the day, what did that get Jobs? Jobs is dead, and Woz is still here, apparently perfectly happy.
Steve Jobs is the reason Wozniak could give away tens of millions and still have $10M and multiple houses. Otherwise he would have been a good engineer and lived a nice quiet life, but nothing like the world-touring adventure he got.
Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.
Tangential, but you don't need anywhere near millions to have a 'world-touring adventure'. The nice thing about the ability to earn money online now a days is that the cost of living in the overwhelming majority of the world is a small fraction of what you pay in the US/EU.
And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
Making that jump is obviously scary, but I think many people could find much greater contentedness (not a fan of seeking "happiness", as it's something that I think should be seen as liminal, not a desired constant state) if they only realized that the world is their oyster.
Steve Wozniak's world-touring adventure wasn't as an English teacher. He toured the world as a technology celebrity.
Steve Jobs corralling him into starting a company made him an engineering hero, technology celebrity, and rich beyond his wildest dreams.
Reread the link, or even the title. He gave away all of his Apple money away, because "wealth and power are not what I live for... it was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness.. " Celebrity, in general, is awful. You never realize how pleasant it is to be able to go somewhere without being fawned over until you have that latter experience yourself, and then you proceed to avoid that place like the plague unless you have some specific engagement.
You reread the link?
He had the privilege of giving away a fortune, to causes he cares about, largely thanks to Steve Jobs.
He's never worried about money and has millions in the bank and multiple houses, thanks to Steve Jobs.
Some people love their celebrity. I've met more than a few, including Wozniak. He seems to genuinely love it, which doesn't mean it doesn't also get tiring at times.
A man of Wozniak's talents would never worry about money in his life regardless of what he chose to do. Talent + intelligence + work ethic ensures success, regardless of one's path in life, which is mostly the point of my comment. Somebody could accumulate a bunch of money at a FAANG but not necessarily enjoy their life or work in the process. Or they could utilize the same talents to go on a globe trotting life of adventure where they may earn much less, but get the opportunity to live and enjoy life much more.
Woz stated he gave away his money because he felt it was corrupting, probably seeing what it did to people like Jobs - although it's more like Jobs was like that to begin with, and the money just made it worse. Woz has also spoken repeatedly about celebrity status. Here's [1] a nice older 'interview' of sorts where he hits on the topic extensively. He didn't want it and has no interest in it.
Interestingly something I didn't know, that's pertinent to our little thread here, is that after Woz left Apple, he became a 5th-9th grade teacher, and did so for a decade!
[1] - https://www.vulture.com/2013/08/steve-wozniak-on-jobs-and-me...
I've never been able to find that elusive "easy to find" online work people keep speaking of.
Am I being gaslighted or am I looking in the wrong places? In the EU in my entire 15 year carreer there have been exactly 0 companies or even vacancies offering fully remote.
You're definitely looking in the wrong places. A large number of companies are basically entirely remote at this point, for instance I know chess.com is, and they have vacancies at this very moment. You can also go indie or freelance. If you can think of something you would want to buy, somebody else probably would too. You might not make much off of it, but even a little is a lot in places outside the EU/US.
There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour, which is quite lucrative in most of the world, and you'll generally have less prep and other meta-issues to deal with.
Similarly you can also sell skills. For instance there's a huge market for chess coaching. And while I haven't tried this myself, I'm fairly certain there's some market out there for teaching/tutoring people in coding. Also if you excelled in mathematics or whatever, there's another possibility. And doing this stuff at a school, or even university, is also completely viable - in most places a bachelors is acceptable for teaching at a university.
This is really what I mean with the world being your oyster. There's so much out there but most people just don't realize these possibilities even exist.
>There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour
Hypothetically if someone was burnt out and willing to operate in the gray a bit, how much can you make (approximately) doing English lessons under the table?
Eg: I go to Thailand. I enter as a tourist. Ocassionally, I meet someone in a café and have a conversation with them. They value that enough to pay me.
One of my big pre-covid regrets is I didn't travel more... I had intended to, having been laid off just before it started but everything got locked down and I had a bit of a mental health episode, feeling trapped in interactions I didn't consent to as I spent money on rent I could have spent on hotels etc.
Right as COVID fell, I'd been researching doing the Moscow to Beijing train then exploring SE Asia... it's funny how much of the planned route is possibly bust... for example, I was going to skip mainland China and only visit HK since less visa issues, not sure if that's still possible...
you can think of something you would want to buy, somebody else probably would too.
Selling something you need yourself seems twice as hard as selling something you don't need and have extra that others want and have few
I was speaking more of software, but in general the thing I find is that when people try to figure out what other people want - when they themselves don't necessarily want it, they have trouble remaining objective. Some friends are serial entrepreneurs and they keep coming up with these horrible ideas that they convince themselves others people would want. Maybe one day they'll be right, but in the mean time it looks pretty silly.
OTOH I think Amazon would have sounded like a horrible idea. A book store minus the ability to peruse the books, pick up a coffee, or browse in the same sort of way? I wonder if it really was a great idea, or it's just some weird butterfly effect that drove it up, up, and away.
I remember the Amazon rollout. The pitch was order a book from anywhere and get a biggest selection of books and price. Small book stores were getting eaten up by Chapters letting you read the entire book. Amazon's secret sauce was accessable affiliate marketing. They had and probably still have the biggest affiliate program and at first the only game on town.
Food/coffee came later when the in person business was declining.
I think GP makes it sound far easier than it really is, but there’s also clearly not “exactly zero” such roles. (I have team members based in EU working remotely. Retention is high and we get a lot of applicants when we open new roles. Those are good for the employer side but negative for individual applicants.)
In my experience, it's much easier as a freelancer. Usually what is meant to be a couple weeks gig turns out to be a couple months or year-long business relationship.
I've worked in 3 places that were fully 100% remote. I'm from Barcelona, ES. They are not the modt common but they do exist if you look for them and there are quite a lot.
Check out Who's Hiring? threads on HN. How I got into Citus & my life was much improved
//And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
What typed of jobs is this referring to, besides teaching English ?
The obvious one is definitely teaching, though not just English. For online teaching, English is a major lingua franca and any skill you might want to teach, from chess to calculus - there will be plenty of online students available in English, even if that may often not be their native tongue.
For in person teaching it's the same thing. Most countries have a system of bilingual schools, international schools, and then university type schools. And all of these offer English language instruction in everything from PE to Calculus. The major difference between a bilingual school and an international school is that the latter will generally pay much more and expect much more with certification a stated requirement, though in practice it often is not.
---
Outside of that there's endless odd jobs available that are in need of English speakers. I have friends working in everything from marketing to rehab. A good idea there would be to pick a country you're interested, find the common job boards there (which LLMs may be excellent for, though I have not used them for this myself - yet) and simply search for 'English' or other such keywords. You'll be surprised.
Absolutely bonkers to think Jobs could have found the same success without Woz. Woz gave him access to a world and community ahead of its time.
Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil. He was on that train until he nearly lost his own life flying a plane.
Woz didn’t need the fame and prestige that Jobs afforded him, but he definitely didn’t say no or walk away until his plane accident.
Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil.
You clearly know nothing about the history of these two. Or, maybe even more likely, you want this to be true so you can feel better about your life being relatively unimportant in comparison to Steve Jobs' life. Seems to be very common.
Woz and Jobs were best friends as teenagers and loved each other. And like many good friends they had their issues but loved and respected each other until the end.
Woz wasn't doing a deal with the devil. He was co-founding a startup with his extremely ambitious and abrasive best friend.
Almost everyone that ever worked closely with Steve Jobs came away with enormous respect for him and deeply appreciated their time together. Yes, they also say that he was sometimes an asshole but that's how people are: complicated.
There's a very good chance more than a few people think you're an asshole at times.
Steve Jobs is the reason Apple, Next, and Pixar made their mark on history. No amount of envy and revisionist history can change this.
The way you have discounted Wozniak's talent, one can also discount Steve's ambition. There are thousands of people same or more ambitious than Jobs. Being ambitious doesn't guarantee anything, neither does being as good as wozniak only work when combined with ambition.
Steve Jobs brought a hell of a lot more to the table than just raw ambition.
I just meant to contrast the level of ambition between the two. Wozniak was extremely unambitious and Jobs pushed him into starting a company, with great difficulty.
Nothing is guaranteed in life but I've certainly met more than a few people that I predicted would be successful and then they were. There are character traits that incline people toward success.
I disagree. Woz was a rare talent that would have found great success in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Would he have been as famous as he is now? Maybe not. But here he is at the end telling us that happiness was the point, not fame or billions.
He’d have found great success by his own measures if HP just let do more of the things he found interesting. Those measures wouldn’t have shown up in his bank account, but I think he’d have been happy.
Well, he had a good-paying job as a youngster at HP and if he stuck with that, retired, and by now would be worth about the same.
That’s cool, but it wouldn’t have changed much about how woz seems to perceive life.
You are so mistaken. Google universal remotes.
On the contrary, I know all about that. Wozniak's company was self-funded with his Apple money (thanks Steve Jobs). It was innovative but not terribly so and was a complete failure as a business.
The death of anyone from a disease like cancer is tragic.
Agreed. I think the point was that Woz was definitely less rich than Jobs(not poor though) and seems to have had a far happier life than Jobs. In some sense, Woz had what Jobs never had. Woz was blessed with having enough.
Yes that's what I don't understand about most of the ultra-rich. They keep wanting more despite having enough to spend millions every day for the rest of their lives. Tesla can't stop throwing tens of billions in bonuses at Musk. But what can he do with that money that he couldn't already?
I think the “wanting more” you describe is less driven by wanting more purchasing power but rather as an outcome of seeking the accomplishment of measurable goals. It becomes about the number rather than what the number represents.
Why does a track star strive to run faster when they can already easily a 4:00 mile and running a 3:42 would be of no practical difference in their life? It’s for the drive not the result.
Hmm yeah like gamification they put in everywhere these days. I don't really understand the attraction of that. I don't want my watch reminding me I'm halfway through my 'goal' which I only set because there was no way to activate the damn thing without setting one. Samsung also keeps switching notifications for it back on. Grrrr.
But in pursuit of these made up goals the industry ruins very real lives by widening the gap between the rich and poor :(
"Money is just a way of keeping score." - attributed to oil baron H. L. Hunt.
One might just as well ask why the person with the largest collection of toasters (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-c...) wants them since there's a limit to how much toast he can consume. Soime people have passions and they work to realize them, whether it's something silly toasters or something crass like as wealth and power.
It's a selection bias, the ones you're thinking about wouldn't be ultra-rich if their greed had an end. And at this level of wealth, money buys you power, not things.
> But what can he do with that money that he couldn't already?
Go to Mars.
Great irony that his moment of maximum leverage with DOGE was spent slashing basic research.
It would be great if he stopped talking about it and would go ahead and do it.
Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
Yeah you may not want that - Musk’s plan to get to mars involves, not necessarily _intentionally_ but with no attempt to avoid, ruining the earth for everyone else. He and his billionaire friends that want to colonize space have said they intend to do it by any means necessary, including by walking on the backs of us poors, if it means their progeny can outlast the rest of earth.
Mars' gravity is 0.39 of Earth's. I don't understand how anyone thinks that can support a permanant colony of humans.
And killer dust almost as bad as on the moon. And lots of radiation.
The gravity difference is probably the least problematic issue with living on Mars.
Is that still his goal though?
I used to believe he was a good person actually thinking about the best for humanity (although going to Mars is not the way to do that IMO). But then he turned full nazi so yeah...
These people end up changing the world. Often for the better sometimes not. There happiness isn’t found by being content with what they have but the desire for total domination.
As these people drive progress forward and most of us benefit from the side effects. Just don’t get too close.
>total domination.
Of people, who they're willing to subject to absolute poverty, and worse, to have their goals achieved.
Millions of people are left unhappy so that they can say "I made this money yuge[, and did it all by myself]".
One of my favorite episodes of Some More News: Are the Rich OK? https://youtu.be/IP2EKTCngiM?si=p3-Mdp4wBRUd2Kkh
It is about keeping score with the other billionaires. Bigger market cap and bigger yacht = more status. Personally, I think you have to be some sort of sociopath to prioritise your billionaire ranking over all the good you could do by giving some of that money to good causes. But I guess being a sociopath is probably helpful if you want to be a billionaire.
Especially when it was caught early on, and was one of the few variations of a horrible cancer type that could have been successfully treated at that stage, but that treatment plan was refused.
And to reinforce/expand on that earlier observation: were it not for Jobs' personality, he likely would not have died of that cancer.
So which personality worked out better in the end?
(Rhetorical question, not a disagreement with anyone)
It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this. People do it all the time with Steve Jobs as if it's okay because he could be a jerk at times.
It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.
Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.
Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.
It's not blaming him to mention that an immediate surgery would have vastly increased his chances of survival.
And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors.
I'm also not blaming my beloved grandfather either when I mention that smoking likely killed him in the end and he knew that years before.
Jobs was a very smart guy with all the means to improve his situation but decided against it. For me it's a lesson to consider where my closely held beliefs could be wrong.
"And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors."
You don't know anything about human psychology if you think searching for alternatives means he thought he was smarter than his doctors.
Here's the most relevant quote from Steve Jobs: "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"
This is the language of fear not arrogance.
He waited 9 months to listen to his doctors -- or anyone -- by all accounts instead trying to cure it with diets and spiritual fads.
Genentech CEO (and PhD in Biochemistry) Art Levinson: he "pleaded every day" with Jobs and found it "enormously frustrating that [he] just couldn't connect with him"
Andy Grove: "Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy"
--
Marc Andreessen: "Steve Jobs was 'one of the most disagreeable people in the history of humankind,' and that was part of his genius."
He was an obstinate man who thought he knew better than everyone else. Sometimes he did. This time he didn't.
Steve Jobs's entire job for thirty years was recruiting, listening, and working with experts in various fields. He never would have succeeded without being able to accept that other people knew more than him in certain areas. He worked with doctors very successfully most of the time.
My take is that he was scared and acting out of fear. Hoping against hope that his bullshit alternatives would work because he was so terrified of having his body "opened" and "violated" by a major surgery. Maybe that fear sometimes masqueraded as arrogance but that's still just fear.
Like many others, you seem excited to be able to judge Steve Jobs on this point. To judge and laugh at him for his arrogance killing him. When in reality you're judging and laughing at a pancreatic cancer patient for procrastinating on their surgery out of fear.
Steve Jobs found success by doing just the opposite: not accepting the status quo / accepted wisdom and disrupting it.
In this way Elon Musk is very similar. That gets you EVs where none existed and it gets you crappy self driving by eschewing LIDAR for cameras only. It gets you rockets that land themselves and it gets a flat concrete launchpad obliterated by the first Starship launch as others warned.
If you'd said merely "I think it was fear, more than arrogance" that could have been an interesting discussion, but instead you've been making it strangely personal throughout.
Frankly I dont care enough about Jobs to be "excited" or "laugh" or whatever accusations you are throwing around the thread -- they reflect more on you than on me.
Jobs was a flawed man, as are we all.
You're the one judging a cancer patient's response to their diagnoses. I'm the one pointing out how wrong that is. So yes, it's about you personally and your actions. Not just you of course.
We are all flawed. I think Steve Jobs was less flawed than most of his critics. Maybe less flawed than myself. The difference is we know everything he did wrong in his entirely life because it's so well documented.
I don't know why you feel the need to white-knight the man, and I find it especially rich that you somehow think that he's "probably less flawed than his critics" whom you know nothing about, but statistically probably don't park in handicap spots, rip off business partners, or abandon their children during their formative years (his denialism about the paternity test seems to resemble that of the surgery).
I said his personality--the one that led him to rip off Wozniak along with his other actions (positive and negative)--likely led him to die [earlier]. But in your view the true moral failing was not in these acts which actually harmed other people, but in merely making an observation about how the man's personality likely ended up harming himself too.
Make of that what you will.
Just to be clear, you're the guy in this thread explaining how Steve Jobs shouldn't have his memory tarnished.
It's not "morally repugnant" to tell the truth; that charge is what's morally repugnant.
From ChatGPT:
"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance of survival if he had pursued standard medical treatment sooner.
Jobs was diagnosed in 2003 with a rare type of pancreatic cancer — a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET) — which typically grows much more slowly than the common and far more lethal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. When caught early, pNETs can often be treated successfully with surgery and other conventional therapies.
Instead, Jobs initially delayed surgery for about nine months while trying alternative diets and other non-standard approaches. By the time he agreed to surgery in 2004, the disease had progressed, and although he lived for several more years, the delay may have reduced his overall odds."
Please never copy-paste LLM answers on a discussion forum. It's poor form to make others read generated content.
Even ChatGPT is making the same point I am
"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance
See the keyword "might" in there? No one knows if he could have been saved, not even his own doctors can be sure.
Jobs said it himself. He said he had a curable cancer and he should have taken the treatment.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/10/biographer-steve-job...
"He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."
"He said he had a curable cancer and he should have taken the treatment."
He never uttered this sentence. You're making it up (lying).
Supposedly, he did say "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"
Which shows a man struggling to come to terms with his diagnoses, desperate for alternatives, and eventually gathering the courage to undergo a major surgical operation.
> and eventually gathering the courage to undergo a major surgical operation
Which suggests he came around to the fact he should have had the surgery in the fist place?
>It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this.
No, it's rude and weird to chastise someone for rightfully advocating treatment. He didn't state that he didn't want to risk the horrors of treatment with the end result being the same -- he spread disinformation. It is good he died, because when others repeat his disinformation, we can point back at his death as evidence against his beliefs.
You weigh the feelings of a dead billionaire higher than the lives of young people with hopes and dreams.
It's very obvious that people, seeming you as well, take some delight in the idea that Steve Jobs killed himself with arrogance.
That is morally repugnant. He was a pancreatic cancer patient coping with his diagnoses the best he could manage. The fact that he was a "billionaire" has nothing to do with it. He was a human and all sentient life is sacred in my view.
You also do not actually know the facts of the case. He did not spread disinformation to anyone. He was intensely private during this entire period and very little information is known for a fact.
But by all means enjoy your mocking, judging, and condemnation of cancer patients. I'll continue to find it morally repugnant.
Let's not forget he grabbed a liver on his way out too
There's a lot more to fairly criticize about this. Mostly the system that allows it but also him for taking advantage of it.
And yet it's basic human instinct to do what's possible to survive. I admit that I would have done the same and I wouldn't believe most people who would claim otherwise.
Especially when it's curable and you decide you know more than your doctor.
Have you seen anyone being "cured" of cancer, the shit they have to go through?
That's not a cure, it's business, creating return customers.
I've seen what happens to the people not cured of cancer. Too many times.
> But what is the "best outcome" when you have your house paid off and ample savings?
I don't know, you'd probably have to ask a billionaire that's ruining the lives of other people to earn their second (or tenth) billion.
Not all of them actively do that, but a large number very actively pursue that sort of thing.
I highly doubt any self-made billionaire who keeps pushing for more is actually pushing for more money specifically. It seems to me that more money is a side-effect of whatever they're addicted to doing.
They've got home offices full of MBA/finance people. It runs itself.
Humans like number go up
I'm not sure I buy it. You don't get to be a billionaire by being net harmful, you do it by selling goods and services that people want, at scale, and capturing a portion of the wealth you created.
There are quite a few businesses that made a lot of money selling net harmful goods. Tobacco and Oxycontin come to mind.
But even selling things that help people doesn’t absolve or prevent someone from doing evil things before or after they hit some specific valuation.
There's a pretty significant difference between the statements: "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because what Woz is ought to not be seen as naive" and "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because most other people wouldn't understand him as naive" and it's unclear to me which of those to statements you mean.
I too have been lucky enough to hear him speak, and he very much does have this naivete of youth in the way he speaks. He has this very simple and straight forward way to view his contribution, along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.
I don't think he's nearly as naive as he comes off, but I think he wants to be seen as naive, because his personal philosophy is one that places naivete in high regard. He wants to follow happiness, and happiness can oftentimes be a little naive.
> along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.
Why does that feel naive to you, though? To me, that seems like an issue with your definition of naivety.
I debated with myself on whether to use "naive" but it seems the most appropriate description. I barely know Woz outside of a 3-hour lecture but it appears that Jobs took advantage of his naivete, lying to him on multiple occasions. It worked out (financially) for Woz and he seems to have a great attitude about it, one of the reasons I admire him. He seems to successfully walk the line of not caring if people take advantage of him while not getting wrecked. I think it fair to consider that a facet of being naive.
I think "innocent" and "guileless" also bracket the sense you're going for, but they don't quite fit either.
Like, he doesn't see the malice in other people, but its not because he's innocent/naive of such intents, nor does he lack the skills to look for it (guileless), but because (as you say) he doesn't care if people take advantage of him, up to a limit.
Properly calibrated, that's really admirable.
I think “grounded” might be a better term vs being naive in this context. People can suck, sometimes a person who sucks is going to take advantage of you, and it’s a choice to handle it in a mindful, positive way. Monk vibes.
I think sometimes people are seen as vulnerable, when they are sincere, or earnest, or open or wear their heart on their sleeve.
But being vulnerable is sort of an important part of being authentic.
And authentic people might have more opportunities to connect with others, especially with the limited time we have on this planet.
It’s not being unaware (naive) but rather a lack of cynicism. I think that’s an important distinction to make. It takes an extra dose of intelligence to avoid cynicism when you are at that level. Cynicism isn’t wisdom, and its absence isn’t naïveté.
He's a lot better off than Jobs now!
"naive" puts this on Wozniak, rather than on Jobs where it belongs. The OP quote expresses a very aware ethic, not naive at all.
I've long highly valued this kind of naivety, so if it's not naivety, it's a shame.
> Why does that feel naive to you, though?
The 3 ladders. People on the sociopaths (Elites) ladder think of everyone else – the clueless (educated gentry) and economic losers (labour) – as naive.
The clueless ladder comes off as most naive. Labour knows they're losing and focuses on their own thing. Sociopaths know they're winning and focus on power accumulation. The clueless don't notice any of this and focus on bettering the world or whatever.
https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...
> but I think he wants to be seen as naive
Where does this need come from, to be skeptical or suspicious? Of someone so clearly above board?
Wozniak doesn't need to prove himself to anyone. Maybe he feels comfortable enough in his shoes to be very open about himself, and so motivate people to be true to themselves. At least that's my interpretation.
They're different dimensions. Naivety suggests a blindness (or maybe willingness to ignore) the true nature of people, hence why naive people are often taken advantage of, or seen as idealistic. You can be technologically brilliant and at the same time not dialled in to those kind of social/people dynamics.
> You can be technologically brilliant and at the same time not dialled in to those kind of social/people dynamics.
I came to that realization rather late. Now, I reflect often to optimize for this.
(Anyways, better late than never)
I suppose it's related to game theory and I am of the opinion that it's not spoken/written about enough.
Yeah, game theory is a great lens because fundamentally it's about understanding people's incentives. On top of that, you add in irrationality and you get behavioural economics which is basically this stuff playing out at scale.
I get what they mean by "naive". I think I would have used the word "child-like"? Even that is not right though. There is a kind of playground simplicity to his philosophy. I think Woz did though in fact bring enough for the whole class.
Kind-hearted
Pure
"If you’re so smart, why aren’t you kind?"
Because people take advantage of your kindness and leave you feeling used.
Unfortunately it's this attitude which perpetuates those kinds of actions. Of course it never starts off that way, it starts off as just wanting to protect yourself from harm, but you can eventually justify just about anything with the argument that its necessary for your "survival" (not literal survival, of course, but you get the idea).
"If I don't exploit this person's kindness now, I'll fall behind those who do and they'll use that leverage against me" gives you some idea
Actually everyone starts off kind. That many people ends up that way speaks to the core of the human condition.
>Actually everyone starts off kind
You only need to hang around toddlers or teens for less than a day to realize people do not start off kind.
People start off egocentric. Unaware or unable to take in to account the people around them are individuals with conflicting wants to you. Also unaware that we are egocentric BUT with social instinct built in to us: if we are surrounded by miserable people, or people angry at us, we don't feel good either.
So we learn that kindness, while sometimes initially painful or less opportunistic, in the long term leads to satisfaction.
Sorry, by "it doesnt start off that way" I didn't mean that people don't start off kind, I meant that people don't start off excusing exploitation
How so? Babies will bite their mothers trying to get food - it's instinctive, but it's not kind. Kindness needs to be taught despite any natural propensity towards it.
I think this is a cynical take-- you can be kind without being a doormat.
It's a very difficult balance to strike imo. People do take niceness and humor as signs that you're not quite as "professional". Of course, other people don't make this mistake, but we don't live in a vacuum - sometimes the jellybrains have control over our promotions.
The difficulty is why it requires intelligence to achieve. It is easy to be mean, and easy to be kind to your own detriment. Being kind while still thriving yourself takes thought.
That's because niceness and humor are often just a mask for being unsure, inconcise, or at worst plain unkind. Being kind is much harder, it requires thoroughly judging the situation, including considering own interests, and then responding in a genuine manner.
I think people are confusing what kindness means here.
It’s not about not protecting yourself against abuse but rather not taking advantage of people.
Being kind doesn’t mean you can’t compete or strategize but rather don’t cheat if you do.
Compassion and acts of charity is kindness.
“Do not mistake my kindness for weakness.” is a handy mantra to help avoid that.
That's a rationalization ... a justification for being unkind. Kind people simply don't say such things.
If you are so smart, why are people taking advantage of you?
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym4Rpd72tq8
It requires ones own mind to fell “taken advantage of” - if one is smart enough to be kind, one most remember to be kind to oneself as well, and not care about what the sad critters gets from the leftovers.
Stoicism promote exactly this virtue of understanding that you are in control of interpreting your own feelings.
On the other hand, your feelings don't exist in a vacuum, disconnected from your external state. If you genuinely feel taken advantage of, no amount of self-delusion is going to make you truly over it, until you acknowledge the source of it, and take steps to protect yourself against it in the future.
Very easy to over-extend stoicism to your own detriment, physically and mentally.
I really hate that you’re downvoted here - it’s a sad truth, too many in this world are here to “get the bag” and will do this to you. Over and over.
Especially people in this forum. Tech is a magnet for these types.
I'm pleased that such a cynical rationalization for not being a good person was downvoted.
It's the sad reality of the society we live in. Money matters the most. Nothing else.
Kind people always get taken advantage of at work. Others take credit and then left abandoned once there's no more value to the company. I guess that's just capitalism.
You need to move into a different industry/society. These things are not ubiquitous.
Agreed. We call those people assholes. We try our best to avoid hiring those people and we weed them out of our company as fast as possible if they're discovered. We also try to have as flat a structure as possible so nobody is taking credit for anyone else's work and ideally many of us are working together so we all share the glory or frustration when something goes well or not.
I do think the flat hierarchy thing is commendable for many reasons.
That said, don't think that just because you (try to) have few bosses that there isn't some form of hierarchy in which people don't take credit for other people's work.
Sure, maybe there's no boss by title that people suck up to and take credit for stuff to look good to them. But there very definitely will be the "alphas" in the group that everyone looks up to and wants to look good to and the taking credit for stuff will be done to impress those people.
So, if you weed out this kind of stuff successfully well enough, again, I commend you. But I doubt it's as complete as you may want to think. It's just a different looking game of favours and sucking up to with less easily visible (can't just look at title to figure out who to suck up to) lines.
For some people this will be positive as they're good at figuring out who to suck up to in that situation while others may need the title to figure that out. I bet many socially awkward / socially less aware people find it easier to navigate titles they can read in an org chart than sniffing these out of the "sociosphere".
There is no society where this doesn't happen.
Never has a colleague taken credit for the work I've done. On the contrary, often in demos and other presentations they've thanked or acknowledged my support even when they didn't need to if they were the driver. I know the world can be harsh but my work life experience gives me no reason at all to be cynical.
There is no greatness without goodness. - James Allen
Its naive not to program defensively.
No its not naive, its called not being a sociopath. Some of biggest movers if not all were and are such. Utter pieces of shit as human beings, to the last one. I dont think I need to name current big names, all of them fit this.
I like Woz, was never a fan of Jobs. And I mean that with regard to their personality — not their skillset.
My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example).
I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh.
It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components.
I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.
He survived a plane crash with a head injury. That can cause you to reassess your priorities.
Good point. Perhaps you're suggesting he was finally just unwilling to dive in and layout the next Apple motherboard — allowing instead others straight from grad school to design the hardware.
Perhaps this was when he began drifting toward education.
> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed
It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it.
It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements.
Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64
The Commodore machine contemporaneous with the Apple II was the PET.
(Dates from Wikipedia)All four used the 6502.
That happened to every inch of the computer adjacent industry. Programming was like that as was games and game development at one point
Woz is extraordinary lucky that he has a legacy (and a lot of money). Clearly the bulk of the credit goes to Jobs. And it seems more than likely that if not Woz, Jobs would have found someone else.
At that point in his career, I'm not sure who else would have had Jobs ;-).
From the outside it looks like the opposite though: Jobs was latching on to everything Woz created — beginning with Blue boxes. (Well, not everything Woz created — Jobs seemed uninterested in his dial-a-joke project.)
Woz is indeed truly lucky that Jobs did partner with him. Jobs saw that it was worth going all in (financially) to push the Apple to the masses. Woz seems like the type that would have remained a hobbyist — perhaps doing a write-up about his "Apple" for Popular Electronics.
Jobs too was extraordinarily lucky he had a smart friend who was just on the cusp of the budding personal computer revolution.
A lot of "survivorship" bias too since there were plenty of also-rans at the time.
It's clear to me that is false. It was Steve's engineering brilliance that made their success possible.
Woz is one of my favorite people ever, a lifelong hero for me.
I think it’s important to remember that he is the product of a very unique time in world history though.
He grew up in a time and place that was arguably the best time ever to be a human in all of history. He grew up in a society with extremely high social mobility, when a house in the bay was cheap, in a homogeneous society with high social trust, surrounded by the smartest people of his generation, in a place in the country which valued open mindedness and true progressive thinking. Things like going to college, buying a house, paying rent, or finding a mate were orders of magnitude easier than today.
Optimizing for happiness is a nice pursuit if this is the society that shapes your worldview, but today this is a luxury view that very few people can afford. The world is much more of a rat race, we have significantly lower social trust, basic survival is much harder to achieve than Woz’s time. So few people can go through life just trying to be happy instead of grinding to get ahead.
Great comment. This quote from Hunter S Thompson comes to mind (although he is referring to middle sixties so Woz would have been a teenager, not quite the 70s young adult)
> “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
This is spot on. Nicely written! I think many people forget what a great, unique, and exciting time those decades were. (Or many simply did not experience them).
There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.
As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.
Without Woz and Jobs there’d be no Apple (as the name was because of Jobs weird eating habits), but most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple.
Everything Jobs was though and the people around him and those that worked before him were important for the state of Apple as he left it.
But Woz is my fav also, and if there were many, many makers like Woz, and there are, that would be fantastic, and it is.
Woz, I love you, man.
> most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple.
I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.
What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.
Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
I think there's a decent chance there's an Apple without Woz. But definitely not without Jobs.
I tend to have a pretty open, kind, and respectful approach to others.
It’s frequently interpreted as weakness and naivety.
I’m actually a pretty hardboiled and cynical person on the inside, but choose not to approach life in that manner. There’s reasons. Long story for other venues.
It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not.
Kindness and generosity are not [necessarily] weakness.
Maybe kindness is the real punk rock.
>It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not.
I'll bite. Go ahead and list some recent examples of this actually happening please.
Many of us live this way.
Why would I tell you my secrets?
Nah, that’s OK. Have a great day!
more people need to be like Woz and we need more Jobs in the world. Jobs was a person who bullied through the ego centric system and paved a good single way forward.
Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it?
Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.
> Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs?
To assume that ms wasn't headed by bullies requires a striking ignorance of ms' history.
You made me lol. Microsoft’s feats of assholishness and bullies is pretty legendary.
> He didn’t have ego though.
False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego.
Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence.
Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3
I met Jobs as a high schooler at Westfield Valley Fair with a "Programming in Objective-C for iPhone" book in hand during like the iPhone 3G era, and he refused to sign the book lol
> his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence
A story about Chuck Yeager. He did a stint as squadron commander in the Korean War. When he arrived at the airbase, he watched the squadron land. Afterwards, he called all the pilots together, got a bucket of paint, and marked off two lines across the runway.
He said the pilots were doing sloppy landings and would now land between the two lines. The pilots protested, saying that was impossible. So Yeager got in a jet, took off, circled the airfield, and touched down exactly at the midpoint between the lines.
The squadron pilots got the point.
Yeager wanted his pilots to survive combat, and that meant being perfect pilots every time. If I was a pilot, I'd be glad to have a squadron leader like that in command, even if he was a total asshole.
I think you'll really enjoy watching "12 O'Clock High" with Gregory Peck.
I'm still trying to find a reasonably priced copy of the book.
I've seen it several times. I have an ancient crumbly paperback of it.
My dad, 32 missions over Germany in a B-17, said it was representative of how things were.
See also the original "Memphis Belle".
He was a textbook narcissist. They're all about ego.
And Apple would never have existed without him.
True, I'm not saying that. I'm sure without a big ego you won't succeed as a big businessman. I'm just saying he was a very typical narcissist and as such his ego would have been important to him (which is what the thread discussion was about). I didn't state any moral judgment there (though I do have one which I elaborated on elsewhere)
> I'm sure without a big ego you won't succeed as a big businessman
I agree. Unconfident people will never take the personal risks needed to get big.
and in fact many unconfident people feel its somehow immoral to feed their ego in this way
Having confidence isn't necessarily a good thing of course.
Neither is 'getting big'.
A lot of politics and industry is made up by vacuous people selling hot air these days. Too much confidence, too little respect and knowledge.
People even more confident than the egoists can have the very same feeling.
this is the right take. the world clearly needs more Steve Jobses or the world wouldn't remember this one so singularly. and i don't know what the number would be before the world didn't need any more Wozniaks. the problem is that the Wozniaks of the world nowadays, if they're not getting paid 9 figures by Zuck, are probably in a random room somewhere doing absolutely brilliant work that will take a decade to appreciate. and the more Wozes in the world, the more advantageous it is to be a Jobs. kind of a funny dynamic equilibrium.
When I was a student, we tried to get him to speak to at our school, but Woz wanted mucho $$$$ to speak. But it seems plenty people will pay what he asks. I guess if my job were to just go around talking about random shit I'm interested in, and I can make $10M doing that, I'd be the happiest person ever too. I don't think it's about naivete.
Edit to clarify: I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to get paid, I'm saying his being "the happiest person ever" is directly correlated to his ability to collect millions just shooting the shit in front of a fawning audience.
it's a bit of work and effort to give a talk. And he is rich enough to not need to do it for the money. Time is important. If he'd be doing it for free he'd probably get too many requests. Adding a high $ can simply help filter down to a reasonable thing.to only the largest locations and highest number of people.
I dont want to do contract work but people ask so I just quote an unreasonably high number and on occasion someone bites. I dont need the money so I need an easy filter.
A person whose every interest and opinion gets validated by the world would indeed be very happy. Imagine just talking about whatever the hell happens to interest you to people and everyone paying attention and even paying you good money for that.
It's a bit related to how billionaires tell everyone to "just work on whatever makes you happy and it's all going to be fine".
Nah, plenty of millionaires and even billionaires who have a license to print money are unhappy.
Are they though? I know that's a trope (poor little rich kid). But is that real life?
Yes. Money does make you happy (really, the pursuit of the money does not as it is not what we are evolved to be happy about)
Less Jobs, more Woz
More of either of them works for me. Compared to Musk or Zuckerberg or Andreessen or Altman or Bezos or any other 2025 tech fucko, Jobs is Woz.
Please don't kid yourself
All of these men today are the way they are because they are trying to emulate Jobs
They absolutely 100% are trying to emulate Steve Jobs. But the version of Steve Jobs they have in their heads is a caricature.
Steve Jobs wanted the world to see him as some sort of artistic, cultured genius. The only aspects of Steve Jobs that today's crop of tech CEOs seem to emulate are his wealth and arrogance.
• Wojcicki admired Jobs while Youtube had the most depraved and moronic comment section on the internet
• Huffman admired Jobs while Reddit had a 'watch people die' subreddit
• Zuckerberg admired Jobs while nuts used Facebook to livestream the Christchurch massacre and Whatsapp to incite mobs to kill Rohingya
• Bezos admired Jobs while Amazon was promoting dollar-store junk on every page
• Musk admired Jobs while Grok was dubbing itself 'MechaHitler'
Those examples are embarrassing enough, though we could go on an on with more. There's no version of Steve Jobs who would allow such garbage to tarnish his image.
Are you sure you don't have a caricature of Jobs in your head?
Apple did a lot of controversial things under Jobs.
* The raids for leaks * The no cold call agreements * etc
They aren't deifying jobs, Jobs was an asshole, but when you confabulate what you think is your tech god and then larp as that, you make a worse version of everything.
Taste is hard to cultivate. You have to care about things like art to cultivate it. As a result all of these dweebs are trying to ape Steve Jobs and they're just succeeding at his worst traits: arrogance and cruelty and a lack of empathy.
> The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
https://libquotes.com/steve-jobs/quote/lbm0q6a
It seems the selected examples in your tendentious anaphora are entirely about justifying censorship and centralization. Strikes me as ironic, since the hacker ethos has been stridently libertarian, information wants to be free and all that. Now I hear more people like yourself, practically begging for restrictions and top down control. Reminds me of the covid hysteria over 'misinformation' around the lab leak theory and gain of function research. Many reasonable criticisms were censored by the big tech platforms. For example, lockdowns were immensely destructive and have never been recommended policy in response to epidemics, school closures caused significant harm to children who were at no real risk of the virus, Fauci admitted 6 feet of social distancing was arbitrary and not based on any science, and policies requiring cloth masks were not found to have any significant effect in preventing transmission, etc..
Steve Jobs didn't allow porn on the App Store. It wasn't the end of the world.
Besides, it would be easy to list 100 more examples of trashy practices (eg: preinstalled crapware, intrusive advertising, dark patterns, etc) for today's tech companies that have nothing to do with censorship.
Not that I wish it on any of them, but getting cancer changes you.
Elon Musk: When you order Steve Jobs on Temu.
I’m actually pretty satisfied we have Chang, Huang, and Su.
Actually the world needs more Jobs too. More Jobs, more Woz. Brilliant engineers and hackers need to partner with some super egotistic, charismatic, bullying asshole visionaries to make a dent.
Remember how Jobs single handedly bullied Adobe Flash into its graveyard? Bullied record labels into selling individual songs instead of the whole CD? Cannot imagine Woz doing that. Elon is the next Jobs only even harder to stomach. I wouldn't want to work for these people but they, along with those who can work along side them, change the world.
I would prefer a world with less 'asshole visionaries'. If that means we get smart phones a few years later (or not at all) it would be worth it, for a kinder world.
Elon is an engineer's engineer.
What software or system did he write that you've used?
https://www.google.com/search?q=did+elon+musk+write+software
Right? Musk isn't any sort of engineer. At most he reviews and comments on the work of engineers.
His name is on many patents. For many other engineering qualifications and work, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
Come on, your comments trail shows that you have a lot of experience. You know that being on a patent doesn't make one an inventor, just like being on a peer-reviewed paper doesn't make one a contributor. Yes Musk seems to be a deeply technical person, even Karpathy wrote it somewhere here after he resigned, but these credentials you're citing are not the proof.
I recently saw a Tesla from the original company; it was a sports car, nothing like today's lithium battery on wheels
After Musk took over Tesla from its original founders one of the original founders sued him in state court in California
In the course of the litigation, discovery revealed Musk had lied about his educational credentials
The pleadings from the litigation are available:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc6...
https://archive.ph/gzGpF
The evidence presented showed that Musk lied about educational credentials
The issue raised is Musk's dishonesty, at most fraud, at least loss of credibility
Why did he lie
Note Jobs was named on some patents as well
For example, "Advertisement in operating system"
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090265214A1/
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8712902B2/
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/
("20090265214").pn.
It's good enough for me. I don't know what proof you're looking for. He's far better than many engineers I've worked with.
BTW, I do not have a CS degree.
> He's far better than many engineers I've worked with.
How do you know that? Have you worked with him?
Otherwise you'd have to believe he bungled his way into multiple fortunes creating engineering triumphs that outdid the established automakers and NASA.
You obviously don't need to be an actual engineer to pull this off.
Elon Musk provided the vision and the money to assemble a great team of engineers. However, I find it hard to believe he does actual electric car or spacecraft engineering, given he has no education in these fields.
"Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he'd borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts."
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 108
All three of those books are advanced engineering books (I have a copy of each).
So a biography says he borrowed some books. Do you want me to believe he suddenly became a genius rocket engineer over the course of a few months? With no prior track record or any indication of his supposedly extraordinary talent?
Hal Finney wouldn't show up for class at Caltech. He'd flip through the textbook at the end of the semester, and ace the final.
Yes, there are people like Hal. Not many, but they exist.
If you prefer to think that Elon bungled his way into inspiring top people to implement his ideas, and bungled his way into launching payload at 10% of the best cost NASA could do, feel free.
P.S. Buy those books, and look through them. They're the real deal.
There are certainly people like that! I just doubt that Musk is one of them.
First there are is no hard evidence for his supposedly engineering genius and second he has a long public track record of lying and gross hyperbole.
What I find more likely: Musk throws around wild ideas and his engineers figure out what might work or not. (After all, he also comes up with pretty dumb ideas.) This approach can be successful, but it doesn't make you an engineer yourself.
I am still confused why you would claim that Musk was better than many engineers you know, based on what little we actually know about his technical skills.
Isn’t he more like Ford? To me it seems like most of his value add is in rethinking the physical manufacturing process
Present-day Apple could use some more Jobs, though.
You could not be more wrong.
Woz was in the right place at the right time. Jobs would have found someone else and no one would ever have heard of Woz. Jobs gave us some of the most amazing products the world has ever seen.
You could not be more wrong.
Woz on Musk's Tesla, Inc.:
https://www.slashdot.org/~SteveWoz
Comment Re:No Autonomy (Score 2) 125
by SteveWoz on Monday April 13, 2020 @09:13AM (#59940526) Attached to: Elon Musk Still Predicts 1 Million Tesla Robotaxis By the End of the Year
You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.
_____________________
Comment Die in your sleep... (Score 1) 213
by SteveWoz on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:30PM (#58807154) Attached to: People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway
At least Tesla respects our right to die in our sleep.
_____________________
Comment Re:Maybe they just realized (Score 1) 172
by SteveWoz on Friday June 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#54537213) Attached to: Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars
You meant to say 'great' cars with 'some' quality problems. Autocorrect can be a bitch...
I'm not familiar with his personality, what is he naive about? like the kind of person that ignores sort of political and business machinations and chases personal interests?
Jobs was not a good person but we wouldn't be talking about Woz today if they had not paired up.
He was a visionary and "got" tech -- Apple's success with him (both times) and the floundering in between demonstrate his value to their story.
Again, not a nice man and not worthy of worship but definitely of respect for what he delivered.
> we wouldn't be talking about Woz today if they had not paired up.
The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.
> The exact same thing is true in reverse.
This is an odd thing to say when Steve Jobs achieved most of his success after parting ways with Woz. Jobs was the product guy at Apple. He laser focused on every detail to make sure that the experience was perfect.
Jobs wasn't an engineer, but there were plenty of talented engineers at Microsoft working for years on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone) because it was so unintuitive. By contrast, the original iPhone was a decade ahead of it's time in terms of design. It had pinch-to-zoom, a proximity sensor to prevent accidental touches during calls, a light sensor that adjusted brightness, and an accelerometer for landscape and portrait mode. These features were originally considered gimmicks, but it turned out to be indispensable.
It's not enough to have great engineers. Imagine a world where Bret Victor gets hired by MS and spends five years in Redmond.
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Wozniak was indispensible in the early days. They had to survive first, and then Jobs could have a chance to thrive, and having someone like Wozniak greatly increased his chance of survival - it's not easy to find someone like that. That he continued to add much more value than Wozniak could to the business is another matter. There maybe many Jobs who died without being known because they could not find a strong partner.
Absolutely -- without Woz apple never would have been a glimmer in Jobs' eye.
Eh, there's no way to know for sure but I would bet that there are a lot more people who could have been swapped out for Jobs with similar success than the reverse. It's generally thought to be harder to find a brilliant innovative technical person for a startup than a business one. I also see a lot more passable Jobs imitators around the industry than I do Woz imitators.
If you think there is anyone in tech today who is a passable Jobs imitator I'd suggest going back to watch some of his talks and Apple keynotes. He was not perfect (no one is), but he understood why we as humans use technology better than any one of his stature today.
Empirically, every Apple product you're using today was designed without Woz' involvement, and nearly every one of them still shows traces of Jobs' involvement.
Conversely, Woz started numerous companies after parting ways with Jobs, and I can't think of a single one that had a lasting impact.
It's not really a level playing field to compare Jobs running an established company with a devoted fan base, to Woz starting companies from nothing. One is much easier than the other.
When Jobs was fired by Apple, he started NeXT (platform where the web was developed) and Pixar. The Apple desktop platform, one of the existing products referenced, still has a lot of heritage from NeXT. I think Jobs was an asshole too but he did start outside companies that did well and still have a major lasting contribution today.
Why do we have to keep saying Jobs was not a good person?
the guy who tried to use fruit juice to cure cancer and routinely refused to register his automobile?
the guy who never acknowledged his kid until a court forced him to pay child support?
He outright lied to Wozniak over payments and shares.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-gave-early-app...
He put himself on the organ waiting list in multiple states when it became apparent that his quack medicine wasn't working to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer. He took a liver from someone out of state and died with it. They changed the law to prevent this happening again.
The guy lied and didn't register his car and handled his own sickness in a way you don't like? The horror!
Sure, complain about him forcing his way onto lists if we're willing to accept that all humans are truly equal (I'm fine with this concept), or being mean to others, but who CARES about the other stuff?
He died early because of his own stubbornness and irrationality. It's a reflection on his judgement.
People like Jobs get attention because they're obnoxious. If they never existed, the world would be no worse off.
So? Who cares why he died? Is it wrong to die for a reason you disagree with? If the world is no worse off without him, then wasn't his judgement neutral at worst, and good at best?
It's weird how much he gets under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole, or at least definitely above the one guy they've ever seen a tell-all story on.
edit: it's almost like, in the current social meta of "doing no wrong is more important than doing good", there is a need to denigrate any approach that doesn't feel extra cozy and warm and loving. But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history. He had a helluva team and made things work. I gotta be honest, I don't really care if he said scary and mean things.
> It's weird how much he gets under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole, or at least definitely above the one guy they've ever seen a tell-all story on.
I'm not perfect but he was everything I strive not to be (I'm not always successful though). I strive to be kind, fair, generous, caring and inclusive. I'm not always those things but I do try. From what I 've seen about Jobs is that he didn't really share those values.
I understand that other people admire him a lot but I don't really, because I have other criteria.
And really to be honest I would not like 95% of successful corporate CEOs. It's not just Jobs. You have to be a certain type, an ambitious person with shark tactics who puts everything aside to get to the top. Otherwise someone else who is will beat you to it. Those are not qualities I consider good in a person.
However each person makes their own judgment and that's ok. My opinion doesn't really matter, but it is mine.
> under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole
I never understood this kind of thinking, and have always found it particularly heartless & puzzling, until one day I stumbled upon something I myself had no visceral reaction to but other people clearly did. It looked like they were being fake about it, either completely, or just in an exaggerating way.
Turned out no, I was just not in the headspace required. Which makes sense cause I mean, let's be honest: what do you think is more likely? The majority of people secretly and intentionally all just messing with you, or rather them just actually saying what they think, and then you just not being able to relate to it?
Nothing I’m saying implies I don’t think they’re speaking how they truly feel. I absolutely believe they genuinely believe them when they say he’s some kind of monster because he didn’t get chemo (???) and was rude to people and took up handicapped parking spaces.
I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick when something like 50% of CEOs already show psychopathic traits.
> Nothing I’m saying implies I don’t think they’re speaking how they truly feel.
Then how am I supposed to interpret "people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole"? You literally say people are pretending.
> when they say he’s some kind of monster because he didn’t get chemo (???) and was rude to people and took up handicapped parking spaces
I would 100% say he was "some kind of monster" for power abuse (verbal harassment), as well as for denying and neglecting his child, yes. The scrambling for an organ donor after his drug-addled delusions fell through thing doesn't sound too hot either.
Judgements are subjective. Usually people operate under shared assumptions, so one would just expect that their judgement would be widely shared - but this doesn't make them some universal truth.
This is how and why you end up in a circle when people describe things he's a bad person for, and then you just say "well I don't find those things to be bad". Great, we already know he's not a bad person for you, you said as much. People just disagree and see it different, and list things off for you to try and relate. And so you list off counterpoints to make them try and relate.
> I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick
Yes, well, being extremely "well known", along with his personality, despite never having met 99.999% of the people who "know" about him is pretty unrealistic / unnatural to begin with. This includes me of course.
I’m saying they’re pretending that they’re more moral than him. They aren’t, of course. Hell, for a tell-all book, it was extremely benign. Flouting minor laws, not taking care of his health, and being mean? Ahh!
And I’m not surprised that you think he’s some kinda monster. That’s the insane world we live in today, and why it’s such an obnoxious one. You’ve got nothing to balance any bad act on, besides “everything must be done with perfect kindness”, so even something as minor as being rude comes across as “some kind of monster”. You’ve artificially moved your Overton window to such a falsely soft world, you can no longer reasonably judge regular people.
If it's any consolation, I find today's world incredibly obnoxious as well. Although mostly from the exact opposite perspective, as you may imagine (though not quite the overdramatized way you describe).
Tried my best to be persuasive, but this is all I had in me. Let's see where our opinions take this world.
> Who cares why he died?
He would, if he were still alive. But he’s not. Most likely due to his own irrationality.
> But I dunno - he headed up some of the most iconic products in history.
Do you really believe that life would have been particularly different if he had never existed? I don’t. I suppose if you’re some sort of Apple fanboy, you might feel that way, but from any broader perspective, I don’t see it.
I’d hang out with you.
> The guy lied and didn't register his car
this was done so he could park in disabled spaces
which is pretty scummy
>this was done so he could park in disabled spaces
That makes no sense to me. I can't think of a place Jobs would ever drive his car where it would matter if he could park at a disabled spot. He had his own spot at both Apple and his home, where else did he ever park often enough for that to matter?
Personally I believe the explanation that he did it to avoid the ugly license plate. It mirrors how he refused any stickers on the Mac, when all other PC makers had to put the "intel inside" on theirs.
I always read it more as a “hacker” thing - he found a loophole and was exploiting it to show it existed, a “look what I can make this do”.
I’m sure Jobs could have had all the legal handicap plates he’d have wanted, if the point was just parking in the handicap spot. But it wasn’t.
> [...] but who CARES about the other stuff?
I care about someone fucking over his business partner.
That's pretty dumb. There are literally thousands upon thousands of companies you purchase from every single day where this happens or has happened. Why do you only care about Jobs?
Answer: because he was the only one brave enough to be this transparent. Literally all you're doing is encouraging everyone to hide this behavior as much as possible, and never EVER own up to it.
Alternate option: I also don't approve of those people either?
I'd day this ship has sailed when he became a celebrity.
Comment on him positively, you're now contributing to elevating his identity into something beyond human (etc.).
Comment on him negatively, and now you're just using him as a scapegoat (etc.).
It would seem like the real devil is in the asymmetry of significance, not in the people in question, or even the traits.
in what way does critiquing steve jobs convince the people being screwed over to not share?
i want courts to make it right, not for the swindlers to be confident talking about how they swindle people without consequence.
"owning up to it" is making it right, not chit chatting
It's possible to care about the practice of deception and also talk about one case.
Personally, I don't give much credit for "bravery" when it's expressed in terms of "being transparent" about being an asshole.
Do you give credit when people are brave enough to admit they have… positive traits? Why would someone even bother with saying that stuff?
“Everyone, I’m bravely showing you my spotless record” is really not an impressive showing. Being willing to completely upend your own reputation is.
I don't consider that bravery at all. So no.
I give more bravery points (which are worthless of course) to a whistle blower or someone running into a burning building to rescue the world's most tragic orphan.
Dang, that’s one unbelievably black and white world you live in. The nuance you miss must be book-worthy
I wouldn't know.
How did you find info that the organ donor law changed from a successfully donated liver across state boundaries? (I've not seen that before)
I found an article that this successful use of a donor organ, rather than waste it, was celebrated, and motivated a pro donor law in California.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-does-it-after-alm...
>the guy who tried to use fruit juice to cure cancer
>to cure his actually perfectly treatable (compared to most) Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic cancer has a 13% survival rate
>refused to register his automobile?
Who cares.
He really was an asshole in his life in ways that are considered notably anti-social.
Because if the future household names don't want to be referred to as "not good" people forever, they ought not sacrifice being a good person for their fame and success.
You don't have to say it, what do you mean by we?
Others may say it, but there's a difference between being annoyed that other people say something, and turning your comment in such a way that others saying it looks like you're being prevented from saying what you want.
From the wiki on his daughter:
"After Lisa was born, Jobs publicly denied paternity, which led to a legal case. Even after a DNA paternity test established him as her father, he maintained his position. The resolution of the legal case required him to provide Brennan with $385 per month and to reimburse the state for the money she had received from welfare. After Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire, he increased the payment to $500 a month."
"Despite the reconciliation between Jobs and Lisa their relationship remained difficult. In her autobiography, Lisa recounted many episodes of Jobs failing to be an appropriate parent. He remained mostly distant, cold and made her feel unwanted, and initially refused to pay her college fees."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs
Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person? Maybe he was a bad parent, maybe he was an overly demanding and overbearing boss, but it's not like he was killing people or selling weapons. He sold phones and mp3 players and computers. He almost certainly contributed to making the world a better place by many objective criteria. I don't know why he's labeled as a "bad person" when there are hordes of people who foment and profit from war and killing and don't contribute at all to human productivity, creativity, or wellbeing but are lauded.
He maintained the position that she was not his daughter, even after DNA test proved that claim wrong. Bad person. The worst. There can't be discussion about this. Unloving and neglectful are not even in the same category.
It sounds like she wasn’t his daughter anyway; he was just a sperm donor.
I see your point.
Speaking only for myself, when I call someone a "bad" person (I am wary of calling anyone "bad," but that is the language used in this conversation), I mean that they treat others poorly. They may contribute immensely to the world (as Steve Jobs did), but that is orthogonal to whether they are a good or bad person.
I know others have a different calculus, and I am not trying to convince anyone. Still, being a bad parent, especially after you have asked to reconcile, is... well... a person I would be hesitant to associate with regardless of how much I loved my iPhone 2G, or how cool the Lisa looked in the early 1980s.
> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person
It absolutely is, in my opinion
> it's not like he was killing people or selling weapons.
Well, if your standard is that no one is a bad person until they are literally murdering people or selling war machines, then no, of course not.
But as a parent myself, I think it's fair to say that if you, as a multimillionaire, stoop to doing the bare legal minimum to support the child you created, who was at one point living in poverty because you failed to support her before, then yes: you are a bad person.
There are obviously many other ways in which Steve Jobs was a bad person! He kept obtaining temporary license plates because he wanted to park in handicapped spots without getting tickets. He orchestrated a salary-fixing cartel that artificially depressed wages for many thousands of engineers in Silicon Valley, all so that he and his other obscenely rich friends could get even richer. And he had his devices manufactured in China under horrendously exploitative conditions again, so that he and his shareholders could make an extra buck. (on top of the billions they already had)
But if your standard of being a "bad person" (not even evil!) is murder or complicity in it, then you could make a strong case that Steve Jobs was not a bad person, altogether.
> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person?
Of course ... and that's not nearly his only negative that has been expressed here.
What is really tragic is that so many people are talking about Jobs at all under this post about Wozniak and his goodhearted ethic.
> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person?
Umm . . . yes?
> Is being a neglectful or unloving parent equal to being a bad person?
Emphatic yes. There are only a few such tests that would get an emphatic yes.
That he could have been genocidal but wasn't does not make him less qualified to be a bad person.
There's always someone worse. That's whataboutism. You don't have to be Hitler to be a bad person.
Being a bad parent can damage a child for life. That's pretty bad in my book. I've seen it so much.
But in my view it's not black and white. He was certainly a bad parent. Also a pretty bad employer when I read the stories of how he treated people. But he was a good marketeer and a role model to many people. Definitely investors will think he was a good person lol
I think it's up to each of us to judge a person by the criteria we find important. Personally I don't think being a successful businessman is a virtue or admirable but creating beautiful things is. He did do some of that and I do admire that (that he sold millions of them and created value for shareholders is something I couldn't care less about though)
But being a kind and caring person is the most important criterium to me. For that reason I have to say that no, in my book he doesn't qualify as a good person. I'm sure that for many others he does and that's ok too. Everyone has their own metrics.
> and initially refused to pay her college fees
I don't understand this part, in America, you cannot enter the college for free even with good grades?
Indeed you cannot. There are various sorts of exceptions but that is generally case. And people wrack up massive college loan debt.
It is helpful to at least push back a little bit on the pass that rich/famous people typically get.
Let’s start with: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
There was a Walter Isaacson-authored biography which was extremely open and honest. Jobs wanted everything fully exposed, to include how terrible he was to his children, how intimidating he was to his employees, and how overpowering he was in business meetings.
It regularly referred to a "distortion effect" he could create, by essentially "gaslighting" (to use a common turn-of-phrase) people into doing things they thought they couldn't - often at great emotional expense. Essentially, he was somehow able to become a target of hatred, causing his employees to team up together "against him". It was extremely effective, but created a lot of copycats who just ended up abusing the hell out of their employees without getting the desired effect.
Realistically, he's just the only person we're getting a truly honest tell-all from. I'm not sure he's really that much worse than most people, I think we're just all judging him much more surgically.
I encourage anyone who is fascinated by Jobs to study the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
There's a good argument that FLW was a supercharged version of Jobs - wildly charismatic, visionary, uncompromisingly obsessive about the most minute of details, and could be manipulative and cruel. What we see w/ Jobs and Lisa, FLW was even worse as in 1909 he just up and abandoned his family of 7, seemingly out of the blue, to travel through Europe w/ his mistress. This was a national scandal at the time.
In his houses, he did all decorations (including providing art from his large personal stash) and built all the furniture and would go on tirades against his clients if he found out if they moved or replaced anything after they moved in, usually cutting off all further ties if they did not give into his demands. Also a fun fact is FLW had an obsession w/ Japanese woodblocking, similar in a way to Job's thing w/ calligraphy.
On top of that, their life took a similar arc where each had incredible success early in life that eventually crumbled under their own ambition, spent a time out in the wilderness, then went through a resurgence toward the end that greatly eclipsed their early success. Regardless, throughout his lifetime he maintained he was the best architect in the world, perhaps in history.
FLW actually wrote an autobiography during his time in the 'wilderness' (basically running an architecture cult in the desert) in the early 30s, and much of it is fanciful bluster, a bunch of half truths and exaggerations, almost as a means to save his legacy. You read it and kinda feel sorry for the guy. Yet, five years later as he turned 70, he created Fallingwater which led to so much work, that the last 20 years of his life he produced over twice as many commissions than he had done to that point. In fact when he died he was in the middle of actively working on 60 projects, most notably overseeing the construction of the Guggenheim.
I had no idea - I'll be diving into this next! Thanks so much for the suggestions!
For sure, his life was a wild ride.
There's plenty of WTF things you'll find upon digging in, such as his partner and her children (and other friends) being axed to death by a servant at one of his early compounds, and his time in Japan building the Imperial Hotel to be earthquake resistant - only for it to be hit by a 7.9 on its opening day, and being one of the few structures to survive mostly intact in all of Tokyo.
And with Fallingwater, after lying to his client that the design was complete, the client basically said, “great, I’m coming over.” Wright hadn’t produced anything - it was all in his head. According to his assistants, he worked feverishly over the next couple hours, putting the design to paper with virtually no mistakes - floor plans, elevations, scale drawings, site modifications - so that by the time the client arrived, it looked fully realized. A project of that scope would normally take months of work and dozens of revisions, but Wright had spent the better part of a year building it entirely in his mind, mostly on site visits just staring at the waterfall for hours at a time.
Because so many people worship him like he's God
His flaws were probably significant contributors to some of the traits that made him successful. He held some extreme opinions and was neither afraid to nor was unsuccessful in steamrolling others. This brought revolutionary ideas to market at a time when consensus was stacked against those ideas.
Why do you think people feel pressured into saying that, rather than e.g. just generally plain agreeing? And why is this a binary?
The sheer amount of conspiratorial, loaded questions on HN these days is absolutely staggering.
No, you don't have to keep saying Jobs was not a good person.
For the same reason people dislike Elon Musk and really like Jensen Huang.
A lot of people have PTSD from ~2021 and are still looking over their shoulder
What's actually "nice"? Is it creating an industry and livelihoods for millions of people (directly or indirectly)? Or is it smiling and making people in the room feel comfortable?
He was flawed, like all of humanity. We just aren't allowed to acknowledge his accomplishments anymore because he didn't personally engineer every Apple product or similar stupidity that is also used eg to diminish Musk.
both are criticized for similar things and it's not because they didn't do all by themselves.
Nobody is perfect but this doesn't excuse everything.
> We just aren't allowed to acknowledge his accomplishments
Nobody prevents you from acknowledging anything.
I am specifically referring to their accomplishments, inane takes like "Musk isn't an engineer, he doesn't have anything to do with the success of SpaceX" or "Jobs doesn't deserve any of the credit for Apple's products" are common.
Don't be obtuse, while you aren't "prevented" you are certainly shouted down/shamed on social media
> inane takes like "Musk isn't an engineer, he doesn't have anything to do with the success of SpaceX" or "Jobs doesn't deserve any of the credit for Apple's products" are common
I haven't seen these things said, but apart from HN I don't do social media. I'll believe you that these claims are stated. They are of course shallow.
I bet it depends on how you present stuff. How you "sound". Or when you choose to present facts.
Here, for instance, it looked like you dismissed the criticisms towards those guys. You stated that these guys have their flaws like everybody. You diminish their issues and that's exactly what will make people strongly disagree with you. In many people's heads, those guys are huge assholes, really not comparable to your random person. You'll need to have this in mind when discussing this stuff. If you do it like this, people might not listen because you may sound like a guy who is a fan of two huge assholes at the same time to many of us (even if it's false).
Even if what you state is true, if it sounds like you take the defense of these billionaires whenever they are criticized for other things, I can certainly believe you will be shut down. They have / had a lot of power, it can seem way off to defend them, they really don't need your help.
There are good and bad timings, and effective ways to state facts and others, not.
You'll need to read the room. Of course.
And toxic places also can't be saved. Just flee.
you have admirable discipline and restraint
Thanks for the compliment! I'm glad you took it positively.
I really hate to say it, but I had a different experience. Woz came to the fintech company where I work for a lecture and Q&A. I was super excited to see him, like a Little Leaguer meeting his favorite baseball player. However, Woz came off kinda rude, like "Everyone else is wrong. I'm right about everything." Maybe he was just having a bad day, or he didn't really wanna speak at my lame fintech company but somehow got roped into it. Or, maybe it's a case of "Never meet your heroes", but I was kinda disappointed. Woz and Kevin Mitnick were my two heroes as a young nerd.
He's earnest and legitimately excited about it and you can pick up on that. It's always fun to talk to people like that regardless of their interest.
[written from my iPhone]
I think the net effect of people like Jobs is a huge positive in this world. Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction. You think this could be related? Perhaps there is something unpleasant about the person that had some effect on his ability for greatness? Or do you think people are like a video game with knobs where you can turn down "don't be a jerk" without affecting anything else?
I don’t see human interactions having a “net effect”. If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.
Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.
Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”
> If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.
That's true! But neither does the 1% spoil the 99%, or make it unimportant. People are very bad at seeing the good and the bad in a person; they want to distill it down to one single data point of "he was good/bad". But that isn't remotely just, and it's worth pointing out whenever people skew too far towards glossing over flaws or refusing to acknowledge the good.
Right now, the zeitgeist is to refuse to acknowledge the good in someone if they did something the speaker considers bad enough. So, one has to frequently nudge people to not forget the good even as they acknowledge the bad.
I agree. Neither cancels the other.
But also: they are not weighted the same. Bad things are usually "more important" -- both practically, and for evolutionary reasons. So the bias -- and I agree the bias has gone too far in our current zeitgeist -- does have some foundation.
Why are bad things usually "more important"?
Everyone has some flaws, yet generally we remember the positive deeds that great people did in history. The positive deeds are usually exceptional, while the flaws are often commonly found in many humans (at least relative to the era when that person lived) that they're unremarkable. And we remember and celebrate the exceptional deeds instead of dwelling on the human flaws.
I think we're talking about two different things.
I'm talking about relationships you have with real people in your life. Avoiding large threats is evolutionarily more important than taking advantage of good opportunities. So if someone does something bad to you -- lies, steals, betrays, physically hurts -- that will generally make a bigger impact, and be remembered longer by you, than nice, helpful, or otherwise positive things they did.
I think you have in mind someone like Jobs, who was known for being an asshole but also for exceptional accomplishments, and in cases like that it is true that history will remember the accomplishments. But historical figures like Jobs are unbelievable statistical outliers. In your entire life you likely won't have substantial personal dealings with anyone of comparable historical legacy. And by the way, I'd guess that for most who had personal dealings with Jobs and were treated badly that the abuse will personally be a more salient memory than his success, even if they are able to acknowledge the greatness of his achievements.
I totally agree, but I thought we were basically talking about Jobs and other famous people?
I mean, there's no reason for somebody who hasn't had personal interaction with Jobs fixate on whether he was an asshole (which did not affect them) and ignore his accomplishments (which probably affected them to some degree)... but this seems to be the fashionable thing to do here.
I'm of two minds here. I agree there is something petty and unwholesome in the fixations of cancel culture, and by and large they don't spring from a virtuous place.
Otoh, it's more nuanced than just "did not affect them". Multiple things are happening here, and some have validity:
1. Such discussions are often serving (or people feel they are) as proxies for discussions about what the current rules should be. In that context, an insistence of calling Jobs or anyone else out serves as an insistence that such behavior not be allowed now. To me, it's silly that people can't separate these two things, but alas many can't.
2. There is a genuine issue of incentives. If people observe that success buys you a free pass for being a raging asshole, many of them will take note. Indeed, being able to get away with being an asshole can even become a special marker of success.
There's bad behavior among a lot of people who did great things.
Do you feel the same way about MLK based on his FBI files?
If everyone was super nice and pleasant we would likely wouldn't have made any progress.
I don’t know about the FBI MLK files. But if I were to meet MLK or Ghandi or <insert widely recognized figure> and they were an asshole, I wouldn’t excuse or overlook their behavior.
The underlying ideas here are greatness and individuals ascribed to doing great things.
Without any evidence I suspect an extremely large majority of progress is done by normal individuals whose names we’ll never know.
Hard disagree, I think I here are great men and they drive history. Its nice to valorize the every day working man, and I'm likely such a person. I mean a lot to my family and maybe a handful of others but I won't shape history no matter how hard I try. I can only hope to make the world better by bringing up well adjusted children that contribute to society. And that's fine.
>Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction
Because I don't want to live in a world of things built by socially maladjusted misanthropes, I want to live in a world build by kind and social people they made with their own hands.
There is something incredibly servile and pathetic in the psychology of people who latch onto perceived great men instead of looking to their neighbor. Like the kind of people who spend their day on twitter hoping that Elon retweets them and gives them attention.
What do you consider the positive and negative effects of people like Jobs?
I mean are the iPhone and computing that feels frictionless really a net positive for society?
They are just tools. How society uses the tools is not the fault of the tool. A hammer is just a hammer and someone can use it to drive nails all day long or one person can smash skulls with it. It does not make the hammer a negative for society.
Just because theZuck and his ilk made apps that dominate the use of the tool does not make the tool bad. Being able to use maps the way we can now is definitely a positive. Having a single device that does that, plus allows communication with anyone you know, plus take very decent images/videos, allows for access to the whole internet all while fitting in your pocket is absolutely a net positive for society. It's those shitty apps that make you question it, and you should not confuse it with the net effect. The net negative are the shitty apps.
You can't ignore the responsibility of the tool's designers and sellers like this, and a phone cannot be likened to an utterly simple tool like a hammer.
Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them.
… This doesn't work very far.
This doesn't mean smartphones are useless or don't have positive points of course! :-)
Sure I can. I just did.
It is not the iOS devs' fault that theZuck makes a shitty app designed to destroy people. It is not iOS that allows theZuck to do that. It is the algorithm created by theZuck's minions. It is the tracking that theZuck's minions have created that feed that algorithm. The iOS devs are playing cat&mouse games with theZuck's minions to not allow iOS to willingly participate in that data collection.
The modern mobile device is an amazing achievement. After all, theZuck came along well before these devices and he and his minions were already up to their shenanigans before their apps were released.
Also, I have none of theZuck's apps on my devices, and do not willingly participate in his shenanigans. I don't have Dorsey's Musky app either, or any of that social crap at all. This forum is the closest to theSocials as I get. My phone is definitely a net positive in my life. You will not convince me otherwise. Because other individuals have made poor choices in their use of the device does not make mine bad. I will agree that theSocials are a net negative for society. So if you want to "fix the glitch", remove theSocials and it'll be clear the devices are a net positive
Edit: Because you clearly edited yours. "Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them."
This is where we disagree. I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.
> Sure I can. I just did.
Of course you did and were able to. But I think you're wrong :-) you know I meant this.
I get your point but I think it is a bit naive.
> Because you clearly edited yours.
Yep, sorry, I can see how this impacted your answer. I notably removed the part were I said I think it's important that engineers and salespeople should take responsibility in what they do. I do think so.
> I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.
But I do 100% agree. That's my point.
Facebook is not innocent in the design of its apps.
The same way Apple is responsible for the design of the iPhone.
But it is not the iPhone that is the problem. It is theZuck's app. That's like saying that the telephone is evil because people use it to scam people. No, the scammers are evil. Quit victim blaming.
We seem to be focused on the iPhone, but what about a Pixel or a Galaxy? They're just devices. People use them for shitty things does not make the device shitty just for existing. You're throwing the baby out with the bath water here, and gleefully acknowledging it.
And the idea for a pixel or a galaxy came before the iPhone? Also what I was referring to was Steve Jobs general attitude to computers. Honestly if they were still the boring business machines the world would be a better place IMO
It's not a Google / Samsung vs Apple conversation where one is better than the other.
It's not as simple as Woz good, Jobs bad.
We wouldn't even know who Woz was without Jobs. Sure Jobs had character flaws but everyone does.
Is there a world where you get get a person who has all of Jobs's positive traits without any of the negative? Maybe but not likely.
People like jobs change the world so that everyone else can be a woz.
AI is taking our jobs, do not worry.
Disagree, almost of all the accomplishments in humanity are driven by people like Steve Jobs not Woz. Elon Musk could be said to be a second iteration, a technical person extremely good at sales that can pursue and sell a vision.
There are a lot of people who want to be happy. Let them be happy, but it's the relentless builders/dreamers who pushes through the entire journey of getting a product out there to the people.
For each Jobs/Musk having the grand vision you probably need a lot of Wozs to actually build the things.
Define "accomplishments". Based on Woz's message, I would say he's been the true achiever in the game of life. He found, what he genuinely believes, is happiness.
Personally, I'd take that over being the creator of something valuable.
If Elon Musk is being held up as a pinnacle of achievement, I don't want that.
> We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world
In this day and age, most people are attracted to "influencing". For better (giving back to society, educational) or worse (pranksters, grifters, "manosphere").
One notorious case is "Zara Dar", a PhD dropout to OF creator. Seemed to have high potential in the industry then something just flipped (money? too difficult? not fond of the grind?) and decided to go to OF.
The new world, with its hypercapitalistic tendencies, take advantage of the worst of us. It's one of the reasons for the rise of kakistocratic administration in the United States.
Could not disagree more. Woz's naiveté is cute. But Jobs' creations are out-of-this-world amazing. If not Woz, Jobs would have found someone else.
I love seeing all the positive comments here on HN regarding Woz.
I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.
I personally always found that to be so far from the truth, and the root of it really was how much Apple people didn’t like him speaking open and freely about the company (failures, success, and everything between).
You're either talking about people who worked with him at least forty years ago and had a problem with him, or people who are talking out of their ass. No doubt about which this is, but I wonder why.
You must have worked in a very odd and isolated department. I never heard that rhetoric, even once, throughout my tenure. Nor have any of my old colleagues who still work there and are quite well known internally (notorious patents, features / tentpole DRI, etc).
From your post history, you left Apple in 2018, so I doubt you have up to date knowledge.
Correct. You’re also assuming I have no friends…
I was there 2010-2015 and I corroborate. The ambitions PM types were always quite critical of Woz, because they were all in on the Koolaid and he is not.
Woz bought 2 Model 3s thinking he would be able to rent them out as robotaxis. I'm sure he's a nice guy but I have no idea why he's (still) held up as some kind of tech guru.
Many of us grew up in the PLD era, k-maps, etc. Woz pushed early HW to the limit, with SW APIs that delivered real value. Woz made astute design trade-offs based on full stack knowledge that his peers lacked. The world’s moved on to the GPU (low precision, accelerated parallel compute?) era, but the Woz view point still holds. You can see it in the AI kernel optimizations, or rematerialization methods to push GPU HW to the new limits, and trade-offs need to be made. GPU HW for 4-bit QAT or even 2-bit will dramatically affect the SW (AI) of this era. What trade-offs do you make?
I saw Woz on Northbound 280 “driving” his cherry red Model S, using FSD. He was looking down at the screen the whole time I watched him. Swear he had ssh’d into it.
He's in the arena trying things
Or maybe he knows that he sometimes has weird ideas, but pursues them anyway, because it's kind of neat.
Why would they promote that narrative? Was Woz critical of the company after he left?
> I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.
Are you sure they werent talking about the other Steve? Are there any stories or examples from your co-workers? I've also only ever heard good things about him as a human and engineer.
Nobody calls Woz “Steve”, he’s almost always referred to as Woz.
And no one says Woz is not to be trusted or insane... so I was just curious about the stories you heard. Where as people have said insane and untrustworthy about Jobs.
I’m not sharing those stories for sake of privacy.
Also, I actually never heard any stories like that about Steve. Steve was more or less: don’t talk to him, don’t make eye contact with him, don’t take the same elevator as him.
Obviously, the public had their opinions and stories of Steve..but generally, I never experienced much commentary on Steve. Woz, meanwhile, always felt like a punching bag for Apple employees on the off chance his name came up in conversation.
> Woz, meanwhile, always felt like a punching bag for Apple employees on the off chance his name came up in conversation.
A little more context would make this interesting. Were people complaining about the legacy of his work for Apple which ended in the eighties, or something more contemporary about Woz's public life?
Sounds like I worked in Infinite Loop at a similar time to you.
Everything you say above about Steve is identical to what I was told to do regarding “SJ”.
That's wild to talk about a guy like that who hasn't been actively working on product for a long long time.
> I’m not sharing those stories for sake of privacy.
This makes it tough to believe. But I get it.
I think that $10 million is a great answer for "how much money is more than you'll ever need".
Significantly more than that, and you're a hoarder.
Maybe I'm not creative enough but I've tried this thought exercise with friends and it's a fun one.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?
I'm of the "only way to win is not to play" mind with this exercise. I would peel off 10-20 million to eliminate lifetime financial concerns for my circle, and immediately go MacKenzie Scott on the rest, trying to put it towards maximum societal benefit.
Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
I don't understand folks with these answers. I would want $1T or more. I could easily invest it.
- I want to build a human cloning startup to build whole-body, HLA-neutral, antigen-clean, headless clones. Taken to the extreme, this cures all cancers except brain and blood cancers, and it could expand the human lifespan/healthspan to be 200 years or more.
- I want to build directed energy systems to manipulate the weather and climate.
- I want to build an open source cloud, open source social layer, open source social media and actually get them real traction against the incumbents. Distributed media exchange layer that is P2P, not federated. Rewire the internet to be fault-tolerant and censorship immune.
- I want to train frontier AI models and make them open. I want to build massive amounts of high quality training data and make it all available (with a viral license).
- I want to build open source hardware. Tractors, automotive EVs, robots, stuff you can hack and own and exchange and print parts for.
- I want to build infra for my city.
I couldn't stop coming up with ideas for things to build.
But, alas, I'm still stuck here at the bottom wondering why a compound in Hawaii could be cooler than these things.
Upvoted for ambition. But some of the things you listed (e.g. cloning) are likely tech limitations rather than financial ones. It's not that money wouldn't be needed to develop the tech-- it absolutely is. But just anyone with a trillion to invest wouldn't automatically be able to develop it, or find the right people to develop it.
Building infra for your city would be great (I wish Denver had an actual metro system and not just half-assed light rail for large swaths of the area). But you're going to have to deal with the legality of that beyond simply budgetary concerns-- liability, at least, and also things like eminent domain against people who may not want to sell.
The OSS stuff already has people working on it and depends more on market share than technical know-how at this point. Depending on whether AI will actually prove monumental in long-term history, simply buying e.g. OpenAI and open-sourcing their stuff might be the most history-altering thing you could do with a trillion (or it could be a footnote, depending on how things play out).
Because your idea for spending $1T is to start six (massive) companies, hire tens/hundreds of thousands of people and basically become more powerful then most governments. Arguably it's not much different then Bezos and Musk starting rocket companies.
All of those things take massive investments in time, a compound in Hawaii does not.
i would do the same, except give every extra dime to dogs and cats (and other animals in need). i'd make sure none of my wealth would go to help other humans.
Saying you’d donate to pets is one thing but saying it will never go to a human is so out of touch with the world. I’m sure you have great intentions but I just don’t see how you can take that approach.
A large portion of aid goes to trying to help humans already. I see no reason to contribute more. Also, animals are completely innocent, most humans are not. (of course kids are though)
There's probably humans you're going to have to interact with in the course of donating to animals, who will benefit from you donating to animals (if not skimming off the top directly by way of being employed by the charity, etc). If you truly want to make sure none of it goes to any human, you'd basically just have to burn it (and maybe hope that does something bad to the economy to get back at the other humans).
I have no problem paying salaries of people helping animals. I just meant I would never contribute to a cause that helped humans
... and, hopefully, before the professional arm candy starts "accidentally" bumping into you in line at the coffee shop.
What a shallow, dismissive and sexist thing to say.
Do you think athletes and musicians are the only ones with groupies? Your assumption about gender reveals your bias.
Inform me about my assumption of gender.
Not GP, but I suspect it's the part where you call them "sexist" -
It seems like in your head "professional arm candy" must be female.
"Boy-toys" are a thing, and people from the Kardashian mother to the local gay nightlife empresario have them :)
By assuming that "professional arm candy" must be of one gender... You've kinda accidentally made a sexist remark, ironically enough ^^"
> By assuming that "professional arm candy" must be of one gender
Didn't say that, you are projecting. I will assume now tho, HN has this untraveled suburban teenage male vibe when it comes to anything except code. That period when they discover Rand and are good a specific set of narrow problems.
Thanks for your reply.
Doesn't saying that "professional arm candy" is sexist imply that it is a term limited to only one gender?
Also, fyi, I'm 32, I was born in Paris, moved to Houston when I was 6, to London when I was 18, to Paris when I was 19, then Marseille, Grasse, and Lyon.
I'm currently writing this from the Stockholm airport, waiting for my flight home to France, and I've never read Ayn Rand, because her work seems to completely ignore the importance of cooperation, which I believe is the key to a happy and successful life :)
how so?
$10M being enough depends on a lot of things:
1. Do you have children, and if so, are they going to expensive private schools or have other expensive hobbies
2. Are you planning on stopping working, and how many years do you need to support at what lifestyle
3. Debt
4. Do you support others, like parents, etc
5. Do you have health issues, or will you, that will be expensive to support
There are more factors but these are just some that prevent 10M from being enough.
Almost all your points are eliminated if you just live in a developed country.
I’m very, very far from rich, yet
1. University costs nothing for everyone
2. Good social safety net, but yes, having own retirement savings is very important.
3. Not for school or medical, the two biggest reasons in the US.
4. Free healthcare for all, aged care, etc.
5. Free healthcare for all.
It’s eye opening to see that the American dream is now “live a quality of life that dozens of countries take for granted”.
> I’m very, very far from rich, yet
Maybe that's why? I know rich people (truly rich, not your upper middle class or rich as in I got a couple mils of net worth), in developed countries (West and Northern Europe) and to be honest your points, apart from being tangled and repetitive just so you can get 5, don't reflect their reality and are just a setup for your last politically charged line.
I'm sure with tens of millions of dollars in your hands, you'd wait for that 20 minute doctor's appointment for 3 months, then another 8 for your MRI. Especially when your kid gets sick god forbid.
> you'd wait for that 20 minute doctor's appointment for 3 months, then another 8 for your MRI
You’ve been fed so much propaganda and disinformation you can’t even separate truth from fiction. Reality is nothing like this.
Yeah, it's not like I live here or anything... stop being a propaganda machine yourself, this community deserves better.
sure but all of those are not that sustainable long term. Denmark made retirement age 70 and that will change in the future because your social economy is not sustainable. This also includes a lot of government things in USA.
$10M and more buys true freedom and reach to global travel and countries. All of those free things in Europe require certain level of native labor and population aging fast is not helpin that across globe.
The US is $37 trillion in debt. It’s pretty clear doing it terribly is not sustainable.
Meanwhile dozens of countries are doing the above without immense debt.
Counter-argument, largely lifted from Graeber's _Debt, the first 5000 years_:
The US trade deficit isn't ever really meant to be repaid, it's basically the modern equivalent of the Roman Republic/Empire demanding tribute from weaker states with a thin veneer of "I'll pay you back" to make it more palatable.
Like the time the homeless dude living under a bridge near me asked to "borrow" 50€ from me :)
Developed isn’t the same thing as socialized… or to what degree even.
In the countries that do have this it’s often much harder to make $10M. Also the context of this is Woz, aka the US.
> In the countries that do have this it’s often much harder to make $10M
Which is a good thing because then everyone has a good quality of life, not just those with lots of money.
It also matters whether we are considering it a static $10 million or considering reality.
In reality, if you have $10 million, you put it in the S&P500 and make an average of 10% ($1 million) per year. Far more than inflation and more than enough to cover those things you're talking about unless you have a pretty extreme medical condition or very expensive hobbies.
I agree with this directionally, however I think you'll make more like 7.2% per year, and inflation will be about 2.5% per year. You'll also likely pay about 30% in federal and local taxes in the USA on it since you're actually selling it to live on it (more on taxes later). So you'll pay 2.2% in taxes. So on average you'll get 7.2 - (2.5 + 2.2) = 2.5% of income. If you have $10M, you can withdraw about 250K a year in today's dollars every year. i.e next year you can withdraw 256.3K or so, and keep doing this to keep your current standard of living. In down years you may want to adjust / tighten belt a tiny bit to not veer off track too much. And you can get cute with taxes but not recommended. That loan interest will add up over time, and when it's time to actually pay those loans, you'll still sell stock and pay taxes on it, unless your offspring inherit both.. and who knows what the laws will be then.
The 7.2% number is already adjusted for inflation. Historically the stock market has gotten about 10% nominal return, 6.5-7% real.
Huh! I genuinely didn't know that and this makes me very happy.
Agreed, but would caveat that the historical market returns happened as the world's dominant economic and technical powerhouse. The current trajectory is looking different, to put it mildly. The US is undermining nearly every advantage that led to such strong growth. Barring some massive pivot in the near future, medium term economic growth will most likely be lower.
inflation was double-digits in the 70s.
and the S&P was flat at 1.6% for the decade
despite some pretty amazing technical innovations pocket calculator and microcomputer (Altair 8800), first email, pong, floppy disks (they were the standard for 20 years), VCR, cell phone (1973 Motorola), barcode scanners, rubiks cube, ...
https://www.modwm.com/lost-decade-of-the-1970s/
> and the S&P was flat at 1.6% for the decade
Nah not really.
Nominally S&P500 did 23% in the 70s, and 2.08% annualised, but financial returns are not just the stock prices, they're also dividends.
If you include and reinvest dividends, you'd have made 83% in the decade and 6.2% per year.
Its true inflation was high though, and an investment in Jan 1970 would've in real terms returned -1.1% a year after adjusting for inflation. If you continued investing equal amounts each year from 1970 to 1980, it'd actually be about -0.5%.
But no investment would've meant you lost half of all your money due to 7% average inflation, so investing would've been a pretty good idea, offsetting almost all inflation in the worst decade 50 years ago.
Also it's common knowledge to do a stock/bond split. Bond returns fared a bit better. -- and it should be said, the following decade inflation came way down and in nominal terms the S&P500 did +364% with dividends reinvested.
I do agree with your general point though, you can't just rely on a 10% annual average and spend that amount. The commonly referenced safe withdrawal rate (WR) of 4% is 2.5x less than the average S&P500 return for a good reason (based on a ton of monte carlo sims that indeed would lead to disastrous results at 10% WR in the 1970s).
Except the market is a bubble. It's going to pop within 10 years as the boomers retire and die. Thats assuming low inflation. With significant inflation the younger folks might afford to prop it up.
Even if that’s the case, with 10 million you have 100 years of 100k+ a year even if you can only barely stave off the rate of inflation.
Can you elaborate? Why is the market going to pop "as the boomers retire and die"?
I assure you, if $10M doesn’t seem like it’s clearly enough for you, $100M won’t either. That worry doesn’t go away.
$10M generates a passive $400k per year (trinity study 4% rule yada yada). If you can’t manage on $400k/year, you might be what we call extremely out of touch.
Lifestyle is the only real issue past a few million, particularly if you own your home (and at 10m you certainly would). Beyond that its all status oriented which is where the "should be enough" bit comes in; if its status your after then theres never really enough.
after few million you start securing the retirement and few decades. like what if you live up to 100 or more? Anything below $3million means no retirement now or money has chance to be all spent in next 2-3 decades. After $10Million it's all enough
3 million invested means you can withdraw $100000 annual income with virtually no risk of ever going broke. That is financial independence. $10MM is way too high a bar.
I feel like $5M should be enough to cover your first 100 children, but then the next 100 should be cheaper as they get the hand-me-downs.
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
Genie: I’ll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100M in a month. There are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away
SRE: Can I use AWS?
Genie: There are 4 rules
Can I train AI models?
Can I mine crypto?
I don't know if you intended this to be only spent selfishly. But if you look to how the old robber barons spent their money they did things like giving the US a large portion of it's public library system. I don't think it would be hard find things to do like this that make everyones lives better.
Charity washing is a thing. And you get more control than just paying those pesky takes and letting the leasers choose that happens to it.
I'm still a fan of libraries. Just not private philanthropy displacing what should be public utilities and institutions.
The fact you were able to get >$1B already made a lot of people's lives significantly worse. Charity is just a way to whitewash hoarding and exploitation.
> try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
https://neal.fun/spend/
Hmm. Doesn't include ongoing costs. The yacht for example will cost $1-4m a year simply to own it, and that's ongoing cost forever. The jet will have a similar figure. A $45m mansion isn't cheap to keep running either. Purchase these things and suddenly you're on an unsustainable financial path with a $1b completely liquid net worth. Forget about charitable giving. $20m of gifts annually put you deep in the red.
Bought 10 million cats, 10 million dogs and 10 million acres of land and have $40 billion leftover for food.
Also:
https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos
... which even has its own wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Jeff_Bezos
>try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
I'll bite. Private island, superyacht, G7, prime mansions in LA, NYC, London, Singapore, collection of old masters, part owner in an NFL team, establish a foundation and trusts for the kids/grandkids, trip to space. Easy
There was a movie from the 80s with this premise. When I mention this to people, I'm usually surprised to find out that I'm the only one in the group who's seen it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...
Excellent movie. I haven't seen it in a couple decades, I should watch it again.
This is crazy. I could easily spend a billion dollars without even thinking. That doesn't even get you a novel drug. Like, if I made $100b I have a shit ton of things I could attack with that.
Even a trillion dollars I could probably spend. I like sailboats so a yacht sounds nice, but I cannot believe it even a fraction of the satisfaction of developing some research, or of having the fundamental research itself done.
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
Easy: The largest ship in the world by area. (Goal - either 500m x 500m, or at least 0.25km^2 with the breadth >= 300m)
The current status quo for bulk carriers are the Valemax ships (360m x 65m), with each one costing around $100 million. (actual figure wildly varies, but sticks around that number)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax#Sale_of_ships
https://www.tradewindsnews.com/containerships/evergreen-adds...
(500 * 500) / (360 * 65) = 10.683760683760683
10.68 * $100 million = $1.068 billion
Even just going with 5 Valemax ships side-by-side (360m x 325m) costs half a billion.
The "number" is always part of a big debate. There's no right or wrong.
Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.
So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).
If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.
Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).
All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.
[0]: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates
2% is quite low. Most of the FIRE community would consider even 3% quite conservative.
Remember you need enough left over to throw off an income to maintain your yacht and private jet. Those things aren't cheap.
Fair enough. So then I'd just fly first class or use Netjets all the time?
But surely you are creative enough to come up with the “buy a jet” solution (just, too sensible to actually go with it).
I mean, can I not just spend the money to buy a better society in which to live?
Museums. I love museums. They all need more support. Kids need more places to do field trips.
Libraries ... they are experiencing budget cuts everywhere now as cities prioritize police spending.
Parks.
Homes for people that can't afford them. Seriously, one of the most effective possible cures for homelessness is to set up a program that helps people cover their rent for a month or two if they get into trouble.
Health care. Like, there's got to be a pile of people that need urgent health care and can't afford it, right?
Education. Adult education, too.
Science and research.
And most, maybe all of these, aren't even things that necessarily need an entirely new organization to spearhead them, or some kind of dramatic social change. They are all things that exist right now and need more funding than anything else. You could hire a small team to just look up all kinds of programs all day long and write checks for them and it would be enormously impactful.
I just... the answer to this seems so blindingly obvious to me, and then I read the rest of the comments, and I really wonder when exactly the hacker ethos got co-opted by the crab mentality.
It seems like a lot then I think about how California’s EDD department gave 50 billion to criminals in 2020/2021 and then it feels less ginormous.
My answer because I don’t see it: climate change research. A billion isn’t much but if it can help save the planet that would be worth it to me personally.
The best part of this game is that it takes time to spend the money, if you can't manage to spend more than 4-5%/year then your wealth will actually be growing.
For reference, on $1bn that's $40M/year or about $100k/day in earnings if you just have the cash in a money market account.
This made an impression on me:
https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/
Buying all this stuff that seems expensive, but then seeing that it barely makes a dent in a truly wealthy person’s fortune.
Of course, he wants even more…
It's a clear sign of a simpleton when a person thinks of Nintendos and other stupid gadgets as "how you would spend Elon's money"
I wanted to buy a thousand tanks for my own private army, but it's a pain to buy them one by one.
Coming up with a list of things to buy isn't an interesting use of the money. Starting companies, using that money to pay people to do things, for, say, 10 years, for all industries you want to get involved in. A billion dollars, over ten years, for 1,000 people, is 100k. Which is fairly decent salary.
Make it 500 people and give them housing.
What to use those people for is left as an exercise for the reader.
Sounds like you'll love "Spend Bill Gates' Money" [1]
[1]: https://neal.fun/spend
It would seem that accumulating stuff is a waste of time at a point much lower than one billion. On the other hand, giving every Debian maintainer $500 a month is ~$5M a year. Add in Gentoo, Alpine, and other things I like and you're looking at probably double that total. Ivy admission for kids is a few million a year for 5-10 years... Retaking Artsakh would be north of $3 billion
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
Try to reduce stray animal suffering across a single city here in India. Or if you somehow are successful, extend that to the country.
If you think that leaves you with a lot of funds, maybe provide a few villages with healthcare checkups for a few days.
That's only if you spend your money on stuff. I wouldn't spend it on stuff, I would fund things like ambitious art and architecture projects. If you can't think of ways to allocate $1B you're probably a very boring person, and if your first thought is "yachts" then you're definitely one.
> Maybe I'm not creative enough
> So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house)
You answered your own question. Very boring and selfish answer, and just serving yourself (ie, greed).
Your son has more creativity than you.
If you are given $1B in hard cash, and the first thing you do is spend it on yourself. You are probably the worst person to ever get a windfall.
That was an example - not what they’d choose to pick themselves. You misread their comment and then came down hatefully upon them for it. Shame on you.
> try to spend $1bn on stuff
Buy an election.
If not, buy a newspaper, a TV network or a media outlet with a good outreach.
Then you can get you 1B back tenfold.
The only real way to spend billions is to build many huge houses all over the world or ONE really big house. To spend hundreds of billions you would have to build something ridiculous like a mile high pyramid with a 1 square mile base.
When you have that much money, you're not interesting in buying things anymore, you're interested in buying power, people.
You want to buy a social network.
Or see if you can swing an election to your favor.
That's what you do with $Bs. It's usually not very good.
50 billion cheeseburgers.
https://neal.fun/spend/
> try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
High end audio equipment. Done. Next!
I've always been given to understand that making a small fortune (out of a large one) was the main goal of owning a bookshop. I'd try that :)
I assume people with $1bn are playing Civilization IRL, they aren't "spending" the way consumers think of goods.
Nice house, nice car, allowance for everyday stuff (food, bills, etc.) and travel, and a little bit of money for retirement.
The rest: charities.
So you just make some charity execs rich instead of you?
That's quite a cynical point of view, and while all charities certainly have overhead to account for, and not all charities are created equal in that respect, organizations like Charity Watch can tell you a long list of organizations that use donations very efficiently - in the sense that almost all of the money actually goes towards the cause, not the people running the charity.
https://www.charitywatch.org/our-charity-rating-process
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
That gets a lot easier to spend if you decide you want to explore space or something.
There was a long Reddit thread[1] a while ago that describes what people in various wealth tranches spend their money on. It's very long, but the TLDR is: They don't buy "things" so much as they buy Experiences, Access, Influence, Time, Political Power, and so on.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...
or just look at how many big yatcht Gabe newell owns and try to calculate cost of maintaining them for a year. That alone easily requires $1billion invested in somewhere so returns can maintain the ownership + trips. Also now he now owns shipyard too.
What's the point of having several yachts? You cannot be on board several of them at the same time anyway.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but all that stuff is personal spending on luxury goods, which is probably the least useful thing money can do. If your goal is something like "solve supply-side housing in my city" then you might need to build hundreds of high-rise apartment blocks, at which point you'll be able to burn through $1bn pretty quickly. And yeah, you'll eventually make your money back, but that's a side benefit.
Posts like these seem a bit silly to me because it's incredibly easy to spend billions of dollars as soon as you get away from a consumer mindset. The value in a billion dollars comes from being able to shape the future in whichever direction you want. I'm not interested in spending money just to make my own life marginally more comfortable, but in elevating the quality of life and overall experience of everyone around me.
Here's a few random frustrations I have:
Most modern hardware appliances are not easily repaired or hackable. I'd love to manufacture and sell open hardware appliances which prioritize repairability and maintainability, including sharing the CAD models and opening up the firmware.
Despite the years of effort that have gone into the Linux Desktop Experience, it still often lacks polish in various areas. You could afford to hire world class engineers and designers to fix up every minor annoyance and really provide the most deluxe desktop experience possible without compromising on the slightest detail. Not only that, you could contract companies to add Linux support for any essential tools and applications which aren't already supported.
And that's not even getting into the ability to fund the creation of really outstanding media. Most modern kid's entertainment treats them like morons while slapping them in the face with basic lessons. You could create some truly delightful kid shows without having to skimp on any aspect, and really lay the foundations for creating a brighter future. Embed lessons of every major topic as part of the show without being hamfisted about it, and when they start to encounter those challenging topics in school they will have some foundational models on which to build upon. A basic example: you can teach a kid the fundamentals of calculus from an intuitive perspective, and when they actually learn proper calculus in school it'll be much easier to ramp up.
Heck, you could fund the modernization of a ton of college level educational content with enough money. Buy the rights to any important textbooks, rewrite as needed, then make them freely available. Hire a team of world class artists, animators, and builders to help create supporting materials / content that cover any topic. Pair that with world class educators and experts. You put that all together and create the most powerful repository of high quality educational content that the world has ever seen. By doing this you're laying the foundations for the development of future generations and setting them up for success!
Those are just some quick thoughts which I'm willing to write up here... If I thought about it longer I'd probably be able to come up with more significant quality of life improvements that could be spread out if someone was willing to spend a few billion dollars into making them into a reality.
Oh here's a final quick one: funding maker spaces across the country. It's not clear how much potential could be unlocked if we had widely available maker spaces where people can ask for help with their projects and ideas. Sometimes all it takes is having someone who can point you to the right tools or people.
I hear what you are saying: consumables and normal luxury items are hard to spend a lot of money on (houses, cars, boats, planes, clothes, food, etc)... if you however were to choose to spend a lot of money on the R&D required to reducing human suffering you'll find that the money will go like its on fire. Build a new drug, create novel ai tech, driverless cars... $1B would feel like you need to clip coupons for the grocery store.
Buy a sports team :)
Art
Yeah but doesn't art and similar collectors items usually make you MORE money?
People don't talk about their losing art trades or the art they over paid for and are trying to sell in a completely illiquid market.
We were in a huge fine art bubble up to covid. This decade has been a much different story. It is a boring news story though compared to a Ken Griffin balling out last decade buying his favorite paintings for incredible sums of money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis
High dollar art is primarily used as a way to hide wealth. Most of it sits in warehouses at duty-free ports.
https://www.ams-tax.com/blog/post/the-secret-world-of-art-ta...
That is not so hard. Try to buy/build something really big and price tag easily goes to 1bn.
A skyscraper. An eco-friendly village. A ship. A spacecraft.
Not to be that guy as I think your point is fantastic, but 1bn dollar yachts exist, probably just to break your question! Haha
Yachts and houses are boring. Can't you think of anything you'd rather do with your life than live in a house and go sailing? You can do that without money!
A million dollars is, roughly speaking, a person-year of dedicated professional services from a world-class professional of almost any profession. There are a few exceptions, like stockbrokers, surgeons, and some kinds of lawyers. But a billion dollars buys you, say, 1000 person-years of the best professionals.
For millions of dollars, you could have your own vaccination program, your own particle accelerator, your own web browser, your own steel mill, your own religious cult, your own pyramid, your own AI research lab, your own permaculture experiment station, your own rare book collection (which you could digitize), and so on.
That's leaving aside personal consumption of things like a diplomatic passport from a foreign country, a private doctor, a comfortable apartment in a former missile silo, and a helicopter to get to it with. Your yacht isn't going to do you much good if you get arrested in a foreign country on trumped-up charges because you unintentionally insulted the wrong guy's daughter, or if your cancer goes undiagnosed until stage 4.
I'd like to build something interesting so I want more. Some people want to buy homes, happiness, and family prosperity with their wealth. If that's the case then $10M is too much. That's multiple homes territory.
But if you want to build something for society and not die doing it then you might need more than $10M.
> I'd like to build something interesting so I want more.
My dad built tents for diabetes research in Africa, I think that's pretty interesting and helpful. He's never had even a million dollars.
You need way less than you think.
Isn’t that backwards? Most people need to build a business to make the $10M+ in the first place. Are you talking about a nonprofit or an airplane/movie business (both famous for turning large fortunes into small ones). Otherwise you probably should follow the advice from the “Producers”: never put your own money in the show.
I think you have conflated 'build something for society' with 'build a business' which is very hacker-news-core. My mind immediately went to building infrastructure and schools in rural Nepal, not building a b2b saas that raises customer acquisition rates by 8 %.
You might be right, but somehow GP’s comment didn’t come across that way to me. Does it take more than $10M in wealth before someone can build a school in rural Nepal? It just seemed like a convenient rationale for wanting to accumulate a lot of wealth, which is also very hacker-news-core.
You are exactly right. If you want to build something big from scratch you will likely need to control that thing, which in our system means ownership and wealth. If you don't own it, someone else will own/control it and you could lose your ability to execute on your vision.
>how much you'll ever need
If that's the case then it's no longer just for you, so I think that's fair
Depends on where person wants to live
You can live in the Bay Area.
Yes. With $10 million in the bank, earning 4%, you'll see $400,000 a year, less taxes.
Whereas with $10 billion, you'll get $400 million a year, or about $7.5 million PER WEEK!
I think guys like Musk and Andreesen (&SBF) might have gone insane just trying to spend their money.
> With $10 million in the bank, earning 4%, you'll see $400,000 a year, less taxes.
This isn't your point, but $400k puts you in a top tax bracket, so figure 30% of that goes to taxes. that brings your return down to 2.8%. The Fed wants to keep inflation at 2%, but it's usually a bit higher, leaving your real return at 0.3%. That's $30k per year.
Most of a typical billionaire’s net worth is a lot of equity though.
> I think that $10 million is a great answer for "how much money is more than you'll ever need".
Years ago I lived on $40 per month, after building my own cabin in Oregon -- wood heat, kerosene lanterns. Then I bought an Apple II and things got more complicated (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...). But basically I agree with you. Most people will never have that much, or need it.
Flight delayed for a couple hours at SFO; this was a great read, thank you!
Most rich people don't "hoard" money like Scrooge McDuck. They're generally spending it on:
1. Equity in companies or loans to the government.
2. Expensive food, homes, clothes, hotel stays, travel, child care, etc.
Citation needed, but also buying homes (that you don't intend to live in or actually use) is still hoarding, and is arguably even worse than hoarding wealth.
I would measure it in multiples of the median income. At 5-6x I imagine that you can buy anything you want but not everything. You are still somewhat price sensitive but rarely bothered by a setback or an expensive meal.
There's lots of things I'd like to do that would cost more than $10 million. Maybe if you're saying I personally only have $10m but control $1t?
Things I'd do if I didn't have to raise money, find investors, etc.
Bribe/payoff whoever I had to and then build a real transit system in LA,SF,Seattle as one example.
Consider making a museum/expo-center that's like the Lucas Museum (https://www.lucasmuseum.org/) but centered around Video Games and/or Interactive Digital Art.
Would buying a good chunk of land make you a "hoarder"? Depending on where you are 20 acres can be more than $10 million even before you build a house etc.
Earth has about 3 acres of habitable land per person.
Definitions of wealth often exclude primary residence for this reason, it depends a lot on where you live, and it's also not very liquid. There are poor people who own large houses (but can't sell for whatever reason), and there are rich people who don't own any house at all.
There's an argument to be had about how if that was viewed as hoarding and taxed appropriately, land would probably be a lot cheaper.
Spending $10m to buy 20 acres is hardly a "need". I think people here are missing the point of the quote by throwing out a bunch of absurd technicalities.
Our lord and savior already answered your question 2000 years ago in Matthew 21:33-46
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21%3A33...
Reminds me of this old post. Once you get to a certain level of wealth, it isn't about money, it is about power.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ifiwonthelottery/comments/9qv4e1/po...
Having more money than that is not for your personal expenses and comfort, but to finance projects at a large scale.
That's why they need more than $10 million for space exploration, or for setting up giant factories to make any kind of goods, for developing massive infrastructure, for warfare, etc etc.
More than that should be taxed at a 100% marginal tax rate. Eliminate endless greed as a motivator.
So when you create $10,000,000 of economic value you should be forced at gunpoint to stop contributing to society and creating jobs.
Jeff Bezos has created many, many millions of jobs while selling essential goods at margins sometimes below 1%. If his reward was stolen after $10m, why would he have bothered slaving away?
Aside the blatant jealousy factor, it's economic suicide and contains shadows of economic systems which have led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
> Aside the blatant jealousy factor
You people really can’t imagine someone thinking they have enough?
What you're really saying is that the millions upon millions of people reliant on Amazon for their primary incomes have enough.
Because Bezos has no incentive to employ them after Amazon was a small business.
The jealousy is so strong that you'd rather stomp on the necks of millions to prevent one billionaire owning a yacht.
It’s so disappointing to constantly see this type of evil envy driven nonsense posted on HN. Capitalism has delivered humanity unbelievable prosperity and improvements in living conditions.
Anyone finding themselves agreeing with ideas like 100% marginal taxes needs to look deep into their own soul and understand where it originates from and then go back and learn history and read authors like Hayek, Mises, and Sowell.
Sowell - “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
And the worst part is that they don’t perceive the massive irony of posting these comments on this particular medium, the Internet, which was initially the product of a military-funded project of the most capitalistic country in history. A project which aimed to deliver a resilient communication network in case of all-out nuclear war!
Most of the people who comment like this most likely have lived since birth in a stable, western democracy with social and economic security and they don’t know anything else. They don’t know what living in a dictatorship is like, or under a fully corrupt government bureaucracy where only nepotism or favoritism gets you ahead. All they’ve known is their little, stable corner of the world, protected by the largest military and economic powerhouse in history, and they don’t appreciate it.
Hypocritically it is often extremely money focused people who put out opinions about taxing the greedy wealthy. Dressed up as caring for others but the underlying drive is selfish.
You're quoting a government project as an argument against taxes?
Depends how you define Capitalism. I’m not opposed to money and markets.
And I don’t need anyone else’s money. I’m doing fine. I think other people need the rich’s money.
> I think other people need the rich’s money.
There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference and even worse nobody will be rich once you try take from them. That experiment has literally been tried dozens and dozens of times with 100% failure rate. Economies are organic organisms and your type of ideas as cyanide.
Please educate yourself and stop believing in fairy tales. Socialism is also extremely unethical and even evil from religious perspectives.
If you need a quick starter guide you can read
https://iea.org.uk/publications/socialism-the-failed-idea-th...
to get some basics.
I’d be curious what educational system you went through that failed to teach the dark evil and catastrophic consequences of your 100% marginal tax rate type ideas.
> There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference
They could make a difference to some. Also consider the harm they do to the system through their politics. It's not just the wealth hoarding, it's the attacks on education and social safety nets.
I think in practice you want to take steps towards structural wealth equality. It's a problem when someone has their big ideas and step-functions a society into them. I have enough intellectual humility to admit that my conception of what policies and systems we need would most likely not work in practice. But changing a few things to be more socialist, measuring, then course correcting would be nice for once. Instead we get Capital and their purchased representation telling us what works and stepping towards what's good for them.
Also apologies but I won't read a 400 page book on your recommendation. But looking over the topics covered it seems to be about states that tried a command economy. To me a command economy is obviously foolish. How is a government, notorious a slow moving decision maker, going to replace the free market? As you said it's an organism. It's complicated with millions of actions happening in parallel. I want incentives to be changed - ideally with as few changes as possible.
> But changing a few things to be more socialist, measuring, then course correcting would be nice for once.
This is constantly happening actually and constantly failing.
> To me a command economy is obviously foolish.
And who exactly distributes or allocated your confiscated money from your 100% marginal tax rate?
> I want incentives to be changed - ideally with as few changes as possible.
Ask yourself why? is it because something is broken and you think this will fix it? that’s the classic empathy narrative which I guarantee is actually nothing but envy masquerading as empathy.
I agree. With $10 million I'd immediately buy a decent chunk of land in the middle of nowhere, build a modest home + a guest home or two, have a hobby farm, and retire with a solid $8 million or so left. Invest, live off interest, done.
Actual numbers aside - I couldn't posssibly respect and admire Woz's statement more than I did.
My English may not be enough to express it but above all else it exhudes a "clarity of purpose" that is remarkable
And a couple of homes. In the Bay Area, that’s another $10MM
I think the reason why so many of us look up to the Woz in the tech world is that he is genuine, in an industry where we see so much of the opposite regularly - and we want to be the same.
There's an interesting job interview question: do you want to be more like Woz or S. Jobs? Elon Musk's management style is very Jobs-like: Motivates via manipulation and wow-factor of cutting edge, has grand visions, yet knows what factories and the market can and can't handle, tries odd drugs, etc. However, Jobs rarely stuck his nose into politics; Jobs mostly just trolled about tech.
I'm definitely a Woz. I appreciate both Jobs and Musk despite their blemishes, but I must say where Musk has Jobs beat is vision. Jobs was content to give everyone a computer. Musk is trying to bring the optimistic future to life on all fronts.
I really do wonder if this is still the case.
As a younger millenial I am somewhat familiar with the legends of yore. But not as familiar as someone older that was around when the tech world was much smaller and more intimate. Where people casually met a wild Stallman at random conferences.
Given how much bigger the software and tech world has gotten, with how much time has passed, and how much things have changed, I wonder if people still see Wozniak as tech hero and as part of casual tech culture knowledge.
Dude. Yes we still see him that way 1000%. It's just that there are a lot of tech people on this planet and they all have different ages and experiences, so they don't all think the same.
Met Woz randomly at the San Francisco airport a few years ago[0].
One of the nicest guys in the world. Humble, kind, gracious.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/share/1BHAeRQDGP/?mibextid=wwXIfr
I think there's 2 kinds of psychodelic oneshot. Woz & Jobs. Woz became content with all he had and Jobs turned into a psycopath. Both geniuses, both gave us a lot. I'd rather have someone like Woz be a trillionare and e/alt using his wealth for good than a money hungry monster.
Jobs is as much a genius as Musk.
This is a slight tangent, but I have not been on slashdot since the early aughts. I'm surprised that it fell into obscurity since technical forums like HN and reddit CS subreddits are thriving. Or maybe it still vibrant and I'm making assumptions?
I still check it out a few times a week, and the discussions have just fallen off a cliff, and that was the biggest draw to me as well. The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political - and I see the draw there, those posts are the only ones that can attract over 100 comments these days, when back in its heyday pretty much everything had around 200 comments on the front page.
And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger. On more than one occasion I have suspected bots have stolen accounts. Looking at post history on some particularly unhinged posts after the previous election, there was a pattern of people posting regularly in the 00s about only technical things and then going quiet for 5+ years and then only making comments about politics. It was fishy enough I sent some examples to the mods but never heard anything back.
It's a real shame, slashdot used to be a juggernaut, and it's just a shadow of its former self.
> The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political
I dunno, it must've been 15 years since I set my signature there to "remember, Slashdot is a tabloid", after I realized how the posts skewed towards... "engagement".
(signatures seem to have been lost in some redesign since)
> And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger.
I disagree. It's still 90% center left. But if you have a low tolerance for seeing conservative responses then sure maybe it feels more conservative. Those views rarely get modded up though.
> it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger.
I've noticed that on teamblind as well (started to use it only recently). I didn't realize there was such hate towards foreigners in the US, especially, in the tech world which I assumed was more educated/progressive. Don't know if it's fueled by Trump or the other way around, but it's pretty scary.
Something like 80% of blind posters are Indians on h1b. Absolutely no judgements here, just saying (source: polls asking some variation of Are you Indian? appear all the time there)
Slashdot refused to moderate comments in an effective manner. Comment section was always full of bad memes that became stale:
* Lot of rickrolling. but replace Rick Astley by Goatse, Tubgirl, or LemonParty.
* Frist post
* BSD is dying
* GNAA
* Nathalie Portman
* Robotic Overlord
* In Soviet Russia
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these memes
* etc.
Then it becames fixated on SCO and basically became Darl McBride News, for years...
However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system. You did not simply upvote or downvote, but needed to add a qualifier to it: +1 Informative, +1 Insightful, +1 Interesting, +1 Funny, -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic, -1 Flamebeat. I never seen such a system elsewhere.
You forgot Cowboy Neal, you insensitive clod!
> However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system
In the abstract, this seemed like a brilliant idea, and I don't understand why nobody else tries it, and I still don't see a good argument against it.
But in their specific implementation, if you deem that "funny" can redeem a post in and of itself (and you allow an open community to judge humour), well, you get what you measure. (And nowadays, "troll" is basically understood to mean the same thing as "flamebait", because nobody trolls the old-fashioned way — it's increasingly hard to distinguish yourself from people who are actually that clueless, and too many clueless people around to make it worthwhile to fake more.)
I used to be a meta moderator there. But you're right, you need to have a strong "hand" or the communities like that fall apart.
Their original owners also sold the site.
Sensiblee*ection used a similar voting system. They probably borrowed it from Slashdot, but added more qualifiers.
slashdot stopped allowing easy new user sign ups a while back. Now its the same folks over and over, very predictable. A number of those old memes have died out, mostly. They really limited ascii art which helped too. There do seem to be a lot of trolls/psyops in the comments.
jesus this takes me back
slides a bowl of grits down the front of his pants
... something something Natalie Portman...
I've never been on slashdot before. And what stands out to me is it's really hard to follow the UI. It's better than the classic forum layout but it's still just not easy to read, I just can't see myself using it. Though I have similar opinions on new reddit and it is pretty popular so I think I don't represent the possible new user.
What seems more relevant is that I didn't know about it at all which seems common with many older internet sites dying a slow dead of no new users as younger audiences are literally unable to discover the site.
It was better before their "redesign" in the mid-2000s, around the same time as the Digg redesign.
Skimfeed, my entry point into HN, still indexes /. threads, so I still check it out from time to time. Definitely not what it was in the cmdrtaco days, but it has gems in there sometimes still.
IMO Slashdot always had some very narrow focus points and the community pretty predictable.
Not a lot of variety in content or community compared to the digs or reddits of the world.
personally hoping for a cultural shift back to smaller decentralized communities
I like the idea, although smaller communities I find now a days to be far less formal and respectful than the slashdot heydays. The ride or die fans of a given thing or community sometimes are strange folks. People greatly upset by differing opinions and so on.
I believe it, as old ossified communities go. I remember a few old vbulletin spots that went through an exodus and often the ones who stick around are trolls, spammers, or odd ducks and people addicted to snark.
Yeah, that was my take too. I used to be on it regularly 15-20 years ago, great nitty-gritty tech plus usually good-natured snarky techy humor; but haven't even visited in over a dozen years.
/. was done after the Slashdot Beta mess. Never recovered.
just checked, my last comment was in 2014... damn
You know, I there aren't many celebrities, especially in tech, that I think "It would be cool to have a beer with them". Not Gates, not Jobs, probably not Musk. But Woz seems like a cool guy with great stories to tell.
I agree, but I also think Gates would be very interesting, especially in his earlier days
I think Steve Ballmer would be pretty fun to hang out with for a bit. Maybe not a beer but lunch with Bill Gates would be alright, I'd love to pick his brain about his charity work.
I think I would like to have wine or tea with Tim Cook
Lmao at that probably
I mean, the rockets are pretty cool.
Wouldn't you rathet talk with the people thatade them?
Sure, but Musk showing them means full access to anything, demos, etc since he runs the show.
I love the line they give Woz in the movie Steve Jobs. In the big final confrontation he says, "Your products are better than you are brother."
The movie is a fiction, but Woz apparently liked it a lot and thought that Seth Rogen did a phenomenal job playing him. So this attitude of his adds up.
"It's not binary, you can be decent and gifted at the same time"
I love that Jobs doesn't have a comeback for that.
I always think about this:
> At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10651136-at-a-party-given-b...
Catch-22 is a fantastic read as well!
The most telling thing to me about Woz's personality was this walkthrough at the CHM. Note the section about the homebrew scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsB8Hxnb52o
Thanks - a very good video! The quick anecdote of how he talks about in his teens / high school he stumbled over the PDP-8 small computer handbook which lead him to sneaking into the Stanford linear accelerator libary on a slow Sunday with his friend and reading through their prized selection of industry computer magazines, filling out the trade cards and getting back manuals for minicomputers which often had very detailed information about practical computer architecture - where he would then shut himself in a room and design on paper his own computers in a game to make them to use less and less chips. He competed with himself. This is a key detail in how he was self taught that I'd never heard before!
https://youtu.be/hsB8Hxnb52o?t=1083
Small Computer Handbook
https://www.grc.com/pdp-8/docs/PDP-8_Small_Computer_Handbook...
another thing I heard but never thought of that was in the video, Woz said he based the Apple I off a terminal! In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
> He was designing a terminal to be used with DARPANet, the predecessor to the internet. He wanted an inexpensive way to use a keyboard and TV as the display for use as a computer terminal.
https://historysanjose.org/how-we-restored-our-apple-1-to-wo...
I guess the IPhone was walking his path after all (as heretical as it may sound)
What a beautiful man, and I envy him immensely! 75 and being able to say he is happy is a privilege most don't get, and he truly deserves it!
Love the simplicity of “Happiness is more smiles than frowns”!
Steve Wozniak is one of the kind of people that makes you happy knowing they exist.
> I never look for any type of tax dodge.
If you're engaging in philanthropy, dodging taxes is perfectly justified. The main thing to look out for is whether or not you are using the money better than the government would, which isn't that difficult.
Here's my Woz story... (from a ~decade ago)
I had gone to SFO to drop off my mom at the airport. After dropping her, I saw somebody who looked like Woz at the Delta First Class queue. I hung back to let him do his chat with the airline agents.
As soon as he was finished, he turned around and I was sure it was him. He had his trade-marked backpack full of electronics on his torso.
Approached him gingerly to ask, "Are you, umm, Mr Woz?"
If he seemed surprised / annoyed, he didn't show.
Then I got tongue-tied... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In a brief second, the entire history of Apple came flooding to me...
I blurted at him that he was a boyhood hero of mine and just thanked him for his contributions, etc. (which is true, I do admire him)
He seemed surprised. He said folks these days have sports heros, and was glad to hear what I said. Inquired about me / my work (also tech), my brief journey, etc. Exchanged a few pleasantries. That was it.
I didn't have any elevator pitch or anything. I came away genuinely happy having met him in person.
The rest of the story. https://slashdot.org/story/445414
It is about accomplishment, but about accomplishing what is truly meaningful to you and what makes you happy.
A key turning point in Woz's life was when he crashed his Beechcraft Bonanza, fully loaded with friends and luggage, from a runway that was too short for the aircraft load and air temperature (high temperatures require longer takeoff rolls). Woz also wasn't rated for the aircraft, but I'm not sure that really made much difference, compared to the allegedly skipped weight & balance calculation, which if performed would likely have predicted the outcome.
This accident is said to have changed Woz's outlook on life, but when I knew him years earlier he already seemed very focused on worthwhile things, like excellent hardware designs and little interest in accumulating money, compared for example to Steve Jobs.
When I heard that Woz quit Apple to become a schoolteacher in a small California town, I though to myself there aren't words of praise sufficient to describe that choice. Still think so.
i won a bid on Juliens for a book that was at some point given to Jobs by Woz.
the dedication reads:
"to the terminally ill, Woz"
I adore Woz, I hope my friends keep pulling a leg on me on my worst days too. Woz is all a man need in a good friend. exemplary
bonus: it's a computer science jokes book Woz wrote
https://www.juliensauctions.com/en/items/23156/steve-jobs-co...
that's cool!
About happiness in life, that only happens when the needs of the body and the needs of the soul are satisfied. Only then we can talk about happiness and piece of mind. Virtually no amount of Buddhist intention can overcome a hungry body and an empty soul.
That is not to bash on those like me that pursue this post-consumerist happiness state, only to say that you can't expect those that are hungry to overcome their state without help, as well as expect those that have their basic needs satisfied to feel guilty.
You can overcome a hungry body by asking for food, cooking food you find, hunting for food, or fishing for it. There's no such thing as an empty soul - just bad people. Do good and good things will follow. Happiness is a choice, a state of being, not an end-game.
I've been rich, I've been poor, I've been in mansions, I've been on the streets. Your life is a rollercoaster, the more risks you take, the more extreme the ride. I happen to like going upside down so I'm a risk taker.
Could you overcome a hungry body by asking for food in Gaza?
What I'm saying is that happiness doesn't hold on the extremes of the human experience, and no amount of positive thinking can make up for that.
> There's no such thing as an empty soul - just bad people.
Maybe we are talking about the same thing. For me an empty soul is that soul that doesn't have roots in reality and is boundless and thus meaningless.
>Could you overcome a hungry body by asking for food in Gaza?
Strawman.
Fair enough, forget the example. I'm saying that "just go find food" isn't possible when there is no food around, either because of a famine or because of deprivation, in the case of Gaza, or because you are past the point where you have enough energy to fetch and digest. So that argument doesn't hold not because of the example, but because your generalization doesn't account for the extremes of the human experience.
A fly can not escape the spiders web.
The only answer I can give you is never put yourself in a position to be taken advantage of by another. Whether that be your location. Your position. Your job. Or your ability to get food.
I sympathize. War is shit. I wish it wasn't but it is. Humans inflicting harm on humans makes no one happy. Keep your eyes open and your belly full.
> About happiness in life, that only happens when the needs of the body and the needs of the soul are satisfied. Only then we can talk about happiness and piece of mind. Virtually no amount of Buddhist intention can overcome a hungry body and an empty soul.
Could you elaborate on empty soul? It's easy to think what is meant by empty body (no food, water or oxygen). But one could, for example, believe that any amount of Buddhist intention is fulfilling for the soul?
But you presume that's not the case. Maybe you mean something different with soul than I do. So I'm curious on how you'd elaborate on it.
I'd never make justice to Need for Roots from Weil. What I'm saying is that while a very few can just detach from human contact and supposedly be fine with it, the majority if prevented from creating bonds with other human beings will develop severe psychosomatic problems. But it goes beyond just interacting and feeling like you belong. It's the need to have your identity, collective memory and ancestry preserved.
I love how someone took clips of Woz smiling his way through "Dancing with the Stars," and spliced them into a song about "doing it for fun," and for passion...
https://youtu.be/3FzuZdZLt54?si=l1hyv_ouGOcYD-ez
But accomplishments lead to happiness
Happy Birthday, Woz!
1) Love to see this 2) Totally checks out that the woz is still active on /.
Not even when you created that Woz coin in 2021? Whatever it was called...
I suppose that depends on whether or not he did it to get a huge pay day or if he just did it because he genuinely thought it was a cool way to try to encourage energy efficiency (but didn't make bank off that backing). Selling out isn't the same thing as not always picking the right thing.
I liked this video on his thoughts on Trump/Musk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-f3qZVcWM
I read outlines of Stoic philosophy here. Recommend "A guide to good life" by William Irving as a great intro into it.
Hmm SW would still be playing with his HP calculator if SJ hadn’t come along and of course the reverse is true too.
huh, does everyone forget this happened?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25330613
Here I thought you were about to link something genuinely bad, like a sexual allegation, and you link him creating a blockchain coin (that was probably indeed useless) in 2020 at a time when all anyone was talking about in tech was how the blockchain was going to change everything and EVERYONE was launching blockchain-based apps.
Do you really think he did this with bad intentions? He almost certainly just thought it was cool and maybe would be useful or profitable. There's no reason to frame this as if it's a reason to ignore everything else about him. Completely disingenuous. Honestly shame on you imo. As if everyone who bought into the blockchain hype is a bad person.
I hope by the time you're 75 you don't have people linking a single failure to sum up and dismiss your entire character and the work of your entire lifetime.
It's kind of nostalgic. Man, back in the day people would flip out on you if you used the wrong technology: "You fucking microserf!"
There's a strange sense of joy I feel about someone being upset that he made a blockchain app. In some parallel universe we're still in the old world of the '90s culturally and engineers go online to yell at each other for which data structure they use. "You asshole! Did you just use distributed hash tables?!"
Wow, I didn't know that. Disappointing.
Woz we all love you , for real. When I was a kid and I got to know who was this guy that invented RGB , that was always smiling… you changed our lives
Can you recommend any books/biographies/documentaries about Woz? Ideally, more focused on him than Jobs.
Woz is just a nerd, simple as that. And he stayed true to himself and that ethos his whole life.
"Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty." --The Bene Gesserit Coda
Steve Wozniak is doing a great job funding other people's retirements. Half of all revenue collected by US federal govt in 2024 (totaling $2565 billion) was given to retirees. Mostly middle class and government retirees. That's $1500b for social security, $865b for medicare, $128b for retired feds, and $72b for retired military.
Woz was always the best Steve at apple
I love his attitude, an example to us all. Woz knows what's important.
This should be pinned. Thank for this! Really really a big thank you!
Easy to say when you have so much money, you don't need to worry about your next job.
Apparently he was so happy with integers that Apple had to license Basic from Microsoft.
Unfortunately, he never got around to creating the floating point routines for the version of Basic he created for the 8-bit Apple computers which had unfortunate results:
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
The question is would he have been happy if he hadn't been successful?
I think worst case he is going to be a successful HP engineer, definitely not as rich but can probably still retire early and do some teachings.
Research suggests happiness often precedes success rather than following from it - Woz likely would have found joy in engineering and creation regardless of financial outcomes.
Even in another universe, if such thing exists, I can imagine Woz is just as successful, if not more, than he is here.
Success in itself is not a sufficient condition of happiness. How many unhappy billionairs are out there?
That would be my guess. Or you can even consider that him focusing on happiness led to success.
(For his definition of success, which I would agree with, but not everyone would)
I find Woz's lifestyle far preferable to Job's.
Logged in to Slashdot! User 1483, since around Q4 1997.
Woz is the FUCKING MAN.
He was on Dancing with the Stars, ffs. Before it got enshittified after Len died. (How did he even get that gig?)
He's doing it right.
Love to see this.
I randomly rewatched Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) last night. Recommended.
While it's certainly not one of the finest movies ever made, it is the finest movie ever made about Apple, and a must-see for anyone in tech.
Noah Wyle was perfectly cast as Steve Jobs. In fact, Wyle participated in an amusing Apple prank at MacWorld 1999:
https://youtu.be/watch?v=TIClAanU7Os
to me life is about getting $10 million so i can be happy by not having to go to work everyday.
I heard Woz give a talk (or Q&A?) at a conference and it was very enjoyable, even for someone who doesn't know much about Apple's history.
If we are to believe his word about not selling out, then I must assume that https://www.efforce.io/company also brings him more smiles than frowns. I suppose if you change the definition of "sell out" you can conventionally sell out without meeting your own definition. That said, I am reluctantly open to being shown evidence that the company isn't a grift.
Sounds like an accomplished life
every good thing i ever did i did because it was fun.
Steve Jobs was a narcissistic asshole who treated people like idiots. More specifically:
- Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder - Narcissistic Personality Disorder - Borderline Personality Disorder
He thought he could cure his cancer with energy crystals and fruit juice.
You rule Woz!
Some quotes relevant quotes from the net/youtube:
"I didn’t want to be corrupted, ever, in my life. I thought this out when I was 20 years old. A lot of basic ethics is truth and honesty, and I’m going to be an honest person. I’m not going to be corrupted to where I do things for the sake of money. I don’t want to be in that group (chasing power and wealth), I just want to have a nice life, a good life, maybe better than a typical engineer. But I gave away a lot of my money. I’m very comfortable with who I am, I’m not one of those private jet people. Part of my philosophy was everything you do should have an element of fun in it. I came up with the formula for happiness, what life is about. Happiness to me is smiles minus frowns, H=S-F. Increase your smiles, do a lot of fun things, enjoy entertainment, talk with people, make jokes. That’s creativity." -- The Guardian interview, 3 May 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2016/may/03/wisdom...
"My starting point was the desire to be a good person. So, I came up with a lot of different values, largely based on truth being the most important thing of all, and the value of what's called ethics. And I just said, I want to be in the middle, where I can associate with the maximum number of people. People are one of the most important parts of this life. Who you are, who your friends are, how you can talk to them—it was important to me because I was shy; I was an outsider. And I wanted to be in the middle, not one of these extreme "way up" people where you can only deal with other "way up" type people. Part of my thinking, was to be open-spirited to people. Part of that was not to build a hierarchy. [..] I wanted to build a philosophy, not a hierarchy. Just say, "Hey, I'm going to present how I think," and if somebody else has a different way of thinking, they just have a different mind. They're not bad, they're just different. So I developed a lot of these different philosophies for life, including things like the desire to make the world better with technology and computers. So, I didn't forget who I was. After a bit of success happened, it also goes to your head; you want to have more value and more money. That's good, that's fine. But I was just one who never sought those goals. I never wanted to be so above everybody else that I would kind of forget them and shove them aside. [..] I think more people should know who they are, decide who they are, think about it, and decide to be that person they want to be." -- Encuentro Nacional Coparmex 2017 in Queretaro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZVPz3T-8JA
"Seth Rogen, who portrayed Woz in the 2015 movie Steve Jobs, described him to Variety as “immensely lovable,” “sweet, compassionate, caring” and “the kind of guy you want to give a hug to.” Throughout his career – in numerous interviews and in iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon, his memoir written with Gina Smith – Wozniak has always been a fount of knowledge and wisdom, whether speaking on subjects like innovation and entrepreneurship, the importance of honesty, or Star Trek and The Big Bang Theory. Think of them as aphorisms by Woz or, as we like to think of them, Woz-isms."
3 Woz-isms:
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me – they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone – best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything revolutionary has ever been invented by committee. Because the committee would never agree on it!”
“You need to believe in yourself. Don’t waver. There will be people – and I’m talking about the vast majority of people, practically everybody you’ll ever meet – who just think in black-and-white terms. Most people see things the way the media sees them or the way their friends see them, and they think if they’re right, everyone else is wrong. So a new idea – a revolutionary new product or product feature – won’t be understandable to most people because they see things so black and white. Maybe they don’t get it because they can’t imagine it….Don’t let these people get you down.”
“Start out with tiny projects that aren’t worth any money in the world, but that’s how you develop your brain and that’s how you learn. Every project you work on in your life – I just look at my own life as an example – is the prior project and a little better and a little more. And every technique you come up with for doing things better you keep forever in your head.” -–Interview with Prof. Alan Brown"
https://www.zurich.com/media/magazine/2022/the-wise-words-of...
I don't like idolization of rich people. Yea, Woz was great for the contribution to computing.
He did sell out though, launching a billion dollar crypto ico which is now at a valuation of around million dollar. Sure anyone would be happiest person ever.
/S
He also famously engineered a bomb hoax in highschool, down to building a ticking device that was heroically disabled by, iirc, the school principal. Today, such behavior would easily end in terrorism charges.
It is all laughing a fun, until you meet people whose futures were destroyed for doing far less in regards to fake weapons in schools.
Say it ain't so!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident
My son accidentally brought a knife to school at age 12 -- maybe a 4 inch blade. When he realized that he had a knife in his backpack, he told his teacher. He was suspended from school for about 3 days and we had a fairly pleasant conversation with the principal after the suspension.
When I was at university, one of my classmates was a cop. He was petrified because that day, due to schedule issues, he had all his cop stuff locked in the trunk of his personal car. At the time, having that sort of weaponry on campus was a big deal. He would have been better off comming to class in full uniform (the exception for cops would not apply if he wasnt on duty or at least in uniform.) He knew what might happen if someone discovered his handgun/taser/mace was on campus.
I remember back in elementary school the YW in my class brought a huge kitchen knife with him in his backpack. He showed it to me. Later that day, he slightly cut himself with it in the toilet over a broken heart or something like that. Next day he was back to school. We called him sleeping bag because he was wearing his pants so low
I myself have been suspended for having a "weapon". The weapon in question was a bent paper clip. No I'm not kidding.
You probably remember when the cops would get called if you were caught with a cell phone or a pager at school.
Love Woz but Woz U is definitely a sell out.
It's not?
> Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns
For me happiness is a terrible life goal. Sure it's nice to be happy, but its such a vapid meaningless emotion. If I were to optimize for "happiness" I would just cash out, abandon my family, move to Vietnam, play video games and eat Hot Pockets all day. It doesn't take much to ride out the rest of my years.
But the life I choose is hard because doing hard things is good and fulfilling. I often willfully forgo happiness because, you know, I'm an adult. Maybe I'm just stupid?
Why would abandoning your family make you happy?
I feel like you seem to have an entirely different definition of happiness than most other people. Are you confusing hedonism with happiness?
Happiness is a positive emotion, pleasure, or contentment. It tends to be episodic and reactive, arising from enjoyable experiences, satisfying desires, or reaching short-term goals.
I am "happy" watching Netflix (smile). I am not happy on a long vacation with screaming children (frown).
If you were to optimize for smile - frown, you would do more Netflix, less children. In fact childless people report themselves much happier than people with children.
I still think you're confusing happiness with pleasure
I think you conflate happiness and pleasure. Maintaining a family surely not always pleasant, but for the most people it makes you happier than being alone.
Abandoning your family does generally not sound like a recipe for happiness to me, given a somewhat healthy relationship.
If you think doing hard things is good and fulfilling, maybe that's what is happiness to you.
Happiness does not mean good and fulfilling.
Having a family is hard. For instance, people with children are consistently less "happy" than their childless peers, yet many choose to have children knowing that. If you optimize for happiness you may be optimizing for selfish empty shallow existence. I'm sure you can take a drug to make you "happy" but that seems foolish.
> Happiness does not mean good and fulfilling.
it does
Happiness in it of itself is not good. An addict might be "happy" in the throws of his addiction. It's not "good"
And it's certainly not fulfilling. It's typically surface level feeling of satisfaction. Were happy playing mindless videogames
But I guess everyone is entitled to their own definition
Yeah, I also think you're mixing up pleasure and happiness.
> If I were to optimize for "happiness" I would just cash out, abandon my family, move to Vietnam, play video games and eat Hot Pockets all day.
That sounds like hedonism, not happiness.
> But the life I choose is hard because doing hard things is good and fulfilling.
Fulfillment is a big component of happiness. Aristotle famously contrasted hedonism (seeking pleasure) and eudaimonia (meaning and fulfillment) in Ethics iirc and mostly agreed with you— happiness is found eudamonia, not hedonism.
I'll also mention, hedonism is most often associated with money, because pleasures can be bought, but eudaimonia is only achieved through meaning, wisdom, action, etc.
You don't think Wozniak is using "happy" to mean "fulfilling"? This is a strawman.
that is an upfront assumption about what happiness would look like, if you got a few months into that plan you would realize that meaning and fulfilment go farther with happiness