Not a lot of variety in content or community compared to the digs or reddits of the world.
* 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.
Their original owners also sold the site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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."
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.
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 absolutely is, in my opinion
Umm . . . yes?
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.
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?
People like Jobs get attention because they're obnoxious. If they never existed, the world would be no worse off.
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.
I care about someone fucking over his business partner.
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.
Personally, I don't give much credit for "bravery" when it's expressed in terms of "being transparent" about being an asshole.
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
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 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.
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.
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. And possibly even more egocentric as he maintained throughout his lifetime that he was the best architect in the world, perhaps in history.
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. What we see w/ Jobs and Lisa, FLW was even worse as in 1908 he just up and abandoned his family of 7, seemingly out of the blue, to travel through Europe w/ his mistress for years.
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 and was still working when he died at the age of 91 in the middle of overseeing the construction of the Guggenheim.
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.
Nobody is perfect but this doesn't excuse everything.
> We just aren't allowed to acknowledge his accomplishments
Nobody prevents you from acknowledging anything.
Don't be obtuse, while you aren't "prevented" you are certainly shouted down/shamed on social media
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.
Conversely, Woz started numerous companies after parting ways with Jobs, and I can't think of a single one that had a lasting impact.
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.
Stoicism promote exactly this virtue of understanding that you are in control of interpreting your own feelings.
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.
Why does that feel naive to you, though? To me, that seems like an issue with your definition of naivety.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To assume that ms wasn't headed by bullies requires a striking ignorance of ms' history.
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
All of these men today are the way they are because they are trying to emulate Jobs
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
Significantly more than that, and you're a hoarder.
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?
https://www.ams-tax.com/blog/post/the-secret-world-of-art-ta...
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.
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.
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, ...
Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
- 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.
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…
The rest: charities.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...
> 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 gets a lot easier to spend if you decide you want to explore space or something.
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.
A skyscraper. An eco-friendly village. A ship. A spacecraft.
High end audio equipment. Done. Next!
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.
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.
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
Buy an election. If not, but a newspaper, TV network or a media outlet with a good outreach. Then you can get you 1B back tenfold.
But if you want to build something for society and not die doing it then you might need more than $10M.
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.
If that's the case then it's no longer just for you, so I think that's fair
My English may not be enough to express it but above all else it exhudes a "clarity of purpose" that is remarkable
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21%3A33...
1. Equity in companies or loans to the government.
2. Expensive food, homes, clothes, hotel stays, travel, child care, etc.
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.
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.
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?
I feel like you seem to have an entirely different definition of happiness than most other people. Are you confusing hedonism with happiness?
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.
If you think doing hard things is good and fulfilling, maybe that's what is happiness to you.
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.
it does
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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
One of the nicest guys in the world. Humble, kind, gracious.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/share/1BHAeRQDGP/?mibextid=wwXIfr
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.
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.
"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...
johndoe0815•3h ago