Steve Wozniak: Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about happiness
yro.slashdot.org
yro.slashdot.org
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> “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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'll bite. Go ahead and list some recent examples of this actually happening please.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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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...
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.
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.
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?
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”
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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?
Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
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.
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
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Make it 500 people and give them housing.
What to use those people for is left as an exercise for the reader.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
High end audio equipment. Done. Next!
The rest: charities.
That gets a lot easier to spend if you decide you want to explore space or something.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...
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.
A skyscraper. An eco-friendly village. A ship. A spacecraft.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21%3A33...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ifiwonthelottery/comments/9qv4e1/po...
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.
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.
You people really can’t imagine someone thinking they have enough?
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.”
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.
And I don’t need anyone else’s money. I’m doing fine. I think other people need the rich’s money.
My English may not be enough to express it but above all else it exhudes a "clarity of purpose" that is remarkable
Musk has the unbound optimism of his ability to succeed. He's good at selling that optimism to others. His decision making is often heavily seated by public opinion and the market.
Also the whole fascism thing.
Of the two Jobs actually accomplished what he sets out to do. Musk's batting record is more spotty. He's got some wins (Falcon 9) but boy howdy does he have a lot of losses, and he's just gearing up to take increasingly more L's
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.
One of the nicest guys in the world. Humble, kind, gracious.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/share/1BHAeRQDGP/?mibextid=wwXIfr
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 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)
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.
* 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.
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.)
Their original owners also sold the site.
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.
Not a lot of variety in content or community compared to the digs or reddits of the world.
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.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10651136-at-a-party-given-b...
https://youtu.be/hsB8Hxnb52o?t=1083
Small Computer Handbook
https://www.grc.com/pdp-8/docs/PDP-8_Small_Computer_Handbook...
> 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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Strawman.
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.
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.
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.
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?!"
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.
Noah Wyle was perfectly cast as Steve Jobs. In fact, Wyle participated in an amusing Apple prank at MacWorld 1999:
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.
- Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder - Narcissistic Personality Disorder - Borderline Personality Disorder
He thought he could cure his cancer with energy crystals and fruit juice.
"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...
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
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.
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
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.