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.
vasco · 29m ago
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.
delusional · 11m ago
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.
antonvs · 8m ago
> 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.
moolcool · 24m ago
"If you’re so smart, why aren’t you kind?"
nashashmi · 11m ago
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.
bko · 21m ago
[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?
callc · 4m ago
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”
bko · 1m ago
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.
croes · 18m ago
What do you consider the positive and negative effects of people like Jobs?
CjHuber · 16m ago
I mean are the iPhone and computing that feels frictionless really a net positive for society?
dylan604 · 11m ago
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.
jraph · 5m ago
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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 9m ago
Less Jobs, more Woz
pstuart · 53m ago
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.
rurp · 7m ago
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.
ivape · 32m ago
Why do we have to keep saying Jobs was not a good person?
nimbius · 21m ago
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.
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.
kulahan · 15m ago
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?
MaKey · 4m ago
> [...] but who CARES about the other stuff?
I care about someone fucking over his business partner.
antonvs · 6m ago
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.
cm2012 · 24m ago
He really was an asshole in his life in ways that are considered notably anti-social.
It is helpful to at least push back a little bit on the pass that rich/famous people typically get.
kube-system · 12m ago
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.
kulahan · 16m ago
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.
gooseus · 18m ago
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.
soganess · 21m ago
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."
Why do you think people feel pressured into saying that, rather than just e.g. generally plain agreeing?
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.
Der_Einzige · 9m ago
For the same reason people dislike Elon Musk and really like Jensen Huang.
FergusArgyll · 26m ago
A lot of people have PTSD from ~2021 and are still looking over their shoulder
1234letshaveatw · 26m ago
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.
jraph · 23m ago
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.
1234letshaveatw · 1m ago
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
xyst · 15m ago
> 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.
ModernMech · 55m ago
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.
namrog84 · 48m ago
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.
vjk800 · 45m ago
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".
prmph · 31m ago
Nah, plenty of millionaires and even billionaires who have a license to print money are unhappy.
nancyminusone · 46m ago
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.
nicbou · 2m ago
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.
atonse · 40m ago
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?
ethersteeds · 28m ago
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...
onlypassingthru · 21m ago
... and, hopefully, before the professional arm candy starts "accidentally" bumping into you in line at the coffee shop.
azinman2 · 37m ago
$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.
dbingham · 32m ago
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.
dkural · 12m ago
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.
phkahler · 16m ago
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.
cloverich · 19m ago
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.
danschuller · 20m ago
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.
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…
orthoxerox · 11m ago
I wanted to buy a thousand tanks for my own private army, but it's a pain to buy them one by one.
ryandrake · 8m ago
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.
Most rich people don't "hoard" money like Scrooge McDuck. They're generally spending it on:
1. Equity in companies.
2. Expensive food, homes, clothes, hotel stays, etc.
threatofrain · 38m ago
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.
qzw · 31m ago
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.
delusional · 6m ago
> 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.
qaq · 37m ago
Depends on where person wants to live
threatofrain · 35m ago
You can live in the Bay Area.
stonemetal12 · 18m ago
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.
zarzavat · 12m ago
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.
kube-system · 9m ago
Earth has about 3 acres of habitable land per person.
delusional · 9m ago
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.
gota · 32m ago
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
dismalaf · 10m ago
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.
dfee · 20m ago
And a couple of homes. In the Bay Area, that’s another $10MM
jasoneckert · 17m ago
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.
testfrequency · 18m ago
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).
Not even when you created that Woz coin in 2021? Whatever it was called...
lordleft · 1h ago
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?
kevstev · 7m ago
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.
duxup · 1h ago
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.
lanfeust6 · 54m ago
personally hoping for a cultural shift back to smaller decentralized communities
duxup · 39m ago
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.
ghssds · 47m ago
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.
ryzvonusef · 28m ago
You forgot Cowboy Neal, you insensitive clod!
ec109685 · 33m ago
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.
annoyingnoob · 22m ago
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.
GloriousMEEPT · 40m ago
slides a bowl of grits down the front of his pants
fibers · 45m ago
jesus this takes me back
ryzvonusef · 33m ago
just checked, my last comment was in 2014... damn
ModernMech · 50m ago
/. was done after the Slashdot Beta mess. Never recovered.
mrtksn · 56m ago
Steve Wozniak is one of the kind of people that makes you happy knowing they exist.
> 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.”
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
stusmall · 32m ago
1) Love to see this
2) Totally checks out that the woz is still active on /.
MilnerRoute · 5m ago
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 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.
itsthecourier · 8m ago
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
davidmurphy · 1h ago
Love to see this.
lysace · 34m ago
I randomly rewatched Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) last night. Recommended.
mnadkvlb · 13m ago
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
sandworm101 · 58m ago
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.
nancyminusone · 35m ago
I myself have been suspended for having a "weapon". The weapon in question was a bent paper clip. No I'm not kidding.
platevoltage · 31m ago
You probably remember when the cops would get called if you were caught with a cell phone or a pager at school.
sandworm101 · 25m ago
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.
bko · 43m ago
> 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?
jdelman · 3m ago
You don't think Wozniak is using "happy" to mean "fulfilling"? This is a strawman.
aylmao · 18m ago
> 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.
aiono · 23m ago
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.
jstummbillig · 37m ago
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.
bko · 29m ago
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.
aylmao · 17m ago
> Happiness does not mean good and fulfilling.
it does
Trasmatta · 37m ago
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?
bko · 25m ago
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 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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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 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?
I care about someone fucking over his business partner.
People like Jobs get attention because they're obnoxious. If they never existed, the world would be no worse off.
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.
"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
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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…
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...
The rest: charities.
> 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.
https://www.ams-tax.com/blog/post/the-secret-world-of-art-ta...
1. Equity in companies. 2. Expensive food, homes, clothes, hotel stays, etc.
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.
My English may not be enough to express it but above all else it exhudes a "clarity of purpose" that is remarkable
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).
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25330613
> 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/3FzuZdZLt54?si=l1hyv_ouGOcYD-ez
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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident
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?
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 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
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.