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Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

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Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#91
post #58

This may feel a little depressing, but I would like to hear the HN community's thoughts on this. Every time I hear about making progress or creating something beautiful, the first thing that comes to mind is: for how long? As humans, do we think about how long we are going to chase the ever-moving goal post of progress? Do we have a ballpark idea of it? Or are we moving like a dog chasing its own tail, going in circl…

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Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#92
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I can agree with this take. > He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying…

> Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do Absolutely not. First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard. Then you have to convince them to come work for you. Top talent is not always just motivated by money alone, so how do you attract them? Then after you hire them you have to retain them, which is also hard, because you have to understand what they are building, a…

That’s really another facet of this that shows what a uniquely talented leader he was: top talent wants to work both with and for top talent. It says loads about Jobs’ strengths that he got so many absolute geniuses to work for him for years.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#93
post #63
post #3

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products in a business world where it's usually limited to the founding members. How many CEOs, product managers and the like have been caught promoting their own brand with a "tweeted from iPhone" tagline. Probably "efficient business people", but literally won't touch…

What's amazing to me is how some people continually try to minimize him. The proof is in the pudding. He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Very few people are able to do that. Any time someone says "oh he just," it says more about their own insecurity than him. Yeah he had a lot of help, yeah he had personal relationship issues, he's not a god, b…

After seeing Elon fail upward I have to agree.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#94
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well suit yourself but for me personally it makes me really question the persons ability to reason in all other aspects of life as well. I think it's dangerous to ascribe talent and expertise to someone just because they made a shit ton of money.

I don't think anyone ascribes talent and expertise in building products to Steve Jobs purely because he made a shit ton of money... its because he made really good products. I wonder what random flaw we could pull out on you? Do you put sugar in your coffee?

Jobs is a salesman. Not an engineer.

An eye for aesthetics perhaps. Getting people to buy your shit is a necessary function for any business.

For advice on actually making something, I'd consider Woz more.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#95

I have a thing for not taking advice from someone that doesn't listen to their doctor.

Always get second+ opinions, in my experience doctors rarely come to the same conclusion and it can be bad for your health. Anyone who trusts strangers based solely on titles or past performance is going to have a bad time.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#96
post #36

What did Steve Jobs actually make other than hype? He wasn't an engineer and wasn't an inventor. He was a salesman (a great one!) but a salesman at the end of the day.

The Three Types of Specialists Needed for Any Revolution https://kottke.org/13/05/the-three-types-of-specialist

"Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top — Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s.

He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way."

Steve Jobs started out a #3, worked his way to being a #2, and was able to attract and retain #1's

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#97
post #36

What did Steve Jobs actually make other than hype? He wasn't an engineer and wasn't an inventor. He was a salesman (a great one!) but a salesman at the end of the day.

Seems like you are very new to gathering information about Steve Jobs. There is a ton of literature that could answer that question for you, but to start here's Bard's answer: Steve Jobs was not an engineer or an inventor, but he was a visionary leader who had a keen eye for design and a passion for simplicity. He was also a master of marketing and storytelling, and he was able to use these skills to create products that were both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly.

Some of the products that Steve Jobs is credited with creating include:

The Apple II computer (1977) The Macintosh computer (1984) The iPod (2001) The iPhone (2007) The iPad (2010) These products were all revolutionary in their own way, and they helped to shape the way we use technology today. Steve Jobs was not an engineer or an inventor, but he was a visionary leader who had a profound impact on the world.

It is true that Steve Jobs was a salesman, but he was also much more than that. He was a creative genius who had a deep understanding of human needs and desires. He was able to take complex technology and make it simple and accessible to everyone. He was also a master of marketing and storytelling, and he was able to use these skills to create products that were both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly.

Steve Jobs was a complex and controversial figure, but there is no doubt that he was a visionary leader who had a profound impact on the world. He was a master of design, marketing, and storytelling, and he was able to use these skills to create products that changed the way we live and work.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#98

I still remember exactly where I was when Steve Jobs died. I think it was because at that moment, I had a realization about him: that there was no other person in recent memory who made such an impact on the everyday lives of people. He wasn’t some grand political figure that uplifted millions with inspiring rhetoric or an athlete that had achieved some amazing physical goal. But every single day, pretty much everywh…

What? Stallman alone changed the world 20 times more than Jobs. The indirect effects of GCC, Emacs, the FSF and GNU around Linux and servers are astounding. From Android's core to the 90% of the growth of companies on tech. And not just tech: physics, genomics... lots of them backed and helped with free software from GCC to Coreutils. At least to build and port BioPerl sucessfully. And, still, Perl's growth was closely bound to GNU and Linux.

Libre software democratized the access to technology, science and free as in freedom books on lots of term and inspired parallel licenses for media and documents.

In 1995 you would need to spend $300 dollars in books and $3500 in a proper workstation to run scientific software. Later, with GNU/Linux, the costs plummeted down. Today you have free compilers, free documentation and cheap NUCs to learn the basics on nearly any STEM career, at least if you can simulate it.

You can even compose music and multimedia FFX with libre distros and DAW software. There are even neural network based translators with libre licenses and models. That's astounding.

Re: Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

#100
post #10

With celebrities like Steve Jobs we have a lot of interviews, autobiographies and data available. It would be interesting to finetune a LLM using all this data to act like him. Then you add TTS with his voice and voilà: Your personal Steve Jobs personal advisor running on your GPGPU or even phone, eventually. Makes you wonder if there will be laws against doing this without permission eventually. It's kind of hard to…

Here is what Steve Jobs said about this in 1983 (copied from the book):

"The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing."

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