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Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

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131–140 of 167 posts

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

#131
post #15
post #9

From the outside looking in, founder CEO’s like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are enigmas. They are able to convince the most brilliant human beings to devote their lives to them. That’s their real talent. Their belief in their mission is so strong and their confidence is unshakable. I wonder what mix of nurture and nature produces human beings like this. Out of billions of people, a handful are born this way.

> Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are enigmas Elon is listening to the music inside his own head. He has the right people working for him, and he's often mistakenly seen as the person who takes all the credit, but he's sitting on the work of countless engineers who work painstakingly to create his product range. As for Jobs, again, sitting on the work of countless designers and product people who make Apple what it is. Jobs…

Your metaphor reminded me of this quote:

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” —Nietzsche

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

#132
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…

> Software Engineering make me only realize that people are never happy. I'm not convinced this is an innate property of humanity, rather I think it is a conditioned behavior to keep us buying things. Pay attention to what marketing tells you, what it really tells you, behind the ostensible message. It is not telling you good things about yourself or your life, and it is bombarding you constantly with these intrusive…

How could it not be innate? One of the most noteworthy properties of humanity is our tendency throughout history to make unparalleled technological progress. Surely something like that requires a dissatisfaction with present conditions.

It seems more probable that marketing, like most things that work well, take advantage of our evolved properties.

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

#133

How wonderful is that Steve was describing ChatGPT in his speech to the T back in 1983, and the vision is being realized in not so distance future in 2023, after 40 years instead of 50 to 100 years as his prediction: "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 spir…

I think it is very concerning to think of ChatGPT like that.

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

#134

How wonderful is that Steve was describing ChatGPT in his speech to the T back in 1983, and the vision is being realized in not so distance future in 2023, after 40 years instead of 50 to 100 years as his prediction: "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 spir…

No offense, but that’s not a very original concept.

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

#135
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software Engineering make me only realize that people are never happy. I'm not convinced this is an innate property of humanity, rather I think it is a conditioned behavior to keep us buying things. Pay attention to what marketing tells you, what it really tells you, behind the ostensible message. It is not telling you good things about yourself or your life, and it is bombarding you constantly with these intrusive…

Even my dog gets tired of eating the same feed all the time or playing with the same toy. It gets excited when I bring new toy and is much more eager to eat when I switch feed to a different type from time to time. I don’t have a TV so my dog is not watching ads so I expect marketing does not affect it. Might still be that other dogs it plays with tell stuff “I got a new toy, get your owner to buy you new one too”. I…

I've been thinking about boredom and the need for change for a long time. My hypothesis is that boredom is the baseline of life. From this basis, I feel like whatever we may do we will inevitably come back to boredom: again, the dog chasing his own tail. Wouldn't be better to live with boredom instead of having the illusion of escaping it from it now and then?

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

#136

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…

Dennis Ritchie had a way larger impact than Jobs; yet he is not celebrated because he did not put an expensive toy in your hands, he had no visibility for the larger public.

Jobs has been a salesman more than an engineer. He did not need to understand tech, he just wanted to sell it.

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

#137

I was working at an Apple Store when Jobs died. People started to leave flowers, management put up huge sheets of paper in the windows and people wrote all sorts of heartfelt messages. What other CEO’s passing would engender that kind of sentiment? Those people didn’t just prefer Apple equipment, they loved it. Jobs tapped into something deep with his ethos and product vision. He had an uncanny knack of understanding…

I mean, do we need all that for a person that sold cellphones? Are we screwed so much by capitalism at this point?

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

#138
post #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 close…

> What? Stallman alone changed the world 20 times more than Jobs.

I know I'm going to get downvotes for this; but I disagree. While Stallman played an important role in GNU and Libre software through his work at MIT and FSF, there were already like-minded people working towards the same thing. It's hard to say that Stallman single-handedly influenced things like that in history to that much impact, given how much impact Steve Jobs had on the personal computing space.

Without Linux (Linus Torvalds), he may not have had much impact at all.

Let's not forget:

- Brian Reid who co-authored BSD Unix operating system under a permissive license, which used BCC (Berkeley C Compiler) - Bill Joy who co-founded Sun Microsystems - among contributions count NFS, Sparc, Java

Who knows what would have arisen from that, had not Stallman had a fortuitous partnership with Torvalds? Would we be living in a world with OpenBSD rather than GNU/Linux?

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

#139
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…

Humans have an intrinsic quality that they are never satisfied for very long. There are plenty of examples of it. People think "once I get that job I'll be happy" or "once I get married I'll finally achieve what I want" or "once I buy a house, I'll feel like I'm settled". But that rarely happens. People get used to what they have and want more.

But that's a good thing. It's the reason why we have progress. Thank god someone thought "No, it's not good enough that we cure breast cancer by removing the breast entirely, we can do better". Or "no, it's not good enough that we can grow 1000 lbs of wheat on an acre, we can do better".

It's a blessing (progress) and a curse (dissatisfaction). But you can't have one without the other.

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

#140
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 close…

Stallman isn't as celebrated as much as one might otherwise expect because he can be quite socially abrasive. There's also the controversies in the recent past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Controversies Whilst Jobs was only human and there are plenty of anecdotes about negative personality traits in regard to how he treated others, he was definitely someone who knew how to work a room of average pe…

End of bullshit:

https://stallmansupport.org/the-practice-of-ritual-defamatio...

Even women close to Stallman had to stop people like you defamating people.

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