Woz is the almost-forgotten heart of Silicon Valley of days gone by, that has gotten stepped on and almost ruthlessly thrown out.
But we need him. I hope he recovers fully.
Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
61–70 of 152 posts
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that sounds like third-world kind of treatment. I would consider suing. Sorry that your mom had to go through this.
> Wow, that sounds like third-world kind of treatment. My first thought was that sounded exactly like here in Canada.
Sadly, I was going to say the same thing. I wouldn't even blink an eye if someone local told me this story. I've heard way worse, and I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least one story like this.
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#63Woz is the almost-forgotten heart of Silicon Valley of days gone by, that has gotten stepped on and almost ruthlessly thrown out. But we need him. I hope he recovers fully.
Thrown out? You are clearly unfamiliar with how revered and loved and embraced and honored and respected he is in the Valley. He is one of the actual and proverbial giants upon who’s shoulders most know they stand (except little shitheads like Zuck or Thiel).
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#64Woz is the almost-forgotten heart of Silicon Valley of days gone by, that has gotten stepped on and almost ruthlessly thrown out. But we need him. I hope he recovers fully.
Thrown out? You are clearly unfamiliar with how revered and loved and embraced and honored and respected he is in the Valley. He is one of the actual and proverbial giants upon who’s shoulders most know they stand (except little shitheads like Zuck or Thiel).
Thrown out by who? Steve Jobs?
You're totally right about Woz's legendary status. He is essentially the living embodiment of the hacker ethos.
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
cool sentiment, but becoming increasingly harder to do. So many people an too many to not discount that some crazies will pop in. Few public/semi-public figures can just keep their contact info around freely. Even if it all is in good faith, they will just get so many mails about business inquiries, recruits, media reqesting interviews, academia, etc. Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these…
emailing famous people or their handlers is kind of a hobby of mine. over about a hundred emails i've received about 30 replies. the surprising thing to me is that their level of 'fame' has little to do with whether or not they reply to me. I've received replies from some famously impressive people, and have been ignored by some real 'niche' ones. I have a suspicion that there is a bit of a bi-modal distribution betw…
So for the really famous ones you think it wasn’t really the person who replied to you?
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#66Woz still holds a special place in my heart. He was the first to sign my laptop at Twitter (right on the Apple logo even). Talking with him was super interesting even though he was mostly a sales figure for hardware storage. He was super curious about the problem Twitter was facing at the time.
YOU.
Those fusion cards were ahead of their time. Shame they didn't take off.
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone you know is showing signs of a stroke (see https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/signs_symptoms.htm ), get them to the hospital right away. Time is of the essence. Once you're there, don't let overworked personnel ignore them. My mother recently had a stroke. She had absolutely clear, textbook symptoms. She got to the hospital by ambulance right away, but busy doctors and nurses sent her home after two days, saying t…
Wow, that sounds like third-world kind of treatment. I would consider suing. Sorry that your mom had to go through this.
Poor triage and dealing with a loved one suffering the consequences of having been placed on the wrong assembly line seem like very relatable parts of American health care.
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#68Woz is one of the most selfless people I've ever met. At a conference he keynoted for (SynBioBeta), he said that even if immortality were available to him, he wouldn't want to live forever, because he'd be taking up a spot in the Earth's population carrying capacity, and even if that's just one spot of many billions, he wouldn't feel right taking up that spot, when he's already lived his life and now it's time for someone new to get the chance to enjoy the adventure that is living.
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#69I wonder sometimes how Steve Jobs would have ended up had he not met Woz. Would he have started a company within even an order of magnitude of Apple?
I think that without Woz to develop the first two product versions (at exactly the right place & time in history, in a field that Woz had been studying obsessively since childhood), Jobs would have achieved minor success at best.
Perhaps Jobs would become a well-regarded author, or a city council member, or own a franchise of restaurants. Alternatively, his drug use, lack of a useful college degree, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and his many other bad decisions could have led Jobs to end up homeless on the Berkeley streets like so many other hippies from his social circle. He might have died sunburnt and unwashed at age 45 from a heroin overdose, just as much as he might have been successful.
Even if he avoided the catastrophic homelessness and destitution which befell the believers of the "turn on, tune in, drop out" movement that Jobs immersed himself in, I think his success would be no greater than any other successful person whose career takes them to the upper-middle class. Charisma and design sense can only take you so far, and the real lotto ticket was the "right place right time" factor which came from Woz, who was practically born to invent computers at a time when the inventors of computers could change the world.
It was Woz who had dreamt of designing a computer since he was a boy, and who even in middle school taught himself computer architecture and circuit design at the Ph.D. level, and whose technical creativity was once-in-a-generation.
Woz was super lucky that his passion was about something that history had ordained would become the next technology revolution (rather than e.g. having his boyhood passion be in ornithology & birdwatching). For every Woz, there are probably 10 or 20 equally brilliant kids whose passions unfortunately, through luck of the draw and no fault of their own, have very little societal or financial value.
Jobs worked with Woz to get to the point where they had a computer company which Jobs could then grow by 1,000x.
But without Woz, Jobs would probably instead be spending the years in which Apple grew big in a "turn on, tune in, drop out" lifestyle of crashing on friends' couches and doing nothing useful, until eventually there are no more friends' couches to crash on, and he becomes a shaggy and dirty person on the street, trying to get money for drugs.
Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
>that sounds like third-world kind of treatment You wish you had third-world medical treatment, though. Having been many times to hospitals in several 1st world countries AND several 3rd world countries, I do not find the former much better than the latter and the 10x-100x price markup is hard to ignore.
Ya, I'm guessing you would actually get better care in a country like Thailand, the Phillippinnes, India, or China. It might make more sense to retire in a LCOL place with good affordable healthcare rather than rely on Medicare. Heck, just get a good policy with evac to the USA if anything major happens you can't handle out of pocket (and at that point, it is probably cancer or something anyways). As I get older, it…
Hospitals in Thailand are actually pretty awesome. I received surgery in Thailand and spent a week in the hospital recovering.
The hospital was amazing and like nothing I’ve seen in Western Europe. Granted it was a private hospital but the people there were almost uniformly Thai.
Thailand is surprisingly economically strong. I don’t think it’s a third world country.