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Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#131

Post by krisoft »

2devnull wrote: post #117
krisoft wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immortality being a curse is a common trope. The silliness of the trope starts with the notion that once you have gone immortal you can't go back. Somehow you are stuck yearning for the sweet release of death. In reality life is extremely fragile, maintaining the right conditions to support it requires constant effort. There is no reason to think that any future scientific advance will alter this fundamental fact.…

You have substituted immortality with being able to live as long as you want. Fair enough, but you’re just changing the premise. The word immortality has a specific meaning, even if you don’t like what it is.

> Fair enough, but you’re just changing the premise.

Because the "true and cursed" immortality is not on offer. Spending resources to extend our life is a possibility. Spending resources to better understand what aging is and how to extend our youth is. Getting cursed with immortality is not in the cards.

> The word immortality has a specific meaning, even if you don’t like what it is.

Ok. You can have your discussion about your fantasy concepts. They are fun! What should we discuss next? How many duck sized horses we would fight just to avoid being cursed with true immortality? It is all good with me as long as we don't try to draw real world conclusions from said fantasies.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#132

Post by someonehere »

Many years ago, I used to go to his website and he had a live cam of his home. I think he had a couple pointed zoom cameras in his house and outside of his house so he can look around. It was always cool seeing him walk by or doing something in front of the camera. It was almost like Justin TV but in the early 2000s.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#133

Post by dghughes »

swader999 wrote: post #127
dghughes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 54 and I can't stand most of people and society now or at least here in what is mainly US/Canada. I can't imagine what it would be like at 100 if I make it that far.

Is it what you see online or what you see in one on one interactions? I would guess this feeling is mostly based on what you see online. If that's the case, ask yourself if that's useful to feel this way about it.

No or I should say it wasn't in the early days of the Internet and Web people seemed civil. Then it was just online where people seemed aggressive and arrogant. But now I see poor behaviour in real life every day.

People seem to "tribal" and self-centred. People don't hold doors for people, they walk past people struggling like say their hands are full and they drop something but people just walk past not helping them. In stores people walk in front of little old ladies nearly knocking them down. Just a total lack of innate civility.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#134

Post by zlg_codes »

Hats off to the one guy allowed to call himself The Woz. Without him, Apple Computer wouldn't have made it off the ground. Jobs may have had some business or marketing acumen but the brains was all Wozniak.

May his recovery go well and there be no long term damage.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#135

Post by epups »

jodrellblank wrote: post #124
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to surveys your intuition is wrong. USA: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/americans-... > Researchers from the university separated respondents into three groups, based on age. One group was younger people, between the ages of 18 and 29, another group of senior citizens whose average age was 72, and a third group made up of individuals whose average age was 88. 18 - 29: 34% Yes, 40% No, 26%…

I wonder how many of those people who want immortality currently avoid smoking, drinking, drugs, air pollution, junk food, get long sleep every night and regular exercise - all those things that are much easier than immortality and can meaningfully increase the chances of adding one, two, three decades of quality life. And then avoid social media, clickbait, ragebait, idling, gossipping, and live in a deliberate and…

Not sure this is equivalent. Those decades of life are usually worst ones, and merely doubling your lifespan with sacrifice is not equivalent to multiplying it indefinitely.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#136

Post by anonymouskimmer »

fastball wrote: post #123
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a problem for the future, it's where we are at now until sufficiently advanced technology (or sufficiently peaceful international relations) intervenes.

Ok but if you're goal is actually some form of altruism, wouldn't keeping a clearly innovative person around forever be more useful than rolling your dice with whoever is taking his spot? Statistically, they are going to be not as useful (depending on your definition of useful of course).

Sure, we Gorillas know that stronger arms and bites are going to be important for future generations.

"It takes all kinds to make a world" isn't just a saying about polite tolerance.

It isn't altruistic to value one person's life more than another for their demonstrated ability to contribute what you think is best. That is literally egocentric selfishness, which is pretty much the opposite of altruism. I think the word you want is "utilitarian".

A person's ability to contribute is also context dependent. Woz was an innovator, but he also got lucky in multiple respects to have contributed what he did. Picking "Golden Children" tends to have negative sociological and innovative effects.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#138

Post by jojobas »

upwardbound wrote: post #129
jojobas wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something something heat death of the universe.

I do hope that our civilization starts someday putting substantial research funding into moonshot bets to escape this limiting ending. For example, if we eventually have multiple star systems' worth of resources at our disposal, then I hope we put at least a trillion dollars per topic into long-shot research topics such as time travel, the multiverse, FTL travel, methods of creating new universes via an artificial Bi…

One in a million FTL and time travel?

No, there's not another tree. We just happen to be rather efficient in dissipating free energy.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#139

Post by flextheruler »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #54
coderjames wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Woz is one of the few figures that many of us in the tech industry look up to and aspire to be like. Relatable. My Woz story is from junior high school (middle school) in the late 1990s. I was writing a report on him and read two different biographies that seemed to report conflicting information. So I emailed him asking what actually happened back at a childhood science fair. And he actually responded and reca…

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…

I suppose it depends on the reason for their celebrity.

If you email someone who is famous for trivial media I’d doubt you’d get a response, but I know some people who have had conversations with more intellectual celebrities over email.

When you reach out with a genuine interest or point in a specific topic I’d like to think they often enjoy speaking about it.

I never would have expected my brother to get an email back from Noam Chomsky but he did after he wrote a decently cogent and complex question.

At the end of the day it possibly wasn’t actually him, but who knows.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#140

Post by fastball »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #136
fastball wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but if you're goal is actually some form of altruism, wouldn't keeping a clearly innovative person around forever be more useful than rolling your dice with whoever is taking his spot? Statistically, they are going to be not as useful (depending on your definition of useful of course).

Sure, we Gorillas know that stronger arms and bites are going to be important for future generations. "It takes all kinds to make a world" isn't just a saying about polite tolerance. It isn't altruistic to value one person's life more than another for their demonstrated ability to contribute what you think is best. That is literally egocentric selfishness, which is pretty much the opposite of altruism. I think the wo…

With regards to the gorilla analogy, I think for all intents and purposes we've already knee-capped the evolutionary process of humanity with modern medicine (not going backwards ala Idiocracy, but not going forwards either). We might need to be a little bit "picky" (read: deliberate) in the future if we want to keep progressing. I believe this is the ethos of trans-humanists.

I'm not Steve Wozniak so if I did want him to be immortal I'm pretty sure that would not be selfishness. I'm also unsure why you think whichever human is "replacing" Woz in this hypothetical is going to up the level of diversity.

All that said, I actually do disagree with the fundamental premise that resources are finite in a meaningful way and that one person's immortality is stealing from someone else in a zero-sum game. Intelligent life is not zero-sum, and it is just as likely that Immortal Woz would develop a new farming technology that allows X extra people to exist than that he would actually require enough resources to be a net negative.

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