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There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

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Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#101

Post by rainbowcash »

Aloha wrote: post #7
ares623 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone chooses the wrong Steve to worship.

If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs. Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer. The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal…

> The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.

Woz was perfect for those in the home brew club and Steve (basically vagabond) had a different perspective on users. It was the perfect combo in hindsight.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#102

Post by pixl97 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #91
pixl97 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at devs consider multi-gigabyte Electron apps "good enough" as the apps themselves. This kind of misses out on a hierarchy of devs here and the amount of work to make it happen. Electron took a large chunk from a multi-billion dollar endeavor to use to make all this work. Electron only worked because Chrome was there. Chrome worked because Google already had unlimited money from advertising, and getting advertising…

True, not every dev has the power of a multi-billion dollar company behind them. But a few do. My point was, if enough people really considered this a big deal then at least one huge tech company might have invested in a solution that provides a lighter weight solution that's truely multiplatform (desktop and mobile). I don't have much visibility on how decisions are made to maintain massive open-source infrastructur…

>but they must be at least partially technical.

Having sat in many a meeting, partially yes, but these things are massively expensive. There is an equation, How much would it cost us to write a replacement that covers what we need versus how much does it cost us to use what exists that isn't efficient.

And this is where you miss the biggest part of the problem. It's the end users that bear the biggest part of the costs. Yes, there is an internal cost for their own developers, but that is comparatively small to the costs of their paychecks.

The next comes to management of the lightweight solution over time. If it's owned by a company at the end of the day companies are rarely interested in lightweight, they are interested in making the most money and quite often that means adding more and more features to accomplish lock-in.

Open source is more likely to keep a project remaining light, but to do that it's quite often by not accepting bulky features that would make companies more money. So you see where the catch-22 situation starts to arise from.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#103

Post by alnwlsn »

andrewstuart wrote: post #55

People are crediting Woz here with great things but not going far enough. Woz invented the consumer personal computer. That is one of the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest.

Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote

“It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”

seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#104

Post by bigstrat2003 »

high_na_euv wrote: post #26
nekooooo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

modern engineering is launching an electron to-do list app that uses 2gb of ram.

Which, at least works relibly across all platforms and devices unlike desktop frameworks? People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative

Literally anything is a good alternative to electron. One should prioritize the quality of the product, and use of electron gives the lowest quality product.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#105

Post by NetMageSCW »

volkercraig wrote: post #87
checker659 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain?

Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low…

> outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.

Computer science and computing was taught and done at universities long before Stallman and GNU came along. I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#106

Post by smt88 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #104
high_na_euv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, at least works relibly across all platforms and devices unlike desktop frameworks? People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative

Literally anything is a good alternative to electron. One should prioritize the quality of the product, and use of electron gives the lowest quality product.

VS Code is a fantastic Electron app

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#107

Post by NetMageSCW »

mghackerlady wrote: post #95
checker659 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain?

Without Stallman there wouldn't be GNU, so the operating system used to host this site and the majority of the web wouldn't exist. The compiler used to build that operating system wouldn't exist. The free software movement that later birthed its little cousin "open source" wouldn't exist, neither would the free culture movement to some extent. The ideals of the free software movement inspired the architects of the Wo…

Most of that is incorrect and revisionist history. The Web was developed on a commercial system (the NExT from Steve Job’s company) and initial implementations were made on various commercial systems by differing groups. Even today, Linux is at most 50% of the web servers on the Internet.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#108

Post by aix1 »

pixl97 wrote: post #92
aix1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, that's a very different sort of thing compared to blindly taking reams of code from an LLM. The amounts of code in a given SO answer or a magazine article are tiny and the code has undergone review of one sort or another. Similarly, if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, that's quite likely to be better quality than what I -- or most folks -- can code up in a comparable amount of time.…

Really what you're saying is it is an issue of quantity. > if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, I'm going to assume the vast majority of code written does not look anything like this, but is dumb little chunks of glue for other important chunks, that are quite often imported from other libraries. As someone that is not a SWE looking from the outside, I think there is a disconnect between what a SWE…

I think we're talking past each other a little bit.

You're talking in the aggregate and making some good points.

I am talking about what concretely I am seeing on the ground. It's become a little too easy to churn out junk that looks plausible enough to pass the initial sniff test but that ultimately results in negative productivity. Someone has to go back and not only redo the initial work but also deal with all the knock-on effects. It's unclear to me that these effects are offset by productivity gains elsewhere. This can also result in highly problematic incentive structures: the initial launch ticks some box, whoever did it gets rewarded and then someone else is left to pick up the pieces. Higher overall cost to the orgnisation and worse experience for the customers than doing it well in the first place.

Not totally clear how to fix this other than by shifting towards longer-term incentive structures (which have their own drawbacks).

None of this is completely new, but has become 10X easier thanks to the current generation of tooling.

This is in addition to my concerns around what this is doing to our junior developers' skills.

Maybe the tooling will soon get good enough that nobody has to ever write any code except for enjoyment, but it's not clear to me that this is the trajectory we're on.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#109

Post by tofuahdude »

My dad was Woz's RA in the Berkeley dorms. He often tells this story:

One night, dad was on duty, probably smoking pot with his student residents.

The phones all stop working.

So dad goes down to the maintenance closet, opens it up... and sure enough, there's Woz digging around the building's phone wiring. Woz immediately says "I'll fix it, I'll fix it!!".

He was down there installing one of those phreaking devices for free long-distance phone calls for everyone in the dorms.

My dad let him do his thing.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#110

Post by NetMageSCW »

alnwlsn wrote: post #103
andrewstuart wrote: post #55

People are crediting Woz here with great things but not going far enough. Woz invented the consumer personal computer. That is one of the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest.

Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote “It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.” seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.

As far as I know, Don never had a computer and the Mark-8 used LEDs.
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