Thank you, Steve. http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/6128/04nextcube.jpg
God, NeXTStep was awesome.. I used Windowmaker for years on Linux until I transitioned to OSX.
NSObject.
Steve Jobs has passed away.
361–370 of 392 posts
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#362I heard this news very late last night (BST) and I didn't sleep. Absolutely gutted that we have lost such an inspiration. His 2005 Stanford inspired to me to go on a journey that makes me smile every day. A true founder of the modern world.
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus. I literally purchased my first Apple product a couple of months ago with great skepticism; I am a frequent critic of iTunes, and Apple products in general. I always viewed Steve Jobs as someone who I admired for his success and vision, but no more than any other notable figure in the field. But I feel a poignant melancholy at the news... when I saw someone's comment pointing…
As much as I love what you said, I hate to break it to you that t_hero.png is actually named due to the fact it's the "Hero" graphic. This just refers to the fact that it's the main splash image of the page.[1] You can see the hero image which was in use before the announcement of Steve's passing here[2] — look at the filename. [1] http://www.med.unc.edu/webguide/policies/hero-graphics [2] https://www.apple.com/uk/ip…
Yeah, I read it in another comment thread shortly after making this one.
(In the industry, we call this "the art of self-trolling".)
I give you a sincere tip of my nerdhat for pursuit of accuracy even when it's kinda awkward.
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#364Steve Jobs held the world up to his standards. Maybe that's why we are at such a loss now when he's gone.
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't care about some dreamy ideal of evolution or adaptability so much that I would choose to die for it. [Edit for more substance: you imply evolution is driving humanity towards some 'good' destination, such that more evolution is better. This isn't how evolution works.]
"you imply evolution is driving humanity towards some 'good' destination" No. All I'm implying is that humanity, in its current form, cannot survive all possible natural threats to its existence. We're still competing with other species, and we're still vulnerable to things like the effects of climate change, so if we completely stop evolving, it's likely that in only a few thousand years, we'll be completely depende…
I'm trying to understand what your view of evolution is if you think we're going to be significantly different in a few thousand years given we stopped all technological process today and let "nature take its course", or if you think we can survive things like climate change without using our intelligence and technology (perhaps it will even be necessary to augment both). Evolution is slow, evolution is dumb, evolution isn't going to magically make us more likely to survive threats to our existence. You would rather subject yourself to such a blind, dumb, uncaring process, than a future product, perhaps itself intelligent, of our own intelligence that outclasses a natural evolutionary process in every way? Do you think evolution is going to magically get our species off this planet should an asteroid wander this way, or in the future when the Sun dies? Our long-term survival is completely dependent on our technology already.
I would be very surprised and disappointed if our technological processes in a mere hundred years are not more robust and better than evolutionary equivalents--indeed we can already do many things evolution could never do itself, the last big step is doing that more on the micro scale. Work on that has already begun, it's pretty exciting to look at it. E. glowli is just the very beginning.
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't care about some dreamy ideal of evolution or adaptability so much that I would choose to die for it. [Edit for more substance: you imply evolution is driving humanity towards some 'good' destination, such that more evolution is better. This isn't how evolution works.]
"you imply evolution is driving humanity towards some 'good' destination" No. All I'm implying is that humanity, in its current form, cannot survive all possible natural threats to its existence. We're still competing with other species, and we're still vulnerable to things like the effects of climate change, so if we completely stop evolving, it's likely that in only a few thousand years, we'll be completely depende…
You're still doing it. When you say "We're still competing with other species, and we're still vulnerable to things like the effects of climate change, so if we completely stop evolving", what you imply is that if we keep evolving, we will improve until we can survive climate change and outcompete other species.
Again, that's not how it works - dinosaurs didn't evolve to be meteor resistant, and carrying on evolving could as well lead to our extinction as to our saving, or indeed to our losing intelligence and becoming a niche species again.
And that's aside from the fact that even with technological immortality, we'd still have people dieing and being created, and evolution will still be happening - it can't not-happen.
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evolution is a vehicle for genes, bodies are just incidental to this process. We are, however, more than bodies that breed genes. We are persons, we have minds. We have developed into something that goes beyond the substrate from which we came and we owe it to ourselves to some day outgrow the need for that substrate completely. Imagine what our minds could do if they had centuries to develop. Imagine what our cultur…
> We are, however, more than bodies that breed genes. We have developed into something that goes beyond the substrate from which we came and we owe it to ourselves to some day outgrow the need for that substrate completely. I'm not sure I accept that, and I have yet to see an argument that demonstrates this convincingly. What substrate are you talking about? The physical world? We are a part of and a result of the ph…
I can very well imagine our culture stagnating if individuals were able to live indefinitely
That's shown me. I guess the death of myself, my loved ones, my friends, and all 7 billion humans alive today isn't so bad compared to the sheer horror of culture staying the same.
Where's your perspective?
In short, we don't know what would happen, and it would be presumptuous to think that we do.
But it would be ridiculous to reject the idea of it based on speculation that it might not be possible.
Our plunder of the world's resources and our destruction of the environment
Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. This self-flagellating viewpoint isn't winning points from a kindly jury. We can't "destroy" the environment or "plunder" the world's resource. All the stuff we've dug up is still in the universe, there is still an environment, and largely it's still the same as it ever was.
There was vastly more severe environmental change happening outside the time of humans than there has been during it, and we don't talk about the time the crust cooled and set as "the great environmental destruction", do we? Or when oxygen levels dropped, or when the earth warmed and ice ages finished? Or when plants appeared and took over the earth?
They were all enormous changes, yet today it's "greenhouse gases and global warming, oh we're so sorry, we're really horrible, we deserve a punishment".
may very well leave the planet unsuitable for human life.
Then we should probably fix that, not prostrate ourselves and play who's the most cynical and holier-than-thou games.
This is the idea that I was addressing in my first post, that of course the species does and should take precedent over the individual.
Of course it does? I refute that. We, the living humans on this planet, take precedence over all future, potential, hypothetical humans by virtue of our existence and their non-existance. Of course we do, any other view is ridiculous. Can you imagine "women and children first" changing to "imaginary hypothetical people first, women and children second"? No.
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#368My first computer was a Macintosh Plus at age ~5. Not sure what I would be doing with my life without his contribution.
I'm another dev whose first computer was an apple IIgs. I don't know if I'd be a dev today if I hadn't spent far too many hours poking around in basic typing in games from magazine, modifying them, and writing my own. For purely selfish reasons -- what could Steve have imagined next? -- he passed far too soon.
Given that it takes years for a big thing to pass through the dev cycle and come to market, you're still going to see some things that were up his sleeve.
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#369What a life; legacy left. Thank you and rest in peace!
Re: Steve Jobs has passed away.
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We are, however, more than bodies that breed genes. We have developed into something that goes beyond the substrate from which we came and we owe it to ourselves to some day outgrow the need for that substrate completely. I'm not sure I accept that, and I have yet to see an argument that demonstrates this convincingly. What substrate are you talking about? The physical world? We are a part of and a result of the ph…
I can very well imagine our culture stagnating if individuals were able to live indefinitely That's shown me. I guess the death of myself, my loved ones, my friends, and all 7 billion humans alive today isn't so bad compared to the sheer horror of culture staying the same . Where's your perspective? In short, we don't know what would happen, and it would be presumptuous to think that we do. But it would be ridiculous…
> That's shown me. I guess the death of myself, my loved ones, my friends, and all 7 billion humans alive today isn't so bad compared to the sheer horror of culture staying the same.
Unless you think we're perfectly adapted to all future circumstances, different selective pressures will require change, as they have for the past 4 billion or so years on this planet. Plus, good luck getting people to stop fucking. We have a finite amount of resources available. Regardless of the philosophical implications, it's not even practical to try to keep people alive forever. You ask where my perspective is, yet you brush concerns like this under the rug because you can't bear the thought of you personally having to go through the experience of losing loved ones, as organisms have been doing for eons.
> But it would be ridiculous to reject the idea of it based on speculation that it might not be possible.
Yes, I overreached there. I meant only to reject the idea that it will necessarily lead to positive outcomes.
> All the stuff we've dug up is still in the universe, there is still an environment, and largely it's still the same as it ever was.
And a lot of it we've put through physical and chemical changes which are non-reversible. And an environment is different than one that can sustain us comfortably. I didn't think I was going to have to defend simple facts about resource consumption.
> There was vastly more severe environmental change happening outside the time of humans than there has been during it, and we don't talk about the time the crust cooled and set as "the great environmental destruction", do we? Or when oxygen levels dropped, or when the earth warmed and ice ages finished?
We probably would if we were around for it. Species were wiped out. As the environment changes now, selective pressures will change again, and anything maladapted to them will die out. If indeed we are changing the environment and extracting resources at an unsustainable rate, we may die out or be radically changed, and by definition, something more able to keep their consumption under control will flourish. I believe that we have reached an evolutionary point where a much quicker memetic evolution will allow humans to adapt, but the resistance to this collective way of thinking will need to be overcome.
> Then we should probably fix that, not prostrate ourselves and play who's the most cynical and holier-than-thou games.
What game do you think I am playing here? I'm making an earnest argument that maybe the life cost of trying to build the biggest SUVs is too high, and will disadvantage our species in the long run.
> We, the living humans on this planet, take precedence over all future, potential, hypothetical humans by virtue of our existence and their non-existance.
And by definition, this is egocentric, which was the original point. Unless you deny that people will be born in the future, calling them imaginary is intellectually dishonest. Pretending that they will never exist achieves nothing except to deflect your anxiety about taking actions which will make the lives of your descendents more difficult.