John mentioning his NeXT computer in this post reminded me of his NeXT computer purchase story from Masters of Doom:
"On a cold winter day, Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and headed out into the Madison snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars caked in frost, trees dangling ice. Carmack endured the chill because he had no car; he'd sold the MGB long before. It was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero's antics out of his mind. He was on a mission.
Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier's check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs's earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack."
Thought of that very passage when I read this. It's not often you get to read a book that is so biographical about a person who is also still posting about their life on social media.
Not really. Tech is still very young. The home PC as a popular item is only around 30-40 years old depending on your criteria. Most of these guys are still around and active. I mean, you can email Vint Cerf today or read endless books about Apple, Woz, etc. You can tweet Bill Gates, etc.
The dead in this industry are the super old timers, many of whom you really never hear about, or the unfortunate souls who passed away relatively young. Jobs was only 56 when he passed away.
I think you missed his point. This is like getting never-before-seen bonus material for your favorite book. It reads similar to the book as well. All in all, very cool.
i just finished masters of doom's audiobook a week or so ago. it was the most addicting story i've heard in some time, and elevated carmack even more in my mind.
the book was also strangely motivating.
have you (or anyone else) read anything else like masters of doom recently?
I have read Masters of Doom and both The Cuckoo's Egg and Dealers of Lightning and these recommendations are spot on. I'd love to reread all of these soon, especially Dealers of Lightning.
Something similar but perhaps a bit drier may be Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely about the personal computer wars. And yes, that's the same Cringely from the Triumph of the Nerds documentaries.
I also do not recommend David Kushner's Prepare to Meet Thy Doom and The World's Most Dangerous Geek audiobooks which I believe are anthologies of loosely related articles he has written over the years. The prose was a little too purple for me.
I'm a big fan of the book and got a similar feeling from watching Indie Game: The Movie. Good documentary about a few small indie game studios that makes you feel like you can start something amazing.
Another book (also great audiobook) I'd suggest is Console Wars. I've listened to that audiobook just as much as Masters of Doom. It tells the story of Sega vs. Nintendo in the 80s/90s.
How many people will spend that money today? I see folks refusing to spend $10/$20 of their own money to get better. It's the weirdest thing. I told someone to spend $100 and run an experiment this past weekend, they looked at me like I lost my mind.
Developers outside of the machine learning PHD world don't make that huge an income, especially if you live in a high rent area and are single they tax the heck out of you in california today. Back then people could afford to drop these large amounts on projects because rent was like $125 a month and taxes were very low compared to say modern california. It actually goes to show how an economy that benefits the rentiers has a way of shutting down innovation and experimentation as all resources go to cover the basics.
There is a pervasive idea that developer salaries in sf and other tech cities only cover the rents, etc. Not at all true. Thousands and thousands of career developers making great wages. It’s not VCs driving real estate prices.
My rent is high, but my cost of living isn’t that high relative to everything (not that different from pricier parts of the Midwest). My salary is high to keep the cost of living maintainable, so I don’t become tempted to move back to the Midwest where my rent was medium and my salary was high, and the cost of living was similarly medium.
Well he was the founder of the company. People are more comfortable doing this stuff if they feel like they have a stake in the company/their work. If you're just a code-money in a megacorp you don't care.
Most young people today are either massively in debt due to student loans or they don't see themselves earning high wages because they don't have a degree. Either way it's understandable that they're averse to speculating with the little money they have.
You should read the book! I'd do a TL;DR but I can't really remember the specifics other than John really hated the distraction of pretty much anything.
Seems Google, Reddit (u/Ungard at [1]), and Amazon [2] have all the answers. Turns out it was Carmack with the ax. An excerpt from the book:
This happened after Romero accidentally locked himself in his office. Hearing the pleas, Carmack gave the knob a twist, paused, then deduced the most obvious and immediate solution. “You know,” he said, “I do have a battle-ax in my office.” Carmack had recently paid five thousand dollars for the custom-made weapon—a razor-edged hatchet like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. As the other guys gathered around chanting, “Battle-ax! Battle-ax! Battle-ax!” Carmack chopped Romero free. The splintered door remained in the hall for months.
"I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs."
Funny he should write that. Many, many years ago I wrote an email to John Carmack asking something about his .plan postings which must have seemed fairly mundane looking back on it now. He was nice enough to write me back. And I thought that was pretty cool too.
I guess it just goes to show that even the people you respect or admire have people they respect and admire themselves.
I can only imagine the amount of garbage he gets in his inbox every day. So to get that email back (on a Sunday for him, as well) was pretty heart warming
I once emailed Woz about some trivial question about the old Apple machines. He emailed me right back with an apology about how he was too busy to answer all these kinds of emails and then in the next sentence, answered my question anyway.
And even when Woz isn't responsive himself, it seems he makes sure his emails get answered. I emailed him once a few years ago -- I forget about what -- and his wife replied with a kind, detailed note.
When I was a kid, I was interested in game development & I found the e-mail address for someone at Infogrames that developed the Alone in the Dark game and said I was a young and learning game development and asked a bunch of questions. Surprisingly the contact whose e-mail address I found corresponded with me a few times about questions I had about developing video games. I somehow doubt that kind of thing would happen today but I'd probably be proven wrong. I then wrote it up as a Q&A and put it on my Geocities website :-)
I love stories like this. A few months ago, my daughter was born and was named after the main character in a Philip Pullman series. He tweeted a welcome message to her! https://twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/946678534776516608 One of the weirdest, most amazing internet moments for me.
They’re busy people and in many cases very influential (and probably also wealthy), but famous people are still people at the end of the day. As a fan of few people in this world, when I do get the chance to meet them, I try to approach them as a human first and a famous person second. Another way to look at that is: great every stranger you’d like to make a connection with with the same respect you’d treat your heroes. If you go up to them and start freaking out because you’re actually talking to them...how do you think that feels for them?
I’ve always thought that it wouldn’t be that fulfilling to be famous, because you’d lose the opportunity to do things like go out to a normal restaurant with your family and have dinner without people acting weird around you constantly. Paparazzi are one thing, fans and stalkers another.
TL;DR don’t be the person who makes being famous suck, and you’ll probably get a lot more out of having an interesting conversation with someone you look up to vs just getting an autograph.
Reminds me a bit of the outer world experience of walking around GDC, where you'd see the big names just wandering around. Talking with lots of big names like Dustin Browder, Tim Schafer and Noah Falstein. Always a delight talking and hearing experiences of these people. Perhaps one day I'll meet Carmack.
For a little bit of a different type of story I wrote Leo Laporte back when I was a teenager and he was on Call For Help. I asked him a very specific question about getting video card drivers to work with a specific video encoder (which, looking back, is a terrible question to ask someone who is doing a TV show and can only give back sound bite answers).
To my surprise he actually read my question and answered it on tv! It was so freaking cool! But, my inner teenager kicked in when I realized his answer was something I already tried. I sent him an really awful email in response. I called him terrible names. I was a complete shit.
I felt so bad about my actions _for years_ that I eventually emailed him a, what I thought was, a heartfelt apology for being such a shit. I got an email back a few days later from his wife telling me she shared it with him and to not worry about it.
On this very forum I had Alan Kay politely tell me I was a fool, and I thought it was great. I bragged to my developer friends, who also agreed that it was great. And that I was, indeed, a fool.
I once gave Marvin Minsky a headache by showing a video tape of bright blinking PostScript graphics! I apologized, and we had a nice conversation about how eye tracking interfaces tend to do the same thing.
(I've written some pretty dumb things to him and he never called me a fooled. He was nice enough to try to re-explain things to me. I finally had to give up because I felt I was wasting his time.)
No he was polite. I suppose I should restate, he didn't call me a fool straight out but let me know it was foolish to comment on things I had no firsthand knowledge of. I think it was an article regarding Steve's visit at Xerox PARC.
But in the opening post, John Carmack said that is what Steve would do: "It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions."
Alan is very smart and was a prodigy, but I think he put up with Steve Jobs' eccentricity to a larger extent than our eccentricity because he could influence people and got a few things right. (Although Alan has been said to call out CEOs for incompetence.) Murray Rothbard (economist) said all the billionaires he ever met were crazy. Probably because their colleagues and employees would put up with a lot of stuff they would never let anyone else get away with.
I think this is a case where you didn't take the trouble to find out the facts and are instead projecting your beliefs on a situation at which you weren't present. I'm calling you on because there is much too much of this kind of commentary in most forums.
I bet dang saw that and wanted to remind him about the HN guidelines and then realized that the author of the comment was freakin Alan Kay and just said never mind.
He was giving a YC startup talk and asked for emails in his presentation. I did and he answered. He seems to genuinely enjoy talking to anyone that cares. He's answered pretty much all the ridiculous things I've asked him on HN.
To add one rung above that, I remember a quote from Jobs's biography to the extent of "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
For anyone wondering how a Steve-Socrates dialog might be like, I found this analogous bit of history:
---
Diogenes was in Corinth when Alexander the Great sent word through a messenger asking Diogenes to come see him in Macedonia.
Diogenes told the Alexander’s messenger, “Go tell your emperor that Corinth is as far from Macedonia as Macedonia is from Corinth. So if your emperor wants to see me, he can come and find me here.”
Irrefutable logic and infinite self-assurance. The last bit can only come from someone who really does not need anything from anyone however high and mighty.
Alexander surely was not used to being turned down. But I suppose being a warrior, he admired courage. So he went to Corinth to meet Diogenes. Diogenes was sitting in his tub and enjoying the morning sun when Alexander showed up on his high horse with a whole bunch of soldiers.
After a brief introduction, Alexander proudly offered to give Diogenes anything that he needed. “Is there anything I can do for you, Sir?” asked Alexander. Diogenes replied, “Yes, you could. You are blocking the sun. Please stand aside.”
This story was one of the first i heard back in high school during my first courses of philosophy. I still admire the courage and free-thinking spirit of those Greek intellectuals.
Imagine some of our current "intellectuals" been called by the White House today. They will be in the hurry to meet the "President". During the visit they will make sure they get some selfies with M. President in order to show it as a life-achievements...
Vanity is a common pattern among our modern days intelligentsia
I sent an email to Jonathan Blow about Jai once, and I was surprised that he sent me a thorough reply.
Russ Cox never got back to me about having GUI apps take over the terminal window in Plan 9 from userspace, although my idea was fundamentally trash so I don't blame him
That's one of the things that I do think is neat about Twitter; there is actually a pretty reasonable chance someone whose book I admired, or whatever, will read and respond to my message.
Back in uni I emailed Andrew Tanenbaum asking some silly question about the Amoeba operating system.
This was around 97, and the Internet was still new to me. There was access in one lab 1 hour once a week or something like that, so the fact that he replied with some pointers to few ps files about the OS was really amazing.
Back in the day (~1989) when Minix was hot stuff I asked a friend who went to VU a question about Minix to pass on to Tanenbaum, next thing I knew I was invited to his flat next to the Amsterdamse Bos for tea and cookies. That was a very interesting afternoon.
I did this too! A question about how they were testing Quake. John responded with some detail about how to set up a simple proxy server. Very helpful and relevant to what I was working on at the time; thanks John!
Can't recall who, but I remember a famous actress saying she got star truck meeting another not far above famous actor. Must be weird to go from star to fan.
Rapid switch between charming and aggressive. Creating an environment where you surround yourself with sycophants. Punch downwards at employees working for you to assert and maintain your power while projecting you aspire for "higher standards". Set unrealistic expectations to see which folks will work nights and weekends to your order.
^^ Managers take note. These are excellent traits to climbing the corporate ladder. Just be a dick without looking like a dick.
You can only do that if you're Steve Jobs. The chances of someone ever working on a product that's going to define an industry are infinitesimal.
If I got a chance to work on the iPhone in 2006, yeah I might put up with a lot of crap. If all I'm doing is writing yet another software as a service CRUD app and I have an insufferable manager - I'll jump ship so fast it will make their head spin.
On second thought, thier head won't spin, they will put out a rec the day I submit my letter of resignation and forget I existed in three months.
> You can only do that if you're Steve Jobs. The chances of someone ever working on a product that's going to define an industry are infinitesimal.
I don't think you have to necessarily be that influential to have at least part of the same power. In other words, I suspect there are mini-Jobs all over the place. The sad part is I think you can get a long way without much influence at all, as what keeps people around isn't how influential or amazing you are, but how much they perceive you to be, and some people are finely tuned producers of bullshit.
I worked for someone who had most of those traits. However, he wasn't Steve Jobs. When I last looked at his LinkedIn, he had a long string of positions which had lasted 12-18 months until (I presume) reality caught up with him at each.
I have seen just this happen. I don't know how someone as basically incompetent as my former boss could do it, but he was made an IT manager for a huge government department, in spite of the IT department at my workplace having the worst reputation in town.
In the case of the guy I worked for, he was charming in half-hour increments and technically decent, and good at seeing new project opportunities. But bad at planning, sharing credit, and basic decency.
> I'll jump ship so fast it will make their head spin.
Sure, you do. Many people don't. There was this thread on Amazon today which tells me people put up with many, many abuses. Fertile ground for others to follow Jobs example.
There's a book I remember reading - I can't remember, but it may have been The Dictator's Handbook - which talked about how this is a common management pattern in authoritarian dictatorships (although typically somewhat more extreme in its implementation). The dictator ends up weeding out most people of exceptional talent and competence, but it consolidates his personal power. Bad for the state when it faces a crisis, but good for him personally. Easy to see how this applies to senior management at a public company.
True. Any organization in which the incentives for an executive to increase or maintain their own power within the organization trumps the incentives for them to work for the benefit of the organization as a whole.
So why did it work so well for Jobs? Perhaps because in the tech industry, you have a high frequency of the rare combination of incredible talent in a profitable industry combined with social/political non-talent, so people feel stuck where they are, or love their work so much they don't care if they are unfairly treated?
Look at open-source, for example. People with little money, often in poor countries, giving away software that generate $billions in profits for already wealthy people.
I've had 15 odd positions in my career. I have no trouble bailing and everyone who stays can continue being miserable. It's not uncommon to hear from past teammates that they should have left sooner. Best time to find a job is when you already have one.
It's not always about the environment being bad. It's often the environment being bad for you.
After awhile, most companies go from new and shiny to sticking with the same technology (it doesn't make business sense to always chase after the tech of the week) that is not where the market is going. You have three choices - either fall behind the market, learn on the side, or change companies. I choose to change companies.
Second issue is that wage stagnation is real and most companies don't do market adjustments and the meager yearly raises start getting out paced by the market. The easiest way to get a raise is by changing jobs.
I'm not blaming the victim. Yeah I can say that living in a major metropolitan area with an in demand skill set where it is easy to change jobs. But not everyone has that optionality.
Eh, I’ve seen it work well at the director level too, at least for a while until the VPs figure out that you’re the problem, not everyone under you. Sometimes that takes years though. Strategically throwing those who oppose you / see through your BS under the bus is elevated to an art form in corporate America.
It's portrayed very well in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. Wozniak says it's an accurate portrayal of personalities, unlike movies glorifying Jobs. One of my favorites is the scene where Gates and Jobs meet.
Yes, it's a common pattern: "Steve Jobs was great! [anecdote about a time he was cool to someone he wanted something from]."
My reaction every time: Yeah, we already have a term for someone who's nice to those that they want something from, and who mercilessly leverages their power against everyone else. It's called ... "not nice".
Having read a few Jobs biographies I don't think the late Mr. Jobs surrounded himself with sycophants. I think he sought actual talent and capability to perform. The fact Apple didn't implode - rather the opposite - indicates this was the case.
Wait, are we talking about Steven Jobs or Elon Musk? Because, lets be honest here, they're both cut from the same cloth. And yet, the tech crowd reveres Musk but is pretty split on Jobs.
We just had someone leave our company because many people gave the person bad internal reviews because of this crap. And many left before that. You have to be delivering in spades for this to work.
Honestly, I think this is what it's like to be in an abusive relationship. You know he's abusive and yet you still stay in the relationship with him/her because of all the good times and you delude yourself into thinking that's OK ... I think this gives a rarely glimpse into the rationalizations that happen in the mind of people that are in abusive relationships. From the outside it is trivial to see that the relationship dynamic is abusive but when you're in it ... suddenly it's OK even for one of the most renowned programmers of all time?
"One time, [...] Steve [...] wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote."
Quite Machiavellian, asking somebody to reschedule their wedding for a keynote and being completely unwilling to return the slightest favour!
The dude got off on power plays. I wouldn't be surprised if the only reason Carmack was invited to that particular keynote was because it was happening on his wedding day.
I'm not so sure. Reading John Carmack's story (and others) it seems that Steve Jobs was able to convince people to enjoy the abuse and remember it with revery. That is a special kind of talent, but as others have mentioned it seems to attract and inspire the worst kind of corporate scum.
The places where it doesn't seem like an abusive relationship it most certainly seems like the way a feudal tyrant would be behave.
There is a difference between just being a douchebag, and actually sparring people.
Psychological pressure is not just a bad thing. Too much of it, yes, and used for selfish reasons, yes - but - there is a net positive effect of making people defend their position and holding them accountable for their views.
From what I've read Jobs combined the positive sparring attitude as well as negative I-must-have-my-catharsis-by-abusing-you as well.
An intellectually keen sparring partner is something most people cherish. Given this sparring partner is Jobs there is a random reward/punishment element involved - is he going to cherish me or banish me?
We all know this random reward system is the key to addictive interactions. Jobs was probably a keen intellectual sparring partner combined with an emotional game of chance.
No wonder people revered him.
I think the 'asshole steve jobs' reverence goes into the same pile with Gordon Gekko admiration. The problem with Jobs is he was a non-fictional character and people the lizard-people kind of types seem to completely misunderstand what was the good part in him as a leader.
I suppose I have a bias. I don't see the value in studying him, or in picking apart these postmortem campfire tales. Aside from (and I say this whimsically); to analyze and better understand the horror that we intelligent human beings are capable of allowing.
I don't envy titans of industry any more than I envy celebrity for this reason. They seem to be our social experiments. We are lucky to have them and luckier still that fewer than most become real devils.
Wish I had a point for this ramble. I just feel like there is a terrible _cost_ to being someone like Jobs, Musk, Tesla, etc. A cost that doesn't seem to be adequately explained to them _or_ the people who revere them. They are the milk producing cows of productivity that we happily take out and slaughter for meat once they burn out. That we seem to love them just makes it all the more strange.
On October 25 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
I tried explaining how we'd performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus [1], but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.
But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying "NeVR Step"!)
I'll have to read the article. I'm a little surprised that pie menus never caught on even in the era of tablets, where they seem extremely well-suited.
They do see some use in games, where you have control over all the menu items. Long strings can break pie menu layout pretty badly, especially if you bring up the menu near the edge of the screen.
Here's an illustrated transcript of a video (and the video itself) demonstrating the pie menus (and SimAntics visual programming language) in The Sims!
Turning a dial is a totally different gesture than making directional strokes, so they are different beasts, and a dial lacks the advantages pie menus derive from exploiting Fitts's Law.
Even though the Surface Dial has a round dial, that is nothing like a pie menu, even though it's round, because you turn it. Pie menus aren't about turning around the center, they're about stroking out from the center.
Also a rotating carousel or rocker switch that you turn or nudge clockwise or counterclockwise to change between different items, and then click to select an item, is not anything like a pie menu.
You have to turn a dial or carousel more and more to select each subsequent item. (Just like you have to move the cursor more and more downwards to select each subsequent item of a linear pull-down menu).
With pull down menus, click wheels and carousels, selection is linear O(n), while with a pie menu you only have to perform one short directional gesture to select any item, so selection is constant O(1) (with a small constant, the inner inactive radius of the hole in the middle, which you can make larger if you're a spaz).
Also, the items themselves should never rotate around the menu (unless you're doing some quick transient snazzy spin-up animation), they should always stay in the same direction.
Here are some window management pie menus that spin up if you click them up without moving, and tilt up around the axis perpendicular to the direction of motion, if you move away from the center before they pop up:
Stallman likes to classify an emacs-like text editor that totally misses the point of emacs by not having an extension language as an "erzatz emacs". In the same sense, there are many "erzatz pie menus" that may look like pie menus on the surface, but don't actually track or feel like pie menus, or benefit from all of their advantages, because they aren't designed to optimize for Fitts's Law by being based purely on the direction between stroke endpoints instead of the entire path, minimizing the distance to the targets, and maximizing the size of the targets.
Another way to implement frustrating difficult to use erzatz pie menus that totally miss the point is to only use the small areas of the item labels as targets, not the entire huge wedge shaped pie slices extending out to the screen edge.
Yet another way to screw them up is to trigger them when you move a certain distance from the center (or pop them up when you roll over a target without clicking, or use time-outs without clicking), instead of when you click or release the mouse (or tap or release your finger, pen, etc). There should always be a kinesthetic delimiter like a click or tap at the beginning and ending of the stroke, but the stroke is free wander around any path or pause for any duration. Only the angle between the delimiters matters, to allow for browsing and reselection and error correction.
If distance or time is the trigger, the user has no way of reliably and directly controlling or sensing at which point the selection happens, or using the menus without looking at the screen, and it terribly interferes with navigating nested pie menus.
Any pie menu that does not initially pop up with the cursor (or your finger) in the center, or that is already showing before you start tracking from anywhere on the screen, is terribly broken, because the whole point is to bring the pie menu center to you, so you can select with quick directional gestures without looking at the screen, not for you to have to first look at the screen and then move to the center yourself. That would totally defeat the purpose of pie menus!
Handling the screen edge problem can get tricky, especially when combined with mouse-ahead display suppression. One way of handling that is to "warp" the mouse back to the center of the menu if the menu needs to be moved to fit on the screen. But you must be careful not to cancel out any motion away from the center that's already happened (which is why you should delay warping the mouse until you actually pop up the menu (if ever), so there is no mouse warping when you mouse ahead and the menu is not displayed).
Web browser don't directly support mouse warping (i.e. like XWarpPointer), and you can't tell if the edge of the browser window is actually the edge of the screen, but you can use the "Pointer Lock API" to implement a software cursor that you can warp anywhere in the window you want (but not outside).
It's the 30 year anniversary of CHI’88 (May 15–19, 1988), where Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser and I (Don Hopkins) presented our paper “An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus”. We found pie menus to be about 15% faster and with a significantly lower error rate than linear menus!
So I've written up a 30 year retrospective:
This article will discuss the history of what’s happened with pie menus over the last 30 years (and more), present both good and bad examples, including ideas half baked, experiments performed, problems discovered, solutions attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption.
Here is the main article, and some other related articles:
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018. Take a Look and Feel Free!
I find it a bit hard to parse the pie menu. My eye has no obvious place to start or end in reading the options, so i try to pick one quickly. Vertical menus have an explicit order (if not alphabetical, an intentional one) which helps I can scan quickly. Also, when I go into a sub-menu, I don't lose the context of the parent (which is also avoidable in pie, but not in the x10 demo shown).
We've been trained from an early age to process lists. Lists are cool.
Registration funds important things like police, fire, and public education. Rolling around town as a tightwad billionaire who thinks hes too good to pay for public services is beyond the pale.
>Im all for giving the dead their rest, but Steve was in my honest opinion more asshole than legend.
Because he didn't pay registration fees? How well do you know people? The average person has done much worse than this.
Besides, "more asshole than legend" goes to some random asshole, not to a person that, asshole or not, still inspired millions, was several times "person of the year", and built the most valuable market cap company in history.
All that, and the worst that they say about him is that he was mean and petty sometimes, and didn't recognize his daughter at first. There are tons of major figures of history that have done way way worst things than that.
>Registration funds important things like police, fire, and public education. Rolling around town as a tightwad billionaire who thinks hes too good to pay for public services is beyond the pale.
As if he did it to avoid paying registration funds. And as if his fortune haven't been used to pay tons of charity and public taxes and build jobs.
Someone who sees through the "disabled parking spaces" BS in the US, where everyone can get their doctor to mark them as "disabled" and park there, mocking the actual disabled?
I'm interested in accuracy, not in defending or offending.
That answered, why do you go into BS psychological questions instead of giving actual counter-arguments?
Is this considered an easy "winning strategy" / cheap cop out from actually discussing: painting the other commenter as having some kind of psychological need / personal issue for saying what they say?
Tightwads don't lease a new car every 6 months (and an expensive one at that). Also, the registration fees would have literally been a rounding error compared to state income+property taxes he was already paying. I think you could easily be right on the asshole vs legend thing but I'm having a hard time seeing how this example supports that opinion.
> Tightwads don't lease a new car every 6 months (and an expensive one at that).
He only did that because he wanted to drive around without a license plate. And tightwads can be tightwads when it comes to spending their money on other people but splurge on themselves.
In my opinion, folks who say they're being "honest" about something are kind of begging the question. That said, I doubt he did it to save money, although I'm surprised he allowed a dealer plate frame on the car. I think he thought they looked ugly. It may even have been a bandwidth issue — he simply didn't want to decide _which_ license plate to get and it was easier to avoid the issue altogether.
He famously didn't own much furniture (at least when he was single) because he couldn't find any he liked, not because he was cheap.
Huh, when I first heard this story I assumed he was interested in added privacy, not (a very very small amount of) tax-dodging. The tax-dodging explanation doesn't make much sense here.
We live in a different time now, where people are professionally offended as a form of virtue signalling - like what you're doing now. Steve came from the 70s, a time where being a bit of a rebel, a misfit, anarchist - and sticking it to the man was considered cool.
This man who had advanced pancreatic cancer wouldn't have qualified for a real handicapped tag? People are getting bent out of shape over nothing here.
You pay reg and taxes when you buy (or lease) the car. He just didn't want to run plates on the car. Many people I know go as long as possible without plates.
For all thinking along these lines I'd recommend to read the "The Steve we knew" section in Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc." for a bit different perspective.
Actually, read the whole book.
>seven years ago, Microsoft opened a small office in Reno, Nev., to collect the money it got from PC manufacturers that installed Windows and Office on the computers they sold. In the years since, Microsoft has sheltered more than $60 billion in royalty revenue in Nevada, a state with no corporate income tax, costing Washington an estimated $327 million in unrealized tax revenue.
Steve Jobs is not dead and certainly not resting in peace aka RIP. The man was a Buddist believer. He is reborn as a bird or a stone or whatever. At least to me its inportant what after-life definition he believed in and gave it my respect.
"After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!"
Where was Carmack when everyone was forcing us to listen to "web apps are the future of mobile"?
It was quite obvious to us at the time that Apple was planning to provide a native SDK but hoped to mollify third-party developers with "web apps" while Apple got their house in order (having barely managed to get the phone done on schedule).
As it happened, the reaction to web apps was so negative they ended up releasing their SDK hastily (which anyone who went through the pain of using it for the first couple of years can attest to).
One of the common mistakes people have when discussing Steve Jobs is mistaking what he said for what he believed. (We see this confusion constantly in the news, where "The Whitehouse believes" is used to describe something in a press release.) He knew how to stay on message, and he knew that saying "our SDK will probably be released in alpha form in a year and be somewhat stable in two years" was off message.
It's also fairly clear that if he had had a bunch of arguments about something and reached some provisional conclusion, he wasn't going to have much patience with an argument he had previously encountered and beaten to death from someone random.
He knew how to stay on message, and he knew that saying "our SDK will probably be released in alpha form in a year and be somewhat stable in two years" was off message.
Reminds me of “we couldn’t get the fingerprint sensor under the screen working, so we had to quickly come up with an alternate authentication method, and that required this hideous notch” vs “Face ID is the newest, best thing ever.”
They still try to hide it when things don’t go their way.
> we couldn’t get the fingerprint sensor under the screen working, so we had to quickly come up with an alternate authentication method, and that required this hideous notch
I think you should try using iPhone X before you comment on it.
> Where was Carmack when everyone was forcing us to listen to "web apps are the future of mobile"?
> He could have ended that HN debated instantly.
This is going to be difficult to hear, but online debates are essentially for entertainment purposes only. Arguments had on the internet rarely affect our industry as a whole. Arguments had in person between people of power and influence are far more effective, time efficient and can affect entire industries (even countries!) in profound ways.
No amount of technology beats face to face communication. No amount of technology replaces individual power and influence.
Of course they don't affect the industry as a whole, however they do affect the people who read HN. Reading a debate on the dangers of over-reliance of DOckers today made me realize that I should consider alternatives for my next project.
Reading about a new awesome technology, might make someone go out and do a project with said technology. While that doesn't affect the industry as a whole, the debates sure are useful for the people reading and participating in them
I can attest to this, having spent a great deal of effort here and on a W3C list arguing against EME. I was aware of the "online argumentation is entertainment" rule but hadn't appreciated the rule's broadness until then.
A good rule of thumb is that a "consultative process" is a smokescreen unless the people being consulted have voting rights amongst those doing the consulting.
Web apps are the future, how many more stupid native apps must I install to get basic textual and photo information? The only right answer is universal apps(the web).
>how many more stupid native apps must I install to get basic textual and photo information?
You're conflating the web with web apps. Those are two separate things.
If web apps are to be the future, bloating up the browser to the size of an OS to get native-app level functionality sounds like a dystopian future to me. I don't want my browser to access my GPU, I don't want by browser leaking my LAN IP, I don't want my browser communicating with USB devices on my machine, etc, etc...
Also, nobody (yet) has been able to create a GUI/Client App standard for cross-platform delivery that performs well across different hardware architectures and operating systems which are designed and optimized for completely different things. That makes sense because the "one size fits all" way of doing things is terrible for performance among other things.
>The only right answer is universal apps(the web).
The only "right" answer is that we should tolerate specific web apps only when the benefits outweigh the costs.
Native apps will likely always have a place when OS/UI integration are paramount. But web apps will become a lot more prevalent than they have been previous as more and more hooks are exposed to the native core. Which is a good thing for everyone.
I'd argue the issue is that a lot of "native" apps are basically a webapp in a native wrapper on mobile (and desktop now - thanks Electron!).
I don't really know the best way to delineate what should and shouldn't be a web app, beyond a vague notion that my daily news rotation should be in the browser.
Yeah, there's certain things that native apps make a lot more sense for (e.g. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger where you want notifications to come up similar to text messages), but certain things really don't need anything more than the mobile website you look at (for example, at least for some people, mobile Wikipedia over the app).
> (e.g. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger where you want notifications to come up similar to text messages)
Actually I'd argue the web is great for that too. On Android you can already implement a messaging app, complete with notifications, on the web.
I wish people like my bank used it. I don't want to install their native app because I barely ever use it, but would I like to get urgent notifications from them every now and then? You bet I would.
I personally don't like relying on my browser for notifications. I like having native apps because usually fine tuning notifications for them is easier in that respect, things that while I imagine are possible through the web browser, probably aren't going to be done on a web app. It's also just an organizational thing since I don't like to have a list of a bunch of tabs, but having a handful of apps isn't too bad to navigate through.
Just because there's been a lot of progress in making web apps do things that were more natural for native apps, doesn't mean that it's the best way to go about something.
I get the wish for more support for web apps, though. I just switched over from a near 4-year-old phone that was replete with security updates and other un-removable stuff in the storage which prevented me from having a lot of apps installed (especially as so many insist on a large footprint in internal storage), so I increasingly used my web browser to access things. After the switch, though, you can bet I downloaded a bunch of apps I had deleted.
Yes, and the browser should be enough in many cases, but the holder of that information tries to force their app on everyone.
One of the most annoying examples of that for me is accepting a new connection on LinkedIn from my phone. I want to tap on the link in the email and be done. Instead it redirects me to the store, I close it, try again. Sometimes it works, sometimes I give up and do it later.
I think the current course, which is making decent web APIs that open the "potential of the device" to web apps, is going to get us the advantages of both.
Not necessarily true. Given source code, it's often possible to create binaries that run on modern computers, and it's often the case that web apps stop working because something they depended on disappeared or someone broke backwards compatibility.
You know, until the server for the app is taken offline, which is far more frequent of an occurrence than a big move like taking your app from 32 to 64-bit which has been spread over literally a decade.
This is a pretty touching story. John has definitely been one of my heroes for a long time in the field as has Steve. At the end of the day, they're human. It sucks that he regrets not getting back in touch with Steve before his passing. We can't turn back time unfortunately. I guess the lesson here is we can get focused on the hero worship and the little details and forget we are dealing with someone's ego and feelings. Some constructive criticism from John and a declined phone call broke up their relationship. :(
Steve could be rough to work with but they obviously had respect for one another, so it is sad to see in the end there was some bad blood. At least John tried to get back in touch. I think the line at the end really says it all, "...but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe. I showed up for him."
Edit: If you're reading this John, thank you for all the gaming joy you've given the world over the years. I remember asking you programming questions and you were always responsive. You've left dents for others too.
Edit: Regarding the snide comment Steve made that you could write your own OS. He might have secretly feared you would. He knew you could.
I think it's weird how Apple, even to this day, took some of Jobs's "darker" traits as if he still runs the place.
For example, a couple of years ago, I remember a game dev saying that they made one of the top selling game on iOS and received plenty of attention/help from Apple's engineers at WWDC, but when they made an Android version of their game, suddenly it was radio silence with Apple.
This is the kind of thing Jobs would have done, but now that he's gone, I'm disappointed that Apple did not evolve past this kind of behavior.
I'm sure it would have been different, yes. I don't know if they expected to be invited to every WWDC, but I remember the developer saying he had good access at Apple because they loved his app so much.
When he announced his Android version, Apple kinda stopped returning his calls and engineers would not give him as much time for questions and help. He went from VIP to nobody.
The impact that John Carmack has on the industry is just ridiculous. Apple, NVIDIA, Facebook. As a teenage software engineer, he was a revered figure to me (and I wonder to how many others). I've had an opportunity to work with his source code for a few months - it was a thing of beauty. If you want to learn from him, read his source code and essays. They are full of brilliance.
A question from someone who has never seen a NeXT computer:
How is it possible that Doom was developed on NeXT?
As far as I know, Doom was first released for MS-DOS. Wouldn't be really hard to develop a MS-DOS game from another operative system and another CPU architecture? Specially at the time without engines abstracting platform details?
It is not that big of a deal, although there was extra work required.
You need to remember that Doom had a software renderer only. It only needed to be able to write to a color framebuffer for display. It also needed access to a keyboard, and sound. As long as you do it properly and carefully (and this is John Carmack we are talking about), it is not too difficult to abstract. You need to be careful not to paint yourself into a corner (endianness, pointer sizes, properly isolating platform-specific code, etc). That way you can develop most of the game without even touching the target hardware.
Doom did have what would be nowadays called an "engine", only it was designed for that particular game. Id Software was probably one of the first (if not the first) company to sell a generic "3d Engine". In any case, the abstractions were there.
They probably could not do the entire development using the NeXT workstations. At some point they would need real PCs to finish the port, and check how it worked on the target hardware. That was even more of an issue back then: although the C code could be cross-compiled (to solve the different CPU architecture problem), they did have lots of assembly code for performance.
Nowadays, we are spoiled. iOS developers do exactly the same thing day to day as they did, only they don't even notice for the most part. Click a button on their Macbooks (which run amd64 arch), code get cross-compiled to ARM and linked with ARM-specific libraries. Android developers do the same, and they even have a fully emulated environment.
If you're writing code in a language that compiles to multiple CPU architectures, it's not hard to get 90% of the way towards supporting all those CPU architectures without trying much. The remainder certainly requires some effort (much less if you think about it up-front) - this is where standard types like int, long, even char, and pointers, have different sizes - and where you can't just write out the memory format to a file if that's the same file you're loading on a different platform (even with the same type sizes, because of endianness).
Writing cross-platform code, especially for early games where you're using a fairly restricted set of the platform code (and even less if you're doing a software renderer), is similarly not that hard in the common case if you've thought about it/have experience with it. There are a few different approaches, but even just having a single file that has POSIX and DOS compatibility functions (ie, above the stuff the C standard provides) and some macros could probably get you 90% of the way there.
I don't mean to downplay how hard it is to, say, support multiple renderers, which is a problem that came later, or porting code that was written without any thought given to future portability. But given they knew they were supporting two platforms, it's not that hard to do (compared to the other, actually hard, stuff they did).
That's called porting. And whether or not it is a lot of work depends on how much foresight you had about doing that at some point in the future. If you didn't then it would be a very large amount of work because platform assumptions would be baked in all over the place. If you did - and you were a disciplined programmer - then it could be reasonably quick. I've written software that ported cleanly between Windows and SGI Irix, the original was built for the SGI and when windows capabilities caught up it was relatively straightforward to port, I tried very hard to keep all the platform dependent stuff in a single file so I knew exactly which bits to leave untouched and where to use the chainsaw.
From my memory of reading Masters of Doom, they developed for where they expected the consumer PC hardware market to be at the time of release. If you wanted that hardware at the time they were developing, $10k Next workstations were your best bet.
When Doom came out, I (and most other folks) needed a new PC.
Ports to multiple platforms were pretty common in those days with games and that's something the team had a lot of experience with from their years at Softdisk. Having looked at the game code, it's not really terribly difficult.
Nah, it wasnt about raw speed, Doom doesnt even run all that well on next, its slower than 386DX40 on emulator trying to approximate NeXTcube Turbo speed.
My biggest question is, why now? I mean what trigger you to post this / share this pieces about Steve Jobs?
The reason I ask was because only a few week ago I posted a few comments about the state of Mac, Gaming on Mac and Gaming as iOS App Revenue. In the age of E-Sports and Gaming is the sole segment that is pushing / slowing / stopping the decline of PC sales, I wonder if Apple would take gaming a little more seriously, since Steve Jobs deleted all Gaming DNA in Apple once he returned from NeXT. And I said I wish John Carmack would comment a bit on Steve Jobs given he has been on Stage a few times in Keynote, and has surprisingly never shared any stories since he passed away.
But I think this confirms my suspicious
>Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally.
And it is a little strange since Steve worked at Atari.
The Steve Jobs "hero / shithead" rollercoaster was real
That's funny. I had a boss at Apple when I did some contracting there in 1999 who told me that Jobs asked him, "You wanna be a hero?" before giving him a project. My boss told me, "Yep, one day you're a hero, the next day you're a shithead."
I suppose its inevitable that we dissect the lives and actions of "great" people like Steve Jobs. The fact is that no one is perfect, and those who usually accomplish great things have fascinating lives and personality flaws. At the end of the day, you take the good with the bad, its a package deal, and call it Human.
This pretty much confirms my suspicion that Apple is|was not a company I'd ever want to work at. Making cool stuff might be cool, but I don't want to sacrifice large chunks of my life for it.
It seems pretty likely to me that Steve Jobs was a high functioning sociopath. The line about how his demeanor changed dramatically when Carmack's wife asked for a favor was indicative to me.
"One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote."
I find sociopaths fascinating, but I would sure never want to work for one. It must take an incredible amount of calculation and self discipline to keep a semblance of normality for an incredibly high profile sociopath like Jobs.
On a side note, the late Pieter Hintjens of ZeroMQ wrote an excellent book about psychopaths available online for free here.
If psychiatrists generally frown upon diagnosing people who are not their patients, as a non-expert, I would be fairly careful in labeling now deceased people based on anecdotal data. Especially if I was not familiar with the person. Jobs had obvious pathological facets in his interactions with other people - but inventing labels on top of the anecdotes really does not add value in any way.
Mr. Hintjens was not a psychiatric expert either. That he wrote a book on the subject, is not entirely to his credit. As such, he could have just described "predatory behavior".
There is popular material available on psychopathy and socipathy written by subject matter experts. For example "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain" by James Fallon is written by a neuroscientist who accidentally discovers he is a psychopath.
Generally I agree with you but there's a really, really clear pattern in everything anyone's ever written about an encounter with Steve Jobs. Over the space of decades he was unpredictably charming or abusive, a consummate manipulator and user, completely untrustworthy and seemingly without a conscience.
It's not a clinical diagnosis and should never be treated as such. But after you've run into a couple of people in your own life with those same attributes and that same pattern of behaviour, that's plenty to go on.
Yes, some people have a pattern of behaving badly. Respectively, I still don't think it's a non-clinicians place to make armchair diagnoses based on anecdotes, especially since,
a) Not every pathological behavioral pattern has some underlying psychiatric or neurological condition to explain it. Some people just behave badly.
b) Often diagnosed psychological conditions don't really manifest in how people think they manifest
and
c) Completely dissimilar conditions can create similar behavior in some situtations.
Of c) especially: For example aspergers and narcissists can behave exactly the same in some situations. They both can lack in reciprocity, but for completely different reasons.
Or just maybe getting hit by that kind of counter offer when you were bothering someone by pushing to move their wedding date hits you like cold water and you are like right, I'll leave this person alone and avoid making it weirder.
There is also this book - "Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas" which seemed to be popular a few years ago. It's unclear how reliable the narrator is but I remember it had a jarring effect on me:
https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Sociopath-Spent-Hiding-Pl...
I was just giving back the "steve jobs" manga biography (yes..). I know 90% of it but ... I still read the 200 pages. He's such a special character for someone who grew up with nascent personal computer era.
By all accounts (and I have no personal knowledge here) Steve could be a jerk, or at least very demanding. Steve was definitely successful.
Being a jerk != being successful!
Having a great product eye and good design sense are excellent traits to emulate.
Having "strong opinions, loosely held" is another great trait to emulate.
Being honest and direct when something isn't good is also a great trait to emulate.
Demanding people do their best is another great trait to emulate.
Being a jerk (at least under certain circumstances) is orthogonal and unrelated.
Unfortunately far too many people mistake correlation for causation and think being a demanding jerk is the key to success. First: you are no Steve Jobs. Second: that isn't what made him successful.
(Being direct and brutally honest can also come off as being a jerk. We have lots of pressure to be positive / supportive and avoid social conflict. It is always easier to say "that's great" or "nice job" than give actual constructive feedback, especially when the recipients are likely to be defensive about it. It is critical for startups to avoid this and be brutally honest with themselves about the product!)
Being successful does not excuse being a jerk and people behaviours/relationships are not to be mistaken with statistical behaviours/relationships (like correlation and causation).
Don't defend him while trying to separate the fact that he was the king of jerks because you have spent big money on his products. Does not work that way. Sorry.
"One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. "
You have to consider his background when you say this. He is super amazing as is, and 10x more compared to how he started.
> Don't defend him while trying to separate the fact that he was the king of jerks because you have spent big money on his products. Does not work that way. Sorry.
TBH, yes. Being direct and abrasive is much easier to handle when it is also combined with usually being right (and a willingness to change when not right).
If I put all my charm on and ask you to postpone your wedding to work for me without giving you anything in return I am not being direct and abrasive. To be clear, steve jobs was not direct and abrasive. He was a jerk.
Many people seem to love to look up to jerks. Look at the current resident of the White House for example. I've seen it in academia as well and I don't understand it. There was someone in the department I got my phd from that I saw be a total jerk to people for no reason and some people still worshiped him.
I suspect you are right- this is actually what's at work. If you are willing to be a jerk you can get people to follow you. It's been a real eye-opener learning this, and I've been alive for a while.
I don't know. That alpha male stuff is mostly bull. And It isn't like all people who are assholes and have people look up to them are actually good or "alpha" in any way. And why do some people look at people like this and say, "fuck that guy?"
Yes, I think he was successful even though he was a jerk from time to time. That trait surely cost him some years. But it also shows how smart he must have been to compensate for that.
I think his success gave him a shield from consequences, so it was easy for him to become a jerk. It's the same theory as the reason that the most attractive people are often jerks. No one is willing to push back.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion and I’m not purporting this as fact, since folks don’t know the difference these days.
Based on his reactions to social situations, I truly believe he was on the autism spectrum, and that he suffered from lifelong reactive attachment disorder. To some degree, I can understand the disdain others feel for him, but I also can’t fully understand it either. It’s not like anyone was suckered into Apple not knowing how he was. I feel that if you signed up to work there, you were signing up for his uncompromising vision. People with uncompromising visions are a lot like him from my observation.
Why is anything you just asserted any more valid than someone claiming that being a jerk is useful trait in becoming successful in business? Just because you used 'orthogonal' in a fun context doesn't mean you've given evidence that your assertion is valid.
It might well be useful. You'll get challenged a lot less if people fear you and your power. But that doesn't mean it's necessary, or even that it's not counterproductive to greater success. Even in the post, Carmack alludes to a couple battle he lost with Steve where Carmack's view was eventually vindicated.
By the way, you criticize the previous commenter's assertion, but you haven't provided any rationale on why they might be mistaken.
Not OP, and even though I agree with them (that it _is_ orthogonal), I think the burden of proof should be with the original claimer, rather than the refuter needing to prove a negative.
I kind of agree, but it's really just a discussion, which I feel has a lower bar than a formal debate. If the refuter thought the argument was weak, they could have simply responded with their point of view and some evidence, rather than complaining. It's not like the OP was making claims on hidden truths.
>By the way, you criticize the previous commenter's assertion, but you haven't provided any rationale on why they might be mistaken.
Fine. John Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, Steve Cohen, Bill Gross, LBJ, Larry Ellison, Pablo Escobar, Donald Trump, Bo Xilai, Harvey Weinstein, Vladamir Putin. And those are just a small fraction of the HUGE assoles. Not even run of the mill assholes like Jobs.
Recent history (and ancient history) is filled with successful assholes. So, my rationale that it's not something that can be asserted without evidence is simply the prevalence. Which, to be honest, probably didn't need to be said. This is common knowledge.
I wonder if it has something to do with stress and being highly involved in a subject.
Let's say I get involved in a pet project, put lots of bloody time on it, and get involved on it mentally. I can become a jerk when someone criticize it.
Taking critics is good. But it is very hard when you put lots of effort. Steve Jobs did put lots of work into Apple. That could made some of his reactions a backfire that people perceived badly.
I don't think its so much that he's a jerk - it's just that he did not try to hide it. He's a smart guy - he could have covered it all up - and there are plenty of people who do.
As an aside, surely a person of Carmack's stature and knowledge would have a dedicated blog. I have to wonder if his decision to post so many of these wonderful stories on Facebook might be due to some "pressure" from his employer.
Years ago, I felt burned when I wrote several articles for #AltDevBlogADay, and they vanished. I have much more confidence that what I write on FB won't vanish. I agree it isn't a great platform for writing, but I only write public long-form things a few times year, so I don't feel like going to another platform for it.
> I have much more confidence that what I write on FB won't vanish
But it's already not very accessible (almost vanished) without a facebook account. I couldn't find an index to other writings (in fact I didn't come up with a google query to find any of your other writings). I like these stories. Thank you.
I specifically remember your quote "It is always better to not have a problem than to mitigate it" from the "Latency Mitigation Strategies" post on #AltDevBlogADay. It was so poignant to me that I wrote it on a post-it and stuck it to my monitor, where it remained for several years thereafter. Bummer that that content is no longer available (although I found a mirror of that particular post here: https://www.wired.com/2013/02/john-carmacks-latency-mitigati...)
I sincerely wish you would put also this outside of Facebook. Anyone who doesn't have a Facebook account or is not logged in would have a really terrible experience viewing this page and reading it. Facebook is very hostile to user experience on this matter, occupying a large amount of screen space for its own banner and making it difficult to read, unlike any other large platform I have seen. I urge you to check this out for yourself. I believe that history and heritage like this shouldn't be subjected to such obnoxious schemes and experiences.
If longevity is your only concern, you could create a blog on Wordpress.com (which has been around longer) and pay about $20 or so a year to have your own domain as well.
Looks like the m.facebook.com link is a bit less annoying, though it also has the Login/Join popover. On a desktop browser, reading public posts (and pages) is very painful, with nearly one third of the screen always occupied by the Login/Join popover that also makes navigation difficult.
[This is easier to understand through direct experience.]
Right, I was on desktop, but I missed that the link above was to the mobile version (m.facebook), which did not had the login popover, which is very annoying on the desktop version.
Maybe someone will write a metablogging platform that posts to WordPress, Facebook, Twitter (in multiple tweets!), Instagram, etc. all with one button. RAIC, redundant array of inexpensive content.
Actually, I'd be surprised if this didn't already exist.
Hey John, thanks for Doom and Quake. I had lots of fun, and you and Abrash introduced me to 3D rendering techniques and advanced assembly programming techniques for which I am grateful since those skills put a little bread on the table long, long ago.
Would you ever team up with Romero to make another game? I'd love to see your guys' take on a battle royale game. I'm having lots of fun with PUBG, but a game like that needs your engine optimization-fu.
Several of the anecdotes are about not doing what Jobs wanted him to. Zuck doesn't hold a candle to Jobs' force of personality. I don't know if Carmack has FU money, but if he decides to part with Facebook, he'll have three job offers before he's out of the building.
The only plausible explanation is that Carmack writes on Facebook out of his own free will.
From the 2013 Quakecon keynote (The somewhat famous "Carmack uses Haskell" one):
"The rocketry has always been a negotiation with my wife, understandably so, where. She has always insisted I not be one of those celebrities that squanders all of their fortune being high on the hill and then being penniless some day, so, rocketry has always had this carved out area, where, "this is John's crazy money" while "All of this is to make sure the family is well taken care of and John's not going to be begging for work some time." But I basically expended my crazy money on Armadillo. So I don't expect to see any rockets in the real near future."
I'm not sure that's evidence that he still has that kind of wealth. To quote Elon Musk: "If you want to make a small fortune in the launch vehicle business, start with a large one."
Armadillo Aerospace went into "hibernation" in 2013 and sold off its assets.
1) id Software sold to Zenimax for $150 million. [1] John Carmack was a large shareholder at the time and claimed a year ago that Zenimax still owes him another $22.5 million. Adrian Carmack owned 41% of id when he was fired & bought out of the company in 2005. From that ownership consolidation, it's very likely John had 1/3 or more of the company when it was sold to Zenimax.
2) Oculus was purchased for $2 billion. $400m in cash and 23 million shares of Facebook. Those shares would now be worth $4.2 billion. Carmack owned a position in Oculus pre the Andreessen Horowitz investment. A 1% stake would have been a substantial windfall.
3) He earned a large amount of money from being an owner of id Software from the Wolfenstein days forward.
According to Wired, he put $8m into Armadillo before closing it down. The id sale alone covers that cost at least twice over after taxes.
I have a vague recollection that he lost his shirt at some point, possibly building rockets. Possibly there was something in Masters of Doom[1]? I don't have it near me, so can't check.
1: Biography of id software, obviously heavily featuring Carmack. Highly recommended.
One of Carmack's driving visions is creating the metaverase. VR and huge scale computing networks are part of that, and Facebook has some expertise as both.
This is not me inferring Carmack's wish to work there are much as it is just assembling things he has tweeted in the past.
I doubt Carmack could be pressured into using a particular platform, but either way it's a bit of a disappointment to see a living legend use common FB as a platform for blogging.
It reminds me of a joke comic that praises "Don Knuth's Big Dummies Guide to Visual Basic", "All practical examples you can use! No theoretical stuff! --Don"
It's not quite "DOOM's John Carmack's latest l33test Farmville hacks and tricks," but it's a little closer than I'd like it to be.
I don't believe it's a ploy. I think John's just doing what he feels to be the right thing given that he is — at least to the audience he writes to — a high-ranking employee of Facebook.
I couldn't even tell you if he even thought that deeply about it. He possibly just thought "I can just write what I need to here, this works" and immediately considered it a solved problem.
I'm not sure what you mean. You mean they don't have a choice in the design? Because there were plenty of alternatives (MySpace). Facebook just provided a better experience.
Facebook's software might be better, their uptake was better, but that doesn't mean their site is more visually appealing. It just means it's more effective.
nabla9 kinda sidles up to this, but some will argue that John Carmack was one of, if not the, original bloggers.
He used his .plan file on his unix account to post long musings on things he was concerned about in an era when running your own website was scary, or at least too trendy for people.
The problem with maintaining a blog indefinitely is the same problem I see with musicians. The really profound stuff you come up with shows up at a slow rate. After ten years of obscurity you have years of material stored up. But you write what you know for a while and you don't know that much more than you did when you started. What goes on your 2nd or 3rd album? New good stuff, or the things that weren't good enough for your debut? If you're smart you stop for a while until you have enough good stuff again.
For those who are unable/unwilling to access Facebook:
John Carmack
Steve Jobs
My wife once asked me “Why do you drop what you are doing when Steve Jobs asks you to do something? You don’t do that for anyone else.”
It is worth thinking about.
As a teenage Apple computer fan, Jobs and Wozniak were revered figures for me, and wanting an Apple 2 was a defining characteristic of several years of my childhood. Later on, seeing NeXT at a computer show just as I was selling my first commercial software felt like a vision into the future. (But $10k+, yikes!)
As Id Software grew successful through Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, the first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer. It turned out to be genuinely valuable for our software development, and we moved the entire company onto NeXT hardware.
We loved our NeXTs, and we wanted to launch Doom with an explicit “Developed on NeXT computers” logo during the startup process, but when we asked, the request was denied.
Some time after launch, when Doom had begun to make its cultural mark, we heard that Steve had changed his mind and would be happy to have NeXT branding on it, but that ship had sailed. I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs.
Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally.
When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform.
I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve.
Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.”
It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.
But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone.
When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas.
I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age.
I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method.
My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity.
One time, my wife, then fiancé, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote.
When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo.
I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with:
“I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.”
That goes a long way, and nobody said a thing after that.
When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities.
I never got brought into the fold, but I was excited when the iPhone actually did see the light of day. A giant (for the time) true color display with a GPU! We could do some amazing things with this!
Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the some keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”.
After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!
Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine.
I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him.
I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”.
People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn’t want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that “Steve appreciates vigorous conversation”.
Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn’t appreciate that.
The Steve Jobs “hero / shithead” rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready.
I wound up writing several successful iPhone apps on the side (all of which are now gone due to dropping 32 bit support, which saddens me), and I had many strong allies inside Apple, but I was on the outs with Steve.
The last iOS product I worked on was Rage for iOS, which I thought set a new bar for visual richness on mobile, and also supported some brand new features like TV out. I heard that it was well received inside Apple.
I was debriefing the team after the launch when I got a call. I was busy, so I declined it. A few minutes later someone came in and said that Steve was going to call me. Oops.
Everyone had a chuckle about me “hanging up on Steve Jobs”, but that turned out to be my last interaction with him.
As the public story of his failing health progressed, I started several emails to try to say something meaningful and positive to part on, but I never got through them, and I regret it.
I corroborate many of the negative character traits that he was infamous for, but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe.
> Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote.
When I start getting a certain vibe from some people, I start countering requests with similar but slightly smaller requests. Amazing how so many people can demand another's time and resources but refuse to return anything themselves.
Often even making that straight-faced, respectful, comparable request will end a relationship. It's sad but it must be done.
>Often even making that straight-faced, respectful, comparable request will end a relationship. It's sad but it must be done.
This is the best way to ferret out narcissists. You cut ties, but they don't necessarily hate you. They just forget you exist. At least until they need something from you again.
I once had a co-worker who was more senior than me on our project (the business lead (I was software lead)) tell me that I was needed in a "very important meeting" during lunch the next day.
Unfortunately, I had plans to meet with a friend for lunch - and that friend was moving away the following afternoon. When I told my coworker that I was not going to attend the meeting during that time under any circumstances he lost his shit ...and I calmly and sternly told him he can take it up with my boss.
I walked away from that conversation thinking "well shit, it was fun while it lasted", Surprisingly my co-worker cooled down, dealt with the meeting situation, and never said a word to my boss. To boot, he _never_ lost his shit like that with me again and we've had a pretty good friendship ever since.
I do think an ethical debate exists. To me the question is whether John published this purely to get his word out, or if he did it as an agent of Facebook to increase traffic and thereby ad revenue to Facebook. I believe it is the former, in which case I haven’t done anything wrong. But that could just be my moral compass baising towards anything I do.
That's not how copyright works. Unless you have his permission, you really don't have any right to repost his blog post in it's entirety. If you were engaging it criticism or some other kind of fair use, that would be fine, but you can't just assume that the copyright owner is ok with how you're using their copyright unless you asked them or they gave everyone permission.
We're having some copyright discussion about reposting John Carmack's "blog" post on HACKER News.
Look, for all you that care that Mr. Carmack might mind; send him a link to the post and if he wants to DMCA it, or ask Dang or Scott to take it down, he can.
I'm personally thankful I don't have to click a link to a tracking-ridden, third-party site that may or may not have the content originally linked two weeks later.
> site that may or may not have the content originally linked two weeks later.
I have a handful of web personal projects which I built and maintain just for fun (no ads on them), pretty light on the incoming traffic, to put it nicely, but a couple of days ago one of them received a spike in traffic originating from Facebook. But looking at the referral got me into a black hole, i.e. the infamous l.php FB page which doesn’t tell me anything about which page linked to my website, in other words totally opposed to the original idea behind the www.
Like I said, I maintain those projects just for fun and I was really looking forward to having a conversation about said project that got linked to with whomever decided to follow said link, but because you can’t peak at all behind FB’s wall that meant that that idea was dead from the very start.
The "Hacker" in HN is not "someone who breaks the law with a computer" but "someone who does clever things."
I'm not the copyright holder, I don't really care in the grand scheme of things. I'm just posting factual information about copyright. If you want to dispute that information, that's fine.
As Stallman says, there is no such thing as „intellectual property”, at least not in law. There is copyright, patents, trademarks, etc., but „intellectual property” is an abstract invention.
> As Stallman says, there is no such thing as „intellectual property”, at least not in law. There is copyright, patents, trademarks, etc., but „intellectual property” is an abstract invention.
Copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. are also abstract inventions. So are most other rights and privileges protected by law.
"Intellectual property" is just an umbrella term that rightly recognizes the similarities between copyright/patent/trademark. There may be no legal definition for the term, but nobody's confused about what it means.
> rightly recognizes the similarities between copyright/patent/trademark.
Can you elaborate on those similarities? Stallman, in his essay[1], states some important differences. He makes a coherent argument. So what similarities here are "rightly" recognised? I'm not saying you're wrong, but "nobody's confused" is not really a complete counter-argument.
"These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.
For instance, copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of expression of a work. Patent law was intended to promote the publication of useful ideas, at the price of giving the one who publishes an idea a temporary monopoly over it—a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others."
I think the term "IP" is meant to highlight the one big similarity they share. We recognize that this thing, which is more of an idea than an object, belongs to an entity (person/company/government/whatever), and that entity has control over some of the finer details of how that thing is used. That's even pretty readily apparent in the term itself: "intellectual property", property that is more of a thought than a thing. Maybe it's a bit euphemistic, and to someone with Stallman's beliefs, the propagation of the term probably seems more than a bit dystopian, but it's still a useful umbrella.
> How many cases has SCOTUS taken over the last decade dealing with hard problems about deciding who owns a physical object?
I don't see the validity of this argument. Look at the number of freedom of religion lawsuits which have come to the US Supreme Court. That doesn't mean that people don't have a reasonable and practical understanding of the topic for most cases.
Going to your question, one sprang quickly to mind, and I'm not even a lawyer. Kelo v. City of New London, concerning the use of eminent domain. The holding was "The governmental taking of property from one private owner to give to another in furtherance of economic development constitutes a permissible "public use" under the Fifth Amendment."
Here are some of the physical property cases from the last 10 years (based on the list at Wikipedia; many of which are not described, so there are likely more).
There's Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, "holding that it was possible for government-induced, temporary flooding to constitute a "taking" of property".
There's Marvin Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States which "held that a railroad right-of-way granted under the General Railroad Right-of-Way Act of 1875 is an easement. Therefore, when a railroad abandons such a right-of-way, the easement disappears, and the land owner regains unburdened use of the land."
In Horne v. United States Department of Agriculture, No. 14-275, "The Fifth Amendment requires that the Government pay just compensation when it takes personal property, just as when it takes real property."
In Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection the Supreme Court addressed a question concerning "littoral property owners' rights to future accretions and to contact the water".
Does that mean that no one understands the laws regarding ownership and control of physical objects?
I think what you say is a "case on strategic grain reserve regulation" is Horn v. USDA. It concerns raisins, not grain. It concerns the ability of the Raisin Administrative Committee to take physical property in order to enforce regulations.
> Chief Justice Roberts began his analysis by tracing the history of personal property from the protection of farmers’ corn in the 1215 Magna Carta,[15] to the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties,[16] to a 1778 editorial by John Jay.[17] Chief Justice Roberts concluded that personal property has not been given any less protection than real property for at least 800 years and that the physical appropriation of property gives rise to a per se taking.
Previously, "the Ninth Circuit found that there had been no taking because the takings clause protects personal property, like raisins, less than real property."
Thus, while the case was a consequence of a regulatory decision, the holding establishes that personal property and real property have equal protections.
In your [1] you objected that you were only talking about "physical personal property", and not real estate or other forms of property. However, as you can see in the above quote, the taking of the raisins was the taking of personal property.
Thus, even if you take all the other cases away, there's still at least one case which fits your requirement.
Concerning your synopsis of Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, I do not see how you can summarize it as a case on environmental regulation.
The owners of beachfront property wanted to continue as owners of beachfront property and argued that the construction of a new public beach between their land and the water was the taking of part of their property right. The FL Supreme Court said there was no perpetual right for beachfront property to touch the water, and the Supreme Court affirmed.
The owners also said that they had a "right to receive accretions to their property", that would be taken by the creation of the beach. Again, that Supreme Court found otherwise.
There is no mention of any environmental regulation in the 08–1151 brief.
In your [1] you assert that I somehow knew you were only talking about "physical personal property". Your leadup to it was: "actual property law ... who owns a physical object".
Black's Law, second edition, defines "property" as:
> Rightful dominion over external objects; ownership; the unrestricted and exclusive right to a thing; the right to dispose of the substance of a thing in every legal way, to possess it, to use it and to exclude every one else from interfering with it.
and further distinguishes between absolute property, common property, literary property, personal property, private property, real property, and more. Private property, for example, is of a tangible nature, and includes houses and lands.
So I think you can forgive me for reading your description of "property" and "physical object" as to include private property such as real estate.
I still do not agree with the validity of your argument. Given the number of freedom of religion laws which have come before the Supreme Court in the last 10 years, does that mean that no one has a reasonably practical understanding of the freedom of religion?
I still think your premise - that looking at Supreme Court cases to establish what is well known - is bogus. You have not responded to my counter-example based on the freedom of religion.
The rest of what I wrote is to get you to say what it is you mean, since it certainly wasn't clear from your original text that you were only referring to personal property rights, and specifically excluding real estate. Narrow down the topic enough and of course there won't be any Supreme Court cases, so I that's surely not what you mean to do.
You have further misrepresented court cases, seemingly to make it appear as if the findings are not all, or mostly, related to property law.
In addition, you somehow believe that my citations from Wikipedia (or one link away) are equivalent to a Lexis-Nexis search. I presume that is satire.
I see no reason to find people who group all of my examples under "property law" since I have no problems with assuming that some of them are mistaken. But it seems that you think that none of them fall under "property law."
For Horne v. USDA I found http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/04/argument-preview-regulatio... which says "The Hornes have drawn the support of the Federal Circuit Bar Association and property law scholars, worried over the impact on “takings” law generally of treating personal property differently from real property;". Therefore, that's one citation which places Horne v. USDA in the category of "property law."
> The dispute between the Roberts opinion and Justice Sotomayor’s dissent focused mainly on the meaning of a 1942 decision by the Court, and on whether railroad right-of-way ownership disputes should be treated by their own set of property laws rather than general property law principles.
> He had Scalia on his side almost all the way (at least after the Justice’s initial taunt). But he and government lawyer Yang had to cope, repeatedly, with Justice Breyer’s sometimes awkward efforts to remember the phrases he had learned as a student of property law.
If you don't like scotusblog site, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, as part of the progression of this case, also quotes refers to "property law" in https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/12-1173 :
> On the other hand, the Cato Institute argues on behalf of the Trust that arbitrary changes in the principles of property law ultimately undermine landowners’ right to be secure in their property. ...
> The Northwest Legal Foundation (“NLF”) argues on behalf of the Trust that, under the common principles of property law, property is never impliedly conveyed; it is only expressly conveyed. The NLF argues that, because the Trust’s land patent does not contain an expressly reserved reversionary interest, the United States retaining a reversionary interest in the right-of-way is tantamount to a taking by the government. As such, the NLF argues that, without the procedural safeguards of government takings under a doctrine like eminent domain, allowing the United States to retain a reversionary interest, here, undermines the principles of property law and greatly expands the United States’ takings powers.
Thus, two of my examples do fall under the 'umbrella term 'property law'".
You don't need an encyclopedic knowledge of the full breadth of IP law to know what someone means when they say "IP law".
Nobody is confused about what is being referred to when someone says "IP", except people like Stallman (and maybe you) who are trying to score gotchas by pretending you can't talk about complex things in simplified terms.
It was a loaded question, but that doesn't mean that the post was necessarily unbiased. It could have been an attempt to get Zuckerberg to like him, say. Not a likely possibility, but one nonetheless.
People are fluid and dynamic. It's easy for anecdotes to get out and become solidified, but the reality is that psychology is rarely static, and different people interpret things in different ways.
Expressive, objective, and committed people tend to assume that their inner sense of security and self-assurance is universal, and don't understand when people get offended at one-off comments, or associate a negative comment constrained within context A as something broadly/universally applicable (e.g., "This is crap" referring to thing A does not necessarily have any bearing on thing B, thing C, etc., even if they're from the same source).
Personally, I think this is the reason that many successful people get labeled "assholes" by people who are less successful. The insecure take offense from little things and memorialize and repeat and nurse them as justifications for their own insecurities, whereas the supposed "offender" hardly realizes anyone has a problem.
You can say it is bad not to elevate Everyone Else's Feelings to #1 priority if you want, but again, it only further solidifies the personality types. The insecure fret over their own insecurities, and the secure and self-assured don't take criticism personally, and focus on getting something real done.
The most concise, yet illuminating description I have heard about ongoing relationships with Jobs is something similar to "dealing with Khrushchev, but without the shoe antics", i.e. that, to him, everything was a zero-sum game, all the time.
All of those CEOs are famous (and more) for being assholes. What made Steve Jobs different is that he also inspired a bizarre sort of love -- People want to be Gates/Zuck/Bezos, but no one dreams of working for them. And no one has a religious zeal for evangelizing their those CEOs' transparent marketing lies like they do for Jobs'.
Steve Jobs and John Carmack are very similar people in a lot of ways.
They're both from lower-class backgrounds, incredibly smart, had serious personality problems as children that could have landed them in prison as adults.
They're both entirely "self-made" and spent their entire lives with (almost) singular focus, to the point of becoming the best in the world at what they chose to work on.
My impression is that John Carmack has avoided being CEO during his career because he knows it would involve him becoming more like Steve Jobs than he wants to be.
Could John Carmack have made an even bigger positive impact in the world if he had gone in Steve Jobs' direction? How much would he have had to change as a person?
I suspect a lot of people would come think of him as an "asshole" if he chose to get his hands dirty with the work of a CEO. Maybe the world would be even richer than it is now but at some cost to John Carmack and (perhaps) others.
In any case, they're both beautiful examples of the greatness and weakness of the partially-evolved primate we call Human.
Citation needed on Steve being lower class. Lower compared to what?
Based on the little I know about how he grew up, it seems he was more middle class than lower, and also happened to grow up in the best place to grow up to rise with the computer industry. Middle class kids in Iowa don't live 20 minutes from Stanford, for example. So, I'd say "middle class with unusually good opportunities".
I'm really not trying to say he didn't accomplish a lot, because he did, but let's not pretend he was seriously disadvantaged.
Carmack seems to have more claim to being disadvantaged, although I have no idea if he is interested in making such a claim. According to some articles I just read he was arrested while trying to steal his first computer, and spent a year in juvenile prison, which generally doesn't happen to affluent people.
"""
... stereotypical geek aspects to my life growing up - phreaking, hacking (nobody called it "cracking" back then), rockets, bombs, and thermite (sometimes in not-so-smart combinations), sci-fi, comic books, D&D, arcades, etc.
I was sort of an amoral little jerk when I was young. I was arrogant about being smarter than other people, but unhappy that I wasn't able to spend all my time doing what I wanted. I spent a year in a juvenile home for a first offence[1] after an evaluation by a psychologist went very badly.
"""
[1] Per wikipedia, the offense was: burning through a window, grand theft of computers, and then presenting as autistic to the psychiatric evaluator.
From my outsider view, I get the impression that Carmack "grew up" into a relative well-adjusted adult with respect for other humans, but Steve Jobs never did.
> Citation needed on Steve being lower class. Lower compared to what?
They very clearly struggled when it came to money. Somewhere between lower and middle, is most likely. Based on the available history, Paul & Clara Jobs pushed their meagre finances to the limit to try to give Steve better opportunities, including moving to Los Altos because Steve was being tormented where they had been living.
"Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955. Schieble gave her baby up to Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class couple in San Francisco. Paul, a high school dropout who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, made his living as a debt collector, a repo man and a machinist. Clara worked as a payroll clerk at Varian Associates, one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley."
"When Jobs was three, Paul moved the family from San Francisco to Mountain View, an unsophisticated town of tract houses and apricot orchards just south of Palo Alto."
"Paul tried fixing up old cars and dabbling in real estate, but money always seemed to elude him. In the fourth grade, Steve's teacher, Imogene Hill, asked the class, "What is it in this universe that you don't understand?" When it came to Steve's turn to answer, his reply was heartbreaking: 'I don't understand why all of a sudden we're so broke.'"
This comment seriously makes me question what you think lower-class is or is like. The comment comes off as tone-deaf.
Neither of them are "self-made", they both had crazy access to electronics that hardly anyone else did at the time. They both did amazing things but, you're hand-waving away their real history for some "bootstrap-y" American success story.
Also, John Carmack WAS an asshole at id. Read Masters Of Doom sometime when you get a chance, loads of hubris and broken friendships in there.
1. Being lower-class in America means things like your parents are not well educated, they don't have any significant amount of savings, you attend public school, you aren't prepped for college, your parents can't pay for college, your parents can't support you as an adult, etc. They're not middle-class, and not upper-class, so they're lower-class.
2. Bill Gates parents were very upper-class, he attended expensive private school, was pushed into Harvard, and he had exclusive access to brand new computers that almost no children did at the time. Jobs/Carmack had no access similar to computers at private school.
3. I've read Masters of Doom and don't think any reasonable person would describe him as "an asshole" at all. Defining someone by their flaws says more about the definer than the defined.
I have come to the realization that, if you are a CEO, you'll have to be an asshole to some people. Maybe not all people all the time, but just enough that you'll accumulate bad 'quotes' over time.
You are, after all, supposed to steer a company. Not all people will be aboard, you don't have all the time in the world to reason with them, even if you would like to.
It might be even worse than seeming like an asshole sometimes, it might actually make you anti-social the way being a VC or police officer does for most people.
It could be that having thousands of negative interactions with people tends to damage your personality in some ways. People who actively choose not to be CEO, like John Carmack, probably sense this effect and want to avoid it.
Some people might be better than others at coping with this. Steve Jobs might've been really good at this, or really bad, it's difficult to determine.
"On a cold winter day, Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and headed out into the Madison snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars caked in frost, trees dangling ice. Carmack endured the chill because he had no car; he'd sold the MGB long before. It was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero's antics out of his mind. He was on a mission.
Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier's check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs's earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack."