I've wondered how the world would be different right now if Jobs was still alive.
Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit that is going on in America, and he would have vindictively used all of his resources as the largest shareholder of Disney and CEO of Apple to fight it.
Jobs was obviously not the greatest guy, and harmed a lot of people around him but it's unlikely that he would be seen within a mile of the current President and certainly wouldn't have been photographed in the WH handing him a tacky gold and glass paper weight like Cook.
Steve was a real, well known, and well documented person with many surviving first-hand witnesses. In his biography, for example, it mentions him pressuring Clinton to tell the truth.
I think it's disingenuous to map one's insight into Steve to an insulting comic about a fictional character.
> it mentions him pressuring Clinton to tell the truth.
Truth about what? Did he also pressure the CCP to tell the truth about Tiananmen Square after he moved manufacturing there?
Virtue signaling to the press in a democratic country is cheap when your company is not at stake and politicians won't retaliate if you run your mouth. He wouldn't try that with the CCP and not with Trump today.
He would have understood the potential of LLMs straight away. If he would have delivered a successful product no one knows but 100% would have understood how LLMs could become another interface to computers.
I think his pitch would have been like garage band but for making apps “now anyone can make an app” feels very Jobsian.
I suspect Jobs would have held off for a few years just to see where the road is going before making a move. In that sense, Apples current lack of real dedicated to move into the LLM space has become a happy accident. They have avoided the hype cycle and the potential blow back once the more exuberant part of the AI craze fade away.
Why are you sure it was an accident? Couldn't the people who rose up the ranks around his orbit have learned the right lessons, and this having been very intentional?
I don’t think so, I think he would have thought Apple could deliver a better user experience (LLM Siri) and gone into it whole heartedly.
My perspective is that Apple doesn’t hold off to see what the market is doing. They hold off until technology can create a viable, usable product (iPhone was ahead of anything, Vision Pro less impactful but similarly advanced, iPod was smaller than any hdd based mp3 player - just some examples where they pushed the boundaries).
They 100% missed the transformer being a technology that could create a viable product, and I don’t think Steve Jobs would have missed that.
He for sure would loathe their current state though. They are a perfectionist's nightmare and detrimental to many brands. He wouldn't even allow Apple^Red for his friend's charity- there's no way he would let AI slop come from Apple products.
Come on. ZFS was created by Sun and opened up in 2005. Oracle took over Sun in 2010, and Jobs died in 2011. The relationship between Jobs and Ellison has nothing to do with it.
Steve met once with Obama and complained about the fact Obama did not ask for the meeting personally, that it was too hard to build factories in America, and that teachers unions were kneecapping the American education system.
All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
> “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.”
Yeah, we're talking about the guy who leased a new car every 6 months in order to avoid having to put a license plate on it, and then parked it in handicap spots, right? Absolute same "rules for thee, not for me" energy
>All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
Yep, this. We're talking about a guy who basically abandoned his biological daughter, had his stuff manufactured by slave labor in factories with suicide nets to save costs and increase shareholder value, and GP imagines Steve Jobs as this leftist freedom fighter that would fight Trump instead of work together with him to increase profits even further. People's delul, historical revisionism of people who were just cutthroat unscrupulous businessmen at the end of the day, saddens me.
We can agree has was good at business, without trying to whitewash him as some humanitarian saint.
Don't worship people you never knew personally as some sort of heroes because you never know. For all we know he could have been a client on some else's island, like Steven Hawking.
There's always plenty of pushback everywhere, all the social media apps are full of critics and hate on anyone who does anything in the world mercilessly. I like coming here to see people admire other people who worked hard to create something that made society better, and not spend as much time criticizing every little wrong thing they did.
Are you declaring Steve Jobs a God? Did he create all the apps you're addicted to or a wonderful tool that lets you access almost all of humanities history, can connect you with loved ones across the world in real-time, play music, movies, it's a compass, a map, etc. You can use a hammer to create or kill, and you blame the blacksmith for the dead.
You use slave labor everyday, so you don't have much wiggle room to judge.
'Tech hero worship' is a gross misrepresentation of my comment and I'm not sure how you could draw that conclusion from a comment that used words like "asshole" and "vindictive" to describe Steve Jobs.
It's easy to be wrong about Jobs, because he was iconoclastic and idiosyncratic. And very very public.
And he did some personally, individually, shameful things. Especially in his 20s when he hadn't learned how to be an adult, much less a billionaire. And the latter protected him from needing to be the former for a while!
But if you believe for a second that Jobs would have tolerated Trump's wholesale ignorance and cruelty, you are making a huge mistake of understanding. That was never in Steve Jobs' personality -- in fact he was very outspoken about the excesses of power over people.
He was an anti-establishment Californian by birth, not a xenophobic RealAmerican™. These streams do not cross. If you do not understand the difference, you cannot possibly understand Steve Jobs.
This comment confuses me. You call Jobs idiosyncratic, but then try to backwards-justify his political stance with stereotypes about anti-establishment politics and Californian ideals. What makes you convinced that he'd resist neoreactionary politicking any better than Cook?
Jobs was fickle, I agree with you there. I just don't think that a fickle iconoclast would last more than two weeks fighting against Trump, especially if he was threatened with an FTC antitrust probe. The only difference with Cook is that he's not as coy, and recognized that there was no way for a monopoly like Apple to fight the fed and win. Trump can disembowel Apple's profit margins, and neither Cook nor Jobs nor Jesus of Nazarath could convince the shareholders that morality is worth more than $AAPL. 2016 Jobs would be retired by the board of directors before he even threatened to make a conscientious objection, reality distortion be damned.
I have no love for the sitting administration, but it is a fantasy to pretend that a FAANG business could resist federal coercion. Just because Apple enjoys a moral halo-effect does not mean they're better positioned than Microsoft or AWS to do the "right" thing. Apple's inability to prosecute NSO Group is a recurring example of how heavily the US can muzzle them.
Which claim? That Jobs was not a monster or pedophile? I'm on absolutely solid ground there.
Assuming you mean whether Jobs would intensely dislike Trump, then -- what can I say? You clearly don't know anything about the guy and that's fine. But if you doubt it, you're wrong.
We were far from personal confidantes, but I had several candid conversations with him over the decades. His personal politics were never in doubt, or far from the surface. He held a special revulsion for warmongering, dishonest, scapegoating, and authoritarian-leaning US candidates and administrations.
He was always at least a bit frustrated with US economic policy. He would abhor Trump for all of the above reasons and more.
I'd say that personality-wise, you probably don't know Jobs well enough to serve as a character witness. I'm not aware of any recorded interview where he explains how far he'd go to defend his business from unfair government treatment. He never saw a preview of the 2016 election or cast a ballot in the vote. He didn't live the interceding years leading up to the election, or form an opinion on the politics dominating the polls.
I think Jobs would have been blindsided by Trump just as much as we all were. On a personal level I can believe that he's offended just like Cook is. But neither Cook nor Jobs' conscience has really ever stopped them from making a profitable business decision that they can take credit for. Even if it means building a meaningless gold trophy or somesuch, to appease the ego in charge.
I agree that he'd have been blindsided like the rest of us. And I agree that he would have put Apple first. That was never a part of my point though.
Jobs had a very strong personality and very strong opinions. Also a good human moral compass, at least in his adulthood.
I admit that I am extrapolating from his thoughts on previous administrations, but I will confidently assert that there is no part of Jobs being that would approve of what's going on today. The man was not ThielMuskAndreesenEllisonEtc. (Someone might point out that he was friends with Larry, which is true, but he did not agree with Larry about some very important things. Jobs was capable of that kind of relationship.)
The degree of appeasement he would be performing on behalf of Apple is a fair subject to contemplate. Whether he'd be besties with Steven Miller and Jeffrey Epstein, is not a reasonable topic to speculate on. The answer is obvious to anyone who knew him at all.
Didn't he buy a bunch of houses in different states so he could be on more organ donor lists than any of us could? I am asking sincerely. Maybe it was a myth.
He would also drive cars without license plates. Despicable man.
He was able to do this by exploiting a loophole in California vehicle law at the time (under California Vehicle Code Section 4456). The rule allowed new vehicles up to six months from the date of sale or lease before permanent license plates were required to be displayed (temporary tags or paper registration might have been involved initially, but no plates needed for that grace period).
Jobs leased identical new Mercedes models every six months through an arrangement with a leasing company. Just before the six-month deadline hit, he would trade in the current car for a brand-new one of the same type. This kept his vehicle perpetually under the six-month threshold, so he never had to attach permanent plates.
All those things may be true but at the end of the day guys like Jobs and Trump are like oil and water personality wise.
Trump would have invariably said some stupid shit about Jobs publicly or to his face privately and Jobs would have never forgot it and would have obsessed with hurting Trump over it.
For better or worse that's just the kind of guy he was.
Did you know him or ever speak with him in person?
I have while working in Apple in a critical engineering group, and the negatives you keep citing seem to have died off in his 20s, at which time they indelibly (deservedly) tainted public perception. the post NeXT 'return' seemed very very different than what you describe, from in person experience.
for the NeXT stage of things --- Luciano Dadda's recent book _Inside NeXT_ is nice for covering at least the hardware, but just not quite the same w/o the personal anecdotes
If we have to rely on the canny benevolence of a random CEO to prevent the world from going to shit, then we truly deserve to live in the shit world. Steve made businesses larger-than-life, and I expect his behavior played no small part in conditioning tech enthusiasts to respond to Trump and Elon's hyperbolic, baseless rhetoric.
Apple has grown quite dramatically in value since his death. Not sure if he would have the leeway to oppose Trump as an officer of a publicly traded company when he's shown to be quite vindictive against companies he doesn't like.
I've been thinking recently about how with the impending demographics crunch hitting a lot of countries soonish you're going to see a sort of day of reckoning for municipalities that were run poorly in the past because people will just move to ones that that don't have horrible budget and infrastructure deficits and the one sthat do will just shrivel up and die.
Tha perpetually increasing population growth is no more and that means no more growing tax base to paper over terrible decisions to pass them onto another generation.
For the first time in a long while we're looking at actual, real selection pressures on municiptalities.
This is what a lot of people don't get. The magic genie that lets you wish for more wishes isn't a a rack of GPUs in a DC somewhere.
It's a domestic robot that can do full maintenance on another domestic robot.
Self replicating machines are the genie that grants you more wishes. They are the genie that can turn that land, energy, and precious metals into copies of themselves.
I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
I like the idea, but I worry about choosing random members of the public when so many people are unprepared for it. Any kind of government made up of "the people" requires that those people be literate, educated, and informed. With things the way they are today I'd worry that your secondary elected legislative body would end up doing everything and you'd either end up with a figurehead who'd be out of their depth and ineffectual or one being used/manipulated.
I could also envision an endless cycle of elections with 75%+ of the population voting "none of the above" because of issues like "Not my personal favorite candidate" or "eats the wrong mustard" or "I hate the idea of government"
How do you expect anyone to take what you just wrote seriously when there's such a blatantly obvious difference in the detectability of the use of these two different products?
what do you mean? if some kid doesn't want to pay attention they can draw doodles, daydream, read a book under the table, talk to other students, and finally ... be on their phone. we did all of these! (played snake on a 3310.)
up to a point the teacher's job is to notice these, and motivate the student to pay attention (report cards, detention, extra homework), or ask for them to be removed from class if they are disruptive, if necessary permanently.
It's just not relevant. When I was in highschool some teachers had a thingy on the wall where you would hang up your cell phone in a pouch. If it wasn't there, you better have a good explanation, or you'll be counted absent.
The solutions are simple and effectively free. That's not the issue. The issue is nobody wants to do the solutions. Schools don't, parents don't, kids don't. Everyone is just lying to themselves.
You can't on one hand claim to care about kids and then on the other dismiss obvious tactics like banning cell phones.
Yes, what you observed is people making unrealistic and disingenuous responses in reply to equally unrealistic and disingenuous reefer madness type propaganda.
What happened is that the people making these disengenuous comments in bad faith did not realize that so many others would watch them and without understanding hte context woudl pick up those same disingenuous arguments and take them as truth.
This is all the long term consequences of allowing Reefer Madness tier propaganda be published and not repudiated immediately.
It's a troll. Just flag it and move on.
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