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> Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only
by thecompilr 9y ago
> Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this café, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.
Wow, I don't know why but this explanation blows me away. So simple and yet so accurate.
- Kevin_S 9y agoI always get this feeling as an excel power user
- pazimzadeh 9y agoI wonder if Steve saw this lecture by Richard Feynman, where Feynman uses a similar metaphor to explain how computers work.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoI absolutely love how Feynman speaks and writes about computers. Most of the time he's criticizing them for their ability to entice you to waste time by seeing what you can do with them. So, I second. Great anecdote!
- justonepost 9y agoProbably, great artists steal.
- wdr1 9y agolink?
- bklaasen 9y agoMost likely this one: https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA Check out Feynman's very cool "Thinking Machines" t-shirt. He was working with Danny Hillis at the time.
- eradicatethots 9y agoI don’t know, should it be special to be able to explain things? I think it should actually be normal
- Sangermaine 9y agoMost people are actually pretty bad at explaining things in a clear, concise, helpful way, very often especially people well-versed in the field they are trying to explain. Communicating complex concepts to non-experts is indeed a fairly rare skill.
- PoachedSausage 9y agoI once had a job interview that had a task where only one person was allowed to view an object made of random Lego bricks, they would communicate the structure to another person, that person would communicate it to a builder. The idea being to replicate the object. It's not easy.
- brianwawok 9y agoXYZ coords done.
- scryder 9y agoThis idea you had, interestingly, has nasty traps. 1. You need to specify an “origin” which is (0,0). This is hard because there is more than one good choice (base or top of a brick?), the structure base may be more than a single brick wide, and you still need an orientation for the base bricks relative to the table, since if they’re at an angle, it isn’t the same. 2. This fails, or at least complicates, on structures that are not fully connected, like 2 towers next to each other. XYZ doesn’t have tools for two towers, rotated, at an angle not parallel to the table. 3. You’re fucked on units if there are any “small” half bricks in the structure, which are common in lego sets. 4. It’s not human optimized. If you forget the origin (easy in a big structure, you fail. It’s not a bad idea, for some forms of the problem, but this underconsideration is why explaining things is hard.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThis is sort of how I was introduced to programming in 1996. The teacher told the class she needed instructions to make a PB&J sandwich, and basically kept interpreting things incorrectly until everything was super precise.
- overcast 9y agoThat PB&J coding lesson has been used forever. It's a good learning tool.
- agumonkey 9y agoJobs wasn't Woz level, but he was no fool either.
- IBM 9y agoJobs was on another plane entirely. One where having more than technical acumen was necessary to actually have impact in the world.
- agumonkey 9y agoI understand but it's easy to imagine jobs only as a salesman that just grabs others ideas blindly.
- panic 9y agoMost salespeople take a product that exists and convince you to buy it. Steve took a product that didn't exist and convinced you to build it. His talent was organizing people around a common vision, not just selling the result.
- jjeaff 9y agoI think more importantly was getting together the people to sell it. Much or even all of the product apple had built were already products. But Steve was able to package it and spin it in a way that made it exciting and must have. One of their watershed products was the iPod. I had a several mp3 players before the iPod was created. But apple made them cool and thus mainstream.
- noonespecial 9y agoI had them too. They all sucked. Apple didn't make them cool, Apple made them work (in a human way that the others just didn't). That made them cool.
- digi_owl 9y agoTrue, he was no fool. What he was, was a wizard at spin doctoring. I have seen his kind in action in lesser circumstances, as they can pick up an idea, any idea, and then spin round and present it as their own without really knowing the depth of the topic.
- kutkloon7 9y agoAs much as I hate Steve Jobs, I like too like this explanation very much.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]