18 ms·

Woz gave a lecture in one of my classes years ago and I came away impressed. He was obviously a brilliant engineer. "Naivete" is generally used in a negative

• ModernMech 1y ago
  When I was a student, we tried to get him to speak to at our school, but Woz wanted mucho $$$$ to speak. But it seems plenty people will pay what he asks. I guess if my job were to just go around talking about random shit I'm interested in, and I can make $10M doing that, I'd be the happiest person ever too. I don't think it's about naivete. Edit to clarify: I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to get paid, I'm saying his being "the happiest person ever" is directly correlated to his ability to collect millions just shooting the shit in front of a fawning audience.
  • wetpaws 1y ago
    [dead]
  • namrog84 1y ago
    it's a bit of work and effort to give a talk. And he is rich enough to not need to do it for the money. Time is important. If he'd be doing it for free he'd probably get too many requests. Adding a high $ can simply help filter down to a reasonable thing.to only the largest locations and highest number of people. I dont want to do contract work but people ask so I just quote an unreasonably high number and on occasion someone bites. I dont need the money so I need an easy filter.
  • vjk800 1y ago
    A person whose every interest and opinion gets validated by the world would indeed be very happy. Imagine just talking about whatever the hell happens to interest you to people and everyone paying attention and even paying you good money for that. It's a bit related to how billionaires tell everyone to "just work on whatever makes you happy and it's all going to be fine".
  • prmph 1y ago
    Nah, plenty of millionaires and even billionaires who have a license to print money are unhappy.
    • Loughla 1y ago
      Are they though? I know that's a trope (poor little rich kid). But is that real life?
      • RHSman2 1y ago
        Yes. Money does make you happy (really, the pursuit of the money does not as it is not what we are evolved to be happy about)
• pstuart 1y ago
  Jobs was not a good person but we wouldn't be talking about Woz today if they had not paired up. He was a visionary and "got" tech -- Apple's success with him (both times) and the floundering in between demonstrate his value to their story. Again, not a nice man and not worthy of worship but definitely of respect for what he delivered.
  • ivape 1y ago
    Why do we have to keep saying Jobs was not a good person?
    • FergusArgyll 1y ago
      A lot of people have PTSD from ~2021 and are still looking over their shoulder
    • cm2012 1y ago
      He really was an asshole in his life in ways that are considered notably anti-social.
    • bee_rider 1y ago
      It is helpful to at least push back a little bit on the pass that rich/famous people typically get.
    • soganess 1y ago
      From the wiki on his daughter: "After Lisa was born, Jobs publicly denied paternity, which led to a legal case. Even after a DNA paternity test established him as her father, he maintained his position. The resolution of the legal case required him to provide Brennan with $385 per month and to reimburse the state for the money she had received from welfare. After Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire, he increased the payment to $500 a month." "Despite the reconciliation between Jobs and Lisa their relationship remained difficult. In her autobiography, Lisa recounted many episodes of Jobs failing to be an appropriate parent. He remained mostly distant, cold and made her feel unwanted, and initially refused to pay her college fees." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs
• vasco 1y ago
  It's not naive to try and be good and not exploit every situation to the best outcome for yourself, that's the whole point. How can people believe him to be so brilliant but also naive? Don't they see it? It doesn't take a smart man to see an apple and take it all for himself.
  • moolcool 1y ago
    "If you’re so smart, why aren’t you kind?"
    • glitchc 1y ago
      Because people take advantage of your kindness and leave you feeling used.
      • jameson 1y ago
        It's the sad reality of the society we live in. Money matters the most. Nothing else. Kind people always get taken advantage of at work. Others take credit and then left abandoned once there's no more value to the company. I guess that's just capitalism.
        • albumen 1y ago
          You need to move into a different industry/society. These things are not ubiquitous.
          • bonestamp2 1y ago
            Agreed. We call those people assholes. We try our best to avoid hiring those people and we weed them out of our company as fast as possible if they're discovered. We also try to have as flat a structure as possible so nobody is taking credit for anyone else's work and ideally many of us are working together so we all share the glory or frustration when something goes well or not.
• bko 1y ago
  [written from my iPhone] I think the net effect of people like Jobs is a huge positive in this world. Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction. You think this could be related? Perhaps there is something unpleasant about the person that had some effect on his ability for greatness? Or do you think people are like a video game with knobs where you can turn down "don't be a jerk" without affecting anything else?
  • croes 1y ago
    What do you consider the positive and negative effects of people like Jobs?
  • CjHuber 1y ago
    I mean are the iPhone and computing that feels frictionless really a net positive for society?
    • dylan604 1y ago
      They are just tools. How society uses the tools is not the fault of the tool. A hammer is just a hammer and someone can use it to drive nails all day long or one person can smash skulls with it. It does not make the hammer a negative for society. Just because theZuck and his ilk made apps that dominate the use of the tool does not make the tool bad. Being able to use maps the way we can now is definitely a positive. Having a single device that does that, plus allows communication with anyone you know, plus take very decent images/videos, allows for access to the whole internet all while fitting in your pocket is absolutely a net positive for society. It's those shitty apps that make you question it, and you should not confuse it with the net effect. The net negative are the shitty apps.
      • jraph 1y ago
        You can't ignore the responsibility of the tool's designers and sellers like this, and a phone cannot be likened to an utterly simple tool like a hammer. Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them. … This doesn't work very far. This doesn't mean smartphones are useless or don't have positive points of course! :-)
• xyst 1y ago
  > We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world In this day and age, most people are attracted to "influencing". For better (giving back to society, educational) or worse (pranksters, grifters, "manosphere"). One notorious case is "Zara Dar", a PhD dropout to OF creator. Seemed to have high potential in the industry then something just flipped (money? too difficult? not fond of the grind?) and decided to go to OF. The new world, with its hypercapitalistic tendencies, take advantage of the worst of us. It's one of the reasons for the rise of kakistocratic administration in the United States.
• nashashmi 1y ago
  more people need to be like Woz and we need more Jobs in the world. Jobs was a person who bullied through the ego centric system and paved a good single way forward. Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it? Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.
  • pyrale 1y ago
    > Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? To assume that ms wasn't headed by bullies requires a striking ignorance of ms' history.
    • Spooky23 1y ago
      You made me lol. Microsoft’s feats of assholishness and bullies is pretty legendary.
  • _mu 1y ago
    > He didn’t have ego though. False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego. Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence. Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3
    • lunarboy 1y ago
      I met Jobs as a high schooler at Westfield Valley Fair with a "Programming in Objective-C for iPhone" book in hand during like the iPhone 3G era, and he refused to sign the book lol
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • 1y ago
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  Less Jobs, more Woz
  • thomassmith65 1y ago
    More of either of them works for me. Compared to Musk or Zuckerberg or Andreessen or Altman or Bezos or any other 2025 tech fucko, Jobs is Woz.
    • bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Please don't kid yourself All of these men today are the way they are because they are trying to emulate Jobs
      • insane_dreamer 1y ago
        Not that I wish it on any of them, but getting cancer changes you.
      • thomassmith65 1y ago
        They absolutely 100% are trying to emulate Steve Jobs. But the version of Steve Jobs they have in their heads is a caricature. Steve Jobs wanted the world to see him as some sort of artistic, cultured genius. The only aspects of Steve Jobs that today's crop of tech CEOs seem to emulate are his wealth and arrogance. • Wojcicki admired Jobs while Youtube had the most depraved and moronic comment section on the internet • Huffman admired Jobs while Reddit had a 'watch people die' subreddit • Zuckerberg admired Jobs while nuts used Facebook to livestream the Christchurch massacre and Whatsapp to incite mobs to kill Rohingya • Bezos admired Jobs while Amazon was promoting dollar-store junk on every page • Musk admired Jobs while Grok was dubbing itself 'MechaHitler' Those examples are embarrassing enough, though we could go on an on with more. There's no version of Steve Jobs who would allow such garbage to tarnish his image.
        • iamdelirium 1y ago
          Are you sure you don't have a caricature of Jobs in your head? Apple did a lot of controversial things under Jobs. * The raids for leaks * The no cold call agreements * etc
• micromacrofoot 1y ago
  I'm not familiar with his personality, what is he naive about? like the kind of person that ignores sort of political and business machinations and chases personal interests?
• loveit___ 1y ago
  Without Woz and Jobs there’d be no Apple (as the name was because of Jobs weird eating habits), but most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple. Everything Jobs was though and the people around him and those that worked before him were important for the state of Apple as he left it. But Woz is my fav also, and if there were many, many makers like Woz, and there are, that would be fantastic, and it is. Woz, I love you, man.
  • WalterBright 1y ago
    > most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple. I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days. What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision. Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
  • pbreit 1y ago
    I think there's a decent chance there's an Apple without Woz. But definitely not without Jobs.
• LandoCalrissian 1y ago
  He's earnest and legitimately excited about it and you can pick up on that. It's always fun to talk to people like that regardless of their interest.
• jimt1234 1y ago
  I really hate to say it, but I had a different experience. Woz came to the fintech company where I work for a lecture and Q&A. I was super excited to see him, like a Little Leaguer meeting his favorite baseball player. However, Woz came off kinda rude, like "Everyone else is wrong. I'm right about everything." Maybe he was just having a bad day, or he didn't really wanna speak at my lame fintech company but somehow got roped into it. Or, maybe it's a case of "Never meet your heroes", but I was kinda disappointed. Woz and Kevin Mitnick were my two heroes as a young nerd.
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  I like Woz, was never a fan of Jobs. And I mean that with regard to their personality — not their skillset. My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example). I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh. It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components. I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.
  • kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    He survived a plane crash with a head injury. That can cause you to reassess your priorities.
    • JKCalhoun 1y ago
      Good point. Perhaps you're suggesting he was finally just unwilling to dive in and layout the next Apple motherboard — allowing instead others straight from grad school to design the hardware. Perhaps this was when he began drifting toward education.
  • pbreit 1y ago
    Woz is extraordinary lucky that he has a legacy (and a lot of money). Clearly the bulk of the credit goes to Jobs. And it seems more than likely that if not Woz, Jobs would have found someone else.
    • jibal 1y ago
      It's clear to me that is false. It was Steve's engineering brilliance that made their success possible.
• Dig1t 1y ago
  Woz is one of my favorite people ever, a lifelong hero for me. I think it’s important to remember that he is the product of a very unique time in world history though. He grew up in a time and place that was arguably the best time ever to be a human in all of history. He grew up in a society with extremely high social mobility, when a house in the bay was cheap, in a homogeneous society with high social trust, surrounded by the smartest people of his generation, in a place in the country which valued open mindedness and true progressive thinking. Things like going to college, buying a house, paying rent, or finding a mate were orders of magnitude easier than today. Optimizing for happiness is a nice pursuit if this is the society that shapes your worldview, but today this is a luxury view that very few people can afford. The world is much more of a rat race, we have significantly lower social trust, basic survival is much harder to achieve than Woz’s time. So few people can go through life just trying to be happy instead of grinding to get ahead.
  • dogcow 1y ago
    This is spot on. Nicely written! I think many people forget what a great, unique, and exciting time those decades were. (Or many simply did not experience them). There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology. As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.
  • sidgriciouus 1y ago
    Great comment. This quote from Hunter S Thompson comes to mind (although he is referring to middle sixties so Woz would have been a teenager, not quite the 70s young adult) > “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  People like jobs change the world so that everyone else can be a woz.
• pbreit 1y ago
  Could not disagree more. Woz's naiveté is cute. But Jobs' creations are out-of-this-world amazing. If not Woz, Jobs would have found someone else.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I tend to have a pretty open, kind, and respectful approach to others. It’s frequently interpreted as weakness and naivety. I’m actually a pretty hardboiled and cynical person on the inside, but choose not to approach life in that manner. There’s reasons. Long story for other venues. It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not. Kindness and generosity are not [necessarily] weakness.
  • jondwillis 1y ago
    >It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not. I'll bite. Go ahead and list some recent examples of this actually happening please.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Nah, that’s OK. Have a great day!
    • sounds 1y ago
      Many of us live this way. Why would I tell you my secrets?
  • NoGravitas 1y ago
    Maybe kindness is the real punk rock.
• rw2 1y ago
  Disagree, almost of all the accomplishments in humanity are driven by people like Steve Jobs not Woz. Elon Musk could be said to be a second iteration, a technical person extremely good at sales that can pursue and sell a vision. There are a lot of people who want to be happy. Let them be happy, but it's the relentless builders/dreamers who pushes through the entire journey of getting a product out there to the people.
  • tim333 1y ago
    For each Jobs/Musk having the grand vision you probably need a lot of Wozs to actually build the things.
  • maxehmookau 1y ago
    Define "accomplishments". Based on Woz's message, I would say he's been the true achiever in the game of life. He found, what he genuinely believes, is happiness. Personally, I'd take that over being the creator of something valuable. If Elon Musk is being held up as a pinnacle of achievement, I don't want that.
• revskill 1y ago
  AI is taking our jobs, do not worry.
• ap99 1y ago
  It's not as simple as Woz good, Jobs bad. We wouldn't even know who Woz was without Jobs. Sure Jobs had character flaws but everyone does. Is there a world where you get get a person who has all of Jobs's positive traits without any of the negative? Maybe but not likely.