They were both brilliant, but from everything that I've read, Jobs was an ass****, and Woz was the opposite, and that is a huge, huge difference.
The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc.
To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.
Oft repeated, and not untrue, but very incomplete.
Jobs also made a lot of people. A lot of fortunes in SilVal only exist because of Steve Jobs.
He also virtually single handedly and without much fanfare at the time or credit in the history books created the employee compensation model that came to define SilVal success, with workaday employees and especially engineering contributors receiving stock options to reward them and keep them invested in the company's success.
I don't disagree with what you say, but I have literally never seen or heard "SilVal". Is this a common shorthand? I hear "the Valley" and see "SV" but never this halfcronym.
You are correct that jobs made a ton of people - and not just wealthy, he created an entire ecosystem around Apple, which made a large number of people vast sums of money.
That last part however.. is not actually true - Fairchild Semiconductor did it, and did it far before Apple did. I'd like to say intel (and a ton of others) did the same thing.
Sure, but he was cruel for no reason to many people who did not deserve it, I don't even care about his tech problems. Nobody should park in the handicap stalls without a license plate because he keeps leasing new cars.
You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.
You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor.
Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.
Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit).
The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.
As Henry Ford is (spuriously) claimed to have said: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
Apple did build Apple II models, up to and including the Apple IIgs. They had a good run. And the line was not without its flops — the Apple III was a notorious disaster, though allegedly more due to Jobs than Wozniak.
But none of the pure 8-bit PC vendors survived the 1980s. One of the better qualities of Jobs was that he was not afraid of the company disrupting itself — foregoing the short term success of the Apple II line in favor of the Mac, which in the long run was vastly superior. The same situation played out with the iPhone disrupting the iPod.
I do wonder if it's possible to be a brilliant marketer, and reach the levels Jobs did, without being an asshole. The core of the profession is learning how to manipulate and use people better than anyone else.
I believe that's what Isaacson tries to write about in the Jobs and Musk biographies, indirectly. He seems to think that being an asshole has nothing to do with being brilliant.
Personally, I think it has more to do with having an emotional hole. Creators who do so primarily for its own sake, be they musicians, visual artists, or coders, are different from those who want to rule the world. The latter may genuinely enjoy the craft, but it's often subordinate to the deeper need for validation (see: emotional hole). It's this need that makes people assholes, imo.
And still, when it comes to built-in accessibility, Jobs is pretty much famous for his "fuck ROI" statement. He set precedence around 2007, which eventually forced other players like Google and Microsoft to follow. These days, Talkback and Narrator are builtin for both OSes, which is mostly because Apple went there first. This move changed the lifes of a a few million people.
I'm not sure what to believe. I know he was incredibly demanding, and I've heard the stories, but he also inspired a lot of loyalty and commitment from plenty of very talented engineers who were not short of other options.
Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs.
He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad.
> Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs.
> He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad.
So about this, I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in 6th grade and this is something which troubles me from watching it (multiple times as it was the only offline movie I had so much so that I once gave a mini speech in class about steve jobs haha & one of my teachesrs started calling me steve jobs haha!)
But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa. I mean iirc he did try to connect with her later but still, I just don't understand why he acted so harshly towards his mother when everything could've been going fine.
Like there were definitely plenty of moments in the movie where steve jobs wasn't the right guy. I really can't find the rationale behind some of the things.
I feel like I still don't know what to make of the whole situation regarding Steve jobs. but when you mentioned this comment, while reading it I imagined the point where Steve jobs offered Lisa a flower.
I remember this because many years after watching the movies, this youtube video came to my feed (I searched it again by just searching some PoSV related thing with lisa flower to find it)
And even the director of the movie commented in the comments of this video which was pinned!
As well as using a lot of 70's & 80's classic rock and roll classics appropriate to the era when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple, we also went for "sound-alikes" (for the Ella Fitzgerald number) and created some of our own music. This piece is one of those creations. There is no name for it that I'm aware of.
Martyn Burke
Director-Pirates of Silicon Valley
>But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa.
Jobs was, by the accounts of everyone who knew him, almost singularly focused on doing what he did in the computer industry, by the time Lisa was conceived. His relationship with Lisa's mom, Chrisann Brennan, had begun during his wild-seed-sewing hippie days. My read on it is, he looked at the relationship with Chrisann as a remnant of a past he wanted to leave behind, and the potential relationship with Lisa as a sink for his energies that didn't fit the image he wished to concoct for himself.
Steve Jobs was a flawed human, like we all are. And like all of us, his flaws were inseparable from his strengths and achievements. As someone who didn't have to experience any of those direct flaws, I feel incredible gratitude for how his achievements changed my life and the world generally, and hope that those people he hurt can forgive him.
You would think that, but there is an icon for not using a dryer. There is an icon for all forms of drying. On a clothes line, in the shade, "flat", ...
<the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility>
you summarized my 5+ year experience living in Germany with one sentence in a way that I have never found the words for - thank you, really, thank you
I feel that in Germany, the original intent of the many rules, processes, and procedures has been lost. Employees are trained to operate such that every situation is governed by a rule/process/procedure, and their job is to look up the situation in a massive leather-bound book of branching rules, see which rule applies in the given situation, and then… apply the rule. But, they will do this only if they assess that helping you falls under their job’s responsibilities. Sometimes your situation is neat and clean, and was what the rule-writers thought about when they wrote the rules. Sometimes, not.
TLDR: if you have an edge case in the German bureaucratic system (forms at the doctor’s office, Deutsche Bahn travel troubles, closing a bank account), you are f***
It is certainly my biggest dislike factor with my stay in Germany, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with it: do I dislike it enough to compel me to move away? is this something I can accept? How much can I influence and improve things that I directly interact with?
It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.
Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside the normal process.
Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the rushed service because they are only compensated for limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me a while to figure out; the process really defines what treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the duration, and they have to do their best with the constraints put by the process.
An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be compensated by the state insurance. This means if the dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush the procedure.
Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick the right practice.
Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air. Goodbye, next person please!
In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be more into the work, and questions things, but the system does push everyone to just follow the process and not do anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing it much less than before, because the system does not incentivise that).
I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.
But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.
I tend to view shop staff having a random talk with someone while I’m waiting to purchase or ask something as a dereliction of duty. If you want to catch up with a friend you can do it on your own time.
Every country is different and you need to learn slightly different ways of dealing with them in each. On a bad day it can be pretty exhausting.
It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in the end. They just go about them differently.
In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying to work with the rules together; as a framework to build within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.
Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time, (especially if the other person is having a bad day themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps even once eh?
The difference in healthcare between private and public insurance is, as far as i know, because if a doctor sends you for some test or something that your insurance feels was unnecessary then the doctor has to pay for it with the public flavour. At least, that’s what I heard but could be wrong.
Interesting that GLP-1s might have different effects on cancer _incidence_ vs. cancer _survival_.
A different study "GLP-1 Receptor Agonists and the Risk of Thyroid Cancer" was published in the Diabates Care journal in February 2023*
The conclusion of the 2023 study: "we found increased risk of all thyroid cancer and medullary thyroid cancer with use of GLP-1 RA, in particular after 1–3 years of treatment."
I wonder what the mechanistic hypothesis could be for GLP-1s increasing thyroid cancer _incidence_ (the probability of thyroid cancer occurring in patients taking GLP-1s) but increasing colon cancer _survival_ (the probability of surviving in patients taking GLP-1s who have colon cancer).
Of course there are numerous important differences across the studies (cancer type, France vs. USA data, etc.), I'm just curious about a why this might be the case.
I'd be cautious for the same reason: thyroid cancers are also positively associated with obesity, and people who take GLP-1s are often obese.
Below a table, it says "adjusted for social deprivation index, hypo- and hyperthyroidism, and use of other antidiabetic drugs..." -- but nothing about obesity.
What if the GLP-1-prescribed patients tended to be more obese?
I think this analysis is cool, and the comments are too critical. The author put something out there, documented it, and I learned something by reading it. Thank you.
Maybe the title needs reframing to soften the reader’s expectations, and I definitely agree that RA as a data source has important limitations that should be mentioned.
I strive to be at the informed part of the spectrum.
Wine example:
- Novice: "I'd like any red wine" -> waiter brings you something you don't like
- Informed: "I'd like a red wine that is dry, not st" -> waiter brings you something you are quite likely to like
- Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences
Keep pushing through the asshole stage and you get to another where you learn to enjoy what you enjoy, whether it is a $10 chocolate chip cookie or Chips A'Hoy. A $200 bottle of wine or a $5 bottle.
It is possible to dig deep into subjects and emerge with a nuanced understanding rather than an asshole demeanor!
I've kept aquariums basically my whole life and have had all kinds of critters including a really expensive marine tank fully kitted out with fish worth hundreds each. My current favorites are some guppies I got for free because it wasn't worth charging for them!
> - Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences
So asshole is having preferences that don't fit the norm? If they don't impose their standards on you, and do not act a snob, why do you care?
The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc.
To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.
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