I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question.

That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.

The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.

So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.

About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed.

And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.

This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.

I've worked in consumer electronics, batteries are built in because reviewers will endlessly trash a product that is just 1mm thicker than anything apple puts out, and they fawn over apple because the products are so thin.

If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back problems".

A small exaggeration? Not by far, reviewers nasty about device thickness.

Then 70% of people shove a case on and it really doesn't matter.

There are good water ingress reasons for non-replaceable batteries, making a device water proof and have a replaceable battery does add a good deal of thickness.

Anyway, you can get a battery replaced at a phone shop for a reasonable rate anyway, so IMHO it isn't as big of a deal now days.

We need to stop making products for reviewers.

No one wants to, but that is how many consumers decide on what to buy. It is especially how early adopters tuned into the review scene for their favorite products decide what to buy.

I appreciate this comment end to end and wish I could write as effectively. Thanks for sharing.

I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.

Worse still, if you’re too polite, many people won’t “get” the message.

“Oh, he just thinks my baby has interesting and unique features.”

> I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.

I agree in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum, we're talking about Steve Jobs. A dude who would semi-regularly send coworkers and subordinates out of rooms in tears, throw shit around the office, and in general make a complete ass of himself.

Like, I agree with you, it's gonna be hard to tell someone their baby is ugly. There's a better way to do it than throwing a stapler at the wall above their head and calling them ugly too.

I don't mean to pick on you in particular but we seriously need to shred this societal idea that visionaries, rockstar devs, auteurs, whatever, have to be anti-social fucking monsters to make whatever they happen to make. It's stupid and it sucks and it excuses tons of abusive behavior. I'm all for making great shit but if you have to hurt people to do it, then I don't think it's worth it at all.

I once worked for a leader who wanted to be like Jobs, complete with the black shirts.

So anyways, going into a design review I (UI dev lead) had warned early on that the new design was bad. I said it was going to be bad. Listed why it was going to be bad, and politely gave my feedback to UX, and I was ignored.

Walk into the review, it gets torn apart. It was really horrible. The GM looks over at me, asks for my take. I reply that I gave my feedback weeks ago and I hadn't approved of the design.

GM proceeds to lay into the UX team, swearing, yelling, and such, and basically asking why they hadn't listed to my initial feedback. It ended with an ultimatum that henceforth the design team was going to listen to me if I said no to a design before they wasted his time.

We were at the time outsourcing UX work to an obscenely expensive design firm who hasn't done software work before, just physical media. Some of the team was good, but a few of the designers were violently incompetent.

(A short time later we nixed the entire team, hired the good ones, and built our own,amazing, internal UX team.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the situation. It was nice to be vindicated, and rockstar personalities rarely listen to polite level feedback. "Fuck you don't bring me shitty designs and bill me tens of thousands of dollars for them when the fucking dev team can tell the design is shit" is kind of a legit response to people who just won't listen.

It does sour relationships though, and IMHO some of that relationship between me and the UX lead took years to rebuild.

Well he was a textbook high performing sociopath, if that's a coined medical term. Very low emotional EQ, very high IQ, and the ability to rationally turn some part of EQ on if motivation is high enough... but nothing of that comes naturally and in stressful situations its elephant in the porcelain shop.

His biggest regrets before dying is how he treated his own family when looking back - again a textbook of what I write above.

Some people have immediate kneejerk reaction to the part with "sociopath" but I don't look at it as some sort of insult, rather just description of certain quality or lack of it of given person. No need to dance around the fact with many words, it is (was) what it is. If he knew better he would do it, nothing one can choose easily. And there would be some negative impact on his professional life, no doubt (some positive too but if you look at ultra rich guys not only in tech, they are +- the same stuff, it seems this is really prerequisite to rise meteorically, nice guys normally don't make it that far).

musk is similar albeit another unique mix of above. Bezos too. And so on and on.

Same reason we bailed out the auto industry: nvidia and co now comprise 1/4 of our goddamned economy, and are thusly wearing a C4 vest in the middle of our money system and threatening to blow it to bits if we don't pay up.

The most rational economic system strikes again. The rich get richer. Everyone else gets fucked. Socialism for corporations, capitalism for the workers.

Edit: upon further thought, this has less in common with the bailout of the auto industry, and far more in common with the 2008 housing crash, and subsequent bailouts which went to the bankers, of course, while workers lost their homes in droves.

The meat of my point remains unchanged though. I just sometimes forget which once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse is which, side effect of being alive right now.

Yep. An American is free to pay $80k for a Tesla while the rest of the world buys a BYD for $25k An American is free to pay $100 for Insulin while the rest of the world pays $20. So too will an American pay for OpenAI while they start blocking foreign competitors from the market "for security reasons" the more the government gets entangled into the scheme.

There’s a difference between Americans paying $80K and getting an overpriced car in return and paying a ton of money to OpenAI and getting nothing in return.

What do you mean, nothing? They have an app that they can ask to read wikipedia for them and turn it into bullet points.

People say this, but I disagree. It's all one big slippery slope of zero value - the more a company can charge you for fewer features, the more they profit.

The parent is correct to identify that a lack of free market controls are what's destroying us here. You wouldn't have to pay out the nose like this if the fed didn't build and enforce monopolies for fun. But now we're here, after 20 years of Google's AdSense monopoly and Apple's App Store monopoly, throwing stones at OpenAI for ruining the fun.

Feels like we deserve this, everyone ignored the warning signs and pushed us way up the corporate escalation ladder.

What if Americans started voting in their own interests.

First, Americans need voting fixed. How can anyone vote for reasonable alternative in the archaic first past the post system, where a slight majority takes all the votes of every voter? It prevents any new small party to grow into bigger party by actually working as a minority in the Senate/Congress.

Either that or hating the minorities, so... yeah.

Genuine question : When companies are bailed out by the taxpayer, why can't we then give ownership of the company to the taxpayer? Effectively 'buying' the company to save it, instead of just gifting it money for it to survive.

Is there a reason not to make the taxpayer (or government) the main shareholder after the bailout?

This has precedent in the US, like when the government nationalized failing freight railroads and merged them into Conrail. But after the more recent bank and auto bailouts I wouldn't expect to see this happen again. The shareholders would really prefer to have money thrown at them but also keep their stake.

> But after the more recent bank and auto bailouts I wouldn't expect to see this happen again. The shareholders would really prefer to have money thrown at them but also keep their stake.

The auto bailouts did not feature shareholders having money thrown at them and keeping their stakes (GM and Chrysler shareholders, for instance, were almost completely wiped out in the bailout, with the new GM owned by the UAW and the US and Canadian governments; the new Chrysler was majority owned by Fiat with minority stakes held by an autoworkers pension fund and the US and Canadian governments.)

Bank bailouts were more protective of shareholders because they were mostly government purchase of distressed assets or extensions of credit,

Thanks for the context. Nuts that this is not seen as a strictly better outcome vs a bailout.

Isn't that what just happened with Intel?

Not really, Intel had funding from Biden's bill, and Trump told them that in order to have that money they had to give a stake to the government. In this case Intel isn't being bailed out, just securing funding for new chip foundaries

> Genuine question : When companies are bailed out by the taxpayer, why can't we then give ownership of the company to the taxpayer?

tHaT'S sOcIAlIsM

Though ironically for the first time ever, the people shouting that would actually be correct. Kind of.

If you mean in a broad "is this possible" sense though, sure, absolutely. Entities owned in part or in whole by the state are not uncommon, but anytime such things are proposed in the US, the right loses it's fucking mind.

Edit: hit the comment rate wall.

> I see! But still, I don't get in what sense it is more socialist that just having people actually buy the company to save it (instead of just saving it 'for free'). If anything it makes it more capitalist if the taxpayers invest in the bailout, instead of just giving it away!

Because socialism isn't an economic system in American politics, it's a scary word that the Russians and CHYNA are. It's also completely interoperable with communism because our conservative party here has long since abandoned anything resembling reality, and even when they were here with us, they didn't know the difference between the two.

Doing it this way is capitalist because it's American. Doing it the other way is evil because it's socialist/communist, like the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans do with the lot of this rhetoric absolutely drowning in racism and nationalism. Mind you, all those countries have issues, absolutely. I'm just saying a conservative with a gun to their head couldn't actually explain those issues, they're just evil because they're not American. [ insert eagle screech here ]

Honestly the best distillation is: It's Freedom when private citizens run things, and it's Communism when the government does. The fact that the government sometimes has to give rich private citizens a shit ton of money to keep things afloat is not reflected upon.

If you try and analyze it through a lens of what these words actually mean, yeah it makes no goddamn sense at all.

But not really right? It could happen in the market, company A chooses to bailout company B by buying it and investing money to keep it afloat.

Except company A in this case is the government. No? Why is it that when it is the government doing this action, it has to gift the money instead of potentially profiting from it?

Edit : just saw the edit. I see! But still, I don't get in what sense it is more socialist, instead of just saving the companing 'for free', people actually buy (forcefully invest?) in the company to save it. If anything it makes it more capitalist if the taxpayers invest in the bailout, instead of just giving it away!

Its pure propaganda playing on American fear of socialism.

In other very capitalist economies governments did take stakes in banks in return for bailouts. The first British bank that needed one (Northern Rock) was entirely taken over by the government and shareholders just lost their money. The government bought stakes in others. It was still criticised as being too generous to shareholders and management.

That's crazy to me...

The stock market is not the economy

You are right. It is a lot of your retirement funding, though. There is a lot of debt involved here too. Crash the companies, enough stakeholders get burnt, money gets sucked out of everything else.

How many Americans even have money for retirement?

It reminds me of 1990s Russia were the smart people didn't get caught up in capitalism casino and just kept tending their vegetable garden like they had done for centuries.

To quote Bob Dylan

"If you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose"

About half of Americans have zero retirement savings

Virtually no one under the age of 18 has any. So that's a lot of Americans. Should they have any?

this while factually correct probably requires age distribution. I did not have a penny saved for retirement until I hit mid-to-late-30's. I am 50 now and can retire comfortably today

The median for ages 45-54 is 115,000, for 55-64 185,000

> Russia were the smart people didn't get caught up in capitalism casino and just kept tending their vegetable garden like they had done for centuries.

Ha. Most people didn't have any money to get into the crony/gangster capitalism. Just peasants with their vegetable gardens. How many American have vegetable gardens?

It is insofar as when it does great we get nothing, and when it doesn't we get fired. And when it does bad enough, tons of retirees lose a shit ton of money for literally no reason.

"Socialism for corporations, capitalism for the workers." ../n this was in my mind but couldn't phrase it. thank you

And good for them honestly. This seems disrespectful as fuck, to just have their work overwritten by some fuckass bot nobody asked for, and have their feedback ignored. I'd tell Mozilla to kick rocks too.

Corpos have a nasty habit of, after so many years, feeling very entitled to the efforts of what are, at the end of the day, volunteers.

> This is an easy mistake in large organizations. Any project often already has so many stakeholders and politics that they are incentivized to avoid adding more stakeholders to the project if they are politically capable of doing so.

This person is already a stakeholder, you don't have a choice to add or not add them, you have a choice to include or not include them. And it's a gamble to not include them for this exact reason.

I'm all for keeping stakeholder counts as low as possible but you can't do it by just pretending some of your stakeholders don't exist, that's no good and in my experience, usually ends exactly like this.

> because we have no idea how it works

Flagrantly, ridiculously untrue. We don't know the precise nuts and bolts regarding the emergence of consciousness and the ability to reason, that's fair, but different structures of the brain have been directly linked to different functions and have been observed in operation on patients being stimulated in various ways with machinery attached to them reading levels of neuro-activity in the brain, and in specific regions. We know which parts handle our visual acuity and sense of hearing, and even cooler, we can watch those same regions light up when we use our "minds eye" to imagine things or engage in self-talk, completely silent speech that nevertheless engages our verbal center, which is also engaged by the act of handwriting and typing.

In short: no, we don't have the WHOLE answer. But to say that we have no idea is categorically ridiculous.

As to the notion of LLMs doing similarly: no. They are trained on millions of texts of various sources of humans doing thinking aloud, and that is what you're seeing: a probabilistic read of millions if not billions of documents, written by humans, selected by the machine to "minimize error." And crucially, it can't minimize it 100%. Whatever philosophical points you'd like to raise about intelligence or thinking, I don't think we would ever be willing to call someone intelligent if they just made something up in response to your query, because they think you really want it to be real, even when it isn't. Which points to the overall charade: it wants to LOOK intelligent, while not BEING intelligent, because that's what the engineers who built it wanted it to do.

I never had data outright vanish, but similar to the comment you replied to, it was just unreliable. I found Syncthing much more useful over the long haul. The last 3 times I've had to do anything with it were simply to manage having new machines replace old ones.

Syncthing sadly doesn't let you not download some folders or files, but I just moved those to other storage. It beats the Nextcloud headache.

I might be misunderstanding what you mean, but maybe the .stignore[1] file is what you're looking for? Apologies if it isn't :-)

[1] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

Oh no worries, yeah that works like gitignore, I’m talking more like how Nextcloud and Dropbox let you like, have a list of folders and checkboxes where you can be like “this machine doesn’t need my family photo collection synced to it” kinda thing. Which to my knowledge syncthing doesn’t have.

Don't apologize tho! I appreciate the help!

“This machine doesn’t need my family photo collection synced to it” is .stignore. It’s a bit confusing because .stignore is more like .git/info/excludes than .gitignore in that it’s not synced between machines[1]. (If you wanted a synced ignores file then you need to #include that file from each machine’s .stignore manually.) And what’s ignored on one machine doesn’t then need to be ignored on the others, which will still sync it between themselves in that case. So no pretty checkboxes, but echo /Photos >>.stignore on the machine in question and you should be good (including to delete the Photos subdirectory on that machine).

[1] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

Oh! Holy shit, that's SO useful. Thank you for taking the time to explain!

You can achieve this by having multiple sync folders instead of one folder with everything. Then you can configure exactly what you sync where.

> Couldn't AI like be their custom inventory software?

Absolutely not. It's inherently a software with a non-zero amount of probability in every operation. You'd have a similar experience asking an intern to remember your inventory.

Like I enjoy Copilot as a research tool right but at the same time, ANYTHING that involves delving into our chat history is often wrong. I own three vehicles, for example, and it cannot for it's very life remember the year, make and model of them. Like they're there, but they're constantly getting switched around in the buffer. And once I started positing questions about friend's vehicles that only got worse.

Why do I need to tell an AI to remember things?! How does AI consistently feel less intelligent than regular old boring software?!

Because you're using it wrong.

Really. Tool use is a big deal for humans, and it's just as big a deal for machines.

Wouldn't an intelligent computer know to use tools? The core of the point being discussed seems to be why do you need to ask it to make it you inventory software when an intelligent system would know that when asked to build an inventory system setting up a database and logging all the information is need and ask agents to do that.

It's the same question that you might have asked in 1920. "This radio hardly works at all. Can't they do something about all the static? I don't see the big deal. This is just a scam to sell batteries and tubes."

A radio isn't intelligent and isn't marketed as such. If you're going to sell software you call intelligent, I don't think I'm out of pocket for saying "this feels even dumber than regular software I use."

I don't find this comparison fitting.

(Shrug) Well, I do. I don't know where you people get the idea that these sorts of things spring forth fully-formed from the brow of Zeus, but it doesn't work that way.

This your first paradigm shift? :-P

A radio is fundamentally do thing the thing it claims. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally not intelligent.

I'm not saying it is useless tech, but no it's not my first paradigm shift, and that's why I can see the difference.

How'd you do at the International Math Olympiad this year?

You seem to bring much more snark than substance.

Sounds like evasion to me. At some point you'll need to explain exactly why systems that thrash Go grandmasters, make entire forums fail the Turing test, and take gold at international math and programming competitions are "fundamentally not intelligent."

The only argument you (and Toucan, who's been around longer) seem to muster is that the systems aren't perfect. They occasionally say stupid things, need extra handholding, babble nonsense and write buggy code, commit blatant plagiarism, fall into fallacious reasoning traps, and can be fooled with simple tricks... unlike people, presumably.

Limited tests in specific settings are always surprising and do speak to it's use, but are not a testament to it being intelligent.

I replied because you answered "you're doing it wrong" to a question of it's failures. It seems you dismiss the concerns of the smaller errors or failures without realizing the point being made. If it's "smart" enough to solve take international math medals and beat grand masters at go, but can't truly understand problems and anticipate needs or issues, to me it's not a genuine intelligence and in it's current form never will be.

It's not that they are not perfect, is that they have no concept of reality, and it's evident in their failures. Beyond this point I am not interested in trying to convince you.

It can do that today. I am doing that today.

It’s frankly wild how many weird problems and UX pitfalls I experienced with my first PC in roughly 2005 are STILL issues.

The fuck is Microsoft having all these engineers work all day on?

> The fuck is Microsoft having all these engineers work all day on?

Rounding corners of UI elements, changing size of UI elements, reshufling UI elements, AI maybe.

And by changing size you do mean ballooning the size of. I've had to run my gaming laptop's screen at 0.75x via the nVidia panel because otherwise my freaking window titlebars take up a solid 8% of the usable space.

I love how you're contrasting the credibility of demonstrably-proven-to-be-unreliable face recognition tech against MERELY government-issued documents that have been the basis for establishing identity for more than a century.

Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn bit better than racist security cameras though.

The entitlement of so many modern vibe coders (or as we called them before, script kiddies) is absolutely off the charts. Just because there is not a rule or law expressly against what you're doing doesn't mean it's perfectly fine to do. Websites are hosted by and funded by people, and if your shitty scraper racks up a ton of traffic on one of my sites, I may end up on the hook for that. I am perfectly within both my rights and ethical boundaries to block your IP(s).

And just to not leave it merely implied, I don't give a rats ass if that slows down your "innovation." Go away.