It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this. People do it all the time with Steve Jobs as if it's okay because he could be a jerk at times.
It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.
Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.
Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.
It's not blaming him to mention that an immediate surgery would have vastly increased his chances of survival.
And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors.
I'm also not blaming my beloved grandfather either when I mention that smoking likely killed him in the end and he knew that years before.
Jobs was a very smart guy with all the means to improve his situation but decided against it. For me it's a lesson to consider where my closely held beliefs could be wrong.
He waited 9 months to listen to his doctors -- or anyone -- by all accounts instead trying to cure it with diets and spiritual fads.
Genentech CEO (and PhD in Biochemistry) Art Levinson: he "pleaded every day" with Jobs and found it "enormously frustrating that [he] just couldn't connect with him"
Andy Grove: "Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy"
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Marc Andreessen: "Steve Jobs was 'one of the most disagreeable people in the history of humankind,' and that was part of his genius."
He was an obstinate man who thought he knew better than everyone else. Sometimes he did. This time he didn't.
Steve Jobs's entire job for thirty years was recruiting, listening, and working with experts in various fields. He never would have succeeded without being able to accept that other people knew more than him in certain areas. He worked with doctors very successfully most of the time.
My take is that he was scared and acting out of fear. Hoping against hope that his bullshit alternatives would work because he was so terrified of having his body "opened" and "violated" by a major surgery. Maybe that fear sometimes masqueraded as arrogance but that's still just fear.
Like many others, you seem excited to be able to judge Steve Jobs on this point. To judge and laugh at him for his arrogance killing him. When in reality you're judging and laughing at a pancreatic cancer patient for procrastinating on their surgery out of fear.
Steve Jobs found success by doing just the opposite: not accepting the status quo / accepted wisdom and disrupting it.
In this way Elon Musk is very similar. That gets you EVs where none existed and it gets you crappy self driving by eschewing LIDAR for cameras only. It gets you rockets that land themselves and it gets a flat concrete launchpad obliterated by the first Starship launch as others warned.
If you'd said merely "I think it was fear, more than arrogance" that could have been an interesting discussion, but instead you've been making it strangely personal throughout.
Frankly I dont care enough about Jobs to be "excited" or "laugh" or whatever accusations you are throwing around the thread -- they reflect more on you than on me.
You're the one judging a cancer patient's response to their diagnoses. I'm the one pointing out how wrong that is. So yes, it's about you personally and your actions. Not just you of course.
We are all flawed. I think Steve Jobs was less flawed than most of his critics. Maybe less flawed than myself. The difference is we know everything he did wrong in his entirely life because it's so well documented.
I don't know why you feel the need to white-knight the man, and I find it especially rich that you somehow think that he's "probably less flawed than his critics" whom you know nothing about, but statistically probably don't park in handicap spots, rip off business partners, or abandon their children during their formative years (his denialism about the paternity test seems to resemble that of the surgery).
I said his personality--the one that led him to rip off Wozniak along with his other actions (positive and negative)--likely led him to die [earlier]. But in your view the true moral failing was not in these acts which actually harmed other people, but in merely making an observation about how the man's personality likely ended up harming himself too.
It's not "morally repugnant" to tell the truth; that charge is what's morally repugnant.
From ChatGPT:
"it’s widely believed by medical experts that Steve Jobs might have had a better chance of survival if he had pursued standard medical treatment sooner.
Jobs was diagnosed in 2003 with a rare type of pancreatic cancer — a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET) — which typically grows much more slowly than the common and far more lethal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. When caught early, pNETs can often be treated successfully with surgery and other conventional therapies.
Instead, Jobs initially delayed surgery for about nine months while trying alternative diets and other non-standard approaches. By the time he agreed to surgery in 2004, the disease had progressed, and although he lived for several more years, the delay may have reduced his overall odds."
"He said he had a curable cancer and he should have taken the treatment."
He never uttered this sentence. You're making it up (lying).
Supposedly, he did say "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"
Which shows a man struggling to come to terms with his diagnoses, desperate for alternatives, and eventually gathering the courage to undergo a major surgical operation.
>It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this.
No, it's rude and weird to chastise someone for rightfully advocating treatment. He didn't state that he didn't want to risk the horrors of treatment with the end result being the same -- he spread disinformation. It is good he died, because when others repeat his disinformation, we can point back at his death as evidence against his beliefs.
You weigh the feelings of a dead billionaire higher than the lives of young people with hopes and dreams.
It's very obvious that people, seeming you as well, take some delight in the idea that Steve Jobs killed himself with arrogance.
That is morally repugnant. He was a pancreatic cancer patient coping with his diagnoses the best he could manage. The fact that he was a "billionaire" has nothing to do with it. He was a human and all sentient life is sacred in my view.
You also do not actually know the facts of the case. He did not spread disinformation to anyone. He was intensely private during this entire period and very little information is known for a fact.
But by all means enjoy your mocking, judging, and condemnation of cancer patients. I'll continue to find it morally repugnant.
In the spirit of assuming good faith on HN, I'd like to critique a particular line of thought you keep repeating, that is continually met with hostility.
You continue to generalize criticism of Jobs as an attack on cancer patients as a whole, despite people citing specific behaviors and actions unique to jobs.
I can't interpret this as anything but emotionally manipulative sophistry that reads to the viewer as you shielding Jobs behind a vulnerable group, and that isn't ever going to be received well.
If there's another way to read this in light of the facts, I'd appreciate an explanation.
For what it's worth, my interpretation of their line of reasoning is a touch different: that judging any cancer patient for their response and reaction (even Jobs) isn't right.
That could have been an interesting position to discuss were it not infused with so much judgment (ironic) for the commenters--making it personal and putting everyone on the defensive.
Because I think the fundamental disagreement is whether anyone considers themselves to be "judging someone [Jobs] for their reaction/choices in the face of cancer." I can see that point, but as you say, I disagree that's what is happening.
I might counter with, "does having cancer make a person immune to criticism? If not, then where is that line?" Indeed I think the other issue is treating criticism as equivalent to judgment (something maladaptive but all too common).
But I think you have the general idea: the tricky part (as you allude to) is that people are making criticisms/observations about Jobs (as a whole) and the story of his cancer is, well, part of his story too.
This thread was borne of the story of Steves Woz and Jobs. One takeaway was Woz was "naive", Jobs was shrewd, Jobs took advantage of Woz: don't be like Woz and get taken advantage of. What I was pointing out was, well that may be so, but who was better off in the end? Often one's strengths and one's weaknesses are two sides of the same coin (like with Musk).
Steve's friends pleaded with him and said what he was doing was bullshit. Were they morally repugnant too?
There's a lot more to fairly criticize about this. Mostly the system that allows it but also him for taking advantage of it.
And yet it's basic human instinct to do what's possible to survive. I admit that I would have done the same and I wouldn't believe most people who would claim otherwise.
Steve Jobs is the reason Wozniak could give away tens of millions and still have $10M and multiple houses. Otherwise he would have been a good engineer and lived a nice quiet life, but nothing like the world-touring adventure he got.
Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.
Tangential, but you don't need anywhere near millions to have a 'world-touring adventure'. The nice thing about the ability to earn money online now a days is that the cost of living in the overwhelming majority of the world is a small fraction of what you pay in the US/EU.
And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
Making that jump is obviously scary, but I think many people could find much greater contentedness (not a fan of seeking "happiness", as it's something that I think should be seen as liminal, not a desired constant state) if they only realized that the world is their oyster.
Reread the link, or even the title. He gave away all of his Apple money away, because "wealth and power are not what I live for... it was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness.. " Celebrity, in general, is awful. You never realize how pleasant it is to be able to go somewhere without being fawned over until you have that latter experience yourself, and then you proceed to avoid that place like the plague unless you have some specific engagement.
He had the privilege of giving away a fortune, to causes he cares about, largely thanks to Steve Jobs.
He's never worried about money and has millions in the bank and multiple houses, thanks to Steve Jobs.
Some people love their celebrity. I've met more than a few, including Wozniak. He seems to genuinely love it, which doesn't mean it doesn't also get tiring at times.
A man of Wozniak's talents would never worry about money in his life regardless of what he chose to do. Talent + intelligence + work ethic ensures success, regardless of one's path in life, which is mostly the point of my comment. Somebody could accumulate a bunch of money at a FAANG but not necessarily enjoy their life or work in the process. Or they could utilize the same talents to go on a globe trotting life of adventure where they may earn much less, but get the opportunity to live and enjoy life much more.
Woz stated he gave away his money because he felt it was corrupting, probably seeing what it did to people like Jobs - although it's more like Jobs was like that to begin with, and the money just made it worse. Woz has also spoken repeatedly about celebrity status. Here's [1] a nice older 'interview' of sorts where he hits on the topic extensively. He didn't want it and has no interest in it.
Interestingly something I didn't know, that's pertinent to our little thread here, is that after Woz left Apple, he became a 5th-9th grade teacher, and did so for a decade!
I've never been able to find that elusive "easy to find" online work people keep speaking of.
Am I being gaslighted or am I looking in the wrong places? In the EU in my entire 15 year carreer there have been exactly 0 companies or even vacancies offering fully remote.
You're definitely looking in the wrong places. A large number of companies are basically entirely remote at this point, for instance I know chess.com is, and they have vacancies at this very moment. You can also go indie or freelance. If you can think of something you would want to buy, somebody else probably would too. You might not make much off of it, but even a little is a lot in places outside the EU/US.
There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour, which is quite lucrative in most of the world, and you'll generally have less prep and other meta-issues to deal with.
Similarly you can also sell skills. For instance there's a huge market for chess coaching. And while I haven't tried this myself, I'm fairly certain there's some market out there for teaching/tutoring people in coding. Also if you excelled in mathematics or whatever, there's another possibility. And doing this stuff at a school, or even university, is also completely viable - in most places a bachelors is acceptable for teaching at a university.
This is really what I mean with the world being your oyster. There's so much out there but most people just don't realize these possibilities even exist.
>There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour
Hypothetically if someone was burnt out and willing to operate in the gray a bit, how much can you make (approximately) doing English lessons under the table?
Eg: I go to Thailand. I enter as a tourist. Ocassionally, I meet someone in a café and have a conversation with them. They value that enough to pay me.
One of my big pre-covid regrets is I didn't travel more... I had intended to, having been laid off just before it started but everything got locked down and I had a bit of a mental health episode, feeling trapped in interactions I didn't consent to as I spent money on rent I could have spent on hotels etc.
Right as COVID fell, I'd been researching doing the Moscow to Beijing train then exploring SE Asia... it's funny how much of the planned route is possibly bust... for example, I was going to skip mainland China and only visit HK since less visa issues, not sure if that's still possible...
I was speaking more of software, but in general the thing I find is that when people try to figure out what other people want - when they themselves don't necessarily want it, they have trouble remaining objective. Some friends are serial entrepreneurs and they keep coming up with these horrible ideas that they convince themselves others people would want. Maybe one day they'll be right, but in the mean time it looks pretty silly.
OTOH I think Amazon would have sounded like a horrible idea. A book store minus the ability to peruse the books, pick up a coffee, or browse in the same sort of way? I wonder if it really was a great idea, or it's just some weird butterfly effect that drove it up, up, and away.
I remember the Amazon rollout. The pitch was order a book from anywhere and get a biggest selection of books and price. Small book stores were getting eaten up by Chapters letting you read the entire book. Amazon's secret sauce was accessable affiliate marketing. They had and probably still have the biggest affiliate program and at first the only game on town.
Food/coffee came later when the in person business was declining.
I think GP makes it sound far easier than it really is, but there’s also clearly not “exactly zero” such roles. (I have team members based in EU working remotely. Retention is high and we get a lot of applicants when we open new roles. Those are good for the employer side but negative for individual applicants.)
In my experience, it's much easier as a freelancer. Usually what is meant to be a couple weeks gig turns out to be a couple months or year-long business relationship.
I've worked in 3 places that were fully 100% remote. I'm from Barcelona, ES. They are not the modt common but they do exist if you look for them and there are quite a lot.
//And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
What typed of jobs is this referring to, besides teaching English ?
The obvious one is definitely teaching, though not just English. For online teaching, English is a major lingua franca and any skill you might want to teach, from chess to calculus - there will be plenty of online students available in English, even if that may often not be their native tongue.
For in person teaching it's the same thing. Most countries have a system of bilingual schools, international schools, and then university type schools. And all of these offer English language instruction in everything from PE to Calculus. The major difference between a bilingual school and an international school is that the latter will generally pay much more and expect much more with certification a stated requirement, though in practice it often is not.
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Outside of that there's endless odd jobs available that are in need of English speakers. I have friends working in everything from marketing to rehab. A good idea there would be to pick a country you're interested, find the common job boards there (which LLMs may be excellent for, though I have not used them for this myself - yet) and simply search for 'English' or other such keywords. You'll be surprised.
Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil.
You clearly know nothing about the history of these two. Or, maybe even more likely, you want this to be true so you can feel better about your life being relatively unimportant in comparison to Steve Jobs' life. Seems to be very common.
Woz and Jobs were best friends as teenagers and loved each other. And like many good friends they had their issues but loved and respected each other until the end.
Woz wasn't doing a deal with the devil. He was co-founding a startup with his extremely ambitious and abrasive best friend.
Almost everyone that ever worked closely with Steve Jobs came away with enormous respect for him and deeply appreciated their time together. Yes, they also say that he was sometimes an asshole but that's how people are: complicated.
There's a very good chance more than a few people think you're an asshole at times.
Steve Jobs is the reason Apple, Next, and Pixar made their mark on history. No amount of envy and revisionist history can change this.
The way you have discounted Wozniak's talent, one can also discount Steve's ambition. There are thousands of people same or more ambitious than Jobs. Being ambitious doesn't guarantee anything, neither does being as good as wozniak only work when combined with ambition.
Steve Jobs brought a hell of a lot more to the table than just raw ambition.
I just meant to contrast the level of ambition between the two. Wozniak was extremely unambitious and Jobs pushed him into starting a company, with great difficulty.
Nothing is guaranteed in life but I've certainly met more than a few people that I predicted would be successful and then they were. There are character traits that incline people toward success.
I disagree. Woz was a rare talent that would have found great success in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Would he have been as famous as he is now? Maybe not. But here he is at the end telling us that happiness was the point, not fame or billions.
He’d have found great success by his own measures if HP just let do more of the things he found interesting. Those measures wouldn’t have shown up in his bank account, but I think he’d have been happy.
On the contrary, I know all about that. Wozniak's company was self-funded with his Apple money (thanks Steve Jobs). It was innovative but not terribly so and was a complete failure as a business.
Cause vs effect. Empires grow exceptionally hubristic over time. For instance the Brits likely never even considered the possibility, in a million years, that they could lose in a military conflict with the colonies. The idea would have been preposterous. It wasn't because of a careful and objective military assessment, but because of hubristic belief in their own inherent superiority - the imperial disease.
At worst it would be a mild rebellion which would be shut down in due order with a bit of good old fashion drawing and quartering. Empires grow out of touch with reality, and base their decisions on this false reality that they create. The outcome is not hard to predict. So for instance the exact same followed the Brits all the way to their collapse. Enjoining WW1 was completely unnecessary and effectively bankrupted them. The Treaty of Versailles was painfully myopic - all but ensuring WW2, and that was essentially the end of their empire.
> For instance the Brits likely never even considered the possibility, in a million years, that they could lose in a military conflict with the colonies.
They likely couldn't. The US independence war was part of a larger war between the French empire and the British empire. The british empire was also at was with Spain and the Netherlands at the time.
Not all of your examples are simply hubris (although there certainly was some of that).
> Enjoining WW1 was completely unnecessary
It effectively was necessary. They were drawn it via a pre-existing treaty with Belgium; it also does not seem like a good long-term plan for them to allow Germany to dominate the entire European mainland.
The whole thing was a mess, but not because Britain was out of touch with the reality of the situation. They were very aware but felt they had no choice.
> The Treaty of Versailles was painfully myopic - all but ensuring WW2
It was, but that's a perspective that's very clear in hindsight, and at the time it arose more from ignorance of the consequences (and possibly some vindictiveness) than hubris.
> that's a perspective that's very clear in hindsight,
It was clear at the time at least to people like Keynes who wrote a book on the subject: The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
"My purpose in this book is to show that the Carthaginian Peace is not practically right or possible. Although the school of thought from which it springs is aware of the economic factor, it overlooks, nevertheless, the deeper economic tendencies which are to govern the future. The clock cannot be set back. You cannot restore Central Europe to 1870 without setting up such strains in the European structure and letting loose such human and spiritual forces as, pushing beyond frontiers and races, will overwhelm not only you and your "guarantees," but your institutions, and the existing order of your Society."
There's a decent Wiki page on Britain's entry into WW1 here. [1] Britain's cabinet had already decided, before they chose to declare war, that the treaty did not obligate a military response.
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"Few historians would still maintain that the 'rape of Belgium' was the real motive for Britain's declaration of war on Germany. Instead, the role of Belgian neutrality is variously interpreted as an excuse used to mobilise public opinion, to provide embarrassed radicals in the cabinet with the justification for abandoning the principal of pacifism and thus staying in office, or - in the more conspiratorial versions - as cover for naked imperial interests."
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Similarly many people were fully aware that Treaty of Versailles was foolish as it was being drafted. Its excessively punitive nature essentially precluded any sort of peaceful reconciliation, which should always be the goal at the end of war. You never know who your allies, or your enemies, will be in a few decades. History loves a plot twist.
Hubris is a second order effect. It doesn't collapse the empire directly, it just hinders the ability to deal with military failures, economic decay, etc.
I think you could also argue that one of the reasons the Roman empire persisted so long was that their existential close calls (Hannibal being the most prominent one), became embedded into their cultural DNA.
The only decisions that matter for languages that get adopted are the decisions that cause adoption.
JS went without static types, Go went without generics, PHP was just a tool for reducing html boilerplate. New languages love to stick null right in there. Rust isn't what Graydon Hoare wanted it to be. Chris Lattner called Swift a failure.
Being exceptionally talented programmers does not automatically make them good language designers. I can think of a couple of people who may not be as good at programming, but are light years ahead at designing languages (and maintaining them over long term).
I'll provide an alternative narrative:
Additional seats at a significant premium are created for international students to allow subsidizing tuition for domestic students and offering of additional services on campus, research positions etc
If you get rid of international students then domestic student tuition will increase and/or campus services offered will decline.
Universities do not want to decrease their endowment. They want to find ways to grow it. And another goal is to increase the international reputation of their institutions. Here international students act like a kind of missionary.
This narrative describes public companies focused on growth and brand instead of schools focused on offering the best education possible in their country.
They have lost their way. They have been corrupted by bribes heaped upon them by rich international people buying their children advantage.
The good news is if you go down the list of "best" universities until you get to one with >30% acceptance rate, you still get a world class education that will more than prepare you for just about anything other than the bare few handful of jobs moronic enough to overvalue an "elite" education.
> There are a limited number of seats at the best universities.
This is only true for a few elite universities.
In particular, for public universities, the vast majority, including many/most of the top ones, do not have any cap on the amount of incoming students. Whoever meets the bar gets in.
Source: Local state university in an interview. This came up during the issue of affirmative action. They pointed out (with actual statistics) on how most of them have open admission. The context was that admitting someone via affirmative action was not depriving anyone of a seat.
This was for "regular" undergrad admission. Grad school/business/law/medicine (perhaps pre-med) may be different.
"Despite the generated code working, it was basically unmaintainable and 3x larger than the original C."
Which makes C2Rust seem pretty useless?
"I’ve recently reached a big milestone: the code base is now 100% (unsafe) Rust. I’d like to share the process of porting the original codebase from ~67,000 lines of C code to ~81,000 lines of Rust (excluding comments and empty lines)."
And yet somehow a hand-ported (and still unsafe) rewrite of a C program in Rust is still almost 20% larger?
If I recall, the Go gc compiler was automatically converted from 80K lines of C to 80K lines of Go. A hand-ported version would have been much smaller.
It does what took him 6 months in seconds. Of course it isn't perfect, failing to keep the name of constants being an obvious flaw. But presumably with a few improvements you could then spend some of that 6 months cleaning up the code and still save time. Sounds like C2Rust is almost there, but not quite yet.
> And yet somehow a hand-ported (and still unsafe) rewrite of a C program in Rust is still almost 20% larger?
Size is not a very useful metric. But the port is still half-done. He has got it working in Rust, so now he is ready to do the "hard" part of the port and actually rewrite the "basically C" code into idiomatic Rust. That is where you expect to get safety improvements and hopefully more readable code.
It generated unusuable garbage code in seconds, which is nothing like what he wrote by hand in six months.
"Size is not a very useful metric."
Size is a very useful metric. Counting tokens is more accurate estimate of "size" but lines of code is a good first approximation.
The entire purpose of high level languages is to make it possible to do more with less code. Size isn't all that matters but it's very important.
Rust code is not only more verbose than C it's also much more irregular and complex. That 20% increase in lines of code is probably more like 50% increase in code complexity, and this is without safety.
Yes it was ONLY 1,000 out of 300,000. But that is only harddrives not other hardware failures/replacement. But it goes to show that things do fail. And the cost of replacement in space is drastically more expensive. The idea of a DC in space as it stands is a nothing burger.
The point is that past burn-in, the failure rates are low enough for years that they're a rounding error and you can plan for just letting the failed equipment sit there.
Allowing the failed equipment to sit there can in fact cut costs because it allows you to design the space without consideration of humans needing to be able to access and insert/remove servers.
The higher the cost of bringing someone in to do maintenance, the more likely it is you will just design for redundancy of the core systems (cooling, power, networking), and accept failures and just disable failed equipment.
It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.
Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.
Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.