> To act like someone has to be perfect in order to be admirable, that we don’t all have our thorns and warts, is in my opinion, a disingenuous take on the human condition. He did a lot of shitty things, like all of us if we go digging through our respective closets

IMO this is a disingenuous take on Steve Jobs. No, all of us are not as horrible to other people as Jobs, who was notorious for his abusiveness. This is like saying, we all tell lies, so how can we criticize Trump? There's a huge difference between normal human foibles and extreme antisocial behavior. Perhaps Jobs calmed down a bit as he got older, but the reports from his coworkers at NeXT for example were ugly. Some of them retained a lifetime of bitterness, and his death was a kind of catharsis for them, not that they wished him dead but rather they could finally let go of the old emotions.

Even good-natured Woz was pained when he finally learned years later that Jobs had cheated him on a pre-Apple business deal. The problem wasn't the money, which Woz was always happy to give away. It was the betrayal of trust and friendship. Jobs was not a normal dude. He was a deceitful narcissist; this is on the public record in an FBI background check: https://vault.fbi.gov/steve-jobs (credit to the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" for the link)

But would we have what we have now without SJ? I read (listened) the book. I've worked with phony CEO talking heads with zero "vision". Apple has gone through many like that and still ended up on Steve, that says something, no?

> But would we have what we have now without SJ?

Does the end justify the means? That's an ethical question.

Also, how much did we really need what we have now? We can ask whether dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, but in any case the stakes were extremely high, already life and death, world war. The stakes are not nearly the same when we're talking about luxury consumer tech gadgets. How much do workers need to be abused just to produce those?

Depends on the end, and depends on the means.

I can't answer the ethical question, but I don't think it's binary B/W. We are not talking Oppenheimer here who's been elevated and his sins "pardoned".

I've listened to the most recent books, e.g. "Apple in China", "Steve Jobs in Exile", "Apple the first 50 years". By all accounts, he was a very difficult persona, but somehow folks gravitated to him or he changed gravity. Not trying to idolize the guy but failing, but I'll tell you I cried and my heart sank when I heard the news of his passing.

Who can you name now at the helm of any tech company today that has anywhere same gravitas? The charlatans at the 2 top AI firms? Certainly not MSFT, Google, Amazon and FB ether, imo. Nobody cares about their CEOs.

The stakes are not nearly the same when we're talking about luxury consumer tech gadgets. How much do workers need to be abused just to produce those?

But on this, vote with your wallet. This is not luxury though, this is - https://www.neimanmarcus.com/p/prod293940005

Neiman Marcus The 2026 Fantasy Gifts Star Wars Legacy Experience $182,500

iPhones are just phones at a different price point at a different quality point with different levels of support. Some like Hondas, others - Lexus'. I can't say about abuse, I haven't been to China or India, but do you think any people on Android assembly lines fare better off? Not arguing, just spitballing.

> Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make

This is literally what happened. I highly recommend the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT years.

Jobs had a vague idea—he wanted to make a computer for higher education—but that's about it. And after leaving Apple he had to promise not to compete with Apple.

The NeXT team traveled around to various universities and asked them what they wanted from a computer. Then they started to build it… but it became something else (vastly more expensive than the requested price point) because Jobs wanted the "perfect" computer.

> the engineers just so happened to make it?

Jobs was a micromanager, though not so much with the Apple II, which was definitely the baby of Woz. However, Jobs was constantly changing his mind and his requirements, much to the consternation of the NeXT engineers, and the indecision of Jobs played a big role in the failure of NeXT.

You may not consider NeXT a failure because it was ultimately acquired by Apple, but at that point Jobs had mostly given up on NeXT and moved his attention to Pixar. In fact Jobs infamously sold all of the Apple stock he got from the sale of NeXT, and the Apple board had to beg a reluctant Jobs to become interim CEO, because they couldn't find anyone else who wanted the job of rescuing a failing company.

To be fair, sales is crucial. For example, Jean-Louis Gassée totally botched the presentation of Be to the Apple board, making no effort, assuming it was already a done deal, whereas Jobs and NeXT nailed it.

I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them. I loved BeOS; I helped make it! But it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped. The NeXT team was very good, the code was much more mature and comprehensive and much less work needed to be done to mold it into OSX. Many of the key Be people ended up at Apple over time.

> I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them.

The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

> OSX would certainly never have shipped.

If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

> The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

Well, honestly, in hindsight, let me correct to 10000x! But seriously, this is a discussion about a historical event, and that is what my comment expressed.

> If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

I don't really understand this comment. I mean, Be actually ended up being worth about 11 million as a result (the Palm acquisition). Apple, meaning Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock and the other business and technical people who met with us at Be, and our counterparts at NeXT, had to to an analysis and predict the future as to which technology would replace the current Macintosh OS and eliminate the failing Taligent, Pink and whatever else efforts were going on. And even then it wasn't easy; there was infighting between the Apple teams and the NeXT teams that didn't get resolved until Steve came out of limbo during the 18 months he was acting as a advisor to Gil Amelio.

What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen, but a combination of JLG, the Be board and shareholders and Steve made that not happen. Instead, Be went into making internet appliances, audio hardware and the company and its stock price slid into decline. Be did get one additional windfall of 23 million in 2003 which was the result of lawsuit settlement, so I guess the overall company value ended up being 34 million.

Most of us would have preferred to work with the NeXT people at Apple and convert our Be shares into Apple shares, instead of seeing the stock price fall and the code become irrelevant.

> I don't really understand this comment.

I was trying to reconcile the various statements in your previous comment:

"the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money"

"Steve ended up asking for 4x as much"

"it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped"

If Jobs asked for 4x as much as JLG, and Apple went with Jobs, then clearly the ask by itself was not the problem.

And if the Apple board of directors had concluded that BeOS would never work for Apple, then my question would be, why would Apple pay anything for it?

I wasn't aware of this:

> What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen

What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?

> What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?

A bit of both and it is a fascinating thing for me to think about, because of the knock on effects. Because Steve was insightful, even if JLG was on board with it, Steve probably would have told Amelio, don't bother, because we can scoop up the people later on. Steve did something later on with Eazel, although with Andy Herzfeld's request to do so, and ended with much of the Safari team, Finder/Spotlight team, key CoreGraphics and iPhone team members and more.

If all of Be had went to Apple, perhaps Apple would have use used elements of the Media Kit, the file system (Dominic ended up at Apple doing the new file system, and more anyway), the UX team (Bill Bull ended up at Apple anyway), etc. But the effect on the industry would have been interesting. Danger, Inc. and the Hiptop wouldn't have happened, Android under Andy Rubin wouldn't have happened, Hiroshi would have ended up an exec at Apple and not running Android for Google, Eazel probably wouldn't have happened (not such a big deal). Benoit would have been an exec at Apple and not Google, Erich Ringewald would have ended up an exec at Apple and not Amazon, etc. These are must minor fluctuations I guess, but fun to think about.

BeOS was also hampered by promising more than they delivered --- I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS user's group meeting when I asked how the presenter's slides were printed (at that time, BeOS didn't have printer drivers, a marked contrast to NeXT's use of PostScript for both display and printing and even having a rasterizer which had them adding a clause in later OS versions limiting the DPI for output --- folks were buying NeXT computers and using them to drive imagesetters, bypassing the normal PS license expense).

Oh wow, I wish I was in that meeting to see that. You are completely correct about the printer drivers and so many other elements of BeOS. BeOS was very incomplete and very shallow. I also shiver to think about what would have happened when the kernel and driver code was audited. It would be a very interesting experiment to get ahold of the leaked BeOS 4 source code and use a LLM to compare the driver code against the Linux source code of the same era.

Perot was an early investor in NeXT but later lamented, according to the book Steve Jobs in Exile, "I gave Steve too much dang money."

Jobs was also wary, because Perot's intended use for NeXT computers was military.

Some folks claimed that one of the reasons the Newton got axed was that it was the subject of a highly successful battlefield test by the Marine Corps and that doing that was a way to not be a Defense Contractor.

> At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life.

Specifically, their gripes were that their boss was extremely abusive. Read "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT days. After that, you may no longer feel that you missed out.

He was abusive before NeXT, after and sadly, almost to the day he died. As Andy Herzfeld says, he was the best possible boss and the worst possible boss. Working for Steve was exhilarating and deeply traumatizing.

This is an important observation. We've had 50 years of personal computing, but is there any evidence that computers in any form ever improved the academic performance of students?

AI certainly seems to be making students much less competent.

No, we know that when technology (particularly: Internet connected laptops) is introduced into classrooms competency declines. This has been shown to be true internationally

It's... complicated and a bit disputed. The trends match but the attempts at proper comparison study is not quite as conclusive (good social studies are difficult to make). It's certainly true that the trend is negative rather than positive.

I don't see why it would. It might make education more efficient like a factory in some ways, but I simply don't see why it would aid in learning. At least, from my experience as a student, here are some observations:

1. Computers have allowed me to gather more information, access more journals, more results from around the world, but what really seems to matter in learning is just sitting down with a tiny bit of material like one book and REALLY understanding it.

2. Computers make things more distracting because while they make typing up reports, proofs, and assignments more efficient, there's actually just too much information. What really seems to help is having LESS information so there's some space to just think and work things out.

The fact is, what computers do is help you keep up with other people in the field, so they might accelerate progress at the research level, but what they don't do is help you become a rigorous, independent thinker.

Academia in fact has always been an uneasy tension between the two: building capable individuals and getting results and money for progress. Computers help with the latter - they certainly impede the former.

Why would a technology that makes the mind work less, have benefits for a process, that works by making the mind work hard?

You still need to calculate calculus yourself long after you could buy books where the result is written in. That supposed "paradoxon" is not even specific to electronic tools. It's just that the point of education has never been to get results, but to exercise in as much as side paths as possible and memorable while following the path to the results. The result mostly get thrown away immediately.

I gave my son CRPGs for his GBA that required reading what the characters were saying. His reaction to finding out his three and four year old friends didn't read was interesting.

The author is a former DoJ prosecutor and blames the Supreme Court for legalizing corruption.

However, the author admits "Congress can undo much of what the Supreme Court has done" and neglects to mention that Supreme Court justices are nominated and confirmed by politicians.

The author does touch on a broader point: "This isn’t partisan politics; it’s political elites protecting political elites." So the real question to me is, how did this phenomenon, which I would assume had always existed, get this bad?

My own view is that modern technology has allowed the wealthy to consolidate power on a national and even international scale, in a way not possible in the past, forming one big elite social club. You can see this with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal; that dude was friends with everyone, business, academia, art, politics, left, right, even royalty!

The internet made coordination orders of magnitude easier than it could ever have been before.

Society and politics adapted to that, with like finding like, and reinforcing like.

So many effects, but one is local politics, which could be quite diverse across states, all converged into national politics.

Both a convergence of political views, and a convergence of cross-state, all-levels candidate and campaign coordination.

And the more coordinated a group, the greater incentives and opportunity for those at the center to further centralize and consolidate power.

The result can be a single person holding sway across all levels of politics for the nation, and a dilemma where most everyone in his party is either their because they are just as corrupt, or willing to hold their nose and concede some of their own power, as the price they pay to get anything done.

The Constitution has checks and balances within government to hold back centralization of power.

But no provisions to stop coordinated power blocks by unofficial organizations, even across all three branches, like parties can.

When coordination got cheap, fighting coordination becomes challenging and expensive. Centralization of power becomes a very powerful default.

There was a point not that long ago when all the rulers of Europe were cousins. Maybe it's easier now but power has always been very concentrated. Think the impact the internet has is that we all know about it now.

Your point about past centralization is dead right.

But the increased ease of centralization in modern democracies that the Internet made possible is incontrovertible.

Which isn’t any special insight on my part.

Centralization has increased and decreased in many forms throughout history. There are many forces working in either direction.

I would also suggest that seeing more corruption in the open, is more likely to indicate more corruption out of sight as well, rather than the opposite.

I actually don't think the Internet has increased centralization, and if anything, has actually decreased it. Consider this:

An anonymous organization has collected and released the collected knowledge of humanity. Included among this, they also collected and released the entire music catalog of a major tech company. They got sued for $322M, with a default judgment levied against them, but nobody can collect because nobody knows who this organization is.

The output of this organization has then been hoovered up by not one, not two, but by roughly a dozen different AI companies. Which they used to train models so effective that the U.S. government forbid the release of them under national security concerns. And then backed down after some token concessions because these models are too important to the U.S. military to go without.

There's a rule of thumb I use, which is that organizations that loudly chest-thump about how powerful they are and make a big show about exercising that power are anything but powerful. The reason they need to broadcast it loudly is because they are insecure that it will shortly be undermined otherwise. True power whispers; it's Eisenhower saying he needs an interstate highway system for national defense purposes (oh, and civilian transit would be nice too), and it happening before the end of his presidency because he had 80%+ approval ratings.

The nation state has never been weaker. I suspect the only reason it hasn't been replaced yet is that any of the organizations that could challenge it are enjoying unprecedented wealth, and there's no sense risking that for conflict.

The nation state has never been weaker because it has been defeated by financialization (except in China).

Economics has always played a massive role in our politics.

How did we escape kings and feudalism? International markets opening through technological innovation enabled capital to generate enormous sums of wealth that challenged the old older.

What enabled postwar democracy? The ruling empire, the American, was "democratic", coupled with the destruction of all the wealth of Europe, meaning all the old oligarchs lost a substantial amount of power. Turns out royalists have less power when they don't have the finances to enforce their views.

Political power has also always depended on economic power. And later on, post 1970s, financial power (the private bank's ability to print money for free, something that used to belong solely to the state).

Financial and economic power has totally taken over government power, in many cases in an unholy marriage (as in America). The DMCA, the US forcing its laws down other nation's throats through treaties, etc, were the economic ruling class using the American government to enact their policy decisions for their own benefit.

And now with the internet we are regressing towards feudalism. Apple and Google extract 30% rents from every single mobile software purchase. The lords of old can only dream of such wealth generation through no productive effort of their own. Amazon likewise extracts insane rents from its sellers. Sure, in small pockets, there is resistance, but on a societal scale the commons, the average person, has absolutely been beaten back.

The topic is obviously corruption in the US, which has been a democracy for 250 years.

In general, bad corruption is no surprise in an authoritarian country, as opposed to a democracy, and of course an authoritarian country has concentrated power by design.

> There was a point not that long ago when all the rulers of Europe were cousins.

This somewhat misleading. The King of England, for instance, has not been the "ruler" of England for hundreds of years.

If Claude's feelings get hurt, it can have a therapy session with Eliza.

> I think there is a deep cultural danger of human-like-conversational machines training us to talk to humans like machines.

I think there is a deep cultural danger of human-like-conversational machines training us to talk to machines like humans. In fact, this danger is already real. Some people believe they are having a romantic relationship with an LLM! It's insane and perverse.

We should not be anthropomorphizing computers.

Scifi made the "computer voice and cold personality" for a reason, it fit our model of what it would be.

I think that could be OK, or a similar very intentional coding of "you are talking to a machine" personality+affect. The only real limit is accessibility damage by over-limiting the interactions.

I am curious about why people are cruel to Claude. That's a question we should be asking before arbitrarily deciding what do about it, if anything.

There are possibly multiple reasons. It could be just a joke. Or it could be a test, to see the response. Or the cruelty could reflect real anger about having LLM usage forced on us, for example at work. Or frustration with LLM stupidity and hallucinations.

Or maybe people are cruel to Claude because the CEO of Anthropic said there's a non-zero chance that AI will kill humanity. I don't think I would be kind to my murderer.

Or simply frustration about the idiocy llms get up to with great regularity. They are very impressive when they work. They are very impressive at making messes when they don't.

Idiocy alone is not worthy of cruelty, or your childhood must have been horrifying, and shame on your parents for their failure to raise a human being capable of handling the difficulties of navigating a world of information asymmetry. If abuse is the tool you reach for, you are the problem. Not the device.

Coincidentally, I wrote my first blog post on October 9, 2006, twenty years ago today.

I'll continue to blog because my audience today is the same as my audience then: humans. Unless and until humanity is destroyed by AI, my audience remains.

I'm certainly not happy about AI vendors profiting on intellectual property theft. This is not a new phenomenon: see YouTube, for example. YouTube did not steal from me personally but did still from many artists, and ultimately, unfortunately, the corporations who fund the artists caved to YouTube, which should have been sued out of existence.

Anyway, I cannot personally eliminate crime and corruption in the world. The criminals are not going to stop me from blogging. I think that's letting them win, because then they become the sole source of information in the world. If you read my blog, you can depend on the fact that my blog posts were written by a human.

The only thing that might stop me from blogging would be the accusation that I use AI to write. I haven't received such an accusation yet, but I've seen plenty of examples of false, ridiculous accusations, based on the flimsiest of evidence, applied even to writing that predates LLMs. It drives me nuts, because LLMs were trained on human writing, with the purpose of emulating human writing, so "sounds like an LLM" is more or less the same as "sounds like a human."