Steve Wozniak Comments On Jobs Resignation Announcement | Hacker News Reader

Steve Wozniak Comments On Jobs Resignation Announcement

cultofmac.com

106 pointsmatthewphiong31 comments

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Wozniak: "Steve needs now to just have some 'Steve time'. He deserves it."

I worry about this. Brilliant minds wholly obsessed with their work often do not take retirement well, or long. As in:

- A week before "Eyes Wide Shut" completed post-production, Stanley Kubric died.

- A week after ending 50 years of "Peanuts", Charles Schultz died.

Other examples exist.

Better indeed he remain on the BoD of Apple in a controlling role, and/or have some other deep involvement suitable for his health. Berkley Breathed has ended Opus' forum (under whatever name) at least four times; restarting has been good for him. May jobs continue to live and breathe Apple for a long time to come, as it is his air.

You might be confusing cause with effect. Charles Schultz may well have lost something essential which caused him to quit the strip and subsequently die.

Actually that example occured to me when I read the news. Schultz announced his plans to retire a period in advance, and yet died the day the last strip was published.

I'd like to see a case where someone didn't stop what they were doing after they died.

Deep in the field of off topic, but person that was doing nothing probably could keep up with it after passing.

There are countless counter examples for this. Steve like everyone else may die (he just got operated twice for critical illness!), but I think you are reading too much in those examples.

Steve, does deserve "Steve time". I like how graceful Wozniak is, in his response.

My uncle had a heart attack 2 weeks after retiring. my family explained it as, "Some people just can't handle retirement" :) He's OK now. One actual explanation I've heard is that the stress can keep your body from healing properly. So as soon as the stress stops holding you together, everything just falls apart.

My wife is a teacher, and she tends to get sick at the start of pretty much every vacation. It's like her body knows that she doesn't have time to be sick until vacation.

I am a teacher. You keep going for the students, then suddenly there is silence, no work, the background noise comes up like a compressed audio channel. Strange embodied meat things we are.

The other way to look at it is these people continued working as long as humanly possible. They quit not because they wanted to move on, but because they couldn't continue.

In Kubrick's case, he took over a decade off before making Eyes Wide Shut and would undoubtedly had wanted to make some final edits after post-production or even after release, as was his habit. I don't think he intended to retire.

Really? Working on Aryan Papers and A.I. is "taking a decade off"?

Well, you can't say he was working at the same pace then as he was in earlier years. His attempt to make a film about Napoleon involved a lot more work, yet occupied a much smaller gap between successful film releases. My point is that if Kubrick were to die due to not taking retirement well, a decade long period of writing and exploring ideas seems closer to retirement than his typical hands-on approach to post-production and release.

Kubrick had worked quite a while on "Aryan Papers," even casting the female lead: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/03/kubrick-holocaust...

Fine. The point is, Kubrick wasn't done with Eyes Wide Shut when he died, at least by his standards. The film was cut and digitally altered after his death to keep it down to an R rating. Kubrick's cuts routinely occurred as late as after the film was released.

Well, Steve Jobs is remaining on the BoD as chairman.

Brilliant minds wholly obsessed with their work often do not take retirement well, or long.

Or more probably, brilliant minds wholly obsessed with their work only retire when their health forces them to. This most often means the end is near.

I am not saddened by Steve resigning the CEO role at Apple. I am saddened by what I fear the reason for his resignation is.

I can't remember from what article this was, might have even been from a book, but I read that in the chinese (probably) community there was an important festival for which the oldest woman of the family played an important role. The researchers found that for some weeks before the festival the death rate was significantly decreased, and for the same period after it was significantly increased. Meaning that people hang on for important events.

With respect to this the good news is that Steve Jobs is still the Chairman of Apple, and thus would still have significant input if he so chooses.

Every time I see an old picture of the Steves, Woz looks like a hacker and Jobs looks like a rock star.

That's a fairly accurate representation of the two.

According to thenextweb.tumblr.com, Wozniak also said this during the interview:

"Steve was very fast thinking and wanted to do things, I wanted to build things. I think Atlas Shrugged was one of his guides in life."

My own personal experience is that there are some very powerful ideas in that book. It's gratifying to see that great people like Woz and Jobs also think so.

Edit: Why is this being downvoted? It is an actual quote from the interview with Woz, with attribution. It's on-topic, and it helps complete the picture of what he actually said. How is that a bad thing? Why bowdlerize Woz?

I didn't initially have much respect for Rand or Atlas Shrugged, having read her years ago and concluded that her ideas didn't account for human nature any better than Communism did... but I have to admit, her stock rises in my sight every time someone feels compelled to mod down a post that so much as mentions the unholy words on Reddit or HN.

Someone who pisses off that many hipsters must have done something right. No one has ever received so much revulsion from the so-called intellectual elite without advocating genocide or other atrocities... and perhaps even then. Dangerous ideas are interesting.

I think I may be misunderstanding the structure of your argument. Are you saying that your regard for Ayn Rand keeps rising because other people dislike her ideas? And that is the only reason?

It's not so much that other people dislike her ideas, but that otherwise-eloquent people react so violently to them that they fail to counter those ideas effectively. The emo philosophy majors who reflexively disparage objectivism and libertarianism in general don't seem to understand that Rand is the monster that Nietzsche warned them about. They end up making themselves look like overindulged children in any online thread where someone brings up the topic. They literally sound just like the gay-bashing Christian politicians who are later caught conducting their own "services" in a public restroom.

Whenever I find myself reacting so defensively to an idea or concept, I try to force myself to look into the matter more closely. Put another way: if Ayn Rand can hold up a rhetorical crucifix and turn me into a puddle of fuming goo, that's my weakness, and not hers.

monster that Nietzsche warned them about

My philosophy professor (from undergrad) is a Nietzsche scholar, and I'm pretty sure he disagrees. What makes you think this?

I'm just referring to the old cliche about taking care when you fight monsters ("objectivist derp"), lest you become what you despise.

It's obviously not precisely what ol' Fred had in mind.

Here's the source of the comments, minus the CultOfMacSpamTabloid trash around it:

http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/personal-tech/table...

I was surprised when Woz said on Bloomberg TV that him and Steve aren't as close as they used to be. He said that he's been finding out this news by reading like everyone else has. That's kind of sad to me. I would of thought they'd still be close friends.

It's rare to keep a close friend for 30-40 years. Especially when you end up in totally different places in life.

“You’ve got to remember. He was surrounded by great, great people at Apple… and those people are still there."

Sounds like Steve's team gets a tick of approval from the Woz, that bodes well for the future of the company.

See this: http://blog.precipice.org/youre-the-ones

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