Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Seems like an exceptional figure. Technical genius. Strong sense of justice, and willing to to make personal sacrifice to help others get a more just outcome. All-around positive figure who delights in bringing happiness to others.
I don't have any personal connection to him, but I'm a fan.
He is one of very few people I genuinely admire and look up to. So much unlike the current crop of leaders-a*holes (like Musk, SBF, and a bunch of other fraudsters not even worth mentioning that were so in vogue just a couple of years ago).
Apart from his impressive technical achievements (and they are impressive, they are his, and they are worth learning about!), his personality and style are something to be admired.
I hope he sticks around for many more years to come.
Let's hope he pulls through and in good health.
Recovery quickly Woz!
Relatable. My Woz story is from junior high school (middle school) in the late 1990s. I was writing a report on him and read two different biographies that seemed to report conflicting information. So I emailed him asking what actually happened back at a childhood science fair. And he actually responded and recalled the history that knocked my report out of the park <3. That left a lasting impression on me that you don't have to be scared to reach out to "famous" people. They're people too and appreciate hearing from polite/civil fans.
Even if it all is in good faith, they will just get so many mails about business inquiries, recruits, media reqesting interviews, academia, etc. Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these days.
over about a hundred emails i've received about 30 replies.
the surprising thing to me is that their level of 'fame' has little to do with whether or not they reply to me. I've received replies from some famously impressive people, and have been ignored by some real 'niche' ones.
I have a suspicion that there is a bit of a bi-modal distribution between 'small enough to reply to fans' and 'so big that there is a reply crew on-staff', most of my emails that were ignored were "Famous but not that famous" types of folks that are in the middle between the two.
if he'd constantly sending one person dozes on messages, maybe demanding a response or something, that would be stalking
I don’t remember what made me start doing it nor what my letters said but I have dozens of autographed pictures of famous people from Elton John to John Stamos just from asking.
There was a time in HS when I had several to-fro with DMR about Unix philosophy without fully realizing what a giant he was in our CS galaxy. I truly miss him.
If you email someone who is famous for trivial media I’d doubt you’d get a response, but I know some people who have had conversations with more intellectual celebrities over email.
When you reach out with a genuine interest or point in a specific topic I’d like to think they often enjoy speaking about it.
I never would have expected my brother to get an email back from Noam Chomsky but he did after he wrote a decently cogent and complex question.
At the end of the day it possibly wasn’t actually him, but who knows.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111122202554/http://archive.wo...
what does that mean?
Those fusion cards were ahead of their time. Shame they didn't take off.
Something I really wish I knew immediately after my mom had a stroke is that the recovery that often happens over the days and weeks following a stroke as the brain adapts to its new normal is nothing short of amazing. My mom was nearly blind, unable to control her eyes, and mostly unable to speak. It was very, very bad, and we both thought her life was effectively over though neither of us said that to each other. A couple weeks later she walked out of the hospital and today she has almost no lasting effects.
The only treatment she ended up receiving was time and monitoring because she got to the hospital so late (it happened on an island, hours from a hospital.) That’s not to undermine the importance of urgent treatment obviously. She was very fortunate.
I wish Woz the very very best and that his stroke doesn't produce too many lingering disabilities. Taking time for yourself in the aftermath is crucial. Sending thoughts to him, in spirit, from a fellow survivor.
I lost a lot of faith in the healthcare system and doctors that night. This wasn’t a hospital in the middle of nowhere either, it was in an upper middle class neighborhood in the suburbs of Chicago. It was amazing she recovered fully from the stroke, though sadly passed away several years later of unrelated causes.
I hope the best for Mr. Wozniak, this isn’t something I would wish on anyone.
the trick is to realize how horridly hostile the system is to us without having to witness it firsthand. I empathize with you however, as I have been through the same things
USA:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/americans-...
> Researchers from the university separated respondents into three groups, based on age. One group was younger people, between the ages of 18 and 29, another group of senior citizens whose average age was 72, and a third group made up of individuals whose average age was 88.
18 - 29: 34% Yes, 40% No, 26% unsure
Average age 72: 32% Yes, 43% No, 25% unsure
Average age 88: 24% Yes, 59% No, 17% unsure
> Differences in responses emerged along gender lines as well, with more men saying they would take the pill than women.
And ironically:
> "If a life extension treatment were to become available that effectively stopped ageing, young adults may be likely to use such a treatment to avoid reaching the ages at which older cohorts say they would prefer to live forever," the study determined.
And then avoid social media, clickbait, ragebait, idling, gossipping, and live in a deliberate and conscious way to make the best use of their time (best according to their own metrics).
(Given that 66% of people are overweight, seeing 59% say they would like immortality suggests there's overlap. Not that I'm preaching, I don't do much of that stuff, and there is argument to want immortality to fritter away on enjoyments and relaxing and that maybe people are unhealthy because they are 'driving it like they stole it' for their limited time - but it's possible to play the finite lifetime cards we're dealt a lot better than than most of us do, without even getting to extremes and maximising things).
Y'know, given that "multiplying it indefinitely" is not actually an available option, whereas not dying at 72 from lung problems from a lifetime of smoking after several years of being nearly housebound then almost chairbound is an available option.
Earth's carrying capacity is a problem to be solved, there are many viable solutions that can be executed in parallel, and it doesn't really sound like a big challenge relative to getting life extension working in the first place.
Really, it's just bewildering to me that having a death wish is considered common-sense, normal viewpoint.
"It takes all kinds to make a world" isn't just a saying about polite tolerance.
It isn't altruistic to value one person's life more than another for their demonstrated ability to contribute what you think is best. That is literally egocentric selfishness, which is pretty much the opposite of altruism. I think the word you want is "utilitarian".
A person's ability to contribute is also context dependent. Woz was an innovator, but he also got lucky in multiple respects to have contributed what he did. Picking "Golden Children" tends to have negative sociological and innovative effects.
I'm not Steve Wozniak so if I did want him to be immortal I'm pretty sure that would not be selfishness. I'm also unsure why you think whichever human is "replacing" Woz in this hypothetical is going to up the level of diversity.
All that said, I actually do disagree with the fundamental premise that resources are finite in a meaningful way and that one person's immortality is stealing from someone else in a zero-sum game. Intelligent life is not zero-sum, and it is just as likely that Immortal Woz would develop a new farming technology that allows X extra people to exist than that he would actually require enough resources to be a net negative.
My "all kinds" cite wasn't meant to be about diversity per se, but about new people. Additionally, youth brings with it a native understanding that age (barring possible global amnesia) can't.
> I'm not Steve Wozniak so if I did want him to be immortal I'm pretty sure that would not be selfishness.
I'm not trying to pull the Nazi card here, it's just the first parallel I can think of: Hitler wasn't blonde haired nor particularly tall, yet his desire for a race of tall, blonde, blue-eyed Aryans was still egocentric.
> Intelligent life is not zero-sum
No, for many other sentient terrestrial species, and even non-sentient ones, human life is negative sum.
Regardless, human society would have to fragment quite a bit for older folks in this hypothetical world of immortality to not dominate opportunities for the younger folks. I hope this happens, but am skeptical enough I assume it's more likely that domineering paternalism is more likely to grow.
How can you say with a straight face "Hitler liked blue-eyed people, this is very egocentric of him as a person without blue eyes"? Makes no sense. Was Hitler egocentric? Most certainly. Is his ideas of Aryan supremacy a good example of that? Clearly not, as you so succinctly pointed out.
Back to the actual point: if the immortals actually made life shitter for everyone else, you can assume they would be French Revolution'd without too much overture.
When I was looking this up I discovered that Hitler did, apparently, have blue eyes.
> if the immortals actually made life shitter for everyone else, you can assume they would be French Revolution'd without too much overture.
The most proximate cause of the French Revolution was a tax on the aristocratic classes, and increased taxes in general, quite similar to the American Revolution: https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution
Another cause was shared with the Russian Revolution: Gradually increasing rights for the hoi polloi that made them acutely aware of the unjustness of the constraints that still existed.
The aristocrats provided the wealth, and the hoi polloi provided the numbers. But in an immortality scenario the aristocrats are being given a privilege, not taxed against it. Or if this immortality is available to all, then the old immortals may outnumber the youth.
In the case of France, an emperor replaced a king. In the case of Russia, a dictator replaced a czar. In the US the previously existing legislatures continued ruling, but without oversight.
Also, if we're positing indefinite limits to the number of humans, then an immortal wouldn't be replacing one person, but the whole series of persons their extended life is taking the place of (and would be altering all lineages descended from those persons).
It's not getting solved though, it's getting worse day by day because of climate change making increasingly large amounts of space uninhabitable, soil erosion, the aftereffects of pollution with all kinds of crap (PFAS, microplastics, nitrates from fertilizer runoff, ...) and over-exploitation below replacement levels (e.g. in fish).
> there are many viable solutions that can be executed in parallel, and it doesn't really sound like a big challenge relative to getting life extension working in the first place.
We barely understand how our body works in detail. We know a bit on how to do genetic manipulation, but at the moment no one seriously works on manipulating germ cells out of ethical reason - even something as "simple" as cloning a human is widely seen as unethical, and completely forget about using something like CRISPR to manipulate the genetics of a live human outside of people for whom this is the only chance at getting a few years out of some fatal disease.
> Really, it's just bewildering to me that having a death wish is considered common-sense, normal viewpoint.
Memento mori.
That's a few decades in the future at least, but biodiversity and climate change is on a way faster scale.
That's the problem with the futurist mindset in a large part of tech culture - we need action now.
That's like saying Rails isn't good scaffolding for a web service, because they're made of steel and are meant for trains.
The silliness of the trope starts with the notion that once you have gone immortal you can't go back. Somehow you are stuck yearning for the sweet release of death.
In reality life is extremely fragile, maintaining the right conditions to support it requires constant effort. There is no reason to think that any future scientific advance will alter this fundamental fact.
Therefore it is highly likely that whoever achieves practical immortality will be also able to undo their "curse" by simply discontinuing whatever practice keeps them alive.
Also, "forever" doesn't happen all at once. Give me immortality, and then check in with me yearly if I still want it. I will let you know once I'm over it.
Immortality as a subscription service—brilliant!
That seems to jive with GC's point. The definition is the ability to live forever, not the requirement to live forever.
Because the "true and cursed" immortality is not on offer. Spending resources to extend our life is a possibility. Spending resources to better understand what aging is and how to extend our youth is. Getting cursed with immortality is not in the cards.
> The word immortality has a specific meaning, even if you don’t like what it is.
Ok. You can have your discussion about your fantasy concepts. They are fun! What should we discuss next? How many duck sized horses we would fight just to avoid being cursed with true immortality? It is all good with me as long as we don't try to draw real world conclusions from said fantasies.
I like the rational attitude. Like you pointed out, somehow people think it's some magic portion that you drink without ever the possibility of going back to being mortal.
The few elderly I know of who approached that age and were reflective enough told me they just ended up letting go. And they were actually happier.
Being sufficiently well-off is probably helping ;)
People seem to "tribal" and self-centred. People don't hold doors for people, they walk past people struggling like say their hands are full and they drop something but people just walk past not helping them. In stores people walk in front of little old ladies nearly knocking them down. Just a total lack of innate civility.
This is one of those cases where one shouldn't generalize from fictional evidence. Immortality as curse is a very lazy trope that breaks down upon casual inspection.
> even surviving to 90 or 100 can be its own kind of hell for those whose life is being unnaturally preserved for the sake of those who can't or won't let go.
That is indeed true, both in fiction and reality, but it's not the kind of immortality that's under discussion. Obviously being forever locked in a state of agony, in a failing body, is something no one wants.
And it's not a death wish. I think a lot of us realise that we probably don't offer a net positive to this earth, that our individual existence probably uses more resource than it provides. So technically that means that the earth would be better off without us, but that's not a death wish. We're not saying we're actively going to kill ourselves
Hitler was bad for human society even if he pooped enriched uranium every 5 minutes. There are people who provide no resources whatsoever who make the Earth way, way better.
Thinking about a human life’s value in terms of “resources in/resources out” suggests to me that you have little understanding of the true value of humans and human culture.
I don't believe most people go as far as reasoning this way - I was thinking more about internalizing "the natural order of things" / "circle of life" stuff too much.
The kind of thought pattern you described can be, for some, a rational and accurate view of their circumstances. It can also be a sign of depression (especially internalizing the "earth would be better off without me/us" part). It can, unfortunately, be also both.
This again reveals the wisdom of very basic biblical truths, like “all men are made in the image of God”. Meaning all humans have value, a special value different from animals and plants
I wonder if being selfless in that sense is not actually the "norm" when we consider most of the people who live and lived. In-between all the ones willing to sacrifice themselves for a descendant, a cause, those with a tightrope life, those who have spiritual beliefs etc.
Most people I know are at ease with their death, which is very different from having a death wish.
Jobs took over his share of that.
We say many altruistic things when we’re happy and healthy.
There’s a great opinion article from a doctor that says people faced with death that come into a hospital usually change their minds about receiving care that would prolong their lives.
I have seen this many times as a caretaker for my own family members.
It’s only at the doorstep of death that we know how we truly feel about death itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/advance-directive...
It's trivial to develop the god complex with that kind of life and the desire to prolong it as much as possible. They know what they have, and they want to keep it forever. Why hedge on the unproven promise of eternal life if you can live in paradise already?
https://theweek.com/science/the-billionaire-led-quest-for-im...
Not surprisingly, it's the kind of people who, if allowed to eternally accumulate wealth and power, will eventually cause catastrophic damage to humanity if they feel not adored enough. Many don't even need multiple lifetimes do get there.
Wozniak's point of view is very uncommon in the rarefied slice of the population that he inhabits.
Exactly.
It is like people can't look away and look at billions upon billions of galaxies clusters and could only see the limits of the Earth. The Earth is finite! we can't grow exponentially forever!
We can't grow exponentially forever in space either. Somehow this gets forgotten.
O(N^t) > O(t^3), for all N > 1
For example, if we eventually have multiple star systems' worth of resources at our disposal, then I hope we put at least a trillion dollars per topic into long-shot research topics such as time travel, the multiverse, FTL travel, methods of creating new universes via an artificial Big Bang, applied theology (trying to find evidence of a God so that we can communicate with them), methods of achieving infinitely positive states of qualia such as something like nirvāṇa, and so on.
Each bet might be 1 in a million - but I'd much rather that we try every possible chance at escaping what we currently see as the inevitable, and not go gentle into that heat death night.
This goal, to break through the wall at the end of the universe, was what Asimov called for in his inspiring short story The Last Question.
No, there's not another tree. We just happen to be rather efficient in dissipating free energy.
For example, there might turn out to be particle types which don't exist at all in our zone, but which are force carriers for forces that enable time travel or other violations of causality. We might have evolved in a zone with zero of these particles simply because it's hard for life to evolve in a zone without causality. Our zone might be a life-friendly little bubble beyond which things get truly strange, but where with appropriately designed nanotechnology, we might achieve incredible things we've never before observed, including changing the past or even stepping entirely outside of the fabric of spacetime into someplace with more or fewer spatial dimensions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
So, 1 in a million is my approximate a priori estimate of the odds of the Cosmological Principle being false in a useful way.
For a fun example of fiction that takes place in a setting where the Cosmological Principle is false, check out A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The zone where Earth is situated, and where the laws of physics are the same as in our observed reality, is called the Slow Zone. There are three other types of zones with other laws, called the Beyond, the Transcend, and the Unthinking Depths.
I suppose that to approach a topic like this, we can reason in the classical-logic manner of the ancient Greeks and others who sought to understand their universe without yet having the instruments to make necessary observations. What I mean is, without our civilization having seen evidence either way yet, the question of what is a good prior probability is only able to be informed through non-empirical means, such as the philosophy of science (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem ), philosophy of knowledge (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle ), and theology (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds ).
Another similar topic about which we must reason without having yet made any applicable observations is the question of whether our universe is a simulation. If it is, then it is possible that a sufficiently well-constructed prayer (message to the system administrators) could have causal effects.
The heat death of the universe is trillions of years off. However even assuming a modest 3% annual growth, humanity runs out of matter in only a few thousand years.
What's nine orders of magnitude between friends? ;)
Instead, he waited years until it had metastasized everywhere and it was too late simply because he couldn't bear the though of someone cutting on him. They then did a far more massive surgery on a fool's errand trying to cut it out of all the places it had gone.
Then he paid off a transplant foundation to get a liver that he definitely shouldn't have gotten meaning someone else died so he could get a transplant then die anyway.
He's quite a contrast to Woz IMO.
Steve Jobs was a forceful and perhaps disagreeable character, but he is one of the clearest examples of how having relentless drive and taste can change the world. Focus less on the feet of clay and more on the giant.
And not to diminish Wozniak’s tremendous achievements, but Steve Jobs continuously innovated over the course of decades and had a much greater impact on the world.
But we need him. I hope he recovers fully.
You're totally right about Woz's legendary status. He is essentially the living embodiment of the hacker ethos.
Tbh, hate macs and macOS but I like iPhone (just because I only use a phone to call, text and youtube, and it just works (tm)) but I've been a fan of Woz for as long as I knew about him... and he hasn't changed at all with age. Dude is just awesome and you can tell he loves the tech aspect so much.
Perhaps Jobs would become a well-regarded author, or a city council member, or own a franchise of restaurants. Alternatively, his drug use, lack of a useful college degree, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and his many other bad decisions could have led Jobs to end up homeless on the Berkeley streets like so many other hippies from his social circle. He might have died sunburnt and unwashed at age 45 from a heroin overdose, just as much as he might have been successful.
Even if he avoided the catastrophic homelessness and destitution which befell the believers of the "turn on, tune in, drop out" movement that Jobs immersed himself in, I think his success would be no greater than any other successful person whose career takes them to the upper-middle class. Charisma and design sense can only take you so far, and the real lotto ticket was the "right place right time" factor which came from Woz, who was practically born to invent computers at a time when the inventors of computers could change the world.
It was Woz who had dreamt of designing a computer since he was a boy, and who even in middle school taught himself computer architecture and circuit design at the Ph.D. level, and whose technical creativity was once-in-a-generation.
Woz was super lucky that his passion was about something that history had ordained would become the next technology revolution (rather than e.g. having his boyhood passion be in ornithology & birdwatching). For every Woz, there are probably 10 or 20 equally brilliant kids whose passions unfortunately, through luck of the draw and no fault of their own, have very little societal or financial value.
Jobs worked with Woz to get to the point where they had a computer company which Jobs could then grow by 1,000x.
But without Woz, Jobs would probably instead be spending the years in which Apple grew big in a "turn on, tune in, drop out" lifestyle of crashing on friends' couches and doing nothing useful, until eventually there are no more friends' couches to crash on, and he becomes a shaggy and dirty person on the street, trying to get money for drugs.
I quote him "Never trust a computer that you can't throw out a window."
Strokes at any age are incredibly dangerous
Most strokes occur at advanced age because circulation decreases (at least that’s my understanding)
From what I understand: strokes are not more dangerous with age, but are much more likely to happen as you age.
I was told that the the risk factor is a matter of how quickly the stroke is identified and how quickly you are able to receive medical care after the onset. Faster response == less time for brain matter to die due lack of blood.
Triage isn't always accurate, especially in overworked emergency rooms.
You wish you had third-world medical treatment, though.
Having been many times to hospitals in several 1st world countries AND several 3rd world countries, I do not find the former much better than the latter and the 10x-100x price markup is hard to ignore.
I had private insurance in China and it was wonderful. I could get an appointment quickly for whatever, the waiting room was really plushy, the deductibles were like 100-400 kuai, mostly the former. The biggest problem is that private insurance in China has a payout limit (around $100k/year for the policy Microsoft gave me)...which...well...whatever.
The hospital was amazing and like nothing I’ve seen in Western Europe. Granted it was a private hospital but the people there were almost uniformly Thai.
Thailand is surprisingly economically strong. I don’t think it’s a third world country.
PS: Btw Rulopotamus-related? (he was a minor celebrity, loved professor in a certain college in some place of this galaxy)
My first thought was that sounded exactly like here in Canada.
If he hit his head/had trauma to his kneck, that's one thing. Clogged arteries are another.
In short, your circulatory system gets old and rusty and either bursts or gets blocked. If you manage to avoid CVD, heart disease, and cancer then a stroke is the next problem.
All of this is part of the reason I think the 'search for the pill/shot of immortality' in modern times is little different than the search for the pool of immortality in ancient times. Everything breaks down over time and so to solve this, we'd need to fix everything, when we yet struggle to truly fix even a single thing.
May his recovery go well and there be no long term damage.
But if HP had been interested in doing so, then Woz might have stayed there to begin with.
Since I believe, and really want to believe, he's got a lot of good years ahead of him, I'm glad to see people speaking freely.
However, it was still too much. If Jobs' passing got 100x the attention, maybe it should have only been 10x.