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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

Less Jobs, more Woz

More of either of them works for me. Compared to Musk or Zuckerberg or Andreessen or Altman or Bezos or any other 2025 tech fucko, Jobs is Woz.

Please don't kid yourself

All of these men today are the way they are because they are trying to emulate Jobs

Not that I wish it on any of them, but getting cancer changes you.

They absolutely 100% are trying to emulate Steve Jobs. But the version of Steve Jobs they have in their heads is a caricature.

Steve Jobs wanted the world to see him as some sort of artistic, cultured genius. The only aspects of Steve Jobs that today's crop of tech CEOs seem to emulate are his wealth and arrogance.

• Wojcicki admired Jobs while Youtube had the most depraved and moronic comment section on the internet

• Huffman admired Jobs while Reddit had a 'watch people die' subreddit

• Zuckerberg admired Jobs while nuts used Facebook to livestream the Christchurch massacre and Whatsapp to incite mobs to kill Rohingya

• Bezos admired Jobs while Amazon was promoting dollar-store junk on every page

• Musk admired Jobs while Grok was dubbing itself 'MechaHitler'

Those examples are embarrassing enough, though we could go on an on with more. There's no version of Steve Jobs who would allow such garbage to tarnish his image.

Are you sure you don't have a caricature of Jobs in your head?

Apple did a lot of controversial things under Jobs.

* The raids for leaks * The no cold call agreements * etc

They aren't deifying jobs, Jobs was an asshole, but when you confabulate what you think is your tech god and then larp as that, you make a worse version of everything.

Taste is hard to cultivate. You have to care about things like art to cultivate it. As a result all of these dweebs are trying to ape Steve Jobs and they're just succeeding at his worst traits: arrogance and cruelty and a lack of empathy.

> The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

https://libquotes.com/steve-jobs/quote/lbm0q6a

It seems the selected examples in your tendentious anaphora are entirely about justifying censorship and centralization. Strikes me as ironic, since the hacker ethos has been stridently libertarian, information wants to be free and all that. Now I hear more people like yourself, practically begging for restrictions and top down control. Reminds me of the covid hysteria over 'misinformation' around the lab leak theory and gain of function research. Many reasonable criticisms were censored by the big tech platforms. For example, lockdowns were immensely destructive and have never been recommended policy in response to epidemics, school closures caused significant harm to children who were at no real risk of the virus, Fauci admitted 6 feet of social distancing was arbitrary and not based on any science, and policies requiring cloth masks were not found to have any significant effect in preventing transmission, etc..

Steve Jobs didn't allow porn on the App Store. It wasn't the end of the world.

Besides, it would be easy to list 100 more examples of trashy practices (eg: preinstalled crapware, intrusive advertising, dark patterns, etc) for today's tech companies that have nothing to do with censorship.

Elon Musk: When you order Steve Jobs on Temu.

I’m actually pretty satisfied we have Chang, Huang, and Su.

Actually the world needs more Jobs too. More Jobs, more Woz. Brilliant engineers and hackers need to partner with some super egotistic, charismatic, bullying asshole visionaries to make a dent.

Remember how Jobs single handedly bullied Adobe Flash into its graveyard? Bullied record labels into selling individual songs instead of the whole CD? Cannot imagine Woz doing that. Elon is the next Jobs only even harder to stomach. I wouldn't want to work for these people but they, along with those who can work along side them, change the world.

Elon is an engineer's engineer.

What software or system did he write that you've used?

Right? Musk isn't any sort of engineer. At most he reviews and comments on the work of engineers.

His name is on many patents. For many other engineering qualifications and work, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

Come on, your comments trail shows that you have a lot of experience. You know that being on a patent doesn't make one an inventor, just like being on a peer-reviewed paper doesn't make one a contributor. Yes Musk seems to be a deeply technical person, even Karpathy wrote it somewhere here after he resigned, but these credentials you're citing are not the proof.

It's good enough for me. I don't know what proof you're looking for. He's far better than many engineers I've worked with.

BTW, I do not have a CS degree.

> He's far better than many engineers I've worked with.

How do you know that? Have you worked with him?

Otherwise you'd have to believe he bungled his way into multiple fortunes creating engineering triumphs that outdid the established automakers and NASA.

You obviously don't need to be an actual engineer to pull this off.

Elon Musk provided the vision and the money to assemble a great team of engineers. However, I find it hard to believe he does actual electric car or spacecraft engineering, given he has no education in these fields.

"Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he'd borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts."

"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 108

All three of those books are advanced engineering books (I have a copy of each).

So a biography says he borrowed some books. Do you want me to believe he suddenly became a genius rocket engineer over the course of a few months? With no prior track record or any indication of his supposedly extraordinary talent?

Hal Finney wouldn't show up for class at Caltech. He'd flip through the textbook at the end of the semester, and ace the final.

Yes, there are people like Hal. Not many, but they exist.

If you prefer to think that Elon bungled his way into inspiring top people to implement his ideas, and bungled his way into launching payload at 10% of the best cost NASA could do, feel free.

P.S. Buy those books, and look through them. They're the real deal.

There are certainly people like that! I just doubt that Musk is one of them.

First there are is no hard evidence for his supposedly engineering genius and second he has a long public track record of lying and gross hyperbole.

What I find more likely: Musk throws around wild ideas and his engineers figure out what might work or not. (After all, he also comes up with pretty dumb ideas.) This approach can be successful, but it doesn't make you an engineer yourself.

I am still confused why you would claim that Musk was better than many engineers you know, based on what little we actually know about his technical skills.

I recently saw a Tesla from the original company; it was a sports car, nothing like today's lithium battery on wheels

After Musk took over Tesla from its original founders one of the original founders sued him in state court in California

In the course of the litigation, discovery revealed Musk had lied about his educational credentials

The pleadings from the litigation are available:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc6...

https://archive.ph/gzGpF

The evidence presented showed that Musk lied about educational credentials

The issue raised is Musk's dishonesty, at most fraud, at least loss of credibility

Why did he lie

Note Jobs was named on some patents as well

For example, "Advertisement in operating system"

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090265214A1/

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8712902B2/

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/

("20090265214").pn.

Ugh, I have rarely been so disappointed in someone I respected than after reading the comments here by Walter.

https://www.google.com/search?q=did+elon+musk+write+software

Isn’t he more like Ford? To me it seems like most of his value add is in rethinking the physical manufacturing process

I would prefer a world with less 'asshole visionaries'. If that means we get smart phones a few years later (or not at all) it would be worth it, for a kinder world.

Present-day Apple could use some more Jobs, though.

You could not be more wrong.

Woz was in the right place at the right time. Jobs would have found someone else and no one would ever have heard of Woz. Jobs gave us some of the most amazing products the world has ever seen.

You could not be more wrong.

Woz on Musk's Tesla, Inc.:

https://www.slashdot.org/~SteveWoz

Comment Re:No Autonomy (Score 2) 125

by SteveWoz on Monday April 13, 2020 @09:13AM (#59940526) Attached to: Elon Musk Still Predicts 1 Million Tesla Robotaxis By the End of the Year

You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.

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Comment Die in your sleep... (Score 1) 213

by SteveWoz on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:30PM (#58807154) Attached to: People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway

At least Tesla respects our right to die in our sleep.

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Comment Re:Maybe they just realized (Score 1) 172

by SteveWoz on Friday June 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#54537213) Attached to: Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars

You meant to say 'great' cars with 'some' quality problems. Autocorrect can be a bitch...

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