Steve Wozniak is our guy.
If you like Android, if you hate Apple, if you don’t like the way things are going in tech… you probably have more in common with Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak than you think.
Co-founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 (-04-01, 50th anniversary coming soon) (plus an investor), Woz wanted Apple to make PCs for tinkerers with open ports, open source, all that good stuff. Jobs on the other hand, wanted a closed system end to end.
Woz is also quoted as saying something like, “they send me the latest and greatest iPhone every year. They’re pretty, but I wish they did half the shit my Android phone does.” He doesn’t open them. He stacks the boxes in his closet, or he used to. He uses an Android phone. I think he’s rocking GrapheneOS on a Pixel. He probably posts on Lemmy under an alias. (No, I’m not him. He probably wouldn’t be on db0. Though, he might be.) (Please don’t say I’m him. I’m nowhere near that cool. And I use an iPhone 16 Pro Max 512GB. My Android phone is 7 years old, though I do like a few things about it more. If I were Woz and I used an iPhone, I wouldn’t still use the 16 Pro Max, I’d be using the 17 Pro Max, and I’d have the 2TB one.)
Behind the Bastards did a great episode on Steve Jobs in case anyone is interested
Y’all I think this guy might actually be Steve Wozniak 👀
Nice try Steve
Never heard of this guy before, he sounds cool, if he was just the co-founder of apple but parted ways I wonder why is he still relevant? I guess he must have been doing something else during all this time and now I have to dig up his Wikipedia to learn, bye
Woz is a legend.
He’s relevant because he’s the one most people liked, but Steve Jobs did all the keynotes (until he got too sick to, and then he died) so that’s who people see. The balding windbag in the black turtleneck and jeans who talks like he’s your friend but just wants to own you. Steve Wozniak was his friend (and remained so until he died AFAIK) who was encouraging him to make products for humans, not shareholders.
Wozniak doesn’t have to do a fucking thing. He never wanted to live like a king and he probably still lives in a modest house and drives a beater of a car. He’s also an Apple investor. He had enough shares to comfortably live on for life before he left Apple. He’s probably bought more. He probably has a lot of things that work very well, but he probably doesn’t have flashy things. I’m not saying he drives a 1988 Honda Accord, but he’s not driving a Bugatti or a Lamborghini to the grocery store. He’s you and I but with unlimited money (or at least more money than he’ll ever need). Maybe he’s got a vast Gundam collection or something like that, I dunno (something niche and expensive).
But yeah, look him up if you want. I’m just spitballing. I really don’t know how he lives. He’s just never seemed extravagant.
He buys (or used to anyway) sheets of $2 bills from the treasury,cuts them himself, and puts them together into a little packet. Then in tipping situations he’ll peel off a wad, just to see peoples reactions for the lolz
You can just… buy sheets of legal currency and cut it yourself?
Not sure if the prices used to be less ridiculous but: https://www.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut-currency/
Imagine fanboying over a billionaire like this. Gross.
Woz is not a billionaire. He’s also the closest thing that exists to a single human who invented the personal computer and universal remote control. He gave away almost all of the money he earned.
Woz has a better take than the vast majority of people the MSM tends to interview. I’m not surprised (he seems pretty technically competent in general), but it’s definitely a breath of fresh air.
(he seems pretty technically competent in general)
My god this is funny.
I know you’re being completely sincere, but taken out of context, that bit in parentheses is hilarious.
Yep, the guy who figured out how to use NTSC to show colors in 4 days of coding because he wanted to play breakout with colors, with a $1 chip.
I’m pretty sure his plane crash robbed us from great things.
What plane crash are you talking about here? I’m out of the loop
It was in 1981 and he had to take a break from working at Apple due to his injuries
Oh thats a shame. If this hadn’t occurred would Apple be more friendly to open source these days?
Not a chance. By the time he left Apple in the 80s they had already gone full corpo
Ah ok
So he had an accident while flying a cesna that he shouldn’t be flying, and suffered a head injury.
Infinite Loop, the book about Apple stuff, said that “Coming out of the semi-coma had been like flipping a reset switch in Woz’s brain. It was as if in his thirty-year old body he had regained the mind he’d had at eighteen before all the computer madness had begun. And when that happened, Woz found he had little interest in engineering or design. Rather, in an odd sort of way, he wanted to start over fresh.”
Thats very interesting. Did he just retire after that or start doing something else?
Woz deserves all the accolades he gets; I was mostly thinking of everybody currently in tech: CEOs who were good at one thing (maybe less), but have decided they’re geniuses across all fields because they succeeded in one. That’s especially prevalent in the AI sphere, with many of the employees “speaking out” against AI just repeating the same baseless claims as the CEOs.
Far be from me to criticize mainstream media, but if I were a betting woman, I’d guess CNN was disappointed they didn’t get the typical apocalyptic prophecies.
He says
“too dry and too perfect, and I want something from a human being, and I’m disappointed a lot.”
I think this is the problem. It’s not human. Stop having this expectation.
It’s not human. Stop having this expectation.
Then it needs to stop being interjected and trying to take over the Human aspect of tech, art, creativity, etc.
Till then…
It’s not doing that.
People are using it for that.
Big difference.
You’re the one humanizing it. This is like claiming a tree is trying to be a musician because someone made a guitar out of it.
Stop humanizing AI.
In context, it sounds like he’s “disappointed a lot” by people choosing to use AI, which is a crucial distinction. His objection is about the kind of society we’re sleepwalking into, not the technical maturity of the current crop of software.
AI’s generated text is “too dry and too perfect, and I want something from a human being, and I’m disappointed a lot.”
It’s almost like they know people aren’t going to read past the headline.
As a software engineer, I’m convinced “vibe coding” is just a meme. It’s like watching a chaotic system. You need to constantly be wrangling it back on topic, and keep it from bloating the codebase, in order to get anything done. You may be able to vibe a small mockup, but it will inevitably go off and produce garbage that doesn’t make sense.
It is useful as a glorified grep, and a sort of natural language to programming language compiler for simple descriptions. But if you don’t already understand what you expect the LLM to output, you’re gonna have a bad time.
A group at the web dev team for my company started a Dev Club to meet on Zoom to discuss code info and showcase dev work from them and other dev teams. Being a sysadmin scripter, I wanted to join to get experience in professional dev workflow as a creeper in the shadows. Then genAI code helpers happened and the guy leading it, the senior web dev at my company, started to use Claude and other genAI tools. Now, that’s like all they talk about and showcase. Like 2 or 3 devs decided to outsource their thinking and now that’s all the convo is about. Not even about their stuff, but leading genAI developments.
I stopped attending the monthly Zoom meetings. Not sure how many in there are into genAI, but since it wasn’t my bag, I didn’t want to say anything and just declined the recurring calendar event. Maybe I’ll start my own dev club with blackjack and hookers!
I think this sort of thing happens in software engineering a lot… it doesn’t matter whether genAI tools are the right solution to a problem. Billionaires are throwing an alarming amount of money at this, so they are basically trying to get a slice of that pie by virtue signaling that they love genAI, even if they don’t think it’s that valuable.
My employer wants features delivered, I don’t have time to circlejerk about genAI.
LLMs for coding has improved dramatically over the past year or so. But, I find that its quality varies greatly, depending on the model. I find models like Gemini and GPT to be too overconfident, and it doesn’t communicate well enough. Claude knows when to stop and evaluate the situation for options. I’ve had mixed results with the local models, but I’m still adjusting quantization settings to make it work best with my VRAM.
You still need the skills to understand programming and design engineering, and you frankly need the personality to be meticulous with your reviews, but it’s really nice having something that can code 3-8x faster than what I was doing before.
There are also those who slam people for having negative opinions of AI. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft’s AI group, called public criticism of the tech “mind-blowing,” Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says the negativity is hurting society, and Nadella has pleaded to move the conversation beyond “AI slop.”
Then stop serving us AI slop. Y’all get paid way too much to claim that your products aren’t what they are.
Ban it outright, in all of your projects. Protect open source:
Related: https://brainmade.org/
I love it! Thank you. :)
I run a microscopy facility at a university.
In the last 2 years, software companies have tried selling AI-based image correction and quantification software.
Fuck no, you cannot do biomedical research by generating slop and calling it data. No one is buying this software.
It sucks so much and they are forcing it everywhere trying to find ways to not pay people for labor.
Its all just generic shit
What a brave, tepid stand.
I mean this is like a casual converstaion on his experiences with it. Its not him announcing a stand on the technology.
God forbid someone have a measured opinion of something.
I get his and stallmans objections or disapointment in this case but really it is just another abstraction of search. which by the way was not expected to give perfect answers to questions. one of the top bad things with llm’s is the expectation by some that what they send back can be just used without review.
It’s not an abstraction of search, though. It’s a conditional regurgitation of the entire Internet with randomization. That is significantly and meaningfully different.
It’s not finding text or context matches and reproducing them, it’s guessing the next word based off of the steaming pile of horse shit people have dumped over the Internet in attempts to garner attention or scam others.
from my experience despite the difference in process it does about as well. This is one reason it providing sources for its answers is so important. Its funny how in social media its so common to get the response. source? but many folks don’t care if the llm gives them it.
which by the way was not expected to give perfect answers to questions
Except that’s how a lot of people treat it. And there’s so way to guard against that.
yeah that is the problem. although you did have issues with people self diagnosing through google before chatgpt. the problem is the more it seems like an answer the larger the group of people who are going to take it as one. Except for the small opposite group who gets their hackles raised when they get the response that way. Which includes me. Still them giving sources and people using them is I think the best we will get.
