HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ th0ma5

I found this audio recording of an Apple user's group meeting very fascinating from 1978. https://archive.org/details/camvchm_000069/camvchm_000069_t0...

Woz at one point talks about how if you don't understand the undocumented instructions maybe they aren't for you. Anyway, kind of nice ambience to it as well.

⬐ uniqueid

Wow, Apple was two years old at that point!

⬐ cronix

Officially, but Jobs/Woz were making and selling illegal blue tone boxes 10 years before that around 1972. They allowed you to basically steal phone time from the phone companies by simulating the sounds that nickles/dimes/quarters made when inserting them into a payphone so you didn't have to pay to use the phone for local or long distance calls.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/27/blue-box-circuit-...

⬐ wittjeff

A 'blue box' routed calls through the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box A red box simulated the tones made when coins were inserted into a pay phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)

⬐ ChrisArchitect

shrug

Everyone still called it blue boxing when you were putting tones into the phone

⬐ teddyh

And people called HTML a programming language. Doesn’t make it correct.

⬐ Daho0n

And people call cracking hacking and hacking cracking. How deep should we go?

⬐ haddr

and phreaking - hacking

⬐ anonymouse008

Nice to know Apple is still Apple.

⬐ tpmx

How so? Woz is answering pretty much every single question in insane levels of detail. So much candor. That's the opposite of the Apple I know.

⬐ anonymouse008

I think we are saying the same thing; it’s a cheeky remark that to read Apple’s documentation is in it of itself, a learned skill, essential to being productive in Swift.

I read the comment as Woz saying documentation isn’t for the faint of heart ... true

(Mind you, I love Apple’s docs now, and honestly prefer it compared to Stripe-y and Twilio-y documentation... to me S&T docs are a style that tries to smooth over the cluttered calls and returns. Are they APIs that makes sense to accomplish x style or job succinctly, or do I have to read the 8 million other things I don’t care about to do the one thing I need to do?)

⬐ azinman2

You're doing it wrong. The actual documentation is all in the WWDC videos... just better hope it covers the section you're concerned about!

⬐ tpmx

Ah, ok. No, we weren't saying the same thing, but I now understand what you meant, and I also happen to agree. Current Apple documentation sucks. I think you may be exhibiting some kind of Stockholm syndrome :).

⬐ julianh95

Thanks for sharing this. Do you have the timestamp for that particular bit?

Edit: Looks like it's from 6:00 to 6:40

⬐ duxup

When I was younger I never quite got what Steve talked about sometimes / wasn't interested. I think I dismissed it as PR hype or whatever (don't listen to the man in the suit!).

Now I hear it and with hindsight and probably just being in the future decades later it seems so on point and such a simple explanation for what to me earlier (if I really thought about it) seemed like "Man for that to be there has to be... <brain seizes up>".

His explanations seem effortless.

⬐ uniqueid

  in the suit

In the tee shirt! SJ may have worn a suit or a turtle-neck, but Apple culture back then was anti-IBM and tee shirts were part of that.

⬐ duxup

Me when I was younger "Don't fall for the lack of a suit, it's still there!"

⬐ etempleton

This is Steve's gift. He understands complex and abstracts concepts and is able to offer up a simple analogy or explanation that anyone can understand. It seems easy, but if you have spent time around enough highly intelligent and technical folks you will know it is not a common trait.

⬐ WalterBright

This was Feynman's superpower, too.

⬐ _the_inflator

"I know the privacy issue is very, very hot in the media these days" https://youtu.be/DbfejwP1d3c?t=613

Funny to be reminded of that fact by someone from 1981.

⬐ criddell

About a minute after that he starts talking about how more and more of the computer's power will be used to adapt the computer to a more human-friendly way of working. A simpler UI requires a more sophisticated computer. Pretty insightful.

⬐ kaliszad

Of course much of this lost power is due to browsers providing mostly terrible, inconsistently implemented and at times buggy APIs that are suited for blogs and news papers but not really any graphically demanding stuff. Yes, you can hack around the APIs, you can also just do everything from scratch again obviating much of the browser but I don't think that is something laudable... and then we have Safari which is basically the modern IE. Somebody misspoke and said Sahara instead of Safari on a call and I found that quite fitting actually.

Nothing of what I describe makes the UX better for anybody, not even the developers of the web browser.

⬐ criddell

From a user perspective, putting things in a browser is a lateral move at best and probably a bit of a regression. Desktop computing really hasn't changed much since the 90's. Wiring everything together was the big change after that.

Since then more interesting things are happening elsewhere like voice assistants. I can just say "play hound dog by elvis" while I'm driving and within seconds it's playing. Or "navigate home" and I get turn-by-turn directions. That's pretty remarkable.

If somebody figures AR out, that could be the next big UI/UX frontier.

⬐ kaliszad

Yes, it is very remarkable indeed. Some of these advances are really amazing and I am hopeful it will improve further.

The reality now is that e.g. Waze is not even able to recognize a broken, curvy road that is a bit shorter, but not really worth it, especially not at night and rain. It is not able to recognize a pattern of choosing the other road either. It can also not read house numbers in Czech properly, so it says not "house Nr. 42" or "house 42" but "house 42nd". Also, Google, Waze whatever often don't understand my and others English when giving commands and I was never told that people couldn't understand me. I do have an accent but I speak quite clearly as a singer.

There are many, many areas, where the computer doesn't support the user at all not speaking of adapting to the needs of the user automatically. People are instead constantly bothered by unimportant stuff, SPAM and settings where sane defaults would prevent 99,9% of the issues.

I guess, it is a matter of priority, focus and business model. If bothering people "engagement" is your business model you will not be motivated to "get out of the way". This is the same with ads. I don't mind good ads in a reasonable amount, good ads can be funny, interesting, educating. Nobody really thought about how to do really good ads on the web - it is mostly some trash I am not interested in in the slightest. Therefore people are using ad blockers, because too much is too much. Where is the UX there?

⬐ criddell

Engagement is a funny metric. For a lot of businesses it's correlated with revenue but from a user point of view, it may be the opposite of what we want. Do you want a product that tries to keep you using it for a long period of time or one that lets you get in and out quickly?

As far as ads go, I'm fine with them philosophically. I'll pay to remove them when I can but I have no moral objection to them. I do object to tracking though and that's why I use an ad blocker.

⬐ petercooper

Nice little bit after the interview is over (at 18:30) where Steve says: "I haven't taken a vacation in a long time. That's how I measure whether I'm successful, is whether I can take off for three months. So far I'm not successful."

⬐ azinman2

Three months is a long time! I've never understood who 'summers' somewhere and how. You have to have enough money to go spend 3 months somewhere expensive, yet don't you also need to work a ton in order to do that (which would also include the summer)? It's a common enough expression that it can't just be only retired people who do that...

⬐ nicbou

Contractors who get paid more and take time off between contracts. Seasonal workers. People whose work is not tied to hours worked. People whose work can be set aside temporarily.

For example, I run a content-based website. Though it requires content updates, if I only work 5 hours a week, no one will really notice. I can and do work on the road.

⬐ johbjo

The bicycle quip appears in so many videos from around that time. Interpret Jobs videos as case studies in a type of marketing.

He's framing Apple marketing as "it's so exciting that we can help people so much", but it's honest and actually true.

The best videos of Jobs are the rare internal ones.

Also, he's 25 in this video? wtf

⬐ JKCalhoun

It bothers me a bit. Having heard it now in so many contexts it is clear it was not spontaneous ... in fact several other tells in this interview make it clear very little was spontaneous when Steve was facing the media.

I suppose I am not surprised by that — that's what marketing does.

The bicycle analogy looks particularly transparent though: there's a pseudo-intellectual aspect to it, even name-dropping "Scientific American" seems to be there to make the speaker appear well-read, a deep thinker.

It works though a lot better than his electric motor analogy that he lead off with. ;-)

⬐ anonymouse008

This. Though I will say, he was still brilliant and quick outside of these settings.

Perhaps the training to prepare for these appearances made his moment at Macworld taking on the 'Mr. Jobs' question a thousand times easier, but still in that moment was a critical one - a public challenge - and Steve knew how to move that whole conversation back from himself to supporting his team, which was brilliant, because everyone wants to feel they have someone fighting for them... especially when the landscape/future is squishy and uncertain.

⬐ Hammershaft

> his moment at Macworld taking on the 'Mr. Jobs' question a thousand times easier, but still in that moment was a critical one - a public challenge

What was this? I've never heard of it.

⬐ AlanYx

It's likely this interaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

⬐ bonaldi

I don't know why this bothers people so — I suspect it's similar to some people's surprise at finding out that stand-up comedians rehearse their acts, even the spontaneous-seeming "I'm thinking this up as I stand in front of you" head-scratching pauses, to the nth degree.

This was a public performance for Jobs, of course he'd have thought through and rehearsed what he was going to say. His ability to weave together the rehearsed with the improvised - like when his remote broke on stage at WWDC - is one of the things that took him to the next level. Just like the comic who can handle a heckle and get back to their set in such a smooth way you can't even see the join.

⬐ beforeolives

It's interesting to see him at a point when he's still figuring out his style and way of speaking. Most of the answers that he gives sound like stuff that he's clearly said before in different context. As if he has a prepared list of analogies and references that he reaches for every time instead of genuinely answering the question. At the time of the video he's still learning how to do this and it seems very different from the sharp Jobs from later years.

⬐ ksec

We are in 2021 and there are still new ( old ) video and audio resources from Steve Jobs that we had never seen before.

Did someone somehow had a VHS type and discover we had this video and upload it? If not what the story behind the discovery of this video and interview?

And I sort of think Steve is still very much Steve even in his early 20s. His understanding of market, business, computing and user experience. Apple just isn't the same without him.

⬐ tpmx

Probably some broadcaster employee who saved some tapes from destruction a decade or two later. See also: r/DataHoarder. Aren't we all lucky?

⬐ RareSirMix

This is all thanks to ABC archiving everything, not an employee saving a tape. However that does happen sometimes at other networks.

ABC and WGBH/PBS are some of the better ones you can find almost full digitized archives of online. Other broadcasters like NBC didn't save tapes until 1980 (multiple Late Night with Letterman episode masters being lost as an example). CNN is another somewhat bad one, they literally threw all the masters to their theme music in the dumpster, but an employee saved them all. They have an internal archive of tapes as well as the "CNN Collection" but it's spotty.

⬐ tpmx

Oh, ABC/PBS have mostly digitized archives online? Where? How did you get access to this video to post it on Youtube?

(Anyway, thanks for doing it!)

⬐ RareSirMix

Yep. ABC is less digitized and hides most full broadcast programs from the public (gotta be an employee for that). But https://www.abcnewsvsource.com/ is the Silverlight run site with everything. Someone should probably archive everything incase the Silverlight shutdown this year kills the site. Ripping it is mildly easy.

PBS/WGBH stores everything at https://americanarchive.org/ which for copyright reasons, some stuff can only be viewed at the LOC or WGBH. The physical only content includes a number of interesting items though like the few Mr. Rogers episodes not aired on Twitch, or around 2000 non-public but aired Sesame Street episodes.

⬐ eggsome

Sounds like a job for Jason Scott

⬐ RareSirMix

Archive Team already has some private archives of news stuff that I assume they'd like to add to. They have rips of every nightly news broadcast from 1969 till 2018 which they'll probably never release. Would love to help them though.

⬐ RareSirMix

This is the raw tape from a piece ABC did, it did air but edited down a bunch. It's only rare because the site it's on requires Silverlight! Funny how that happens.

I've got a bunch more raw ABC tapes uploaded like Frank Zappa talking about Larry Flynt, 2 hours of b-roll of E3 1995, and an Atari Car Chase simulator being demonstrated to police in Miami.

⬐ ksec

>I've got a bunch more raw ABC tapes uploaded like Frank Zappa talking about Larry Flynt, 2 hours of b-roll of E3 1995, and an Atari Car Chase simulator being demonstrated to police in Miami.

ARH!!! Upload them all I want to watch it. Thanks for doing it this got me really excited.

⬐ RareSirMix

I try! Highly recommend you go through btm0815ma's channel if you wanna see more of the ABC stuff. He and I are the main archivists of it and he beats me to cool stuff, like Star Wars premiering in Japan. https://youtube.com/channel/UCVTQ7Jdm8_6L3RxH3_EAGMQ

⬐ wiremine

Thanks for sharing, this is great.

The level of discourse of the interview feels so much higher than a lot of the interviews I see today. I was just a kid back in the early 1980s, so I don't have a good frame of reference, but does anyone have any data to support that feeling?

⬐ blacktriangle

Another famous interview I remember from the 80s was Phil Donahue interviewing Ayn Rand. Regardless of what you think of either of them, the conversation is more like this video and way above the sadness that is a contemporary interview.

⬐ khazhoux

Nah.

You're seeing the raw footage. The final cut, after edits and splices, will be shorter and less detailed.

And there's plenty of great interviews today, and terrible interviews back then. Just pick your forum.

⬐ Nelkins

Incredible that he was only 25 when this was recorded...

⬐ sneak

If a personal computer is like a bicycle for your mind, augmenting and expanding your own intellect, what does that make a modern smartphone, where the what and how you use it is dictated by remote parties instead of your own needs and ideas?

It's really interesting to see Apple leading the way toward "impersonal" computing devices like this, considering.

⬐ ALittleLight

I think a phone is a huge step forward in fulfilling the bicycle for the mind analogy. The phone makes it really easy to Google things, take notes, send messages, pictures, etc. If you don't like notifications you can reconfigure them.

⬐ sneak

What if I don't like the way the browser renders something? What if I don't like the UI in an app? What if I want to make my own apps?

⬐ als0

There's another great one of Jobs in 1991, ten years later. The footage is equally raw! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_t-iKeWdRI

⬐ temp8964

Who is in the portrait behind him?

⬐ mtalhaashraf

What I see is that he has gone way ahead in understanding the technicalities of the problems and then come back in the explanation to help it make sense.

My experiences have also shown the same strategy to be effective. Just understanding a problem and its solution is not enough. One has to simplify its explanation so that everyone can grasp it.

⬐ raymond_goo

Anyone knows who that person in the framed picture is?

⬐ bjornlouser

Joan Baez?

⬐ mwcremer

Yes. They dated in the 80's.

⬐ js2

No, that’s not her. Also, they didn’t meet till 1982.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/new-steve-jobs...

⬐ haydenlee

Cool to see hear his 1984 analogy a few years before they made it into the famous 1984 super bowl ad.

⬐ bern4444

Very cool video, I enjoyed how even then he was thinking about "intelligent devices" when he talks about intelligent ATMs and intelligent video games.

I wonder if this was always present in his mind and helped lead to the term "smart phone".

⬐ matthoiland

> Man riding a bicycle was twice as [efficient] as the condor - way off the end of list [compared to all other animals]. And what it really illustrated was mans ability as a toolmaker, to fashion a tool that can amplify an inherent ability that he has.

> That's exactly what we think we're doing here – we think we're basically fashioning a 21st century bicycle here, which can amplify an inherent intellectual ability that man has and really take care of a lot of drudgery to free people to do much more creative work.

My takeaway of this perspective really illuminates the value of augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR). The escapism of VR is fine for entertainment, but amplifying our understanding of the real-time real world with AR is very exciting as a species.

⬐ mlyle

So much of our reasoning is abstract and removed from immediate physical reality, and VR alone may very well prove to be a powerful tool for understanding, reasoning, and conceptualizing these things. Even when I'm designing physical things there often isn't a real-world context to relate them to, yet. That is-- the jury is out on how much augmented reality is necessary to be "useful" versus immersion/"escapism".

And even seemingly escapist things can be great for increasing intuition or our strengths in reasoning about things... witness Kerbal Space Program or Poly Bridge.

⬐ matthoiland

I really like your argument concerning reasoning – especially considering how we can experiment with the "shadows" of four dimensional shapes in VR. Science, research, reasoning – all very likely to be revolutionized with VR.

But in daily life – always on – I believe AR will be as common as putting on shoes to protect our soft feet.

⬐ nkrebs13

I think VR will be much more important than AR in the long run. The technology isn't there yet, obviously, but in the long run. I think viewing VR as an escapism entertainment medium is far too close minded. Sufficiently advanced VR would be able to simulate your actual environment* and anything else AR could simulate.

There are also many more functional applications of VR than AR. Random examples to illustrate my point: * Can train on the "real thing" instead of watching videos, doing exercises/drills, or reading books (e.g. military, pilots, surgeons, construction workers). * You and your coworkers could all go to an "in office" meeting without being in the same hemisphere (i.e. it would look like you were all sitting in an office together) * Students wouldn't have to sit through another boring lecture to learn, they could go there and watch it unfold for themselves (even if the lecture content takes place over a large period of time!)

*by this I mean within the scope and context of whatever you're doing and not that the VR simulation would be created perfectly down to the last atom

⬐ Austin_Conlon

Another interesting one from 1991: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_t-iKeWdRI&t.

⬐ Black101

Privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbfejwP1d3c&t=612s

⬐ 29athrowaway

And now 40 years later, we are back into 1984. Centralized systems ("the cloud" and large companies) have taken over privacy.

⬐ suyash

Listen to what Steve said - just replace when he says "computer" with "ai" - it will totally make sense today!

⬐ criddell

In 1981 you could replace "computer" with "ai" and it would have made sense. I suspect that forty years from now it will still be true.

⬐ flowerlad

Funniest question from the interviewer: "What is there left for you to do?"

⬐ tdaltonc

40 years later and video games still make Apple very uncomfortable.

⬐ rblatz

The next Apple TV is rumored to be game focused.

⬐ als0

If Apple Arcade is any indication, it's very clear they don't understand video games.

⬐ wunderflix

I miss him every day... RIP

⬐ ChrisArchitect

source of the interview or location??

⬐ uniqueid

I don't know who posted the clip on Youtube. I assume the location is Bandley 1. I don't know what the show was. It's around the same time as the ABC Nightline clip which has done the rounds on the internet for a few years, but probably unrelated since none of this footage is in the Nightline segment.

⬐ RareSirMix

This was done for ABC News on technology and computer gaming becoming more prevalent from what I remember. As for location other people probably have better guesses than me.

I didn't include the footage but later on the computer behind him gets shown off by someone not Steve. The piece later goes to an arcade machine manufacturing plant. I'll have to review the footage again and get back on all that.

⬐ Tenal

Jobs looked bored. I'm bored. This guy wasn't a God. This is just a rudimentary PR-enforced interview capture. The way people hang on every mundane word that comes out of certain people's mouths is tribalistic to a disturbing monkey degree.

⬐ kaliszad

Certainly people hang on words from Steve Jobs. Some for a good reason and others as worshippers maybe.

A good reason to listen might be, he has some useful insights, he has actually shown the overall approach and execution is desirable/ works.

⬐ jimmaswell

Why does anyone still talk about Steve Jobs on technical forums? He was an extraordinary salesman and a functioning but abusive top-level product manager, nothing more.

⬐ Tycho

Napoleon, Caesar, Paton - functioning but abusive top-level battle managers, nothing more.

⬐ kaliszad

8m36s This is exactly what we see as well at OrgPad.com Instead of writing long text where you have to think about form to structure your thoughts linearly, OrgPad lets people just write those thoughts down in little cells or bubbles and connect them freely. We let people include pictures, videos, other websites (like Google Maps, Google Calendar, Wikipedia a document from Google Docs, other OrgPages etc.) and files into such cells. The way such a document is structured already conveys so much subtle hints about the topic and the person writing about it. If used frankly and deeply, OrgPad can be like a mirror to ones mind as the tool is simple and out of the way letting you work, think, enjoy. Listening to Steve Jobs even when he was quite young is very much resonating with us because he valued simplicity, creativity and wanted to empower individuals to do great things.

We are also influenced greatly by Rich Hickey and Clojure/ ClojureScript that we use to write OrgPad. Thanks to mostly my colleague Pavel Klavík, we have some quite smart things in our code base. Some of those will go live in the next few days such as physical animations using differential equations calculated live in JS and written as CSS transform or SVG animate for greater efficiency. Everybody else either uses simulation and rewrites the position each frame (if they don't miss it) or just use linear animations that are frankly not very pretty. We are also writing our own collaborative rich text editor that should be ready to ship sometime at the end of summer. It will be similarly sophisticated as Google Writer/ Sheets where it makes sense and much simpler at that. We have the advantage, that OrgPad is much more about the content and connections between ideas and not at all about printing to paper or following established norms. Therefore, it is much more useful in the current digital world.

⬐ tpmx

That moment 4m15s in when he realizes his answer is way too complicated, stops talking in the middle of a sentence (thereby making that recorded video unusable) and asks if he could have another shot at answering the question. The next iteration is dramatically simplified.

This is communication masterclass level, already back then. How the heck did he get to there, so early?

⬐ duxup

It's a funny contrast considering his comment about lowest common denominator at the start ;)

He knows he has to play that game too.

⬐ beckman466

> This is communication masterclass level, already back then. How the heck did he get to there, so early?

1) luck,

2) living in Silicon Valley.

“Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.

Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.“

Source: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

⬐ baxtr

Why would you say it was luck? Do you mean he had a "gift" or proper "genes" and that's why it was luck?

⬐ williamtwild

Right place at the right tome perhaps?

⬐ Tycho

It's possible he started giving one pre-canned answer and then realized it was the wrong one and that he should have been using another pre-canned answer.

⬐ purple_ferret

To me it just sounds like he realized he wasn't making the point he wanted to and asked for a retake. The two answers he gives are somewhat different.

⬐ Jugurtha

Here's another instance, refining the delivery of "a bicycle for the human mind": https://youtu.be/NKT5nbEPdfs?t=60.

It is a "performance art", like a stand-up comic, an actor, a politician, a presentation, or a congressional hearing. Some people do not want to rehearse as they feel it "empties them". He was known to meticulously practice the delivery of keynotes so he could hit things on time, as if it were a play, if I recall correctly.

You can see that there's a good part of storytelling. If you watch Elon Musk videos, there often is repetition on the three things he focused on in college: the internet, multi-planetary life, and sustainable energy.

In more recent videos, the narrative has shifted to five things he focused on during college, and an addition of genetics and artificial intelligence made it to the list. This is a bit different, like a git history change, which goes unnoticed by most interviewers. However, people think about a lot of things and nobody would be able to list all their ideas or thoughts, let alone someone like him.

One of the best interviewers in the space is Sarah Lacy, in my opinion. She has enough raport with her guests in Pando Monthly videos (there are bout fifty of them, and I invite everyone to watch them), but she doesn't hesitate to invite her guests to better recall the events, timeline, or context... "Yes, but X had invested before and you had replaced so and so on the board at that time, so that must have been before Z". Way better interviews because she has the context, as opposed to someone just looking "just" for an interview. The interviews are really good and dive into decisions founders and VCs took and what had motivated them, etc.

Long videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7983B23CA8F80AFE

All, including short segments from these videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgHogDu1ewdkkWZjfKIuKXQ

One other interview is really good: "The lost interview" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDqQcmVqAm4

Here's an "internal" video for NEXT where he explains their strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU

Here's a video of a NEXT brainstorming session in a retreat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kp9cSzbLFE

⬐ dang

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26583631.

⬐ tpmx

Seriously, what is this? GPT-3 output? How did you get from Steve Jobs via Musk to spending a very long paragraph on Sarah Lacy/Pando and then pushing their youtube videos?

I'm sorry, but this smells like spam.

⬐ pembrook

The links posted were all very interesting. Great comments like those are the reason why I visit Hacker News.

On the other hand, your comment is the one adding nothing to the discussion and derailing the thread.

⬐ Jugurtha

>Seriously, what is this? GPT-3 output? How did you get from Steve Jobs to spending a very long paragraph on Sarah Lacy/Pando and then pushing her youtube videos?

Here's how: not all interviews are equal. Some are very good because the interviewer dives deep, and the guest answers the questions and allows themselves to be taken there and open up.

I have linked interviews of Steve Jobs and videos that I have considered of value, for example "The lost interview" where he dives in really interesting topics like building product, the ways he looked for venture capital, the differences between sales driven organizations and others, etc. That is someone very interesting sharing his thought process.

This naturally lead me to link to other similar videos where guests who have built very interesting products and organizations share similar insights. This kind of videos is rare, as it takes a guest willing to go there, and an interviewer who helps them get there. The Pando list contains a registry of these videos. Think hunter-gatherer vs. agriculture: going around gathering content in the wild, vs having a bunch of it in one place.

>I flagged this since I consider it spam.

I understand.

All the best,

⬐ tpmx

Well, you succeded in killing the relevant discussion in this sub-thread by means of your bloviation. Congrats.

⬐ Jugurtha

You succeeded in teaching me a new word, "bloviation"[0]. Thank you.

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloviation

⬐ laurent92

> or a congressional hearing

Interesting: He was never summoned by Congress. All the other technical directors have been: Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, even Larry Ellison from Oracle. Maybe having the upper hand in being well-understood and well-spoken, goes as far as to have a smoother relationship with the general public?

⬐ saalweachter

Apple spent most of its existence as a well-known but not particularly dominant company in its fields, which goes a long way to explaining why Congress never took an interest in it.

Think back to 2008-9, when Jobs had to step back for health reasons. While Apple had made a solid turn-around and most of the pieces of its future were in place, it was far from the juggernaut it became. The iPhone was coming on like gangbusters, but Blackberry and Nokia were still a thing, Zunes were still a thing...

⬐ simonh

It was an interesting time. The iPod was a phenomenal success, iPod launch events were media circuses and the cultural as well as commercial success was huge.

Yet iPods themselves were really just music players. A more sophisticated Walkman.

The iPhone combined the computing flexibility and utility of an Apple computer with the convenience and user friendliness of an iPod. But by 2009 they were still just getting started with it.

⬐ gumby

He died before congress/tech press cared much about the big tech companies. And during a previous wave in the 90s (e.g. CDA era) Apple was just a hardware company.

⬐ Jugurtha

Tim Cook has been. On a related note, I am convinced that Zuckerberg would have an easier time with these matters with a different haircut..

This is not a personal attack on Zuckerberg, but I think the haircut is damaging his image and makes him less trustworthy than he may be. Joel Kaplan, Myriah Jordan, and their teams may have prepped him well for these hearings (and the famous picture of the talking points left open accidentally-on-purpose is just funny), but he seems to provoke a visceral reaction in people that others do not.

Many see Gates, Dorsey, Ellison, etc as CEOs with certain traits, like nerdy, charming, well-spoken, funny/outspoken/brash, etc, but I don't think they assume they are evil.

I don't think people would see him and think evil on a video like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--APdD6vejI

Again, this is not an attack on physique or on the person, but an observation based on what a lot of comments on these hearings are about. They mostly are about him, not others, drawing comparisons to animals or robots, dehumanizing him, etc. This leads me to think it's a matter of perception and image and I'm wondering what impact the latter would have on the former.

⬐ laurent92

> Many see Gates, Dorsey, Ellison, etc as CEOs with certain traits, like nerdy, charming, well-spoken, funny/outspoken/brash, etc, but I don't think they assume they are evil.

I’m really from the other side of the world, then ;) Gates’ 1998 hearings made him look extremely bad; the modern Gates is charming, but so charming it’s made up (people are used to PR stunts, teenage now distinguish ads hiding as memes very quickly, same goes for any PR stunt); Dorsey is seen as quite evil for those who know him in my circles, rather like a Taliban in his last congressional hearing, reminding of Bin Laden: https://media-vanityfair-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/media.va...

I reckon beautiful hair can have a lot of impact on perception. Philosophers have long hair. I’ve also read somewhere that we intuitively estimate people’s intelligence to the size of the displayed forehead (Some Slavic haircuts with hair down, have negative prejudices associated), and maybe a part of your point about Zuckerberg’s haircut is doesn’t display a large enough forehead.

Superficial, but masses have collective behaviors.

⬐ reducesuffering

> "Dorsey is seen as quite evil for those who know him in my circles, rather like a Taliban in his last congressional hearing"

Do you mean people who know of him, not know him personally? That's the only way that makes sense because if they knew him personally I don't see what his looks in the hearing have anything to do with it.

Personally I'm surprised Dorsey isn't received better. He's clearly the most social mission oriented. Gave away 28% of his Square equity, Twitter is barely profitable, and his SF lifestyle is fairly modest in comparison to these other super-CEO's. He just doesn't strike me as one who cares much about personal wealth. But I guess the distaste comes from his tweeting for leftist causes.

⬐ Jugurtha

I'm wondering about the perception of the majority of people who are privy to nothing other than the public image of these executives, not those who do have information on how Gates did/does business, or those who know Dorsey in your circles. If you were to see them through the eyes of that majority, what would you see?

⬐ yesenadam

Are you familiar with the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists and its associated clubs?

https://www.improbable.com/hair-club/

"When working on her doctoral dissertation in psychology, Robin Abrahams dreamed one night that she was asked to be the editor of a prestigious psychology journal with a singular editorial policy: all articles must mention Steven Pinker's luxuriant, flowing hair. ...She told Marc Abrahams about this dream and the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists was born.

The first member, chosen by acclamation, was psychologist Steven Pinker, whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study. From that lone, Pinkerian seed, there has grown a spreading chestnut, black, blond, and red-haired membership tree. ...

The public loves to see and applaud scientists who have luxuriant flowing hair, a luxuriant head of former hair, or luxuriant flowing facial hair. Therefore, all LFHCfS members who come to Improbable Research events are invited to take a bow, allowing the audience to shower them and their hair with applause."

Maybe check out their blog featuring new members, with their pics and them talking about their life and hair:

https://www.improbable.com/category/lfhcfs-hair-club/

⬐ perl4ever

>I don't think they assume they are evil.

Not expressing any opinion of my own, but I did think people assume Ellison is evil.

⬐ gumby

Steve Jobs described Ellison as his "best friend"

⬐ Hammershaft

> Ellison

Well... maybe a little evil.

⬐ sahila

Sure but the presumption in your comment is that he has the ability to have a dramatically different haircut. My sense is he's struggling with hair loss (take a look at his father https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190201121030-facebook...), and in this context, he might have a very limited set of haircuts available to him.

⬐ sumedh

Elon Musk was able to fix his hair loss, Mark has the money to fix it as well.

⬐ sahila

I don't mean to get into an argument about this, but as someone who also doesn't have great hair genetics and has looked some into it, "solving" hairloss isn't turnkey and doesn't produce the same results for everyone. There's genetics at play and things we don't know (if any startup/company does solve it, there's a pile of gold waiting for them).

If you want a counter example to your Elon, take a look at Lebron James.

Anyways it's entirely possible Mark has looked into it and doing it what he can (and we're seeing the results of it), or simply he doesn't care as much and is okay with what he has, or I'm off base and he picked this haircut despite having an abundance of hair available to him.

⬐ sumedh

Good point.

⬐ mynameishere

I mean, he just flubbed it and asked for a retake. Happens all the time. By the way, he's dead. You can quit kissing his ass.

⬐ tpmx

Yeah, there is no ass-kissing going on here - on the contrary... I think he was brilliant at marketing and communication, but that's not what technology (primarily) should be about. I do think it's interesting to find out how he got so insanely good at marcom so early, though.

⬐ adventured

The skills we use at ~26 are being actively developed throughout childhood and our teen years, just typically not consciously. Most likely the device he's employing he had utilized frequently when he was growing up, perhaps as a means to convince other kids to do what he wanted or otherwise to get his way (whether with his peers, parents or other authority figures). It's Tom Sawyer's whitewashed fence. Jobs is trying to manipulate your mind and I don't mean that in a sinister way.

Also keep in mind, Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People was published in 1936 and was a very well-known book throughout Steve's life. There is a pretty good chance he ran across a few books like that which would have aided his advancement in manipulating impression, narrative or outcomes. He didn't have to entirely invent the wheel in that sense.

The interviewer mentions Go half-way through the video. If anyone's curious about what Go was, here's an article about it: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/The-Rise-and-Fall-of...

Also, the video that came up was this interview from '81 which I'd never seen before. That's getting back there alright https://youtu.be/DbfejwP1d3c