Anyways, he seems to have protected himself well later on, was able to do good (stories of him giving stock to ppl left out early on, that kind of thing) -- people hyperfocus on one very specific thing (Jobs ripping him off in the atari days) when it's a small point in a much larger life.

I too have been lucky enough to hear him speak, and he very much does have this naivete of youth in the way he speaks. He has this very simple and straight forward way to view his contribution, along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.

I don't think he's nearly as naive as he comes off, but I think he wants to be seen as naive, because his personal philosophy is one that places naivete in high regard. He wants to follow happiness, and happiness can oftentimes be a little naive.

To assume that ms wasn't headed by bullies requires a striking ignorance of ms' history.

False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego.

Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence.

Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3

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.

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.

I'll bite. Go ahead and list some recent examples of this actually happening please.

I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.

What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.

Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.

Personally, I'd take that over being the creator of something valuable.

If Elon Musk is being held up as a pinnacle of achievement, I don't want that.

There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.

As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.

The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.

I dont want to do contract work but people ask so I just quote an unreasonably high number and on occasion someone bites. I dont need the money so I need an easy filter.

It's a bit related to how billionaires tell everyone to "just work on whatever makes you happy and it's all going to be fine".

Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.

Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”

Because I don't want to live in a world of things built by socially maladjusted misanthropes, I want to live in a world build by kind and social people they made with their own hands.

There is something incredibly servile and pathetic in the psychology of people who latch onto perceived great men instead of looking to their neighbor. Like the kind of people who spend their day on twitter hoping that Elon retweets them and gives them attention.

Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...

1. Do you have children, and if so, are they going to expensive private schools or have other expensive hobbies

2. Are you planning on stopping working, and how many years do you need to support at what lifestyle

3. Debt

4. Do you support others, like parents, etc

5. Do you have health issues, or will you, that will be expensive to support

There are more factors but these are just some that prevent 10M from being enough.

Genie: I’ll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100M in a month. There are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away

SRE: Can I use AWS?

Genie: There are 4 rules

https://neal.fun/spend/

Easy: The largest ship in the world by area. (Goal - either 500m x 500m, or at least 0.25km^2 with the breadth >= 300m)

The current status quo for bulk carriers are the Valemax ships (360m x 65m), with each one costing around $100 million. (actual figure wildly varies, but sticks around that number)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax#Sale_of_ships

https://www.tradewindsnews.com/containerships/evergreen-adds...

(500 * 500) / (360 * 65) = 10.683760683760683

10.68 * $100 million = $1.068 billion

Even just going with 5 Valemax ships side-by-side (360m x 325m) costs half a billion.

I'll bite. Private island, superyacht, G7, prime mansions in LA, NYC, London, Singapore, collection of old masters, part owner in an NFL team, establish a foundation and trusts for the kids/grandkids, trip to space. Easy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...

Museums. I love museums. They all need more support. Kids need more places to do field trips.

Libraries ... they are experiencing budget cuts everywhere now as cities prioritize police spending.

Parks.

Homes for people that can't afford them. Seriously, one of the most effective possible cures for homelessness is to set up a program that helps people cover their rent for a month or two if they get into trouble.

Health care. Like, there's got to be a pile of people that need urgent health care and can't afford it, right?

Education. Adult education, too.

Science and research.

And most, maybe all of these, aren't even things that necessarily need an entirely new organization to spearhead them, or some kind of dramatic social change. They are all things that exist right now and need more funding than anything else. You could hire a small team to just look up all kinds of programs all day long and write checks for them and it would be enormously impactful.

I just... the answer to this seems so blindingly obvious to me, and then I read the rest of the comments, and I really wonder when exactly the hacker ethos got co-opted by the crab mentality.

Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.

So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).

If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.

Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).

All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.

[0]: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates

My answer because I don’t see it: climate change research. A billion isn’t much but if it can help save the planet that would be worth it to me personally.

For reference, on $1bn that's $40M/year or about $100k/day in earnings if you just have the cash in a money market account.

https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/

Buying all this stuff that seems expensive, but then seeing that it barely makes a dent in a truly wealthy person’s fortune.

Of course, he wants even more…

[1]: https://neal.fun/spend

Buy an election.

If not, buy a newspaper, a TV network or a media outlet with a good outreach.

Then you can get you 1B back tenfold.

https://neal.fun/spend/

High end audio equipment. Done. Next!

The rest: charities.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...

Even a trillion dollars I could probably spend. I like sailboats so a yacht sounds nice, but I cannot believe it even a fraction of the satisfaction of developing some research, or of having the fundamental research itself done.

Here's a few random frustrations I have:

Most modern hardware appliances are not easily repaired or hackable. I'd love to manufacture and sell open hardware appliances which prioritize repairability and maintainability, including sharing the CAD models and opening up the firmware.

Despite the years of effort that have gone into the Linux Desktop Experience, it still often lacks polish in various areas. You could afford to hire world class engineers and designers to fix up every minor annoyance and really provide the most deluxe desktop experience possible without compromising on the slightest detail. Not only that, you could contract companies to add Linux support for any essential tools and applications which aren't already supported.

And that's not even getting into the ability to fund the creation of really outstanding media. Most modern kid's entertainment treats them like morons while slapping them in the face with basic lessons. You could create some truly delightful kid shows without having to skimp on any aspect, and really lay the foundations for creating a brighter future. Embed lessons of every major topic as part of the show without being hamfisted about it, and when they start to encounter those challenging topics in school they will have some foundational models on which to build upon. A basic example: you can teach a kid the fundamentals of calculus from an intuitive perspective, and when they actually learn proper calculus in school it'll be much easier to ramp up.

Heck, you could fund the modernization of a ton of college level educational content with enough money. Buy the rights to any important textbooks, rewrite as needed, then make them freely available. Hire a team of world class artists, animators, and builders to help create supporting materials / content that cover any topic. Pair that with world class educators and experts. You put that all together and create the most powerful repository of high quality educational content that the world has ever seen. By doing this you're laying the foundations for the development of future generations and setting them up for success!

Those are just some quick thoughts which I'm willing to write up here... If I thought about it longer I'd probably be able to come up with more significant quality of life improvements that could be spread out if someone was willing to spend a few billion dollars into making them into a reality.

Oh here's a final quick one: funding maker spaces across the country. It's not clear how much potential could be unlocked if we had widely available maker spaces where people can ask for help with their projects and ideas. Sometimes all it takes is having someone who can point you to the right tools or people.

A skyscraper. An eco-friendly village. A ship. A spacecraft.

You want to buy a social network.

Or see if you can swing an election to your favor.

That's what you do with $Bs. It's usually not very good.

That gets a lot easier to spend if you decide you want to explore space or something.

> So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house)

You answered your own question. Very boring and selfish answer, and just serving yourself (ie, greed).

Your son has more creativity than you.

If you are given $1B in hard cash, and the first thing you do is spend it on yourself. You are probably the worst person to ever get a windfall.

A million dollars is, roughly speaking, a person-year of dedicated professional services from a world-class professional of almost any profession. There are a few exceptions, like stockbrokers, surgeons, and some kinds of lawyers. But a billion dollars buys you, say, 1000 person-years of the best professionals.

For millions of dollars, you could have your own vaccination program, your own particle accelerator, your own web browser, your own steel mill, your own religious cult, your own pyramid, your own AI research lab, your own permaculture experiment station, your own rare book collection (which you could digitize), and so on.

That's leaving aside personal consumption of things like a diplomatic passport from a foreign country, a private doctor, a comfortable apartment in a former missile silo, and a helicopter to get to it with. Your yacht isn't going to do you much good if you get arrested in a foreign country on trumped-up charges because you unintentionally insulted the wrong guy's daughter, or if your cancer goes undiagnosed until stage 4.

If that's the case then it's no longer just for you, so I think that's fair

My dad built tents for diabetes research in Africa, I think that's pretty interesting and helpful. He's never had even a million dollars.

You need way less than you think.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21%3A33...

Anyone finding themselves agreeing with ideas like 100% marginal taxes needs to look deep into their own soul and understand where it originates from and then go back and learn history and read authors like Hayek, Mises, and Sowell.

Sowell - “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

I dunno, it must've been 15 years since I set my signature there to "remember, Slashdot is a tabloid", after I realized how the posts skewed towards... "engagement".

(signatures seem to have been lost in some redesign since)

I've noticed that on teamblind as well (started to use it only recently). I didn't realize there was such hate towards foreigners in the US, especially, in the tech world which I assumed was more educated/progressive. Don't know if it's fueled by Trump or the other way around, but it's pretty scary.

In the abstract, this seemed like a brilliant idea, and I don't understand why nobody else tries it, and I still don't see a good argument against it.

But in their specific implementation, if you deem that "funny" can redeem a post in and of itself (and you allow an open community to judge humour), well, you get what you measure. (And nowadays, "troll" is basically understood to mean the same thing as "flamebait", because nobody trolls the old-fashioned way — it's increasingly hard to distinguish yourself from people who are actually that clueless, and too many clueless people around to make it worthwhile to fake more.)

Their original owners also sold the site.

> He was designing a terminal to be used with DARPANet, the predecessor to the internet. He wanted an inexpensive way to use a keyboard and TV as the display for use as a computer terminal.

https://historysanjose.org/how-we-restored-our-apple-1-to-wo...

I guess the IPhone was walking his path after all (as heretical as it may sound)

There's a strange sense of joy I feel about someone being upset that he made a blockchain app. In some parallel universe we're still in the old world of the '90s culturally and engineers go online to yell at each other for which data structure they use. "You asshole! Did you just use distributed hash tables?!"

Having a family is hard. For instance, people with children are consistently less "happy" than their childless peers, yet many choose to have children knowing that. If you optimize for happiness you may be optimizing for selfish empty shallow existence. I'm sure you can take a drug to make you "happy" but that seems foolish.

I am "happy" watching Netflix (smile). I am not happy on a long vacation with screaming children (frown).

If you were to optimize for smile - frown, you would do more Netflix, less children. In fact childless people report themselves much happier than people with children.