I live my life a quarter century at a time

Luckily there is no indication that he was interested in this sort of things. Contrary to…others.

Insert Bill Burr on Lance Armstrong "just keep him on the bike" quote.

It was widely documented at the time that Jobs chose non-medicine over medicine very soon after diagnosis, and then went through heroic real-doctor efforts once it was too late: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

All else being equal, for team-based, creative, knowledge work, having everyone collocated is more productive.

But not all is equal. You can't necessarily attract the all the talent. It doesn't scale without extremely disciplined organizational and physical space design - working remotely in the office, is the more common norm. Your team is spread over different locations and buildings anyway so you aren't really working locally in practice. Strong communication and collaboration practices are what dominate - so just having people together in one place and expecting osmosis doesn't beat good async tooling and discussion practices (like those from the best OSS projects).

Oh, I'm sure it's even fuzzier than that. Apple's cachet over the past 25 years was built on the type of class consumerism that reflects and then amplifies a lot of America's particular brand of social dysfunction. Much of tech during this time was focused (and continued to focus, to their market detriment, until they "wised" up and stopped) on a sort of egalitarianism; if the proposition is, "Anyone can benefit from our product," most companies whispered the qualifier, "...if you can afford it." Apple, on the other hand, shouted that last part from the rooftops, also encouraging the addendum, "...and it makes you better than people who don't use our products."

Apple was a standard-bearer for the toxic exclusivity and gatekeeping that's kind of always been a part of American society, but that we occasionally see some chance of finally throwing off.

if you believe that enabling people to easily communicate with each other and access basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge whenever they want is a good thing (ie if you think giving people iPhones so they can message each other and read wikipedia is a good thing), then you can say his work did help with that.

You can also say that Macs have helped many people express themselves creatively (iMovie, Garage Band, Logic, Final Cut...), which you might think is a good thing.

As a customer I find a stark difference between Musk and Jobs. I have a Tesla and I was also a customer of Jobs’s Apple since 1999.

The big difference is that Jobs never lied to me. Sure, he was an enthusiastic salesman, but the products actually did what was promised. (I even bought Mac OS X 10.0 in a retail box. It was rough but it showed that their new OS is delivering.) Apple products fit my purposes and I kept coming back to buy more.

Musk sold me a very expensive feature that still does nothing, six years later. He knew that he was lying about the capabilities of the cars, but still took my $7,500 for a feature that was worth zero. I’m never buying anything from him again.

The same approach of bald-faced lies is evident in most of the tech industry today. Cryptocurrency products don’t serve any purpose but enriching people like Andreessen. AI is almost as bad. And now these titans of misinformation are barging into global politics. They don’t care about empowering people and creativity like Jobs did, they just want more personal power.

Almost everything in Hinduism is not prescribed strictly because Hinduism is really an amalgamation of many separate beliefs systems / traditions / ritual / books, etc. which were followed by local cohorts.

That's why many books contradict each other. Some books prescribe an age and order for such steps, others don't, etc. They weren't meant to be all collected, all studied, and all chosen piecemeal by one observer. But over time it has evolved into a much different thing than when it started

Indeed, why wait till 50 to start giving back.

Edit: Not talking purely about financially giving back, but also volunteering your time.

Or you can never stop peaking and growing in different ways :)

That is certainly possible, I don't know yet. But what I have noticed is that it is only past 40 that I started doing things that matter, and I learned to recognize things that do not need doing or that should not be done.

This goes across the spectrum: from knowing what to do (and more importantly what NOT to spend time on) to build a business that earns money, to avoiding jumping onto the latest and greatest JavaScript framework.

Incidentally, one amusing side effect is that I tend to disagree with >90% of HN commenters and often regret posting my comments, because I get downvoted or criticized into oblivion. I might of course be wrong. But then again, when I look at the depressing comments even in this discussion, or at comments from people worrying about their job, securing income, etc, and compare this to my situation, which I've ended up in by following my own compass — I stop worrying, take a deep breath and continue to do my thing :-)

I’m 50 now and have plans to run a 5K in at around 30 minutes by the end of the year. I haven’t run a 5K in over 15 years. Even though I have worked out continuously since I was 12.

But from my current training, I don’t see any reason that isn’t achievable. No part of my body is giving me warning signs and the training isn’t any harder than it was 15 years ago.

As far as “ageism”, I changed jobs at 40, 42, 44, 46, 49 and last year at 50 and neither time did it take me more than 3 weeks to get a job. I got my first only and hopefully last job at a “FAANG” at 46.

None of those were management jobs and I’m now a “staff software engineer” at a third party cloud consulting company.

I’m well aware that my body will decline over the next 20 years. But no need to give up prematurely

I made enough so she doesn’t have to work anymore. Before Covid, she was a special needs bus driver. I didn’t want her on the bus after Covid for both her health and mine.

By the time Covid lifted, we had decided to fly around the country taking one way trips and she was deeply into her passion projects.

We got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit into 4 suitcases. Our official home was our vacation home in (state tax free) Florida that was being rented out while we were traveling as a short term rental.

The “state tax free” came in handy when I was getting RSUs/pro rated signing bonuses

She’s unemployed and he pays for her lifestyle

She's been 'taken care of'...

The biggest turning point for the worse and for the better was not having a good stable home life.

I am not saying you have to be in a relationship to have stability. Of course it’s better to be single than being involved in a bad relationship.

Looking back, what really started things going bad was a lack of self confidence and wanting to be in a relationship.

I was a short computer geek, kind of awkward. I got better. Now I’m very comfortable talking to anyone. It’s my $Dayjob.

Ironically enough though, I had no trouble being in front of people at 28 and had been a part time fitness instructor for 3 years by then as hobby. I was in great shape.

I met someone who was physically attractive and was interested in me after being friendzoned all of my adult life. I got married and I should have seen the signs.

That led to everything else that happened for the next 6 years - staying at a job too long, getting too heavily invested in real estate trying to make more money, stagnating both technically and financially. Got divorced at 32.

At 34, in 2008 around the time of the real estate crash, I just had to accept the fact that everything I had done up to that point was a waste and be comfortable starting over from scratch.

I got ready to interview after being at my second job for over 9 years and did a vertical move to another job that would let me get some real world experience with an in demand language - C# and the startup was working with ruggedized mobile devices right when smart phones were taking off.

I wasn’t trying to date anyone at that time and my now wife had to basically shove her number at me once we had been working together for over two years. She was in another department. I told her all of the shit I was going through at the time with my real estate and she was still interested.

We both got laid off when the company went out of business and she got a job quickly that had benefits and I got a good paying contract without benefits. I proposed to her while I was working as a contractor with the plan for us to get married after I got a permanent job.

She suggested we get married sooner so I could be on her benefits. That arrangement kept until 2020 when I was 46. It allowed me the freedom to jump back and forth between full time and contract jobs to build my resume.

In 2020, as a direct result of me being able to aggressively job hop, a remote position at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap in 2020.

The difference between what I was making pre-AWS and post AWS was 3x what she was making. But there is a direct line from her supporting my career to me being able to do that.

I have no problem with my wife not working so she can pursue what she wants. It gives us a chance to travel like crazy and it’s not like my life is stressful once I left AWS.

I worked at Iomega (Zip Drive) from 1994 to 1998. The VP was rumored to fire people on the spot for the smallest thing.

One day we worked an all nighter. The entire department. The next day we were still there. Having solved the problem, most of us were asleep at our desks.

The VP made an unannounced visit and walked through the office. None of us noticed him. He walked to my bosses bosses office and asked him to assemble us in the meeting room.

He walked into the meeting, said he was impressed with how hard we were working, pointing out that our heads were down in deep thought. Then he left.

These days, I think he was trolling us.

I got to know him quite well later in my career. I never saw him fire anyone.

Learning has no expiration date

The NDA could say that by signing this I am to hand over my first born but it isn't enforceable. An obvious straw man example I admit but to make the point that signing a thing doesn't give a thing some kind of godly power.

Terminology I head in law classes over a decade ago is tacid contact and definitely was a legal contract although difficult to prove in court when I did study the little contract law I studied.

The reverse is true. They asked to sign an NDA, the person looked at it, decided not to agree, but they kept them on regardless.

It would be better to have never handed te person the formal agreement, than give it and be ok with them not signing.

(not keeping track is just as bad, it marks the NDA as unimportant)

I believe full-window moves were an optional Windows 98 feature. Possibly also available in Windows 95 via registry tweaks or if you had Microsoft Plus! installed.

That's not too dissimilar to the folder tabs which appeared at some point in classic MacOS, though I don't remember when: quite possibly after '95.

As the author notes, Windows 95 was remarkable for the iterative process that Microsoft’s UI folks undertook. They published an article in the ACM [1] on how they completely discarded the previous approach of designing from first principles in a vacuum in favor of rapid iteration and frequent usability testing. This let them abandon their fear of changing too much—in fact, the article directly addresses the evolution of taskbar icons from the version shown in your linked screenshots to what eventually shipped.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611