The irony of Sam Altman's company pretending to care about what's "fair" is so very rich.
He literally made billions exploiting the intellectual work of millions of his fellow humans, yet has the audacity to whine about how the system isn't fair.
Plus, in long-running series like these writers (implicitly and explicitly) write for the actor. It's a bit chicken and egg-y, but you absolutely cannot (honestly) pretend that another actor would have the same lines written for them.
I mean, in season one sure, but by the time you get to "there are four lights" Stewart and Picard really are inseparable.
IDK about the "being an asshole to your face" part (my story on that, above, did come from early Apple).
But he was still famous for working his teams an insane amount of hours throughout his career. It was an open "joke" that any new project he released would be completely unsupportable for the first week ... because he drove the entire team that built it so hard, the entire team crashed for a week after.
That is not how any healthy/reasonable adult runs any team, tech or otherwise.
From personal experience there are two types of bosses who works their employees insane hours. The ones who are “finish this or else you are finished” and the ones who want “we must work to make this the best thing ever”. And the second one is infinitely more pleasant to work under because they see that you make an effort together with them. I always prefer to work 40 hours per week and not a minute more. But from stories on Folklore and elsewhere it seems Jobs at least was the second kind.
It seems we've setup the conditions where someone who toxically pushes people to their limits is seen as a hero, and the people who do the actual work are seen as lesser than.
It takes exactly 0 talent to sit in a room and tell someone their worldclass effort is "not good enough". Just as it takes 0 ingenuity to say "I want a manned return mission to mars by 2030"... Just because the executive says it doesn't mean they're contributing anything of worth to the outcome.
Less "forgetting" and more "not as brilliantly insane as Jobs" ... but Jobs was NEVER someone that ANYONE should ever emulate.
Fun real life story: I worked with an engineer once who had some sort of disability that required him to walk around with crutches attached to his arms. Before he worked with me, he worked at Apple, and was high up.
One day he had a meeting with Jobs, and he was late, because a non-handicapped car had parked in the handicapped spot, and as a disabled person it took him a long time to get from a normal parking spot. He said as much when he arrived in the meeting.
Now here's the "Jobs is burning in hell right now" part. Jobs looks the disabled guy directly in the eye and, without any shame whatsoever, says "oh, I parked there ... I believe the US government overreacted after WW2 and built too many disabled parking spaces, so I park in them."
He says this ... to the sweaty disabled guy who just had to "race" across the parking lot to get to the meeting! Fuck Jobs and fuck emulating him.
Its the fundamental problem of our age: everyone is building pieces of a system, and almost no one is actually looking at how those pieces fit together into a system.
This is not about (just) the healthcare system ... it's the core problem with:
- our legal system (millions of laws and rulings and zero effort spent reconciling them into a good system that treats everyone equally)
- our economic system (we reward people who create true wealth in many different ways ... but those rewards are wildly disproportionate to how much true wealth they add)
- our tax system (again, millions of laws, and yet the people who should be paying the most pay the least because of how they fit together)
- our electrical system (although, due to its centralization, this one is actually catching up much faster than the rest)
Individual people claiming to have a superior Big Picture for humanity is basically what big politicians are. We assign them, then give them 3-4 years to remake the world in their vision.
And once we have a few dozen of them in a room together, it's the recipe for endless passionate arguments about exactly what Truth is, and what Value is, and what Goodness is, about anything and everything.
One of the biggest challenges is that rules are set by experience, but every new rule is also the start of a new story we've never read (called 'The Future'). And humanity changes pretty fast!
I imagine it would look like a bunch of North Korean guys (probably not starving like their countrymen, but probably not looking great either) sitting in something like a cross between a NK state prison and an American office.
They probably are. I used to write software for a financial institution and we saw a lot of traffic from Chinese and Russian IP's hitting our firewalls constantly (ssh login attempts with typical default passwords, random wordpress exploits, that sorta thing). It wasn't very sophisticated so I don't think it was state sponsored or anything, probably just random cyber criminals trying to hit US targets because their governments wouldn't care.
I mean, this was at least 15 years ago.. so it might be a different story. But when the game is throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, I imagine they're still going after whatever targets they can find.
Honestly, IMHO it's complete and utter crap compared to the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE work Stephenson did with everything that came before.
Snow Crash? A milestone in modern sci-fi. Diamond Age? A truly incredible work of art! Even lesser stuff like The Big U or In the Beginning Was the Command Line were really, really good.
Then came Cryptonomicon, and it was good too ... but he was already deteriorating into loving the sound of his own voice way too much by then, so you had to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff.
And then there was Anathem ... where he made up half a language and required you to learn it to read the book (and it was like ten zillion pages long). Good writing is NOT about just throwing whatever brilliant ideas you have onto the page ... it's about cutting it down to the good stuff. Stephenson just stopped doing that by the time he got to Anathem.
To be fair, lots of people were willing to wade through all that fake language BS and Stephenson writing 100 words when 10 would do, and they all report loving the book ... but as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
I found Anathem significantly better than Diamond Age fwiw. Different strokes.
Diamond Age you can tell why he is very popular with silicon valley executives (and honestly is showing its age nowadays -- Japan is oddly relevant and the description of future China would read comical for someone in the 2020s). Anathem you can tell why he is popular with nerds like me.
It was published in 1992, but it was likely written in large part during the 80's ... and back then the world thought Japan was the future because of the popularity and success of Japanese tech corporations.
Their failures a few years later would dispell that myth ... but for awhile it really seemed plausible, and you'll see a similar fixation on Japan in lots of sci-fi from the 80's.
Yep. Sorry, thought I made it clear in my comment that this was a reference to the book showing its age.
The comment about popularity with executives was related to this romanticization of Victorian-era social structure that I see as a prominent undercurrent of Bay Area-coded literature, more recent iterations include Too Like the Lightning.
I'd make the same contrast between Anathema and Snow Crash. Cyberpunk in general seems to appeal to a class of person that's not quite a nerd's nerd - perhaps a little more extraverted, the kind of person that might go to conventions.
I noped out of Anathem when I realized learning the new language was going to be non-optional and non-trivial. I was also at a place where I needed my reading to be recreational rather than mind expanding.
Makes me wonder what Anathem looks like in other translations and whether... Mathic was it(?), was as much an issue in translation. Maybe I'll take another go at it. It's been years, and people that I respect greatly have told me it's one of their favorites.
I loved Snow Crash, and I still think about Diamond Age fairly often, 20+ years later. The ideas in Diamond Age were really just incredible.
I even enjoyed his first book, the Big U.
But I also agree about Cryptonomicon. After eating up Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I've tried to make it through Cryptonomicon twice and failed. I just can't seem to finish that book.
I'd disagree. Especially his last two books are very much getting to the point, and I really liked Seveneves and Termination Shock as well, all after Anathem. ("Fall" is the exception that proves the rule/trend; I'll just pretend that didn't happen. One of the very few books I've ever not finished after making it beyond the first half.)
> as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
You might want to give his later stuff a try. I think he's really improved his ability to wrap a story up, without compromising on the grand ideas.
He literally made billions exploiting the intellectual work of millions of his fellow humans, yet has the audacity to whine about how the system isn't fair.
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