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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Joining Apple Computer (2018)
leyka wrote 28 min ago:
Thank you Bill.
Rest in peace
khazhoux wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
The last 15 years I'm nagged by this thought that we don't let software
developers be software developers anymore. Between sprint planning and
JIRAs and project managers and constant meetings and "stakeholders" and
senior engineering leadership who confuse progress-tracking for
progress... when the hell are people supposed to do the amazing work??
I know it's beating a dead horse to pick on these, but it's a real
problem. I look back at how productive we were with tiny teams up
until right before 2010, and the main thing that stands out compared to
today is all this goddamn overhead.
FabHK wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
> my code accounted for almost two thirds of the original Macintosh ROM
Respect. RIP.
adwawdawd wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
If the two year lag is still true, the state of the SwiftUI SDK is even
more ridiculous.
tonyedgecombe wrote 14 hours 16 min ago:
"In 1990, with John Sculley's blessing, I left Apple with Marc Porat
and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General Magic and help to invent the
personal communicator."
Sculley really wasn't the right person to lead Apple. He should have
been begging them to do it in-house.
tiffanyh wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
Sculley also joined the Board at General Magic too ... and them
missing out on the web/internet, in hindsight, was the death nail.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
KerrAvon wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
I don’t disagree with that assessment of Sculley but I’m not sure
if that would have helped anyone. What the movie makes clear is that
General Magic very badly needed adult supervision (all these
“geniuses”! doing absolutely nothing of value! together!), and
I’m not sure Apple of that era would have been capable of providing
it in a productive way.
eschneider wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
Sometimes the smart think is to encourage folks to do their thing,
and if it's successful buy it back in-house.
KerrAvon wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
That has never really worked in the long run for anyone who’s
tried it. (Counterexamples welcome; I can’t think of any.)
r0m4n0 wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
> I left Apple with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General
Magic and help to invent the personal communicator.
It’s always wild to me how many of the people that are the beginnings
of these large prodigy companies and the connection to other powerful
rich people. You look up some of these people and see the relationships
and it’s wild. Like the name Porat rang a bell so I look up Marc and
oh? That’s Ruth Porat’s brother. The ex CFO of Morgan Stanley and
current CIO and president of Google. Is it truly talent that drives
these leaders to the top of these organizations or is it connections to
other crazy powerful people? Maybe both.
Sometimes I feel like I’m over here building cool stuff with talent
galore but nothing ever gets what it needs financially. It’d be nice
to know these types of people I suppose
TheOtherHobbes wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
It's very localised and Californian. There were really two big tech
scenes - one around MIT and Mass, and one around CalTech/Stanford and
adjacent areas - with some also-rans in other areas that were mostly
gov mil/aerospace spinoffs.
The Mass scene sort of fizzled in the 90s for various reasons - not
dead, but not dominant - and the centre of gravity moved to the West
Coast.
So if you were born in CA and studied there - and Atkinson did both -
your odds of hitching your wagon to a success story were higher than
if you were born in Montana or Dublin.
This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's
a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural
constraint on opportunity. It's not that other places lack talented
people, it's that the networks are highly localised, the culture is
very standardised - far less creative than it used to be, and still
pretends to be - and diverse ideas and talent are wasted on an
industrial scale.
dumdedum123 wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
Huh? Caltech/Stanford? These are two different tech scenes.
majormajor wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
> This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact
it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and
cultural constraint on opportunity.
I don't think social relationships and their geography are a
particular characteristic of capitalism - let alone US-specific
capitalism.
They - and the resulting hub/centralization effects - predate it by
millennia. There is no shortage of historical cities or state that
became major hubs for certain industries or research. How much of
the effort in those places is "wasted" seems hard to quantify in an
objective way, but again, the pattern of low-hanging fruit being
more available to the first wave and then a lot of smart,
hard-working people in the future generations working more around
the edges is not capitalism-exclusive.
nostrademons wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
FWIW CalTech is in southern California and far away (both
geographically and socially) from Stanford. Its strengths also
tend to be primarily in physics, rocketry, and astronomy, rather
than in CS - its primary ties are with JPL and NASA. The Bay Area
tech scene is anchored by Stanford and UC Berkeley, though most
Stanford alums would probably say it's just Stanford.
ghaff wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
There's probably a book in there. The CA axis was probably
Stanford/Berkeley with Caltech relatively small and in another
part of the state and probably much more theoretical in focus.
Don't really buy Levy's thesis of the migration from east to west
and Stallman as "the last hacker" hasn't aged well.
But Boston/Cambridge (really Massachusetts generally) did sort of
empty out of a lot of tech for a time as minicomputer companies
declined and Silicon Valley became the scene. I actually decided
not to go that direction because, at the time in the nineties, it
would have been a relative cost of living downgrade.
criddell wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
You said it yourself - universities are the major hubs that bring
talented driven people together and provide access to some of the
greatest teachers and researchers and other resources. MIT and
Stanford are special, somehow, in this regard.
You see this as inefficient and maybe you’re right. I think about
how little it has cost to run these schools compared to the wealth
(financial, cultural, technological) they spin off and to me it
looks very efficient.
cellu wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
It’s purely luck driving success. The book _thinking fast and slow_
illustrates it quite eloquently. Real geniuses are rare and even then
they do not necessary become successful
vl wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Thinking Fast and Slow is in the center of Replication Crisis.
Basically large parts of it were written based on research that
later was found out to be fabricated.
dumdedum123 wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
This is correct. Thanks for pointing it out. Even Daniel Kahneman
admitted it.
newsuser wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
I'm curious, could you plz share the source for the last claim?
In my field - distant from the book - it's quite respected.
buran77 wrote 16 hours 12 min ago:
You can be a superstar and still not succeed alone, without other
superstars around you. They are so successful because they know each
other. And survivorship bias guarantees that all those who didn't
make it are unknown, or not mentioned.
This is the role of successful companies like this, just like top
universities. They help create the connection between people with
huge potential (or money), superstars, and amplify it.
Remember those pictures will all the famous 20th century geniuses in
one place. They each got to reach the peak by building a new step on
top of someone else's previous step, and so on. Eventually they all
climbed the same ladder together. They were like a talent packed
sports team dominating the sports for many seasons. It's not a
coincidence they're in the same picture.
bobbiechen wrote 9 hours 6 min ago:
The Fifth Solvay Conference
From back row to front, reading left to right: Auguste Piccard,
Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de
Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang
Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin,
Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik
Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max
Born, Niels Bohr, Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Skłodowska
Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin,
Charles-Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans
Richardson.
[1]: https://mymodernmet.com/the-solvay-conference-photo/
0xCE0 wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
The General Magic movie/document (2018) is amazing and underrated.
Always getting teardrops while watching it (watched it ~3 times). A
true old-school startup story. And the soundtrack is also beautiful.
piyiotisk wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
I totally agree. I watched it 3 times as well. One in London with a
panel of the general magic employees. It was an amazing experience
0xCE0 wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt and
Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2 watchings. Both
so amazing but generally unknown/underrated.
piyiotisk wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
Yeah in London, I was sitting next to Tony Fadell. I couldn’t
believe it!
I didn’t know about this show. Thanks for the recommendation
I’ll check it out.
Is it based on a true story?
wanderingstan wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
Not based on a true story, but anyone familiar with computing
history will see how real-world events were turned into plot
lines; e.g. Compaq’s reverse engineering of IBMs sdk, the
competition between directory-based index of Yahoo and
algorithms of Google.
BolexNOLA wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
I love h&cf but it’s important for people who are curious
about it to know that it is definitely an overdramatized AMC
piece akin to mad men. It’s basically mad men but PCs lol.
It has some brilliant writing and the acting is off the charts
(whoever handled casting is unbelievable), but man it can
definitely make you roll your eyes occasionally lol
ghaff wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
Rarely. I actually expected it to go in a somewhat different
direction. But as somewhat who was at COMDEX and in the
industry in general during that period, it felt pretty true.
dev_chhatbar wrote 12 hours 2 min ago:
I agree with you! I love that they're both extremely
underrated. I remember buying the Documentary and watching it
immediately. The fact that they're not well known, gives I
guess our side of world our own sorta "special something" to
watch/enjoy.
wnc3141 wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
Access to capital/other's talent and/or access to your market (users)
is the primary competitive advantage among those talented enough to
design and build a product.
gyomu wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
"I worked at Apple for 12 years, making tools to empower creative
people [...]"
I think this was the hook that got many of us to admire Apple as a
company (and more broadly, to get excited about computing as a
discipline/industry). For a long time, that was arguably (one of) their
primary mission.
I suspect to what extent it could still be considered to be the case
today would be subject to much debate.
tilne wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
Is it even up for debate that that’s definitely not what their
primary mission is? Their market cap sits at 3.5 trillion, ranking
them third behind Microsoft and nvidia. Unlike those other two, Apple
makes most of that on selling iPhones and the like to consumers.
dagmx wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
That’s not really at odds with the goal of empowering creatives.
A significant chunk of every iPhone and iPad release is features
specifically for creatives.
This specific site doesn’t cater to creatives and will often be
full of developers comments bemoaning those things, but I really
challenge anyone to look at any of their Mac/iOS product releases
in the last decade and point out how creatives aren’t still a big
component of their DNA.
swyx wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
> Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the
HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their
own interactive media.
I'm interested in how to do "good" journeys vs non-good ones...
duxup wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
What a wonderful read.
I find myself pining for a lot of the "old days" when anything seemed
possible and it was open and exciting. You could DO surprisingly, not
a lot, but everything still felt possible.
Now everything seems trapped in advertising dominated closed box.
Login and live in this limited little space...
The internet is still there, I can still put up a site that isn't
covered with ads. I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.
mhandley wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
I came of age in the 8-bit era of the early 80s, rode the Internet
wave of the 90s and early 2000s, kind of missed the mobile wave but
spent that time developing ideas that would eventually turn out to be
useful for AI, and now I'm having great fun on the AI wave. I'm
happy to have grown up and lived when I did, but I feel that each era
of my life has had its own unique opportunities, excitement and
really interesting technical problems to work on. And perhaps most
importantly, great people to work with.
zaptrem wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
I'm around the age these guys were during this story. I feel the
exact opposite way. I spent middle/high school feeling similarly,
only pining for the 2000s ("wow, with smartphones and the internet
the industry was wide open with opportunity, anything was possible.
Now it seems like everything's been done and giants rule the world").
However, the GenAI boom completely changed my mind. I feel like we're
the most lucky of all the generations of engineers so far considering
how many crazy things are now possible with just a few determined
individuals.
bigyabai wrote 9 hours 33 min ago:
I don't really think AI solves the engineering problems of our day.
Compared to the impact of the tape measure, slide rule or digital
calculator, I wager AI will be a blip in the engineering landscape.
bdangubic wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
you should try to find a job today and see what the impact is
already let alone in a year or two…
bigyabai wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
4 out of 5 technical interviews I have done in the past 3 years
were whiteboard reviews. I'm really not that worried about Joe
Shmoe using ChatGPT to cram for a Typescript examination.
TechDebtDevin wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
What is now possible that wasnt before, other than writing really
really bad code fast?
MangoToupe wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
This has always been one of the secret sauces that some startups
use. Sometimes you just need a semi-functional app at the right
place at the right time.
promiseofbeans wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
[1]: https://kagi.com/smallweb
duxup wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
Thank you.
9d wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
> I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.
You just solved it for me.
I've been wondering what to use 90s.dev for.
That's it.
mrcwinn wrote 1 day ago:
Just had a flashback to the thunk sound of turning on Apple Lisa!
Grateful for all his work.
dedicate wrote 1 day ago:
I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was
all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom.
But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app
stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
Lu2025 wrote 4 hours 38 min ago:
> feel we've gone backwards
The word you are looking for is enshittification.
JKCalhoun wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
Yeah, Hypercard or MacPaint (really a demo for Quickdraw). Had he
done only one of those two he would still rank as a genius.
KerrAvon wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
From a particular POV, they’re it’s the same evolutionary
chain. QuickDraw -> MacPaint -> HyperCard.
kibwen wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
What's worse, in context here, is Apple's distinguished primary role
in bringing this about.
GeekyBear wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
Swift Playgrounds is very much in the spirit of HyperCard, but also
gives access to the same APIs the professional developers are
using.
It's also designed to be usable and educational for kids.
PontifexMinimus wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
It's like they remembered their 1984 advert, and decided they
wanted to be the baddy in it.
thowawatp302 wrote 20 hours 58 min ago:
Idk 2003-2009 was very much the days of the sort of malware and
spyware that showed developers in a
company didn’t deserve rights anymore
bigyabai wrote 9 hours 31 min ago:
I don't see what that has to do with Hypercard. If anything,
Hypercard (or modern HTML) is living proof that you can create
and share a secure software runtime with the world.
If developers "didn't deserve rights" for what they did with
that, then I don't see how we should let Apple off the hook for
PRISM compliance and backdoored Push Notifications.
KerrAvon wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
HyperCard is completely insecure by any reasonable
security/privacy standard.
iancmceachern wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
I totally agree
gyomu wrote 1 day ago:
It's really hard to extract computing from the capitalistic,
consumerist cradle within which it was born.
Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater,
writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of
cultures, societies, and economic contexts.
But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive
and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing
components; and corporations producing software and selling it to
other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable
income that industrialization created.
In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in favor of
the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating what can be
done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few blips like the
free software movement here and there (and the outsized effect
they've had on the industry speaks to how much value there is to be
found there), but the hard reality that's hard to fight is that if
you control the chip factories, you control what can be done with the
chips - Apple being the strongest example of this.
We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To name
one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write software
for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the cheap,
abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that will probably
still be available and understandable a century from now.
reaperducer wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive
and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing
components; and corporations producing software and selling it to
other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable
income that industrialization created.
You must be too young to have experienced the time when it was
expected that you would build your own computer at home, and either
write your own software for it, or get it for free (or just a
duplication beer) from the local computer club.
swyx wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
you can only blame capitalism so much for the unpopularity of
hypercardlike things vs instagram/facebook/twitter etc
on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than
create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people havent
tried to make creative new platforms for self expression and
software creation and they all kinda failed
Nevermark wrote 17 hours 1 min ago:
> is just human nature to want to consume than create
That may be true.
But it doesn't really explain why the tools for simple popular
creation are not there. There are a lot of people in the world
who would use them, even if its only 1%.
reaperducer wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
They were there, but nobody used them.
For a long while, Apple computers came an entrie creative suite
of programs to make your own content and publish it on the
Internet via iWeb.
For a variety of reasons, hardly anyone took advantage of it.
bigyabai wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Part of the problem trying to isolate computing is that it's
fundamentally material. Even cloud resources are a flimsy
abstraction over a more complex business model. That materialism is
part of the issue, too. You can't ever escape the churn, bit rot
gets your drives and Hetzner doesn't sell a lifetime plan. If
you're not computing for the short-term, you're arguably wasting
your time.
I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but you're not
"pushing back" against the consumerist machine by outlasting it.
When high-quality software becomes inaccessible to support some
sort of longtermist runtime, low-quality software everywhere sees a
rise in popularity.
ronbenton wrote 1 day ago:
Apparently we need to be doing more LSD
LoganDark wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
LSD can be quite helpful to the right mind and when used with the
right mindset. It can also be quite harmful if used improperly.
Still wish it were legal though.
criddell wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
I wish safe, tested sources were generally available. I’m 55 this
year and would like to try it, but I’m not going to buy street
drugs nor am I capable of producing it. Is there a pharmaceutical
version of LSD available somewhere in the world through legitimate
channels?
carlosjobim wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
If you haven't done it by 55, you probably aren't going to do it.
There are easy ways to get safe LSD if you want it. But you do
not actually want it.
LoganDark wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
It's possible to want something but not enough to break the law
and risk your safety for it. I use LSD regularly, but that
doesn't mean sourcing it is for everyone.
apples_oranges wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Not sure about "safe and tested" but LSD prodrugs (substances
that metabolise into LSD which then works as usual) are available
in many places. One example is this [1] .
Eventually they are made illegal but new ones appear.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1D-LSD
LoganDark wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
Not exactly LSD, but psilocybin clinics have been legalized in
certain locations, such as the US state of Oregon. Psilocybin is
of the same psychedelic class (tryptamines), so it is not an
entirely dissimilar experience, although for me it's less
stimulating than LSD, so YMMV.
I understand though that clinics aren't the ideal for many (they
are for some), since you aren't allowed to have the trip at home
or leave the clinic until it is over.
criddell wrote 10 hours 54 min ago:
I actually think I would be more comfortable in a clinic.
LoganDark wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
Then that may be an option for you. It just needs ... a
diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression and a
prescription for psilocybin therapy by a specially licensed
psychiatrist...
acheron wrote 1 day ago:
I was wondering recently about where the original sin of “light
mode” came from. Guess it was him!
> The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I argued
that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white background
like paper. It works fine to invert text when printing, but it would
not work for a photo to be printed in negative. The Lisa hardware team
complained the screen would flicker too much, and they would need
faster refresh with more expensive RAM to prevent smearing when
scrolling. Steve listened to all the pros and cons then sided with a
white background for the sake of graphics.
wpm wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
“Sin” of being readable
monkeyelite wrote 1 day ago:
The real sin is having both.
throwanem wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
I don't get it. I grew up with green and amber CRTs and I don't
miss those days at all. What makes it mean so much, to you kids who
never knew those days to miss?
floren wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
Looks cooler, and you tell yourself that you're saving your eyes
as you sit in your blackout-curtained hacker den... but the pitch
black hacker den is also part of the desired aesthetic.
Real Hackers didn't use rgb dweeb keyboards though
throwanem wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
Oh, I see. In my day we smoked cigarettes, compared with which
RGB keyboards seem like a pretty clean win. Literally a clean
win; the main reason for keeping the lights off and the windows
covered, as I recall it, was to hide all the filth that
constantly accumulates in such an environment. Not to say I
don't look back on it fondly, but when I actually look back on
the photos I still have of how I lived then, it sort of makes
my teeth itch, if you know what I mean.
9d wrote 1 day ago:
> It was exciting working at Apple, knowing that whatever we invented
would be used by millions of people.
I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and
helpful.
And that it's disappointing when that thing isn't used by anyone.
It's even worse when it turns out it's just not that useful.
But in the end, everything is replaced anyway. So I guess it's fine.
amelius wrote 16 hours 19 min ago:
> I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good
and helpful.
It's sad when management takes that work and locks it down, and puts
it in a walled garden.
roughly wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
> I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good
and helpful.
I want to double down on this - I’m lucky enough to have worked
places where I truly believed the world would be a better place if we
“won,” and not on the margins, and it really, really makes a
difference in quality of life. I’ve worked at other places, too,
and the cognitive drag of knowing that your skills and efforts - your
ability to change the world - is at best being wasted is something
you don’t truly feel until it’s gone.
9d wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
I've wasted countless years on pursuits I thought were good but
later determined to have been bad, and therefore deeply regretted.
I don't wish this on anyone.
I've also wasted countless years on pursuits I still think were
good but overall never truly helped make the world better. This was
less bad and seems inevitable.
roughly wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
Yeah I got a couple places on my resume I don’t like to talk
about anymore. Turns out an awful lot of things are bad for the
world in the wrong hands.
Still, if I’m going to spend a third of my life on something -
and, more importantly, if I’m going to be responsible for my
efforts contributing to something - I’d prefer it be something
I find value in. I’ll take the risk of being wrong - although
I’m certainly looking at the world through less rose-tinted
glasses than I used to.
9d wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
I agree, and I'm convinced selling my own software is the only
way I can do that. At least for me. I just need to put it all
together now, all the skillsets I've honed for decades, and the
insight I might have gleaned from what people need.
walterbell wrote 1 day ago:
> whatever we invented would be used by millions of people
Two billion active Apple devices in 2025.
zoky wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
I mean, as long as the average number of Apple devices per person
is > 2 (which seems pretty likely, I have three on me right now),
that’s still technically in the millions range.
9d wrote 1 day ago:
I was reflecting on his thoughts and my life's work.
mehulashah wrote 1 day ago:
Legend. I still remember first putting my hands on a Mac, and the joy
of computing that ensued in high school. I could get lost in the
computer for days. Thank you, Bill.
JKCalhoun wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
Yeah, I think it was MacPaint actually.
9d wrote 1 day ago:
I had that feeling too.
How do we get it back?
How do we share it with others?
There has to be a way.
criddell wrote 11 hours 56 min ago:
> How do we get it back?
If by it you mean excitement about a personal computer, I’m not
sure.
If you are speaking more generally about having some activity that
is creative and all-consuming, then look to the arts. There are
people picking up a guitar or paintbrush or bread recipe for the
first time today and it’s going to become everything to them.
jonstewart wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
I have been thinking about this more, about how I spent hours and
days exploring everything of my family’s new Mac SE, and then
HyperCard, and creating with it.
There is an aspect of creativity that comes from being inspired,
taking off from others’ ideas.
But there is also an aspect of creativity that’s more ascetic,
and requires being bored—when there’s nothing else to do, turn
the computer into a toy, to play with it, so you are not bored. And
I am increasingly of the opinion getting to that state, at least
for me, requires turning off the internet.
9d wrote 21 hours 27 min ago:
100% agree, you must be bored to be inspired.
I think I know how to recapture that "whole new world" feeling
and share it.
It's on the tip of my tongue, and has been for a while.
But I can't fully see it yet. I need to go offline for a while.
You're right.
WillAdams wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
I am looking forward to trying to make use of a Raspberry Pi 5 as
much as is feasible once I get a small tablet shell for mine.
If it works out well, I'm going to see about getting a Wacom One
display tablet with touch.
paulryanrogers wrote 1 day ago:
> How do we get it back?
Time machine.
> How do we share it with others?
Just like the church, capture them in their most formative years.
9d wrote 1 day ago:
No. There has to be a way.
Waterluvian wrote 1 day ago:
It feels a bit like he wrote his own obituary with this.
duxup wrote 23 hours 14 min ago:
I find myself, as I get older, telling stories that have a similar
perspective flow. It happens.
bravesoul2 wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
Maybe he did. We are all going to die. And if you have an interesting
story (of interest to many) it's good to share it.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
Surprised he was only at Apple for 12 years. A wild ride, I'm sure.
When I moved out to "the Valley" in 1995, the apartment I picked out
turned out to be right next to General Magic (on Mary Ave.).
I knew it as a "spin off" of Apple but at the time did not know the
luminaries that were there. It was just a cute rabbit in a hat logo —
lit up when I got home late and was turning off to my apartment.
plentysun wrote 20 hours 20 min ago:
a wild ride definitely!
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
> Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the
HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their
own interactive media.
Watching some YouTube about the Beatles and, of course, their LSD
trips. More recently the history of Robert Crumb — on his big acid
trip he more or less created a large part of his stable of comic
characters.
Somewhere along the way, someone said that LSD alters your mind
permanently....
It caused me to wonder if we'll never get the genius of Beatles music,
Crumb art without the artist taking something conscious-altering like
LSD. Of course then I have to consider all the artists before LSD was
"invented" — the Edvard Munch's, T.S. Eliot's, William Blake's, etc.
(Tried acid once in college. That was enough of that.)
paulryanrogers wrote 1 day ago:
Survivorship bias? Plenty of brilliant people smoked tobacco. I
didn't think more smoking will produce more brilliance.
tough wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
Neither does smoking alter your conscioudness in any remarkable way
further than irritability or cravings due to whitdrawal symtpom
at least acid doesnt make sense to consume daily because it stops
having the same effects the more you consume it
pyinstallwoes wrote 1 day ago:
Pretty ancient practice probably. See the history of drug use in
cultures and spirituality/art. Soma, etc.
nine_k wrote 1 day ago:
All traditional practices of use of psychedelic substances emphasize
the importance of preparation, having the right state of mind, right
stimuli / environment, and sitters in un-altered state of mind
nearby.
LSD is not known to permanently alter brain; for that you need
psilocybin.
j_bum wrote 1 day ago:
You had me up until your last clause…
If you understand that LSD doesn’t permanently alter the brain,
why do you think PY “permanently” alters the brain? It does
alter the brain (like LSD; see the plethora of research on PY
altering neurogenesis and functional connectivity [0]), I’m
unsure of what you mean by “permanent”.
[0]
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07624-5
nine_k wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
AFAICT there exists no conclusive biomedical evidence of
permanent physiological effects of LSD. This may mean we're just
not looking hard enough, but there's no certainty.
For psilocybin, there is plenty, e.g.:
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376772/
j_bum wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
First, you’re cutting an in vitro study. Second,
“permanent” is a serious claim that bears a large burden of
proof.
I think defining “permanent” would first be useful. The
brain is extremely plastic.
Beyond that, OP comment was referring to psychosis effects. See
his comment below.
TechDebtDevin wrote 1 day ago:
It permanently changed my buddy's brain when we were in college
doing it. He thought he was talkng to God and blew his brains
out. Not worth it for me now.
asveikau wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
If you've known a few people who suffer psychotic symptoms and
get to know the pattern of how they developed, drugs can appear
commonly but it's much less cut and dry whether the drugs are
responsible.
For example college age, like your buddy was at, is very
typically the onset time for schizophrenia even without drugs.
And schizophrenia itself may make people gravitate towards
drugs.
j_bum wrote 1 day ago:
I’m sorry to hear that.
I know that there absolutely are people who shouldn’t take it
based on their mindset and underplaying predispositions.
There is certainly a point to be made about psychoactive (and
other) drugs inducing episodes of psychosis. This is something
on the uptick with marijuana legalization in the US [0].
And I think am plainly wrong about my understanding of these
effects not being “permanent”. I suppose I was thinking
about this too much from a “neurotypical” angle, and not
from the angle of how substances can alter the neurological
trajectory of people with predisposed sensitivity.
[0]
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/marijuana...
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