Woz is awesome and as an engineer I understand the urge to say he’s the main one who should be honored but we have to be realistic. Jobs ushered in 2 eras, only 1 with Woz. The personal computer and the computer in everyone’s pocket.
That’s not touching any of the other areas like helping to drive Pixar. Woz did not have a second act, which is perfectly fine and I deeply respect him but he doesn’t have quite the same cultural impact.
Woz is a genius who invented the personal computer as we know it.
Jobs was a celebrity who was good at branding himself as a genius.
I don't consider a clever UI idea like a touch screen to be a work of brilliance, especially since he did zero engineering work, both for early and later Apple devices. Touch screen handheld devices would've come around with or without him, just maybe a few years later.
Woz was one of many people who designed microprocessor based computers in the 1970s (I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01_201710, and the variety is astounding), and far from the first one, though he was very good at what he did.
What really set apart the Apple II from many of its peers is that it came preassembled, in a neatly designed case (though the Commodore PET and TRS-80 were pretty much released at the same time), and those esthetics were due more to Jobs than Wozniak.
Jobs did not write product code, or design boards, but he had a constant presence in the design of Apple's products and many (though by no means all) of his inputs changed the products for the better.
This is much more true than the parent comment, but nobody invented the concept of an integrated system in a case with keyboard and screen. That's because said concept is called a "video terminal" and had existed for at least a decade prior to the mid-70s. In fact one of the prime target markets for the first generation 8-bit CPUs was...video terminals. A late-70s personal computer is really just a video terminal that has been made programmable by the user. The hardware is pretty much identical.
> Woz is a genius who invented the personal computer as we know it.
History being written by the victors here, I believe.
He designed some clever things for example bit-banging the floppy interface which allowed the Apple 2 to have floppies at a lower price point than competitors. Another innovation of the Apple 2 at the time was its use of a switched-mode PSU. It was almost certainly the first personal computer to have that, but designed by Rod Holt not Woz. He didn't invent the switching PSU -- they were commonly used in portable test equipment at the time.
Having been alive at the time and paying attention, I disagree that Woz invented anything very significant. Definitely an important figure, and a clever guy though.
After looking more closely at the release dates of the earliest home computers, I found you're right. Three major home computers, all preassembled, with keyboard and video display and BASIC launched in 1977. Seems Apple II was not the first, only the most forward-looking of the three.
I still don't credit Steve Jobs with starting any computing revolutions, in 1977 or 2008.
At the time it seemed that the advantage Apple had over the Pet and TRS-80 was the lower price-point for floppies and color, and over time much more software becoming available. Obviously those advantages weren't entirely due to luck -- Woz designed the low-cost floppy interface and someone specified the color modulator and enough memory for color graphics. Someone decided to use a switched mode PSU which made the Apple much lighter and therefore easier to lug around than a Pet. The general idea of "having a computer at home" had existed since the 1960s so I wouldn't credit Jobs with any amazing breakthrough in that regard.
Also worth noting that the Apple 2 was really a US/North America phenomenon. For example although they were sold in the UK (my school, unusually, had one), they were not popular and pretty much nobody had one in their home. So you might as well say that the person at the BBC who decided to commission the BBC Micro was the pioneer of personal computing. Or Clive Sinclair.
On the side, custom coloring books for kids using nano banana, started with a project for my son, and its a little janky for some photos but have had some interest already: https://bespokebooks.io. I think it needs to be a phone app to really work for most people though, so that's next on my to do list besides some prompt tweaking.
I think there are a lot of really fun projects possible now in the child book creation space, particularly as you build tools that they can use themselves (like adding voice interfaces to building a book or story).
This is outside my 996 job of AI Agent/Assistant infra + ops :)
Currently using Lulu because they have a developer api and allow printing a single book programmatically, many places I found either didn’t have an api or required a min order of books that isn’t needed for a one off custom design. https://developers.lulu.com/home
My hope for this project is to get enough demand that I have an excuse to figure out a printing option myself and buy some new equipment :)
This is truely awesome and reminds me of the project that was making a litle one story book with the child as the main character. It was at least a couple of years ago I think.
Because I don't really want to penalize a company for bringing in foreign labor. If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person.
What I care about is the current system isn't being used to find hard to find labor, it's used to bring in cheap labor in an abusive situation.
We as a nation are really better off if we bring in the best in the world to work here with a cushy salary.
Multiple registrations are being filed for the same person in order to game the system. This is discussed in some details in a USCIS report [1]. The increased application fee is presumably to stem that practice.
"If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person."
You're believing and repeating the propaganda. The H1B was sold to Americans as for this purpose and then very deliberately turned into a loophole for importing massive amounts of foreign labor.
How silly is it to accept the idea that Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Tesla are not be able to hire Americans for any role they want. They're the richest companies on the planet!
These companies use the H1B to increase their labor supply, suppress wages, and gain indentured workers.
If they couldn't cheat by importing cheaper foreign labor they would have to compete against each other much more than they do for American workers.
This is all about big companies rigging the system. They do not care if it's good or bad for America, the foreign workers, or anyone else. It's simple greed.
this is also believing and repeating the propaganda, just a different propaganda.
and entirely different propaganda is that without being able to hire so many people constantly, the work just doesnt happen, and companies downsize to save money rather than grow to make more money.
a greedier facebook doesnt dump a ton of money into VR or ai glasses.
US has the highest salaries for software engineers in the world. If this is what suppressed salaries look like, then what do you think they should be paying? I think if the labour pool is further restricted by measures like this one, it can only lead to companies doubling down on opening R&D offices abroad.
They've almost all already doubled down and opened R&D offices abroad. They will do absolutely whatever helps them maximize profits. There are no ethics to it.
American companies shouldn't be able to bribe American politicians into letting them cheat the market at the expense of Americans.
If companies couldn't cheat by importing foreign workers they would have to hire and pay Americans more. They would also lobby for good things, like educating even more Americans to work for them.
The fee should help ensure that only higher paying jobs or truly hard to find roles would be worth paying for as well (not that this is the right option, but playing it out). You would gladly pay 100k if the role already is high paying, it will be a small fraction of the cost, you won’t do that if it’s a couple year salary. It will also help curb abuse through multiple applications. I agree hard to find jobs for highly talented people (who are paid well) should be brought in.
Well, again, I don't really care about prioritizing local hires. The 100k fee really only penalizes the company from hiring abroad.
I'd much rather push everything into the salary of the person being hired. Both because it ends up raising the median salary for local workers and because it stimulates the local economy where that person is brought in. It's also a yearly fee. I think there's value in getting a very capable person working in your company and having a high salary is one way to make such roles highly competitive. A highly capable person will ultimately make everyone they work with more capable.
If country has 10 qualified people but 15 positions to fill you cant find it by just hiring in the country. Then you just end up with a circle where the people move around.
Yes, I also can make up imaginary math. 6 is bigger than 3. But 9 is less than 12.
There are extraordinarily few roles handed out to H1Bs where there aren't enormous numbers of domestic options. Indeed, by far the biggest users of H1Bs in tech are shitty consulting firms like Cognizant, Infosys and Tata doing absolute garbage, low skill development.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are truly unique talents in the AI space, for instance. Not someone to build Yet Another agent, but someone who actually understands the math. They are extraordinarily rare in that program. And for those exceptional talents, a $100K fee would be completely worth it. But they aren't going to pay it for an army of garbage copy-paste consultant heads.
In actual reality it's just a way to push down wages by forcing Americans to compete with the developing world in their own country. In Canada we have "TFWs" filling the same role. It is a laughably unjustified, massively abusive program.
I think the difference for the UK is it’s HCOL but low pay, so people there can’t afford the mortgage down payment as much, which is not normal for say American HCOL cities.
Yes and they’re still much lower than buying an equivalent place. I’ve looked. Almost twice as much for a mortgage of a similar space for what I rent right now after putting 20% down. Only reason it makes sense to buy is if you really plan to keep the place for decades.
> Yes and they’re still much lower than buying an equivalent place.
Of course renting will be cheaper than buying an equivalent place. Most of the time in most places that's the case.
My point was this is true in the year of purchase and for a few years later. Over time (and you'll need to live somewhere your whole life) it will become cheaper. And then a lot cheaper. Rent will only ever go up.
My biggest regret as a first-time homebuyer was not hardballing every realtor in the city to see who would facilitate my transaction at the lowest cost.
You're not taking into account that housing prices can fall, not just stay flat and there are always things to fix and deal with in a house that you own.
Renting it out is also not always gauranteed or easy if you are not nearby or don't want to deal with being a landlord, so imho that flexibility is not really there in many cases.
I can say I'm very much on the other side now after owning (and unfortunately still owning) a townhome that I used to love living in but now can't seem to get rid of in Seattle while I rent across the country. I moved for work and really wish I had been renting since I do not want the hassle of being a landlord, but Seattle townhome sales have slowed to a crawl as the city never really recovered after covid.
If you get unlucky with no reason to still be in a particular city and that city starts a downward swing, there's no gaurantee it ever comes back and you're stuck taking care of something that you might never be able to sell for anything but a loss.
I will likely stay a renter and keep that flexibility in my new city for a long time after this experience.
That’s not touching any of the other areas like helping to drive Pixar. Woz did not have a second act, which is perfectly fine and I deeply respect him but he doesn’t have quite the same cultural impact.