Reads like AI slop, no genuine insight, bland, clearly someone who has very little insight into Apple or Tim Cook.
The job of a public-company CEO is to grow the company for the shareholders, they have a fiduciary duty to do this. Tim Cook took all the ingredients that Steve Jobs left him and maximised them, and I doubt there are many people in the world who given the same raw ingredients could have increased the market cap as much as Tim did...
Tim is and was not ever a product or marketing genius as Jobs was, so why compare him to Jobs? Very, very few people in history have ever been as good at product and marketing as Jobs... BUT, Cook is an operations genius, and he led Apple using his particular strengths and he has left Apple as an incredibly healthy company.
He was also insanely smart with some of his strategic moves, e.g. not overhiring during covid and leaving Apple in a superstrong post-covid position, also, not overspending on AI (like Meta), and realizing that all of the AI software providers would ultimately need to put their apps and software on iPhone. I.e. let Apple focus on what its best at (hardware), let others waste their money on AI, we will use the best when it becomes commoditized...
This is the kind of thought that only rich and successful people can have.
If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
Similarly, if you're fighting in a war so your family isn't raped or murdered then you don't have these kind of thoughts either.
Basically, you're lucky if you live in a situation that gives you the leisure and time to sit around and think about life being a farce. Probably he should be sitting around thinking, "boy, i'm so lucky I get to sit in this nice coffeeshop with no reason to work, no threat to my life, just chilling, so I can ponder on what a farce life is"
Edit: Because some people start criticising my comment, here's an addition:
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
In my opinion, life is for living, being with people, engaging in the world, taking action, connecting with people, and giving back. When you stop living, engaging with the world, and spend too much time alone, you start thinking this way.
I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
Miners had elevated suicide rates and alcoholism rates. And when you read stories of families from such environments, similar thoughts were present. Yes, they did had these kind of thoughts. It is not just perfectly possible to be poor hard worker with family and have depression or missing meaning of life, but entirely common.
Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?
Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
But were they really sitting around discussing absurdism, nihilism, life being a farce? This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
> Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?
Yes they were talking about it while drinking beer and cheap distillate. What makes you think they could not possibly talk about it?
> This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
Dude, we have history of nihilistic writings going on far far into the history. Including complains of rich people about poor having those attitudes.
> Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
Sure, depending on place and time, the health impact could be extremely serious. But blaming all alcoholism, depressions and suicides on that only would be absurd.
> How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
The name for this view of the universe is "absurdism". It was first espoused, as far as I can tell, when the discourse of Qohelet was recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes. So yes, they had it in the 1700's although perhaps not by that name.
> If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
This is almost the opposite of the truth. Those with careers that do not occupy their minds do not sit around with their brains idling and empty all day. They spend much of that time thinking about exactly this sort of thing.
I suspect it to be far less rare than you think. Literally every human at some point in their life asks "What is the purpose of my existence?". They are then faced with some variation on "to be or not to be." It is not the exclusive domain of the idle and the educated, they're just the ones who write about it. It's a universal condition, and effects those without leisure equally. If that weren't true religion would not have been the driving force behind much of civilizations rise. Even the overworked and overwrought look for answers. Perhaps ESPECIALLY the overworked and overwrought. So maybe they did not sit about in cafe's discussing it, they mined coal while thinking it quietly to themselves or shouted it in crowded bars after work when they'd had a bit too much to drink.
Hell, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell when I first read Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". Well before that though many a bean burrito were handed out the window while I considered the absurdity of life. Perhaps my thinking wasn't as nuanced as it would later come to be, but the concepts occurred to me quite naturally.
The fact that you're 1) Posting on Hackernews and 2) Read Camus as a teenager, already puts you in a group which is very atypical.
I would say, if you're reading Camus for fun and not a school assignment as a teenager, you're in the 0.01% of people or probably 0.001% of people in the world in terms of priviledge and education. And certainly, in the 1700s this group was much smaller as a percentage of the overall population as free-time was much more rare and books, education were much less common.
In 1750, the majority of France's population were peasants who lived in the fields, they weren't pondering the meaning of philosophical literature at weekends.
> There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
Well, I didn't expect I would have to spell it out.
But seriously think about it. Why doesn't your pet dog sit around thinking about what a farce life is?
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
Your last sentence claims that he should appreciate how lucky he is. But this is a different question from what, at face value, the statement that life is meaningless or absurd is about. The two choices (first being operative in this thread):
1. Life is meaningless: descriptive claim
2. You ought to appreciate life to the best of your ability: normative claim
It's shows true ignorance about what happiness is and where it's found. You can probably find more smiles and hope for the future in the Ukrainian trenches than reading comments from Silicon Valley workers making $150k a year.
I mean, do you guys even know Buddhism any more? It was such a hip thing in the 70s over there.
Did you read the article? He struggled for many years before achieving fame, and his main source of purpose was having young children. The HN headline doesn’t give the context that he feels outside of Mr Show and raising children, and after a near death experience, he feels less purpose than ever.
> I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
Probably a better question would be ask the Amish how happy they are? G-D was conceived to fill this gap in the human experience. The Amish harness it to set limits on desire.
From all the parochial nationalistic close minded savage bigoted homophobic toxic macho corrupt Putin boot licking behavior they regularly exhibit, and their spectacularly brutal self-destructive war criminal performance in Ukraine, you'd think they all lived on a community farm, raised as livestock and cannon fodder.
Living in modern cosmopolitan Moscow yet still acting and thinking that way is so much worse than actually being born on a community farm without choosing that lifestyle and mentality.
It's neither streaming NOR live, by my definitions.
It's generating single images, one by one, based on a prompt. So it's automating image generation via calls to Gemini. That's it.
It's not generating "websites", it's generating an image based on a prompt, then generating a new image based on the previous image, and the position of where you clicked it, and a prompt.
The author has massively exagerated the complexity of this, you can one-shot this with a single prompt in Claude or Codex.
It's not really a website streamed live at all... It's just asking a model to generate an image with some web searches plus its built-in (trained knowledge)
You can do this with any agentic coding model now... just ask OpenAI codex : generate me an image given this query: "the query" and you will get the same kind of outputs.
As someone that's written some apps using official WA for Business accounts, I would strongly advise against any 3rd party tools for automating WA.
Whatsapp has some really stringent requirements on any kind of automation. E.g. Not messaging anyone automatically unless they messaged you with 24 hours, in fact, this is explicitly blocked if you use Meta's API. You have to use message templates in this case.
Also, any bots need to be verified with Meta etc.
And the TOS has gotten more strict recently, not less strict. So buyer beware here, Meta is really protective over reverse engineering WA protocol or automating it, so you can easily get yourself blocked or banned here.
I'm somewhat amazed this got upvoted to the frontpage... I guess the title got upvoted because it's really terrible writing, either LLM generated or someome trying their hardest to sound "deep".
There are so many technical and stylistic issues with this, I would say it's either someone learning to write and trying too hard, or again, using an LLM.
1) Why is the whole thing written in the second person perspective? Is it disguised autobiography? It seems to be a cheap way of trying to claim intimacy with the reader, "here look, this was your experience". It ends up sounding like someone narrating your life at you while actually (secretly) talking about themselves.
2) While mostly written in the second person, there are several jarring switches back into first person. Unsure if this is a mistake or was intentional, either way, it just sounds bad.
3) The tenses are bouncing all over the place in this writing. We have present tense: "You take the train", past tense: "You took it", future tense for a kind of prophetic vibe: "A decade from now, you will not know", and finally a sort of timeless present proverbial tense: "The text is the same. The reader is not. This is what the contemplative traditions mean when they talk about the spiral — the return to the same point, but at a different elevation."
The effect of all the tense switching and weirdness just makes it hard for the reader to feel grounded in any of the scenes.
4) Rhetorical negation. The writer loves this pattern of describing things by what they are not. Examples:
"It was not silly. It was not even reverent. It was just a thing."
"Not with a call. Not with a vision. Not with a voice in the night."
"Not a metaphor for one. Not like a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage."
It can be a nice effect if you use it once... not repeatedly in a short piece, it makes you think the writer is constantly arguing with an imagined critic. "It's not this, it's this!"
5) Performative plainness, e.g. "You walked. You ate. You slept." "You stood for a minute. You looked at the statue." There's a lot of these kinds of fragments, and they feel strange because they're written in an active voice by describing a "character" who never makes any choices, i.e. entirely passive. It's like the author is trying to ape Hemingway's style in these moments but missing the characters and the story which go along with this spartan active voice.
Taken altogether, it feels like the author is trying to sound profound but with enormous effort and trying to use every trick in the writer's toolbox, which ends up sounding confusing, and creating distance between the author and the reader, and the "gap" is obvious, the engineering is visible. It's like the writer is saying "You were not trying to be moved." and the reader feeling that the author has tried desperately hard writing 3000 words to try and move you.
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