Potato I have

I missed reading Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford this past June, but it showed up on digg a few days ago and I found it pretty good. Here’s a text transcript and a youtube video (14:33). Being a confirmed story addict, I like his “just three stories” format.

I’m setting off in a new, uncertain direction myself, and so I especially appreciate this:

you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

And I share his “death is your friend” sentiment as well — is that morbid?

I’d seen mention of the $100 laptop project but never thought much past the lowered economic barrier part; reading this Wired interview with Negroponte, it’s much more interesting than that.

From this BB post, I found this Clive Thompson entry; the pencil and the mathland analogies are important ones.

The open-source aspect is very interesting too: OSS is already a pretty low-barrier world, what happens when you remove the hardware part? Not only will OSS be used (assuming this takes off) by millions of kids, any of them with any technical inclination will be carrying around their own OSS “mathland” with them. Among other things, Negroponte suggests this will push OSS desktop mainstream.

(via boingboing)