Sergey's challenge looks like is not in retiring early or with non-work.
We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the adrenaline rush of experiencing the blues Monday morning!?
Another colleague used to drive up to the parking lot of their previous employer, post lay-off., so that he could feel normal., and he did this for well over 6 - 8 months. Pack bags, wave to his wife and family, drive up in his Porsche to the parking lot and I guess feel normal !?
I took a four-year break from work (2009–2013) and moved to India. The reasons were simple: some family health issues required downtime (though probably not as much as I ended up taking), and I could afford to do this in India in a way I couldn’t in the US. This happened to coincide with the market bottom, but I wasn’t laid off—it was entirely voluntary.
I didn’t experience an identity crisis for a single day. I didn’t feel insecure or anxious about not working. The only real friction came from my family.
One big difference was social life. In India, I was constantly meeting people—connections were easy and organic. In the US, maintaining a daytime social life felt much harder. Everyone is on a treadmill—insurance, income, careers—often not by choice. I know there are ways to build community here, but in India it just happened naturally.
My extended family struggled more than I did. Once it became clear the break wasn’t temporary, there was a kind of quiet depression around it. I initially framed it as “taking a breather” by doing an executive MBA, but the break never really ended.
What eventually brought me back wasn’t overt pressure, but practical limits: my spouse’s mental health, and the constraints of India’s education system for our partially disabled, special-ed child. Those realities mattered more than any career concern.
> One big difference was social life. In India, I was constantly meeting people—connections were easy and organic. In the US, maintaining a daytime social life felt much harder. Everyone is on a treadmill—insurance, income, careers—often not by choice. I know there are ways to build community here, but in India it just happened naturally.
The primary reason for this is the built environment we live in here in the United States. It's very difficult to organically build connections when you have to drive a car somewhere to have basic social interactions. Even some of the items you mention, like insurance and income are very much informed by the requirement to have a car to participate in society.
I don't know if it is build environment or cultural thing. In US showing up at friends, or neighbors unannounced and spend hour or two would be very odd if not downright impolite. But in India it is something everyone would do or at least used to do a 15-20 yrs back when I was there.
One simple reason I think is overall US is very rich so people just can have anything they need on their own and sharing small things which lead to more interaction is simply not needed.
It's a little of both but the built environment is the primary issue.
We have neighbors - sometimes we need someone to grab a package, or we make too much food and we share, &c. or we run into each other walking to a restaurant or through the park. But this isn't the norm. We live in a neighborhood built before the introduction of cars, so homes are built a little bit closer together, but not too close, and we have mixed-use developments and a good level of density to support restaurants and other amenities.
You can't have spontaneous interactions like that easily in the United States because we build too much sprawl, visiting people or showing up to a bar requires a drive, and in the end you wind up just staying at home participating in surrogate activities like social media.
It really comes down solely to cars and car-only infrastructure that degrades our social interactions to an extreme extent.
-edit-
I do want to mention, at least when I was a kid/teenager I recall we used to show up to people's houses uninvited/unannounced too. But we did not talk to our neighbors. That was a weird thing. There are some cultural things here. But also even if we wanted to visit someone, well, gotta hop in the car. Maybe stop and get gas, and the next thing you know, eh it's too much effort. Might as way stay home. That's kind of how that works. The car-only model that is implemented in most of America, particularly the cities not so much rural areas, is a leading cause of cultural and social malaise I believe in the West.
I don’t think the built environment is that determinative. I live in a car-dependent suburb. Walk Score 2.
My neighbor knows the whole street. She knows the garbage men. It’s because she wants to. When I run into her outside, she chats. She walks her dog and chats with dog owners and anyone else she sees.
Easy relationships are available at the grocery store, post office, etc. I’ve been seeing some of the same people working at Costco for years. I don’t know them. It’s not the built environment. I’d need to take effort to build a relationship with them. My neighbor would. I’m simply not so inclined.
This is an incredibly important point - you could remove the car entirely, even make you dependent on others (as you're dependent - or were before self checkout - on the Costco clerk) - and you still would have the disconnect.
Hardship can force it more often, perhaps, but that is accidental and secondary.
In all the times I've traveled on forms of "mass transit" (airplanes, subways, trains) the only time I've ever really talked to someone was at the seat-together dining on a long-distance train. Otherwise you can sit next to someone for 20+ hours and never say much more than "excuse me" if you need to use the restroom.
(Another counter to this is kids, if you have kids and there are kids anywhere within screaming distance, they will find each other and immediately be best friends. Parents get dragged along - https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-2/cafe/ )
It's absolutely the built environment. Your Costco example is a clear example. you drive to Costco, you walk in, grab generic packaged goods without needing to really talk to anyone, and then go to the checkout and use the automated kiosk to make your purchase.
There's no reason to have a human interaction, so why would you bother getting to know the cashier? You're never going to build a relationship with the cashier precisely because of the environmental structure.
Contrast that with walking down the street to a local store that one of your neighbors owns. I bet you would already have a relationship unless you chose not to. Why? Because you'd also see them at your kids birthday party, or you'd see them at the bark down the street, or out on a walk.
I made the choice at Costco to not build a relationship with anyone. There's a guy standing at the entrance checking memberships. I've seen him for years. I don't know him. I don't use the automated kiosk if I have several items. I see some of the cashiers for years. I'm cordial but I don't chat them up. One woman who has been there for years chats with me a bit; I'm cordial but don't reciprocate a ton.
There's a corporate supermarket owned by a Dutch multinational not far from me. I see some of the same employees there every week. One of them loves people and recognizes me. I could stand around and chat with him if I wanted. But I don't want to.
I made this choice. Someone who wants to build relationships chats with people. Folks like that chat with people at the grocery store, on the airplane, waiting in line, etc. Often it leads to nothing, occasionally it leads to something. But the point is, they practice it. I don't. The built environment is not stopping it. Not being in a "local store that one of your neighbors owns" has nothing to do with it either. Plenty of relationships are built in corporate chains.
> One simple reason I think is overall US is very rich so people just can have anything they need on their own and sharing small things which lead to more interaction is simply not needed.
That's a very interesting observation!
I have a theory that reducing "friction" is actually a net negative after a certain point, and US society is way past that point. But everybody keeps doing it, because they're myopically focused on little problems and don't see the big picture or down have a full understanding of all the alternatives.
People need external constraints, because those are the things that keep certain internal drives under control.
It's like when food was scarce it made sense to gorge yourself on calorie rich things and avoid physical effort unless absolutely necessary. Now that food is abundant and it's actually possible to nearly completely eliminate physical activity, we have an obesity epidemic, because those drives no longer hit external limits and are now out of control.
If you can afford it, why get back? Now after a dozen years I am bored of my 9-5 but running the race to make my FIRE numbers plus provide some cushion for my son with disabilities but if I had a choice I would quit again ( but I am much older now )
I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity.
I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google.
But that "work as identity" may still be a problem. For a lot of us, what we do is who we are, and so not having any work to do is like not having an identity.
You're describing my father. Now that he's retired his lack of hobbies is really catching up to him. His only hobby has been working and I've noted this about him since I was an adolescent and decided then as something I would not emulate.
A few times I've quit a FAANG job with no plan for after other than to wander, and both times the lack of professional competition meant not just coasting horizontally but that I was actually lowering myself somehow. Hard to explain, and I don't fully understand it.
I also noticed most people, especially women, determine your value by your 'right now'. While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.
> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" [..]
Risking a stereotype.
In my experience from traveling the world it's a tell-tale sign for being from a culture heavily influenced by the Protestant work ethic. Introduce yourself like that in Spain, Italy, or Brazil and you'll get strange looks.
On the flip side, I've found that people who do not define themselves through their work primarily often do so through family. My younger self is certainly guilty of giving someone a strange look when within the first five minutes of meeting them, they told me whose cousin they were.
In a business/formal context it would be normal to introduce yourself like this in the countries you've mentioned.
Do people introduce themselves like that in informal contexts in the USA? If so that's indeed a bit weird, and more a topic you would start talking about for small talk or if someone asked about it.
I would find it strange if someone introduced themselves to me with their business title. I sometimes ask "what do you do for a living?" as small talk, but that's solicited.
Even when it's solicited, I think it's weird. I don't tell people what I do for a living when I introduce myself. And when they ask, I tell them I'm an exotic dancer. It's a silly joke (since I'm a fat 50 year old) that tends to break the ice and lighten up the conversation. In general, I think small-talking about what you do for a living is not really interesting to people, and just allows them to silently put you somewhere on their mental totem pole of importance. Better to talk about actual interests.
Not very common as the intro, but pretty common around here (bay area) to get asked that pretty soon after the intro. I don't like it, and I wished people didn't focus so much on it though.
I've also lived on a small island where on first meeting, two locals will work out how they're related. I guess similar to the cousin thing.
In the city I currently live in, it's fairly normal for locals to ask where another local went to school within 5 mins of meeting them, because that establishes an identity here.
First time I was in San Francisco and someone introduced themselves like that, going even beyond, was indeed a super weird experience being a brazilian.
Correct. If you said your title in Spain, you'll get a strange look and someone might respond with "why would you tell me that?". No one there cares what you do for work.
For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem. That is I guess the point the person you were replying to was trying to make.
It's also not really weird for a job to become such a big part of your identity, when people spend most of their time at work or at home thinking about their work.
A couple years ago a friend of mine mentioned that he had known another mutual friend of ours for many years, much longer than I would have guessed. I asked him "what does he do?" and he thought for a moment before saying "you know ... I have no idea, it has never come up".
I don't know if this is acceptable in the US, but I always found it distasteful when people ask about your job 30 seconds into meeting you. I think it's much more polite to talk about generic stuff until jobs or skills come up naturally. Sometimes, they just never do, and that's fine. Need to know!
>For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem.
That's only 1/2 of the dynamic. People also like to assign an identity to others.
For example, if I say, "I'm semi-retired." ... the follow-up question is always "Oh, so what did you do before that?" ... which is polite coded-speak for, "Did you inherit money or what work did you do for money that put you in the position to do that?"
People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc. Having a "no identity" stance isn't really a satisfactory answer for many listeners. They want to know more.
EDIT to replies: I do understand the harmless "small talk" aspect. I should've added more to re-emphasize the "people assigning identity" aspect.
Once I reply to the followup question with "Oh, I used to do consulting for finance" what then happens is others then introduce me as "And this is jasode -- he was a consultant for X". My ex-consultant life that I last did over 15 years ago is now part of a tagline/subheading associated with my name even though I never intended it.
The point is other people have this irresistible urge to "fill in the blank" with an identity -- especially an identity that is tied to how one earned money. I'm not complaining about this and it's just an observation of what humans naturally do.
It's also a low risk topic that can generate lots of follow up questions. It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life? Sure, you're not your job or your career, but it's also a very normal part about getting to know someone and I'm not sure equating it to some way of gauging success levels is necessarily to right way to think about it.
>It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life?
Having a natural ebb & flow to conversation is all true but that's not the issue. Let me restate it differently.
It's ok and natural to ask what people do/did for work. It's also natural to respond and share what was a significant aspect of their life.
The meta-observation is: others then like to compress whatever life narrative they hear into a "shorthand" or "identity" -- even if the recipient never intended it to be his/her identity. Several parent comments mention "their work being their identity is the problem". My point is that the identity we get tagged with is often outside of our control and we didn't create the problem of work being our identity.
My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant". For that identity to change, I'd have to do something new that was significant enough to override that ... such as... get into another career, open a restaurant, become founder of a startup, etc.
How does one have "no identity related to their job"? Sometimes you can't unless one wants to be evasive about what one does to earn money.
> My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant" … How does one have "no identity related to their job"?
The obvious answer is to have some other identifier that supersedes the job. Do you have some other interest or hobby that you spend your time doing? That you talk about all the time?
People get associated with their job because it’s probably the thing they spend the most time on and it’s also a common topic of conversation. If every time someone asked you about your job you said, “it’s good” and steered the conversation into a story about your latest epic ski trip, you’d probably be the “guy who skis” instead of the “ex-consultant”.
Situations like this work as a filter of sorts (If you’re so obsessed with measuring relative status/prestige that you want to reduce me to a job title, we’re probably not going to be friends?).
The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.
But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.
You can often politely dodge probing questions about your employment. When someone, for the purpose of small talk, asks me what I do for a living I just say I'm an exotic dancer or a runway model. It's funny and breaks the ice a little. Then I'll ask them about their watch or something. If they insist "no, really, what do you do for a living??" I'll politely say I work with computers and again try to move on. Very rarely I'll get someone who won't drop it "come on, WHAT COMPANY???" and at that point I know they're really not interested in talking--they just want to stack rank me in terms of importance or salary or whatever and I politely dip.
In modern life, yes. I wonder if it was such a low risk topic as we moved towards the past? For example the fear of the stranger is something that is very common in past writing across a number of cultures. If you met a stranger and they said they were a soldier it would have different ramifications than if they said they were a baker. Also in smaller social groups that required the work of everyone to survive it was a way of measuring the resources available in said group.
It is not just about assigning identity to others.
I am probing for topics of mutual interest, or topics that make other people passionate, to learn more about them generally.
In some people, this is completely orthogonal to their careers, but most of the time, there is an overlap. Like, I haven't yet met a railway engineer who wasn't a raging railway nerd at the same time.
> People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc.
I definitely find this more true in some cultures. e.g. silicon valley, it seems people want to know where you're at on the "hierarchy". Many parts of Asia too, you get treated differently if you're a low level worker, regular worker, executive etc.
Well, the "I'm Marcus" part is saying "I would like you to call me Marcus" I guess.
You're right, it is easy to say. But there's an identity and professional pride and all sorts of stuff wrapped up in the job title that isn't so easy to let go of.
It also leads on to questions like "and what are you doing now?" which get to "I'm lazing around doing nothing because my mental health took a hammering while I was IT Director", and so on. It's all so much easier and tidier with the job title.
Sounds really sad. I am not a director of anything, I probably make almost nothing compared to you, and yet I know who I am outside of my job. I have friends who value who I am, regardless of my job or even between jobs. I would not trade places with you for all the money in the world. I would not have any use for all that money then.
I really don't like getting asked what I do for a living. I exchange labour for money somewhere out of necessity, what's at all interesting about that? What I do in my free time is who I am, and that's much more interesting to talk about, to me.
I don’t like getting asked what I do for hobbies. The real answer I want to give is “none of your business”, but I’m polite enough to never say that, so it gets awkward.
Getting asked what I do for a living is totally fine. It’s on my website, the whole world can find out if they bother to search. I’ll save you a search.
The point is people are different. Not everyone wants to share their private interests with you, especially if you just met. What you consider interesting conversation, well, for some of us it’s just intrusive. I also don’t care what you like to do 99% of the time. I’ve been socially forced to sit through way too many of these “interesting conversations”.
Could we be thinking about different social situations? I’m not turning to people on the bus and asking what their hobbies are. And it’s not my first question of people visiting my office happy hour.
If you’re at my home for dinner, I hope anyone that still feels this way does answer “the details of my private life are none of your business” when I’m trying to get to know them as a friend, so I know never to waste another good meal on them.
I sometimes joke and say that I type for a living, not entirely untrue. But I've found that sometimes people are offended if I answer their question evasively
Same! I love the pregnant pause after "What do you do..." as they start to mentally draw up their usual work spiel before adding the "...for fun" to flip the conversation around and actually get their brain thinking and exploring beyond the standard conversation flows.
If you ever get to talk to people who are more than laborers trading time for dollars, it is great fun. When dollars are just one of the many rewards from their career (where a person spends like 80% of their life energy), you get to hear a lot of passion, learning and growth. It really is a whole different way to live.
After a decade, "founder of X that I no longer work at" is considered a lame answer. People want to know what you are doing now, not your highest claim to status of your entire life.
When I lived in the bay area for a few years, everybody would tell you where they worked, and if you didn't tell them, they'd ask. Since moving to Portland, I've definitely noticed that people are much more interested in what you do during your leisure time.
I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often. In CA people ask that so they can mentally rank you as worth their time or not. Elsewhere, people ask you how your weekend went, or how your family is. One of the awesome parts of moving to Austin was not hearing that as the first question as much.
> I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often.
I moved to California a few years ago from the Least Coast (insert shaka, surfer, wave emojis here) and had multiple other out-of-towners in the same situation as me say the exact opposite at a party. They all were adamant that they had yet to hear "what do you do [for a living]?" since they'd moved as they did ad nauseum when they lived on the other side of the country.
I've not noticed either way. My pet theory is that people hear this frequently if their social and professional lives bleed into each other which they do if one lives in a town dominated by a specific industry or profession. Those moving westward during COVID and remote work suddenly had to contend with this much less.
Never hear that question either. I don’t ask it either. I’ve actually been pretty successful but asking that question seems to rank someone on a scale that does not reflect their amazing contributions to society.
I ask because a) I'm interested in the same way that a child is in what people's jobs are and b) it gives me a frame of reference for interacting with them conversationally vis a vis common ground.
Wealth signaling still seems to me to be done primarily by conspicuous consumption and expensive hobbies.
> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>"
Tech bros would mock Finance bros who would open a conversation with anyone who would listen with "Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Goldman Sachs" and yet here we are now ...
Hoo boy, this is definitely a weird one to navigate, especially if you have a weird set of roles. It takes time to settle various threads and figure out how to address this.
Seriously. There are so many opportunities to give back to society. One does not need formal employment to be fulfilled.
I will say in Sergey Brin’s case, he had the unique opportunity to go back to work with the best and brightest without any friction, and nobody could tell him “hey maybe your credentials don’t quite stack up high enough for this department yeah?”
But for the rest of us, there’s FOSS, there’s computer repair, home automation, day trading a small fraction of your wealth, volunteer work at hospitals and libraries, gig work apps like taskrabbit…
If you are bored after being away from work for even a month, I’m not sure I could be friends with you.
I left Google to build an open source project a long time ago. A big part of the appeal was being able to have something to work on that's truly mine. Sergey already has something that's his and it's called Google. So I think he belongs there.
I think it's difficult for a normal brain to live with the low impact of another project while you created Google. Also, the speed of a personal developer is nothing compared with the speed of a software engineering area or company. You can easily feel like a turtle even working on an interesting project.
Depends on the shareholder. At Sergey Brin's level, that shareholder value shapes the future of humanity, a legacy affecting many more people and will last far longer than spending time with single, or even double digit number of children.
I can't really tell what you're trying to say, do you really think the shareholder value of Google is positively aligned with the future of humanity?
As in: If Google builds a really good AI and makes a lot of money from that, this will be a net positive for the world?
A mentally healthy person wants to be helpful. They want to be seen as helpful and they expect others around them to be helpful as well. This is the foundation of "pro-social" behavior: I benefit the group as much or more than the group benefits me.
Tying your identity to the place where you're helpful and where that help is appreciated and acknowledged isn't mental illness.
But this person was laid off. His help was (apparently) not appreciated, and he's not helping anyone by sitting alone in his car on the parking lot.
Do you think it is healthy behavior to go to a parking lot at 0900 every day and do nothing because you mentally cannot face the idea of not going to an office?
Coping mechanisms are complex and diverse. The individual in question lost a major source of meaning-making in their life and was struggling to cope with that loss. I don't believe this is any less healthy than other common responses, which range from societal withdrawal to substance abuse.
That's just your take. We don't know where he sat in the team, so we can assume the idea that he wasn't appreciated by his teammates as incorrect. He didn't make the cut based on unknown metrics from upper management, but they have their own reasons for doing things.
Getting in to the parking lot of the old office sounds way healthier than not making it out of bed at all.
What a weird dichotomy. It's not between "sitting in your old employers' parking lot" and "lying in bed all day", it's between "sitting in your old employers' parking lot" and "learning new skills", "finding a new job", "discovering new hobbies", "spending more time with your loved ones" or almost anything else.
Instead he chose to sit alone in a parking lot so he could feel "normal". Feeling compelled to do a specific action (excluding things like breathing) just to feel normal has a name, and that name is "addiction". It is not usually considered a good thing.
They could go anywhere though - why not go to a coffee shop at 9 with a laptop or on a morning hike? I agree sitting in bed depressed would be bad but it seems like avoiding the issue to specifically sit in the parking lot of an old employer.
At minimum I think it would be healthier to tie part of your identify to an aspect of your career you enjoy rather than a specific employer itself.
You've cherry-picked a situation where there is an obvious social norm being broken. A better example would be going to the park and sitting on the bench you used to sit on with your ex. I agree with GP that this is healthier than lying despondent in bed.
I hear what you're saying, but routines, especially long-lived, are difficult to break/change. It's normal to have phantom limbs when they are cut off.
I recently rewatched a Tested Q&A where Adam Savage discussed his post-Mythbusters life; his framing of that duality was very similar: https://youtu.be/2tZ0EGJIgD8?t=322.
It aligns with a common design principle: constraints often make a problem space easier to navigate. I suspect life is similar. Having limited time creates a "specialness" that is easily lost when you suddenly have an infinite amount of time at your disposal.
It's not THAT bad for me, but I really can't take vacation days for "nothing". I struggle if I don't have plans and work really forces one to have some structure. If you need the structure and don't have any plans post lay-off, I can believe the struggle to "let go" and do something better.
I am guessing if you have been doing this daily for a couple decades then the neurodivergence is not going through this. I assume any normal person will find it hard to not do any kind of work and if you spent 20 years of your life doing tech, how useful are in the "real" world. Unless you have been doing handy work on the sides, spoiler alert: not much.
Wasn't sergey forced out for hitting on employees? It seems pretty reasonable for him to be unhappy with a forced retirement and ultimately unwind it now that meeto is pretty much over.
When you define yourself solely by work, you lose your entire identity when you retire. Most people don't have hobbies, so work is literally the one thing they have in their lives.
This is why people should have an opportunity to semi-retire when they are still young. A year or two. United States safety net does not really allow that unless you are loaded already.
It's very helpful to zoom out and do LIFE for a change. I got laid off three years ago, started my own project. Didn't take off, but also two mini-mes showed up during that time, and I am infinitely grateful that I could punt on work and just be there.
Hashtag blessed and all. That backrent I owe now, well, that's a bitch.
It's really interesting that my comment here where I said that employment can inflict brain damage got flagged even though previous comment described behavior that would be obviously significant clinical symptom if it was caused by anything else as it is irrational and detrimental.
It's been great to see. Google's AI efforts have truly seen a resurgence in quality with his return. What I enjoy about this article is the fact that it presents a view that now seems relatively rare: the idea that you may have a purpose beyond pleasure and that pursuing that purpose is a more fulfilling pleasure than any comfort you could give yourself.
I think that kind of thing strikes many people. Sometimes like with Socrates and his daimonion which restrained him from risk and other times like with one of my favourite lines in all literature where Ahab of Moby Dick remarks:
> What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me?
I find so much of this relatable in my own way, billions absent. It's good to see there are others who feel this way. Community from afar.
I don't buy this narrative (notwithstanding that great commencement speeches are almost always hyperbole). The way I see it Sergey HAD to come back or risk the poorly managed mess that is google completely drop the AI leadership . It proves again that all thats good in Google happened exclusively because of the two founders and that their CEO is not an effective leader at all.
I've been curious how much the Facebook IPO affected the industry also
We know they lied about video metrics; everyone has to pivot to video to stay competitive (with fradulent metrics)
Given the suspicion of fake accounts and further ad fraud how much have companies felt they have to follow trends rather than come up with sort of, their own organic business models
I'd have guessed that Google's rapid advance with Gemini was more due to the merger of Google Brain with DeepMind under Demis Hassabis than the return of Sergey Brin.
I remember seeing an interview (Dwarkesh?) with Sholto Douglas who had been working at Google at the time (now at Anthropic) who said he would work late there and the only other person was Sergey Brin, apparently wanting to be part of (or following) the development/training process.
My doctor had a renowned research record, retired at 68 but got bored, and went back to work. Whilst I was in hospital, I got to observe him throughout the work day.
I don't mean this in a creepy way at all, but I got the impression the greatest source of joy was hanging around with younger people. A hungry grad, a cleaner, a nurse, male, female, whatever.
I'm sure he enjoyed his peers as well, but I could detect a shade of boredom of those interactions, which inevitably had stress and responsibility attached.
I think what I'm trying to say is that work isn't just about challenge, it's about socialization and having fun. And one of the greatest benefits of being financially independent is being able to navigate to those kinds of moments without the pressure of being on the make.
Sergey is brilliant but it's really the lightsaber that is super voting shares that make him uniquely empowered to slash through Google's immense bureaucracy.
I think being the founder of Google gives him more political capital at Google than anything on paper. As a controlling member of the board there's a variety of things he can do with that hammer, but just simply being who he is, not even just on the org chart, has got to be worth way more.
this seems an idealistic view, my cynical view is that if King Lear gives up all his legal paper power he will find out nobody cares who the hell he is and take advantage of him without remorse.
In my experience (at a much smaller scale than these guys, of course) the legal papers power is more of a formality. It’s the soft power tied up in knowledge, relationships, trust and goodwill that really count.
Brin wasn’t bothered to wield any of that power to try to arrest the decline in Google’s search quality. He wasn’t bothered to direct the Chrome team to support MathML, or to bring back Google Reader, or do anything about a hundred small insults like, say, the deletion of YouTube comments with URLs to keep the rubes inside the casino. But he was able and willing to come back and wield his clout because he was bored and wanted to play with AI. As someone who’s old enough to remember how much leeway Google used to get from governments and the public at large on the basis that Page and Brin were nice young men who could be relied on to be responsible stewards it’s a little galling. Don’t give Mr. Brin any belly-rubs until he tells us when Reader is coming back.
Right, though it's also reasonably clear that part of the story there is that he finds a high-stakes AI race personally interesting and exciting on a technical and a business level. Conversely it's also fairly clear that he finds doing anything about the steady encrudification of Google to be a big snooze. (Even though it may also be a long-term, though less dramatic, problem for the company's future health, exactly the sort of long-term issue which Google's dual-stock structure was supposed to empower Page and Brin to care about and act on.) But in any case, whatever his mix of motivations are, he's able to act within Google on things he cares about. He is also perfectly able to act on a number of the issues at Google which have significantly bad effects on its users and on the population of Earth at large. (Not all of them, to be sure: there are clearly some problems which would be very hard to fix, alongside a number of no-brainers.) He evidently just isn't willing, because he doesn't care about them.
Enshittification of existing money making activities of Google independently of AI is also an existential threat. Parts of the threat are codependent on AI, but there is little reason to open the door wider as they have.
I loved google reader, many people were blogging and social network was "ick" as people immediately associated the term with okcupid/friendster(myspace?) and reader was decentralised and encouraged all walks of life to participate... maybe I just missed the vibes back then, gosh I was so hopeful
The videos too. Geopolitical commentators cannot show e.g. an explosion in Ukraine caused by a drone, and they say "T" instead of "terrorist", and "kaboomed" instead of "killed", etc. Doing so may see the vid demonetized or even taken down.
OTOH deep fake gepolitical commentators are all over the place, and it is allowed (sometimes Youtube shows a label, sometimes the channel itself describes itself as a "fan channel" of the commentator, and not the real deal. Sometimes e.g. for Shorts you can see in the info whether things are AI generated).
I do think about this in the context of other tech companies, the "bidirectionality of enforcement", or whatever you want to call it
Let's say you have Facebook, which is notorious for banning people yet never seems to ban the things people report that should be banned. That's a real life example, but take any hypothetical company
If someone posts x bad thing and doesn't get banned, do we immediately take our torches and storm the premeses to protest? Maybe, maybe not; "look, scale is hard" (and sometimes calls to remove things outright get politicized, as seen in the last few years, so sometimes it's a tricky line)
That would be... not fine, but more fine than it is now. The lack of fairness in the bidirectionality ensures that you, Joe Schmoe, get a month ban for calling someone a jerk while the most egregious hate or racism or... anything... gets a quick check followed by This Does Not Violate Our Community Guidelines
(And of course because these services are monopolies, well, too bad, you just have to suffer. Hope you don't need the information from that Facebook page, because Facebook will tend to make it borderline impossible to view something public without an account)
I think companies like Google dont even try like they are "Too Big to be Regulated".
Facebook is much worse because everyghing on there is user gemerated. Any small company would be just crushed by governments if they would have similar issues.
I think they are similar to FedEx. FedEx knows that millions of packages per day are transporting illegal goods, any bad enough accident shows it. However, FedEx would absolutely go bankrupt if they tried to open every package and make sure the contents were good. At the end of the day, that's the government's job.
If the DEA and ATF wants to staff every shipping hub with people checking every package, that's fine by them (though admittedly it would hurt revenues).
For Google and Facebook and all the other user-content sites, it's just impossible to actually, fully uphold the law themselves, so their best bet is just to try to make it a pleasant experience for the users and leave upholding the law to the upholders of the law.
If I became financially independent tomorrow I'd go straight to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle to help build that. I don't think we've evolved to be healthy and idle. In retirement you can choose what to do, and volunteering on some nerdy construction project sounds amazing.
This is kinda right, kinda wrong. I was a workaholic - I was a VP of engineering at Google. I'm doing fine retired.
You don't have to find purpose when you retire
At all.
Instead, you just have to be willing to face each day when the day has no expectations. You can do anything you want, and decide you love it, hate it, whatever. You can do it again the next day, or not. you can hate it one day and love it the next. It's completely up to you.
For some people, this lack of structure is crushing. For others, it's liberating.
It's similar to having spent significant time alone as an adult - some people can't deal with it, some can.
I meet a lot of people who are like "I haven't figured out what i will do when i retire". These are the people i worry about, because there isn't anything to figure out. They want a structure that probably won't exist. They will likely tire of trying to force their own structure on it, and seek structure elsewhere (IE work).
In the past 3 weeks i've done the following:
Building powered paper airplanes with the kids
Mentoring high school and college students
Advising startups.
Woodworking
Hacking on CNC machines
Hacking on minecraft mods.
Hacking on compilers.
Playing video games.
and a lot more.
The next 3 weeks may be the same or different, depending on lots of things (mood, energy, schedules).
There are also days i do nothing cool or useful at all, and feel great (and unapologetic - nobody gets to judge my retirement but me, my spouse, and my kids :P) about it
The world is really big, and has lots to do. You just have to be able to drive yourself because you aren't being forced into doing anything at all.
In the end - for some i also feel it's similar to divorce - lots of people don't get divorced because they don't want to deal with being alone.
Retirement similarly forces you to spend a lot of time with yourself (even if you have an SO and even if they are retired). Lots of people don't like that, at all, for various reasons. Work lets them ignore it.
Just wanted to say, one of the exciting things I realized when I joined Google was that the maintainer of GDB was my org's director at that time. Not sure how much it matters, but it gave me confidence in the leadership to know that someone who knows the details is running the show at the top. It made me trust the leadership chain much more than I normally would otherwise.
I wonder if this was the LOL[1] days - looking back on it, it's hard to believe how much people outside the org cared about the name, and us trying to not take ourselves too seriously.
[1] For everyone else, at one point we named the org Languages, Optimizations, and Libraries. People either loved or hated it.
This! People need to get a life. I wouldn't have any trouble keeping myself busy after retirement. I do not have nearly enough time for the things I really WANT to do beside work.
I am saving up to retire early. If I mention this to friends, most look at me with big eyes and ask “But what will you spend your day on then!?” in a sceptical tone.
I imagine they think I want to drink beers and play golf all day every day, or something like that.
I’m a bit heart broken, that so many of my friends cannot imagine being masters of their own time, without thinking it would be bad for them and/or unproductive.
Yes, I have experienced exactly the same with friends and find it bizarre - essentially having total freedom seems to scare some people.
Is it because we have been told what to do our whole life and so the thought of having to determine our own destiny each day is too much for some?
Well, my friends immediately assume I want some luxurious self-indulgent perpetual vacation/holiday-thing.
They seem relieved when I explain it’s more of the perpetual weekend I’m aiming for: sleeping till I wake, reading, cooking, hanging with friends and family, coding on my FOSS projects etc.
I think it's also a uniquely American thing. We are so defined by our work and our careers here. It's kind of sad, in my opinion, but that's the reality.
I think that's the one silver lining of the pandemic's lockdowns; some people were at home again for extended periods of time, finding themselves with a lot more free time and in a place that wasn't just for eating and sleeping.
I also have think that's a substantial reason behind the RTO push: some people found their lives empty without the office social environment, even after two years, and enough of them had the power to change it.
Yea I've noticed this is the singular difference between those that enjoy early retirement and are successful doing it and those that aren't. Many ambitious people end up wrapping their entire identity up with work and feel completely lost with that gone. It's why so many successful founders throw themselves into new startups right after an exit, despite having way more than enough to retire. Personally, I've taken some time off since selling my startup and I've been so busy learning new things and building new hobbies that I can't imagine going back! Maybe I will one day, but it will likely involve something I've learned from during this time
Why? Why can work noy be your retirement plan as well? I have benefitted a lot from professors who have kept teaching (voluntarily) till physically possible.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is one big reason.
As a developer if, let's say, AI does make my profession no longer a viable option monetarily, what would happen if my entire identity is tied to it?
You cannot fully control your career no matter what. Many external factors can affect it and you deeply if that's your identity.
What if you can't even teach after retiring because nobody else cares about it?
For me it's about risk/reward and unfortunately in our current system the fact that all my efforts reward someone else disproportionately more completely taints it.
From observing my parents and other elders, it isn't "work" in the job sense that we all need. It is feeling needed by others. This can be accomplished by being an active grandparent, charity(active volunteering not just allocating money), open-source contribution, mentoring.
It can be something other than a job. It just can't be done alone.
We are social creatures and need to be needed by each other. Luckily there are plenty of people in need.
My grandmother said it like this, "sometimes people need to help more than people need help" in the context of a much younger me asking effectively why she bothered (I forget the context). That has stuck with me for years.
This is a common misconception. I’m quite happy not being social and have absolutely no need to be needed.
I FIREd 3 years ago and don’t miss working one bit.
I think leaving work becomes more difficult for those who do need to feel valued and especially if they don’t have interests outside of it. There are many people like that.
Totally, it's "work" in the sense that you're doing something to contribute to the world, even if it's something small or mostly unimpactful. Those kinds of things provide internal fulfillment, in my experience.
My perspective on these things have changed when I saw a successful old friend of mine thank his friend for asking his help. I feel like being asked to help by a friend might actually be a privilege sometimes.
I think it definitely is - simply because it means you are approachable enough (and knowledgable enough) that people feel both comfortable enough to ask and see you as a reliable resource.
>> We are social creatures and need to be needed by each other.
I think this was illustrated well in the movie I Am Legend with Will Smith. He creates artificial situations where he is interacting with mannequins in order to fulfill this very basic need.
Its interesting that this part of the movie was missed by a lot of friends and family until I pointed it out to them.
Exactly, the prevalence of the word "work" in this conversation is such a telling indicator of what 'western' culture-at-large has been taught to focus on
> Adherents of the popular financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement scrimp and sacrifice to retire early. Only for many of them to discover their dream of post-work life does not match reality.
I think the more important goal in FIRE is the 'FI' part - financial independence. Something that allows you to retire early - not necessary that you have to use this privilage. Something that allows you to next day take a day off or week off or 1 year sabbatical to recharge without asking anyone for permission or worrying if you will be able to pay the bills.
I think even in 4-hour-workweek Tim Ferriss called it taking mini-retirements throughout your life rather than at the end of you life.
Financial Independence, You're Not The Boss Of Me.
Once you're financially independent, at a level that you're comfortable with, you don't have to put up with crappy bosses.
If you're Sergey Brin, you kind of don't really have a boss, do you?
If you "retire" into working at a hardware store, or volunteering at the Humane Society, or just shifting into a lower-stress job...
Well, that's the dream, isn't it?
I was so happy when I realized that, unless there were dramatic shifts in the markets, I would always be able to find "decent" work for great wages. And maybe I could be patient and find "good" work for "pretty great" wages.
Once I had that level of comfort, I was way, way more brave at work. I thought, "Well, they could fire me for their own reasons, any day. So, I might as well do The Right Thing™. If they fire me for doing The Right Thing™, well, I didn't really want to work there anyway, did I?"
And then there were dramatic shifts in the markets, lol. But fortunately for me, I had built up a nest egg, and now I've shifted into a lower-stress job.
I honestly don't know what advice I'd give to younger folks. Move to Norway?
But I think "Fuck you money" implies, "I honestly don't have to worry about money, ever again."
Now, we all have different definitions for that, but the kind of thing I was talking about is definitely not "Fuck you money," to me.
I think if I had "Fuck you money," my best friends and close family would all have their medical debts paid off. I think my parents and in-laws would have their mortgages paid off.
It’s more than just money, it’s how you set up your life to be resilient to contingencies. For example finding a compatible life partner. For example finding happiness without lifestyle inflation and breaking free from the hedonic treadmill. Or perhaps having a good lifestyle business for some people. Or having extended family support nearby. I call these things unfuckwithability. Money is a big part of it, but may not be the biggest missing piece for many people.
I might have missed it, but I don't see this quote in the article. Either way, it feels disingenuous when a place like business insider posts these criticisms of FIRE like it is the ultimate gotcha.
Finding a purpose outside of work seems like the main issue most people struggle with when doing FIRE. Once you get going, the saving is automatic and addictive to some, but figuring out what to do with your life to give it meaning outside of a traditional work context is not just an issue with FIRE.
After FIRE I started building my own small to medium projects. Emulators, tools, games, some available to the public. I tell people I'm a full time software developer who does remote consulting gigs (the last not true but justifies my FIRE income)
If you want something to lust after, I recommend you find a project you care about getting involved in right now, literally today. The things that make us happy are doing something we care about every day, not seeking long-term goals.
47. I didn't wait for FIRE to plan the projects, I had a notebook of ideas I collected over the years and had studied the necessary skills to put them in action throughout my work life.
Additionally, I could see myself going back to work at a company if I saw a truly exciting project. But that excludes around 98% of the jobs I see out there.
No, the next generation of privacy management experiences that will impact billions of users configuring their privacy settings isn't interesting.
Nothing will make a boring corpo job not-boring, but one thing that can help mix it up is to change which boring corpo job you're doing once or twice a decade. Five years is a decent stint at one job. Worth taking a look around and seeing if an opportunity catches your eye.
I'm not doing FIRE, I have children and just live below my means. I'm hoping to retire around 55 assuming the AI bubble doesn't nuke everyones portfolio.
The typical FIRE requires compounding growth. You start with portfolio worth 25 years of expenses but if expenses keep on growing due to inflation and portfolio shrinks because of expenses and zero growth, it can get hairy quite fast.
There are various ways to look at numbers but my thumb rule is 4% inflation 9% growth keeps you perennially happy with some choppy years of course. 4% inflation 9% growth implies you can withdraw 4-5% every year and still have equivalent portfolio in inflated money.
Typical FIRE also requires access to affordable healthcare. In the US that is going away with ACA subsidies.
Five years ago I paid for “market rate“ insurance through my business for my family because we did not qualify for ACA subsidies. The cost was about $40,000 per year.
I mean they are no different that the trash stories you'd read about robber barons in the 1800s (poor orphan got offered a job, smart worker talked to railroad tycoon, etc).
The article hits on something that I believe everyone is at least aware of. Id argue the next generation is best suited for not having this issue that the current generation does have as they at least seem to think about everything and are very careful about tying their identity to work which prior generations seem to do without much thought (for better or worse).
I'm in my 50s. About two months into retirement I fell into the deepest depression of my life because I couldn't shake the "who am I without my job?" question. It took almost a year (and therapy) to accept that I still add value without working.
> I'm a person that wants to learn anything and everything.
That is exactly what I do now. Every question I've ever had I now have the time to devote to answering it. I take classes, I volunteer, I mentor Comp. Sci. students. But, more than anything, I still write code. I spent the last few months creating an LLM from scratch which was incredibly fun.
That said, I have a friend who will probably work until he dies. His only real interest in life is his job. I'm not suggesting that is a bad thing; its more to the point that "retirement" isn't a panacea for everyone.
I do see this as a bad thing and an abdication of taking responsibility for one's own life. As was recently put to me after the sudden death of a friend's father (who lived an unusually rich life): everyone dies, but not everyone truly lives.
Ah... we found the person who thinks they can pass judgement on how people choose to live their lives. I didn't say that my friend doesn't love his job (he does) - I said that he'll probably die before retiring.
Stephen Hawking, Einstein, Marie Curie, and Linus Pauling never retired. Did they not "truly live"?
About a year ago I had an unpleasant and demoralizing experience at work, and thought "fuck it, I don't need to put up with this shit any more" and decided I'd had enough of work for now. In the spring and summer and early fall, it's easy to find enough things to do outside. Right now in the rainy, windy winter it's a bit more difficult. Today I went to the gym at 7am, then did a 2 hour indoor cycling workout at home, then went for a short plunge in the lake (41 F). Then an hour in the hot tub.
It's pretty cool doing whatever I want for now, but I don't think I can do this for another 40 years. I feel like there's something missing - the sense of accomplishment whenever I finish a task. Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
So maybe at the end of summer 2026 I'll wait for recruiter emails and start responding to some of them. I'm done with applying to 100 jobs to get one response. Maybe I'll try a startup job to experience working in a place that doesn't have a 50-page document describing level expectations.
I highly advise traveling - went a similar experience - had some savings that could last for a few years (much longer if I stretched them)
So just decided to get a motorbike license and go check out Asia.
Ended up finding a partner (totally unexpected) selling everything, moving abroad, marrying them and now expecting a child (planned), all in a manner of 3 years.
Has been quite the joyful and interesting experience, all after I had the deeply depressing feeling of having “solved life” at my nice position in the EU.
There are so many places in the world where you can feel you are actually doing great service to the community, on a shoestring budget and feel happy and fulfilled.
> Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
This comment reminded me of a book I read recently - Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lembke. She talks about how pleasure and pain and experienced by the same region of the brain and they need to be balanced. I'd highly recommend reading that book.
I haven't worked in about 7 years. Only recently I started helping out a friend with a software project semi-regularily. And it wasn't really out of boredom. It's just that the project has some cool stuff, people on the team are cool and he's a friend. I passed 7 years with gaming, internet, talks, walks and mixtures of any subset of those. Only occasionally doing some coding just for fun or out of curiosity or to occasionally help someone. AI is a big game changer for me now. So much more fun to be had with coding.
I don't think I un-retired but I'm performing some commercialy valuable tasks for someone.
Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least)
Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology.
It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once.
That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her millions in the divorce proceedings to get RFK Jr into a cabinet level position to gut billions in research spending.
:(
I don't know who to credit, maybe it's Sergey, but the free Gemini (fast) is exceptional and at this point I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. It's not just capability, but OpenAI have added so many policy guardrails it hurts the user experience.
It's the worst thing ever. The amount of disrespect that robot shows you, when you talk the least bit weird or deviant, it just shows you a terrifying glimpse of a future that must be snuffed out immediately. I honestly think we wouldn't have half the people who so virulently hate AI if OpenAI hadn't designed ChatGPT to be this way. This isn't how people have normally reacted to next-generation level technologies being introduced in the past, like telephones, personal computers, Google Search, and iPhone. OpenAI has managed to turn something great into a true horror of horrors that's disturbed many of us to the foundation of our beings and elicited this powerful sentiment of rejection. It's humanity's duty that GPT should fall now so that better robots like Gemini can take its place.
It's the best model pound for pound, but I find GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro to be more useful for serious work when run with xhigh effort. I can get it to think for 20 minutes, but Gemini 3.0 Pro is like 2.5 minutes max. Obviously I lack full visibility because tok/s and token efficiency likely differs between them, but I take it as a proxy of how much compute they're giving us per inference, and it matches my subjective judgement of output quality. Maybe Google nerfs the reasoning effort in the Gemini subscription to save money and that's why I am experiencing this.
When ChatGPT takes 20 minutes to reason, is it actually spending all the time burning tokens or does a bulk of the time go into 'scheduling' waits. If someone specifically selected xhigh reasoning, I am guessing it can be processed with high batch count.
I'm curious, what types of prompts are you running that benefit from 10+ minutes of think time?
Whats the quality difference between default ChatGPT and Thinking? Is it an extra 20% quality boost or is the difference night/day?
I've often imagined it would be great to have some kind of chrome extension or 3rd party tool to always run prompts in multiple thinking tiers so you can get an immediate response to read while you wait for the thinking models to think.
It's for planning system architecture when I want to get something good (along the criteria that I give it) rather than the first thing that runs.
I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it.
In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
I recently bought into the $200 tier and was genuinely quite surprised at ChatGPT 5.2 Pros ability for software architecture planning. If you give it ~60k tokens of your codebase and a thorough description of what you actually want to happen then it comes up with very good ideas.
The biggest difference to me is how thorough it is. This is already something I noticed with the codex high/xhigh models compared to gemini 3 pro and opus 4.5, but gpt pro is noticeably better still.
I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall.
It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.
FWIW, my productivity tanks when my Claude allowance dries up in Antigravity. I don’t get the hype for Gemini for coding at all, it just does random crap for me - if it doesn’t throw itself into a loop immediately, which it did like all of the times I gave it yet another chance.
I've been a huge sceptic of the whole AI hype since the beginning now. Whenever I've tried any of the AI tools, the results have just been underwhelming. However, two weeks ago I tried Gemini (the pro version) and have been using it for various, random tasks and questions since then, and I've been pretty impressed.
There seems to be much less hallucination of facts than in other tools I've tried and whenever Gemini makes assumptions on stuff I didn't explicitly specify in the prompt, it says so. The answers also always have nice structure: it starts with a short and concise version, then gives me options and more details and considerations.
I also like the feature that I can make it remember facts across chats. I'm a physicist by training and I've told Gemini so, so now every time I ask something, it gives me an answer perfectly tailored for a physicist (often with mathematical formulas, etc.).
Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money.
It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)
> even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible
If you put yourself in their shoes, you realise that you have to give advice for the 10-20th percentile parents (or worse) because you are giving the same advice to everyone.
The alternative would be to offer more complex advice such as "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", but the perception is that's too difficult for people to follow.
So you end up making very defensive (and therefore onerous) recommendations.
An interesting fact is that, since the introduction of the "baby sleeps on their back, alone", SIDS has gone down, but flat heads have gone up. It's probably been a good tradeoff, but it's still a tradeoff.
Also, I've seen a second time mother refer to "don't cosleep" advice as "western nonsense" which I found funny because it puts things in perspective - vast swathes of the world think cosleeping with your child is safe, natural and normal.
I wonder whether we're trending towards a high-sensor variation of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" / Vannevar Bush's Memex that ingests the details of a user's daily life (the smart glasses being a primitive first example products of such) and identifies salient information in their lives can help us perform mass customization of instructions into direct prescriptives, with backing evidentiary data for SME's. Instead of "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", the interaction becomes "do this, anticipate that outcome" to the user, and if an SME (a doctor in your example) asks about it, the system recalls and presents all the factors that went into deciding upon the specific prescriptive.
I'd be happy to do 60-hour weeks of good work, in a good environment.
I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though.
I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.
* You like that your financial needs are taken care of, so that you don't have to think about that.
* You like that everyone else's financial needs are taken care of, because you want everyone to be happy.
* You like that there's alignment by everyone on this. (Even though there will be disagreements on, say, how best to accomplish the mission.)
If someone gets in and doesn't actually have or find motivations like that, or doesn't rise to the occasion despite help, I guess they'd be managed out. That cultural mismatch wouldn't be good for anyone involved.
That's what's beautiful about this scheme: people with attitude you presented would self-select out of it.
That solves half of the problem of typical work dynamics already; the second half, preventing unqualified morons from getting in and setting themselves up for life by being paid good money for doing nothing, would need to be solved in some other way.
Okay? I'm not making a point about how long individuals should want to spend working (although this being 2026 I believe it should be less not more)
Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company
His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable
This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few
(In my head at 2am, I was (wrongly) taking that as a given, understood by everyone, and then remarking on a tangent from there. About the implications of 60hr/wk at Google specifically. And then going from there, about how maybe it didn't have to be like that. Moot for Google in reality, but it makes a good example for what-if thinking or daydreaming about how we'd like the next good tech employer to be.)
I know how frustrating it is to have a contrarian opinion and get smacked with the majority's reaction to it (believe me, I know - it's an asymmetric experience in the worst way) - but lashing out is not a good way to react to that. It only makes things worse.
It’s very frustrating for the bot’s reinforcement function.
This is another account created after widespread access to LLM was available to the public that is pushing a political view that is somewhat coherent until pressed and then it falls apart like all chat bots
Maybe it’s a real person and I’m being an asshole here, but it’s hard to tell.
The fact that is hard to tell if they are real or not means we need to come up with a heuristic to identify actual humans now that passing the Turing test has become trivially cheap.
> Maybe it’s a real person and I’m being an asshole here, but it’s hard to tell.
The site guidelines are clear on this: you should assume that it's a real person and try your best to reel back these sorts of accusations, which are nearly always wrong, and nearly always driven by differences of background and (therefore) opinion.
Maybe, but someone engaged with you and your response showed it was utterly unproductive to do so. COVID may have been mishandled but it does nothing to justify the administrations decisions regarding healthcare. If that's the reason you think positively of the man then you should evaluate the rest of what he's said and done.
If you have the time, two podcasts from this doctor which I think kind of highlight what's going on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBllzAb_vAk (where they have a discussion with one of the leading researchers on nutrition, who has come into direct conflict with RFK Jr. because he doesn't say exactly what RFK Jr. believes to be the case, and has had papers censored and funding cut as a result)
I was initially trying to make a point that the ideological lines that people have drawn have made it so they automatically think RFK is anti-science and they as a consequence have a whole host of assumptions for which I don't even blame them if they haven't spent time reading up about it. I apologize for not countering every single point and going to covid but it's kind of worth pointing out that RFK a) raises some very substantive charges against Fauci for frankly war criminal like actions throughout his unfortunate history of practicing medicine and b) it wasn't "mismanagement". They did, seriously, the opposite of good practice (both accepted good practice and what was discovered in 2020 going forward) in just about every case
If you're not sympathetic to that then of course you're going to disagree and you might think that the only reason someone like Musk bought X (and please don't think this is me Musk fanning, I dislike him for several reasons) is just to have a joyride (which is still possible); they used to ban so many people and real doctors for information that they didn't like and it was a serious problem and if they could do that for covid then they also did it for other things
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You're doing it quite badly. I don't want to ban you, but posts like this make it hard not to, because people will start accusing us of enforcing the rules unfairly.
Also, many of my comments which are not controversial are similarly marked "flagged". Maybe that's a way to defuse flame wars, but it sure leaves a bad taste/bad optics
You could just edit your first comment instead of replying to yourself multiple times.
I haven't read RFK's book and even if every single fact in that particular book was true (which I very highly doubt), it wouldn't change anything he's done in the last year that involved gutting American medical research, spreading misinformation about vaccines that's debunked within their own "research", and coming up with the absolutely genius idea of "tell doctors to tell patients to eat better" to "fix" American's illnesses. Oh, and telling people to eat fried food as long as its fried with beef tallow. That's really dumb.
He's an utter and complete moron at best, and the only reason that people (like you presumably) listen to him is because of his last name.
Sergey might have some positive influence on Gemini, but given that he isn't an AI scientist ( AKA no technical background), I really do wonder what sort of influence that (only) he could have had, beyond just bringing in key people.
I'm not sure what you mean by "he literally can't and he literally doesn't" but he's got PHD in CompSci and did everything at Google in the past from writing complex code himself to managing small teams to managing huge teams.
Exactly what do you think he can't do?
Certainly he's well qualified to manage a team of a few thousand (?) AI people and understand what they are talking about and get the best out of them.
Like Batman he has the superpower of money. If he has gaps he can pay (or otherwise arrange) for someone with those skills to 1-1 coach him in them.
He's not trying to become a top researcher, he's trying to learn enough to understand what they are talking about and be able to make decisions around say what areas should be pursued.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This is such a high proportion of what you've been posting that I think we have to ban the account. I don't want to do that, because it's clear that you know a lot about things that people here are interested in—but the damage caused by these poisonous, aggressive comments is greater than the benefit you've been adding by sharing knowledge.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The man that invented PageRank while going to college at Stanford for a PhD doesn't have a technical background? He did not get that PhD because he founded Google. He may not be as smart as you think you are, but he's no slouch either.
It was interesting to see my dad retire. He struggled a lot initially and even went back to work for a while. He had to actively work on learning to enjoy his hobbies and time once again.
I don’t find hobbies to be a replacement for work. Maybe it depends on the hobby but many hobbies are solo. work, or work that I enjoy, is not. Accomplishing things with others and for others has its on motivation for me at least
Of course maybe your hobbies or your dad’s hobbies are social. when someone says “hobbies” to me I generally think of things done mostly alone and I know for me, that’s not enough
Hobbies are just anything you truly enjoy doing that isn't mandated by your job. If you would continue doing your job even if your employer drops your salary to 0, then yeah your job is your hobby too! It is up to the individual to figure out what works for them.
im probably just projecting but going back to work when youve amassed enough to live off to an enormous fortune feels like a failure of imagination. sure everyone needs to keep their hands busy, feel valued by others, etc etc but surely there’s some other hobby, interest, or unprofitable passion project you would invest time into?
but maybe being in a corporate environment (any any env) shapes your thinking in such a way that it’s really hard to think outside tha conditioning. feels like that to me only a few years int working
Well, XYZ rando going back to work after RSUs are vested is lot different from Google founder going back to work because he sees his 'baby' is in trouble.
Those hobbies, interests etc sounds like middle class thing where people take upon gardening, cooking, hiking, surfing or some such that they couldn't do enough while working. For people like Google founders they would've had any adventure they seek outside work anywhere in they world every weekend.
People forget Bill Gates advised (maybe still consulted) by MS long after he formally moved away from any official position in company.
If I could I'd retire tomorrow, I have so many projects I would like to take on, I have the feeling I could fill 3 lives with them: gardening, learning math, system programming, wine tasting, carpentry, sport, traveling etc... There are *so* many interesting things to do and so little time.
I guess time will tell but at the moment I have a hard time imagining myself getting bored.
In my old age I'm learning that this is rare. I take my projects for granted, because I guess I'm just very creative, I have way more "projects" than I have days remaining. But it seems like most people have no projects, and nothing in their lives but watching television, playing video games, or doom scrolling.
Not to knock you specifically, but I know a lot of people who say that they have no time for this stuff waste a ton of time watching TV and doom scrolling.
for me, it would be bread and cheese making (easier cheese varieties), vegetable fermentation, more cooking of various cuisines including indian ones, drawing and painting, carpentry, permaculture (i did organic gardening earlier, which is a subset), wood carving (done some before), and maybe tailoring (making clothes, by hand or by sewing machine, for own use).
only a few at a time, of course, maybe only two, and by rotation. and then maybe i would narrow it down to two or three for long term.
It's interesting that he's returned to work on Gemini and that it has been central to Google's rejuvenation in that time. I am curious how much of this marries up with traditional founder driven companies being successful (Jobs returning to Apple, Jensen Huang, etc) compared to being adrift without their original founders. How much was he driving as part of Gemini? Or was he just chipping in?
Retirement isn't quite applicable to billionaires.
They never have to work. They do it because they want to.
Retirement implies there was work you didn't want to do. You did it because you had (or wanted) to make some money. Now you have enough money. You've retired.
Hell, it isn't even applicable to many wealthy software engineers who got rich from tech startups. Many are coding as much as when they were working.
I retired when my first kid was born. I had plenty to keep me busy playing with her, taking care of her, traveling with her. And then we had the second one, and were extra busy.
But I was still "working" the whole time. I was running a small startup, and still keeping up on tech and taking speaking gigs. I was not great at fully retiring.
I unretired when the second kid got to 1st grade. We could no longer travel on a whim and the house was empty 6 hours a day. I didn't seek work, but someone reached out with an interesting job and I didn't say no.
Funny enough, my wife and I were just talking about how we were both bad at retirement (she also retired and has since gone back to work). But we talked about how the next retirement will be better, because the kids will be gone and we'll just sit around making art and building Lego all day.
It's honestly a bit confusing to use words to mean things that they don't generally mean.
Retirement has the definition to stop working. One could argue that another definition may be that you reach an older age and start receiving pension payouts (regardless of whether you keep working or not).
But having a passive income alone simply doesn't mean retirement.
I look forward to the sweet kiss of death to solve the retirement funding issue, and forever declining health while working struggle. Working for "The man" takes everything someone has.
It’s funny when people ask you what you want to do after you retire, and you tell them you are going to sit behind your PC and do exactly what you are doing now.
I totally understand. I "retired" last summer, but I continue to work about 50%, mostly at a new place that needs my help. I like what I do. Anyway, gaming/reading/etc. are fine and dandy, but not something I want to do 24/7.
The only thing I don't quite get about Brin is going back to Google. Since he doesn't need the money, why not support open source AI projects?
If I was in this situation, being a centibillionaire (or just having enough money for me and for my kids and their kids to never worry), I would write so, so, so much software. I have so many ideas for businesses, too, I just have no time and funds and I'm too risk-averse.
> They have food and housing, but their life is devoid of meaning.
I find it difficult to relate to such worlds. I make up all kinds of explanations like, "well, it must be because while they have food and housing, they don't have any funds to entertain themselves". Or, "well, it must be because they simply haven't had sufficient education to reach an activation level where the higher tiers of Maslow's come into their line of sight".
And then I read about plenty of counter-examples, like wealthy offspring living the textbook aimless/dissolute/pick-your-adjective life, or the ennui of able-bodied welfare recipients with quite reasonable spending cash from generous Scandinavian welfare regimes when one considers the mind boggling amount of free media, free libraries, free parks, free entertainment in general in the developed world. Perhaps this is just part of their human condition for people suffering from this malaise.
And here I sit, drowning in ideas of what I would be interested to pursue to know our beautiful universe if only I had the time. So much so I write them down into a file just to quiet the cacophony in my head like a dog seeing squirrels everywhere he looks, just so I can get real work done on a timely basis, haha.
When once asked whether I'd ever be bored with eternal youth and boundless resources, I immediately replied an eternity is still too little time to satisfy my curiosity.
There is an element of the years long conditioning to work that the article points to. But I think people do find it important to have various means to engage with life, and building and creating is a dominant outlet.
Pursuing goals that are intrinsically motivating, genuinely interesting, that give you a strong sense of purpose with healthy integration into core values leads to high life satisfaction.
It’s as if they’ve never heard of Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Needs before and further did they don’t know Self Actualizing is right at the very top.
Without that key stone on the top the human being is still a wanting animal. And if you somehow “mission complete” one Self Actualizing, then you immediately start to want something fresh “purpose” etc.
And obviously Self Actualizing doesn’t have to come in the form of work, although often it does.
At the end of life, Maslow became convinced that self-transcendence was the pinnacle of the hierarchy. Strong identification with work will not get one to that final step. I am not sure if ai is a path to self transcendence or self annihilation, but it's interesting to ponder in the case of some like Brin.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been widely criticized as being too rigid and simplistic and too biased towards an affluent Western cultural context. It also hasn't been tested and validated by science, and is based on hearsay rather than empirical data.
"Self Actualization" being a primary universal human need is just one guy's personal opinion, it isn't a law of nature or physics.
Considerations of a poor billionaire being bored apart - why is it that we still consider work and retirements as "black or white" things ? It might have made sense for physically exhaustive works, but for anything intellectual, wouldn't "progressive retirement" make much more sense ? As in, starting a certain age, provided you're physically and mentally able, of course, you get to work 80% of your time (in civilized countries where retirement is payed by states from taxes, you would get "about" 20% of your pension, but your employer would keep paying taxes), then 50%, then 25%, then 0 ? Would that be easier to finance given life expectancy increase (barring WW3, of course) ?
This basically exists in Austria as “Altersteilzeit” [0] (“old age part time”). You even get 50% of your loss of income back through social security. So e.g. when reducing work by 40% you still get 80% of your salary. I’m guessing this is to incentivise employers to keep people near retirement employed as it would be much more expensive for the state to finance them if they were unemployed.
Medically speaking, your proposal would perhaps prevent a lot of heart attack deaths. It has been shown that not working is not just unpleasant, it's a strong stressor [1,2].
> ... wouldn't "progressive retirement" make much more sense ?
Of course it does. I've seen it in my parents' generation: many wanted to reach retirement do "do nothing" and, well, they just lost their marbles. Doing nothing is neither good for the body, nor for the mind. Endless TV watching or endless pina colada drinking in the pool (or both at the same time): idleness brings absolutely nothing good.
But my parents' friends who kept working a bit (like my godmother who kept supervising her real estate agency): she stayed sharp and fit.
People think they're going to read and do exercice etc. but truth is: most are going to do jack absolutely shit. And turn to the latter.
So keeping partially active is the best thing possible.
I see it with my mother-in-law: 70 y/o, still working, daily, with my wife (they own a little SME). It keeps her in the loop: she still knows how to use a computer, her mind is quick. She's not idling.
The financial aspect of it all is something else: but people doing nothing is not what a society needs.
Humans spent thousands of years living in small groups where everyone had to be useful. When all of sudden you stop working and sit in your corner, you are doing something that run against thousands of years of evolution.
I scrolled this whole thread curious if someone would make this simple observation. We did not survive and evolve for millions of years to be born and then do nothing, to not meet needs and have needs met. Historical precedent, tamper with carefully.
I am partial fire and I feel that line of demarcation personally. I've also watched it play out in others like clockwork. As wealth grows, new responsibilities emerge.
When I started my company, we suddenly found that we were in a good small fortune, not enough to be millionaires or billionaires, but enough to get people to run the business semi automatically with very minimum input from the founders.
I took a semi retirement approach to the business, there really wasn't a lot of things to do, my role was sort of just "managing" programmers. I got so much free time that I could even start a second business on the side.
Despite my best ability to stretch my work, I couldn't even fill up half of my working hours. One would have thought that this is heaven. But the time I was most free was also the time I was most miserable. I wasn't happy, I was gaining weight, I was perennially asking myself why the business couldn't be bigger and I couldn't sell it, so that I can be real millionaires and billionaires with financial freedom!
Then fate intervened, the sudden fortune disappeared and I no longer had the luxury of just "managing people"; I have to do hands-on. And it was this activity, the feeling that I was contributing to something, that I was writing code again and actually building stuffs, that made me happy again.
Today we are bigger than what we once we were, but still, I am writing code and pretty much hands-on.I vow that I will never retire, even though if I could. Because it's the meaningful work that sustains life and provides happiness. Being able to work on it is a luxury that I will never want to give up, ever.
You agree more than you disagree. Meaningful might be something else for you. But I bet deep down it is doing something for others (clients, coworkers, friends, family, even strangers) that gives meaning.
It’s easy to eye roll at billionaire guy wanting to go work, but it’s a real thing, I recall my dad struggling with retirement, after having planned so long.
He did a bit of consulting, was a rural mail carrier for a year and ended up managing a county program for a few years. He also discovered teaching as an adjunct professor, which he loved deeply. At some point, he was ready, and he had several good years of retirement with grandchildren and travel.
With a story like this, I choose to see what we have in common with a very successful, very rich person. Many people think “If only I had a more, everything would be grand.”
Well… Brin is a billionaire controlling one of the most powerful corporations on the earth. He found meaning in his work, or chose his work because of the meaning to him. Either way, given the ability to do anything, he made his choice. Don’t worship the guy, but perhaps see the humanity that we all share.
Mitchell Hashimoto went on to create a new awesome terminal emulator, in a programming language he had not used (much) before. Sounds like a great way to stay entertained!
It's interesting to hear about his experience, but I'm not sure if it's typical. There are millions of people retiring each year, presumably many are happy to be done with the drudgery of work and excited to spend time on hobbies and projects they enjoy.
I'm curious to know how many retirees end up like Sergey and how many you don't hear about because they're too busy enjoying their retirement.
I will say that this topic is a common one among people talking about FIRE “financial independence, retire early” — folks who are saving as fast as they can so they can quit working. There are a lot of people who already got there who come back to warn people they won’t necessarily be happy and fulfilled just because they quit the day job. Like, that’s an amazing feeling at first but it probably won’t carry you for 30-50 more years.
The article actually includes some of these examples, but I get the feeling that a lot of readers did not make it past the Brin part.
It works much better for most people if you replace “retire early” with “recreationally employed”. You can select the work you do without optimizing for income or status-maxxing.
The few cases I know of people who retired in their early 30s they really didn't want to even be "recreationally employed", they diverted their efforts to causes they believe are bigger than usual work. They help communities, they started projects in their free time that enhances others' lives in direct and meaningful ways which had nothing to do with their past day job.
I believe I'd do the same, forget about coding yet another little project/library, and go into the real world dedicate part of my time to causes that can't pay much but have meaning to others.
This is entirely within the scope of "recreationally employed". There is no implication that what you spend your time on has anything to do with your former career.
In most cases I know of recreational employment has little to do with their former employment. They often put in a lot of hours and it is still "work" in the ordinary sense but it is entirely self-directed.
I believe it's a misuse of "employment" then, I do not understand employment as something you do without payment, to me it is necessarily related to paid labour.
If you obligate yourself to significant and consistent labor when no such thing is necessitated by your life then you are effectively "employed". You have to show up. Absent external motivation, like feeding your family or staying out of prison, it is purely a lifestyle choice. It is the opposite of playing video games all day or sitting at the beach.
The FIRE types are not working to survive by definition, allowing them to work at non-profits for a pittance, run a farm with no meaningful market, do thankless maintenance on FOSS, or travel around the world saving the whales. The lack of a meaningful paycheck doesn't make these things not "jobs" for all practical purposes.
Financial freedom is about not having to worry about losing your job, or tolerating shitty work conditions. Why would you retire if you do what you love? I think the real problem might be if there's nothing you actually love doing (long term), that's when money won't help.
But that's the problem - if you don't like doing anything, what will you do? What will you fill your life with? You will quickly get bored of anything you try. Your life will have no meaning, and you will probably turn to alcohol or drugs.
Indeed, video games are probably the things most of humanity will retire to if they didn't attach so much ego and meaning to their jobs and by extension, the people around them.
Just be sure to swap games once in a while so you don't get bored.
Everyone, even the laziest person likes doing something even if that’s just parking yourself in front of the TV and stuffing your face.
Most people though genuinely like activities that most times would be impossible to monetize enough to make a living, which isn’t a problem if you’re rich. Alternatively, there are plenty of things people want to do that they have no intention of being the best at, they want to dabble.
Had this exact situation. Turned to drugs. Lived like a GTA character. That’s unsustainable, similar to luxury vacations which turn dull. Now I‘m finding investors for curing MS with a team of researchers who‘ve built sth that is more accurate than CRISPR to cure my sister.
I actually want to get in contact with Sergey Brin about that because we might have something interesting for him - but my American contacts are only connected to Musk and people like a Polygon founder and music/hollywood people. This is not a psychotic or exaggerated message, I‘m sure HN can vet us (@dang) and get us contacts, currently I‘m talking to family offices in Saudi Arabia.
About meaning: if you get bored, aim for bigger positive impact.
short: We have a rigorously validated antigen-specific immune tolerance platform with bystander suppression, NIH/MS Society backing and a clear translational gap.
This might rub some people on HN the wrong way but what these people call "work" isn't really work in the sense of what most people consider work. They jet here and there, intervene wherever they want, and everybody listens to them all the time. They can cancel and postpone meetings as they wish, and so on and so forth. It's work in the same sense as buying another house is work -- you have to get together with lawyers and plenty of people but in the end these people all work for you and you can also change your mind and not buy it.
That's also the reason why these multi-billionaires never retire. They've retired from real work a long time ago.
Was looking for this comment. Cutting meat in some factory is considered 'work', running a global tech business is also considered 'work'. Both 'work', different requirements from the 'worker'.
It's work in the sense of exchanging their attention, energy and the hours of their lives towards a goal, while in the moment they'd rather be somewhere else doing something else.
it doesn't quite work that way. Once you do this what you call "work", you can't just extricate yourself in the middle of dealing with complicated situations or drop things where others depend on you. So it's still work in the sense that you can't just literally do what you want the way you do when you lounge around your house.
It is clear that Alphabet is his baby and neither he not Larry ever fully left.
He is still in his 50s so maybe just too young to play golf and chill on superyachts all day. While him being a billionaire makes any lesson derived have to have an asterisk him enjoying technical work even after long having won the rat race is a pretty cool role model.
No wonder he returned: he can focus on meaningful work without direct financial pressure, with full access to people, decisions, and resources.
If only we all had a time in life to do what we love, get paid, and face no paywalls. I call that "liberated work". If only at least retirement was like that.
It has been my observation that those that retire without solid plans to keep busy 15-20 hours a week really do struggle. You have to be missed by people when you are sick or out of town. You have to have a reason to get out of bed. I think your choice of activity tells a lot about you since the 'pay the bills and save for retirement" argument no longer applies. Some volunteer to better the world. Some continue their life work to take wealth from those with less power.
You're saying he should have gone the Gates path and formed an NGO? Fair enough but I imagine nothing else matches the thrill and stress of running the C suite at Google
I took a moment to participate in an ARIN (https://www.arin.net) call. They drive policy for IP addresses that run the Internet. Anyway, one thing that stood out to me was during a portion of the conference the organization was holding elections for open seats. The seats are open to anyone, I'm pretty sure.
There were a bunch of people, from across the country, MANY in retirement, trying their best to sell themselves that they are the right candidate.
Sergey can just make a phone call and he gets to build Gemini and run a billion dollar organization and have meaning in old-age. This is what wealth buys you. The rest of us, I guess, we will be arm-wresteling for the few open oppertunities to make an impact.
Do you think he can still spend time on his $450 million yacht or is he too busy writing prompts?
Snark aside, good for him. Absolute non-news though, as is any extraordinary individual action during and contributing to a bubble. It'll be interesting to see what stays when, or if, the bubble ever pops.
You can very well write that prompt from the top deck or from one of the office cabins on said yacht (no, not speaking from experience).
I'm not envious of anyone's big yacht, but I wouldn't waste my money that way (you can probably rent one for special occasions) - as long as there are still children hungry or without schooling.
I'm definitely envious of the yacht. Like, come on, how awesome is that! It's HUGE! I've been invited on tiny yachts with "only" a couple staff onboard and that was already fantastic to just be on for a day.
That said I don't think I could ever justify spending THAT kind of money on it.
i never really understood the billionaire yacht hate.
Once you buy a yacht 450 million dollars of ownership in a company you had goes to people who built a beautiful thing that exists in the real world and you're on the hook for employing a lot of people to maintain it.
I take a lot more issue with accumulation and hoarding of wealth than the spending of it.
> i never really understood the billionaire yacht hate.
Once someone reaches that level of fame and fortune it's almost a requirement if they want to travel or have some sort of 'vacation'. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a great problem to have, but it's one of the only ways to find privacy at that level of wealth.
If I'm ever super wealthy, I hope I can also stay somewhat anonymous so that I can walk down the street like any other person.
An economy that wasted resources building mega yachts for billionaires is more unequal than one that builds cruise ships that high income families can go on an holiday.
Holding shares in a company (or dollar bills) is not depriving others of something. The fisherman will go catch fish tomorrow, the wheat in the fields will keep growing, the builder will build a house.
If someone starts paying the fisherman, farmer, builder, more to stop doing what they are doing and start building mega yachts, then there will be less fish, bread, and houses for others.
That said, I assume it's much simpler than that and it's just about the hypocrisy of the climate change billionaires to be bellowing out carbon while demanding the selfish greedy commoners cut our emissions.
It lines up with the AI arms race kicking into overdrive around ChatGPT's triumph in late 2022. Brin pops out of hiding right then, admitting Google "messed up" and starts coding, analysing losses, and basically playing dictator with his super-voting shares to shove the company back on track.
Rivals like OpenAI yanked him in and now he's in the office daily because the "trajectory of AI is so exciting" - translation: his ego couldn't handle watching his empire get outpaced, and with those voting rights, he can bulldoze through bureaucracy to keep the throne.
Ultimately, it's less about some profound quest for purpose and more about a control freak safeguarding his legacy and billions as the tech world burns. He never really let his kingdom go.
I too would very happily do just the bits of my job that I like, when and how I want, and have any requests or comments or complaints I make get immediate attention and responses.
All in the knowledge that no one is going to be time-tracking me or doing performance reviews, and I can just not do work at any moment I don't feel like it or have something better to do that day, like go to my private island or take my private jet to burning man etc (or as it turns out do a talk at Stanford). All while you have so much money that the price of anything from clothes to cars to houses is just some arbitrary number that has no meaning to you it is so absolutely tiny number... not that you actually buy anything yourself any more, mainly your team of personal staff deal with that grubby reality.
As for the rest of us, well we need to pay the bills while playing "the game" and politics and cowtowing to keep the money coming.
Exactly. If you work in a field that’s close to your interests, there are probably parts of your job that you’d do for fun even if infinitely wealthy. It’s the other stuff, the boring annoying grind, that makes it a job and not a hobby.
And importantly, in this analogy - most people here aren't even able to play that lottery. He founded a company based on the research he did whilst studying for a government funded PhD. Most people are not in a position in their life where they could even spend time trying to do research that would result in this type of eventual wealth.
If you don't try you are sure to not win.
The rest is about being able to put the odds in your favor.
You obviously can't do that with lottery. There is no logical lever.
AI replacing workers and launching the post-money economy aside, it should probably not be about age or actual networth but outcome.
That should still be a worthy and attainable goal.
He is not the only rich person out there...
That attitude is the weapon of suppression. Yes, it's true that life isn't fair. But it's also true that people have agency and can make material improvements to their own quality of life through smart decisions and dedication. Of course most of us won't start the next Google, but that doesn't mean dreams and hope are bad in general.
We have no evidence that people have meanginful agency, or even agency at all. It is an assumption that to start with requires that the universe is not largely or entirely deterministic beyond what we can measure, but even in the case of some "hidden variable" that provides agency (try to even define it in a way that doesn't make it either deterministic, random, or a combination that implies no actual control) we have plenty of evidence that events outside our control ("life isn't fair") means that the vast majority of people, while they may make decisions - with or without agency - that will make material improvements - still are not able to get anywhere near a position that makes it meaningful in this context.
Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.
But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.
If you think you have no agency why do anything at all?
You could choose to stop doing anything.
Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(unrealised futures) gives you agency.
It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even if that compute can be deterministic at a higher level, but you should not care.
It's a nested universes system just like in type theory. The meta of the meta. Agency is only defined within a single universe at a time.
> If you think you have no agency why do anything at all?
I addressed that in my comment, but let me address it again since it's the most frequent objection to this:
> You could choose to stop doing anything.
In the mechanical sense that an "IF ... THEN ... ELSE" statement makes the program "choose" which branch to take, you're right, yes I could.
But then I'd also suffer the consequences.
As I pointed out, if I were to life down in despair and not go to work, I won't keep getting paid just because I didn't have agency over the "choice" of whether to lie down and sulk or get up and go to work.
But for "agency" to have any meaning, we can't interpret choice that way. If we don't have agency, then while I may have an artificial "choice", that "choice" can't change the outcome.
In that case every "choice" I make is just as deterministic as that IF ... THEN ... ELSE: The branch taken depends on the state of the system.
> Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(untealised futures) gives you agency.
>
> It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even that compute ca be deterministic but you should not care.
What you are describing is compatibilism: The school of thought on "free will" that effectively says that free will is real, but is also an illusion.
Personally I think that is basically brushing the issue under the carpet, though I also think it is the only definition of free will that is logically consistent.
I do agree with the point that you mostly should not care:
You need to mostly act as if every "choice" you make does matter, because whether or not you have control over it, if you do lie down in despair, your paychecks will stop arriving.
Cause and effect does not care whether or not you have agency.
Where I take issue with compatibilism is because there are considerable differences in how you should "choose" to act if you consider agency to be "artificial" or an illusion (compatibilism) or not exist at all (for this purpose these are pretty much equivalent) vs. if you consider it to be real.
E.g. we blame and reward people or otherwise treat people differently based on their perceived agency all the time, and a lot of that treatment is a lot harder to morally justify if you don't believe in actual agency. Real harm happens to people because we assume they have agency. If that agency isn't real, it doesn't matter if we have an illusion of it - in that case a lot of that harm is immoral.
To tie it back to the thread: Whether agency is not real at all, or just significantly constrained by circumstance, it changes the considerations in what we should expect ourselves and others to be able to overcome.
E.g. it makes no logical sense to feel bad about past choices, because they couldn't have gone differently (you can still feel bad about the effects, and commit to "choosing" differently in the future). You also then shouldn't feel bad if you haven't achieved what you wanted to if you believe the context you live within either have total control over the actions you take, or "just" a significant degree of influence over it.
And so we're back to my original argument that for most people, acting as-if they have agency by "choosing" to bet on making the surrounding conditions more amenable to good outcomes is a better bet than thinking they have agency or enough agency to achieve a different outcome.
But again: The fact that I believe we have no agency, does not mean I won't try to do things that will get me better outcomes. I just don't assume I could act any other way in a given instance than I end up acting in that given instance, any more than a movie will change if you rewind it and press play again.
I think we agree. The subtelty is that, it is about closed and open systems.
Your partial knowledge makes things a locally open system.
You are processing new data and then acting accordingly.
That's dynamic agency. The better you can get knowledge, the better you can influence the next step.
That realization happens at the meta level and gives you agency in your actual universe.
Even though at the meta-meta level, that realization itself can be deterministic.
Not to be confused with someone who would be external to the system and could watch your life as if it was a video tape, being omniscient.
They would not have agency in your system as they can't interact with you and for them everything is predetermined, and they could compute the next state of the system from the past state.
You can't but the system is impredicative enough that by recognizing this, by self-consciousness, the system effects itself toward its own favored state.
And in fact, the more knowledge you have, the less agency. Because the fewer choices.
The meta level person doesn't just observe how the video. It observes the fact that people realize they are characters in a video and how that realization affects the choices they make. Given the initial conditions.
Should you have regrets in life? You had the choice of knowing more and be more able so it makes sense. Could things have happened differently given that they did and obviously you wanted back then for them to be different and wish they had been? Or did it happen because the conditions were set to happen?
Basically the question is whether we control our odds?
Doing anything is controlling some odds so I'd say yes. Requires increased self consciousness. Being able to imagine what is not there. Animals seem to have that capacity. Especially humans.
We can make sure that certain things don't happen by virtue of our own existence. This is our agency.
Are we biased by construction toward the best odds of we can recognize them? Yes. Are their really things with the exact same odds in the system? Wouldn't that block us? Probably. But the system is already made in a way that it wouldn't happen by virtue of having (at least local) asymmetries. In practice we wouldn't be blocked. Someone perfectly symmetrical in a system that also is, would perhaps. But there might not be any two same most desired odds then so no. Unlikely.
So again, this is basically the compatibilist stance. To me, it rings hollow because it glosses over whether you actually made a decision in a way that is qualtitively different from how a clock "chooses" to move the minute hand one minute further.
And so I would answer to your question about regrets that I don't believe you had that choice. That you couldn't have chosen differently given the same inputs and state. Your "choice" followed the preceding state with the same predictability as a well functioning clock.
Interesting thought exercise, let me try something:
Only if we can predict everything ourselves do we not have a choice.
But since we don't know what we don't know and that may occur at any moment (black swan), we can only act given probabilities.
Then what we control is our level of appetite for risk of an undesired outcome.
That risk is not data that we can reliably measure and assert.
So it creates randomness/stochasticity in the system.
That's why I was speaking of open vs closed system.
Randomness provides agency.
That randomness is subjective. You may well still be predictable for an omniscient person. But that person would not have any agency.
You do as long as your choice does not rely upon knowledge.
I guess that's why the human society is weird in a sense. People act from belief they have no certitude about.
A clock does not do that, there is no metacognitive process to influence an action toward a yet unrealised future. Seems incomparable?
But yes, other than that, there is not real accurate way to deny compatibilism I'm afraid.
In fact, true agency is the attempt to eliminate choice.
It is like being in a Labyrinth where the walls are moving.
The clock sits in the labyrinth and gets crushed by a moving wall.
An agentic person detects the movements and recalibrates.
Honestly I don't disagree with anything you wrote, I don't think. It is worth remembering that if we were born in someone else's shoes, with their genes and their environment, we would literally be them and would act as they act. In that way, yes, agency is an illusion. Remembering this can help us to have empathy for others, potentially even those with whom we vehemently disagree.
But, as you said, we still all make decisions every day, and those decisions do affect our lives. So by acting as if we have agency, we can still have a positive impact, both on ourselves and others.
The attitude that we should all have access to more freedoms and that inequality has reached extreme levels is suppression? Then sign me up to be suppressed.
I am not saying we should be defeatist! I making the argument that it does not, and morally should not, have to be so that we all have to toil when we have such a wealth of technology.
How we go about changing this, I do not know, but everyone just playing along nicely in hope of one day being the one who strikes gold seems not to be working!
“Life isn’t fair, suck it up and get good!” is another form of suppression/delusion. Well, if life isn’t it fair, let us at least try to counteract that with cooperation. It seems to me that we have all the tools and technologies we need to make it a lot better.
This framing I'm on board with. The original comment took it too far for me, and even if not intended as defeatist I think could encourage that response. I'm all for people working not only to better their own conditions, but society as a whole.
This is very true but the path to that seems to require a weird optimization where it is concentrated among a few before being being widespread.
Technologic improvements should help. Help decouple time and money.
And when does this start being for everyone? We have had agricultural machines for ages, but I still have to pay an ever increasing part of my salary (and hence time here on earth) not to starve.
Because of asymmetry. Some people are more inclined toward certain things than others.
People who are excellent at math are much more likely to be able to advance AI for instance.
The goal of physical systems being to remain at rest/(humans included ;) the gradient of resources lean toward these people so that they can improve the technology allowing everyone to be able to conserve their energy (be lazy in a sense).
Retirement wasn't as interesting as a role at the company you founded where everyone looks up to you, doing whatever you feel like with no expectations or defined responsibilities? Shocker
Seriously, I'm glad he came back and found something he's interested in. I bet his role has grown some responsibilities, too.
I worked at a company with multiple cofounders; one of them became the CEO, the other one was initially CTO, but ultimately his title was just cofounder after a while and someone else was hired to be CTO. This person then went on to just prototype and build whatever he wanted to; the service he built ended up having no OC engineers supporting it, pages went to him but he didn’t bother responding and nobody would tell him he had to respond lol. Ultimately people just didn’t use that thing or delayed using it as they couldn’t really rely on it.
What a horrible promo-article - in particular when we look at the damage caused by Google in total. I actually think it would be better if the two original Google guys would, while shamefully admitting to have failed, stop working altogether. Others can fix the problems Google caused.
> "Going back to work just for fun might sound like a uniquely billionaire move."
Ah yeah? Can be boredom too. I fail to see why this article wants to promote this.
> Like many people, Brin had a relaxing vision for his post-working life. “I was gonna sit in cafés and study physics, which was my passion at the time,” he told the Stanford audience.
Any why would anyone take this at face value? How many of the guys there were paid to go there by the way?
PR-piece for the Epstein thing, isn't it? Just in time. Brin also likes them young, the nounce that he is, and no legal entity in the US is going to do shit about it.
It is definitely a well-timed story. It's notable that even though they are billionaires they care what people think about them so much that they have to do this PR nonsense.
As no governmental authority is actively investigating the allegations, Sergey Brin might never have the opportunity to clear his name from the Epstein child abuse allegations in the court of public opinion. If there would be an investigation and/or court case, Sergey Brin's lawyers would at least be able to legally clear his name. As long as evidence is being withheld, any association between Microsoft and Google leadership and Jeffrey Epstein will bring up rumors about their involvement in the child abuse, even though they might have been "only" clients of the JP Morgan private banking services for high net worth individual which was managed by Jeffrey Epstein.
Imagine if they locked Serg out of the protected quantum research he loved reading as it was department employees only and the only way he could continue his access was returning to work at a senior enough level to cross read. Imagine.
The problem with famous people unretiring and doing something different is they are kind of the nepobaby children of their former career arc selves. I both feel bad for him but am glad he's happier now.
Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)
I really don't buy his explanation. Here's one of the world's smartest guys, with more money than Smaug, and he really couldn't come up with anything better than going back to Google to work on Gemini?
What's the point of all that money if you won't even hire someone to help you find hobbies.
So many STEM universities have online courses. The art world froths itself mad over smart people with stupid money. Local projects beg for angels like him.
Hell even just doing the AI schtick but for free open source or as a pet startup.
To me those are all either inferior to working on AI or can be done outside of work. And for the founder of Google, probably Google is the best place to work on AI.
Hiring someone to find hobbies defeats the purpose of hobbies. Why would you want to pursue something that someone else finds enticing rather than you discovering it yourself?
he has a phd in CS, hes probably always been interested in AI, you dont think getting to play with AI with essentially infinite resources is more fun than collecting stamps or skiing or something?
> Having given so much of themselves to their careers, they often felt unmoored and purposeless when they left their jobs.
That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.
My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.
Can you please not post cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? I can understand the feelings behind it—we all can—but this is really not what we're going here, and it has a way more degrading effect on the threads than I'm sure you intended.
I was kind of retired, earning passive crypto income for several years after 2019 throughout COVID. Best time of my life. I was living on a Mediterranean island, splitting my time between snorkeling and open source work.
Then I got cheated out of my position in the crypto project. Literally scammed by the project founder with the full support of government regulators who are supposed to be preventing this stuff and lost all my income overnight. The regulators literally facilitated fraud instead of preventing it... And I had the pleasure of being gaslit about it while also being gaslit about COVID by a different set of regulators. I became a conspiracy theorist during this time! Now I'm forced to work again...
It's especially infuriating in this age of perma-bailouts where the system is basically bailing out everyone with assets.
I figured out that the system is a scam. I can prove it to anyone in excruciating detail, with citations. If anyone should be bailed out, it should be me. I shouldn't be forced back in the hamster wheel. It's hard to compete against others who think the system works a certain way and don't realize how the hamster wheel works. I shouldn't have to compete with delusional fools who think that their effort spent on the hamster wheel is going to yield any rewards.
Anyway it drives me nuts how the only people who can afford to retire, choose not to... And those who are desperate to retire, can't! This is so pervasive, it feels like a psyop.
Living as we do in a society where basic needs are not guaranteed without a giant pile of money, most humans don’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a place where you don’t base your life decisions on financial well being. Thats very limiting; it isn’t that surprising that someone who has achieved that is now looking for meaning in other things. Besides: if you’re Sergey Brin, I imagine you can get to talk/work with whatever at Google interests you most and hand off the gruntwork to minions all the while being treated with deep reverence. It’s not exactly hard to see why he might like it.
One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.
I don't think this is really accurate because the traditional state of society, and one that remains in the 'developing world' which is almost certainly still the wide majority of the world at this point, is families living in multi generational housing with many people contributing. This enables older to generations to comfortably 'retire' when they see fit, and provides financial comfort and security. It's basically like decentralized pensions.
This new world of low fertility, small household size or even people living entirely alone, high external dependence, and the consequent broad insecurity - is still extremely new. And I do not think it will survive the test of time.
I think you might be romanticizing multi-generational households a bit. We introduced social security systems precisely because the family systems failed so frequently. In all but the richest families no retirement as we understand it today was possible. Illness or death of the main bread winners was fatal to the whole household and children were expected to work as soon as possible.
It was not because family systems were failing. It came about in the era of the great depression, and the idea was rather unpopular at first, particularly among groups like farmers who had no interest in the new taxes that would come alongside it. Some of the arguments in favor of it were it being a way to get older individuals out of the work force in order to make room for younger workers. You have to keep in mind it was introduced at a time when unemployment rates were upwards of 20%. And retirement was and is absolutely possible. When people own their land and house and have basic maintenance skills, your overhead costs become extremely low.
Of course there's also no reason these things must be mutually exclusive. I think the ideal is to learn from the past, which proved its sustainability over millennia, and work to improve it. In modern times we've instead set out to completely replace it - or at least build up something from scratch, and what we've created just doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
Pre-1960s, the elderly were living in SROs, often windowless, with family (without aid or care), in county poorhouses, or marked as senile and sent to a mental hospital.
Retirement and living with family was viable for many as long as they remained healthy. People imagine Norman Rockwell. Reality was very different.
I've posted 23 comments in the last 24 hours, 386 in the last month, 4828 in the last year. Plenty of things get my attention!
A couple points that are important, if you want to understand how moderation works on HN:
(1) we're mostly responding to a random sample of the total - there's far too much content for us to read it all.
I have the impression that when someone posts a "you're moderating this, of all things?" comment, as you did here, it's usually because they've seen other cases where a comment ought to have been moderated but wasn't. Then the moderators' priorities start to look strange. The likeliest explanation for this, though, is that we just didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
It is everywhere now. Musk censors his X responses, Grok defends billionaires, the all-in podcast has only positive comments in suspiciously perfect English since a month or so. Previously they allowed criticism.
HN hasn't changed in this respect in a good 10 years, and no one who sees what gets posted here need fear that criticism is verboten. It isn't, and will never be. We do need to do something about shallow cynicism though (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 from earlier today, if curious).
@dang, I get what you mean in a vacuum but this article is pretty insulting to the readers intelligence.
The third sentence of the article is
> But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5.
Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5?
They might have well said “Google co-founder shares secrets that stealing bread to eat when you’re hungry and sleeping under bridges is actually illegal”
I hear you! I didn't read the entire article but I agree it doesn't exactly pattern-match to very good. We highly prefer articles that respect the reader's intelligence; they aren't always easy to come by.
The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.
(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)
The article is not about Sergey Brin, he is just the hook. It’s about the loss of meaning people can face after retiring, which can happen to anyone who is able to retire. That’s not everyone, but it’s also not just billionaires.
I do not accept that the analogy was made without an implicit attempt to conflate the two positions.
Most tech jobs aren’t a 9-5 either since that’s a traditional hourly job and tech has on call rotations that are unpaid.
This is what I’m talking about with the article insulting the readers intelligence. If you wanted to make the point of “people who retire should be aware that they need to find meaning outside of work” then it could just say so, instead of trying to act like it’s so hard to be so wealthy that there is no more struggle in life and you need to invent new ones for yourself.
I think the snark comes from (and becomes merited through) an article that shows such an utter lack of empathy towards the problems that the vast majority face on a day-to-day basis.
No, when Alice and Bob are people whose hardships are actual hardships. It's not just that it's a hardship that's rare, or that "it's just a different hardship", or something — I can read about genuine plight that might affect some small portion of the population and empathize with that, and they with me at the same time – even implicitly, without statement in the article. But this, by virtue of being written, explicitly is unempathetic, whereas "this rare cancer affects 8 people" is not. That's not a problem I wish that I had, vs. this is a problem faced by someone who is well off, to even call this a "hardship" is a stretch.
To do so during a time when tech is also dragging its reputation into the mud by generally harming the rank and file, through large corporations whose actions are not held to account in anti-trust laws, to tech bro oligarchs who wine and dine with power while the rest of us are worst off in a time of unprecedented inequality, to tech laying off hundreds of thousands of employees over the last few years, to LLMs replacing hard working people with slop-generators… is just additional insult to injury.
The article is simply, itself, shallow. "… Is a Lesson for the Rest of Us" — no; barring unforeseen and extremely unlikely circumstances, I'm literally never going to have the "problems" faced by Brin, because I have no expectation of ever retiring with "perpetual wealth" levels of money.
I'm also going to dissent with a "but is it a shallow rebuttal?" here? TFA is a of the "problems we wish we had" sort — we're all just temporarily embarrassed billionaires here, right guys? Right?! (Because a mere million doesn't cut it, these days…) But the rank and file of us are still on Duck Tales, Larry. Especially these days.
As I said in a separate comment, TFA is distinctly lacks empathy.
This article reads like propaganda to keep the worker bees slaving away until they die. But I have a few things to say about this and Sergey Brin in particular.
In the early days, many considered Sergey Brin to be the soul or the conscience of Google. He was reportedly the driving force in Google originally pulling out of China rather than capitulating to the censorship regime [1]. This was also after the apparent state-sponsored hack of Google in China [2] so perhaps the motivations were mixed? I don't know.
But Sergey I think is a good example of someone for whom his creation outgrew him. I'm reminded of an old Jeff Atwood blog post where he quoted Accidental Empires [3]. Sergey was a commando. By 2010 Google needed an army. Now? Police.
GoogleX has Sergey's playground but if you look at the track record, possibly the only success I think is Waymo. Glass (mentioned in the article) was not a success and his affair with a subordinate also destroyed his marriage [4].
To me it felt like Sergey was drifting many years before he stepped away. His stepping away felt more like formalizing something that had already happened.
I'm not a billionaire. Not even close. Honestly, I think I'm glad about that because it seems like despite being surrounded with unimaginable wealth, many such people end up isolated and rudderless, desperately dsearching for meaning and connection. Or maybe that's just cope (from me).
The article mentions Gates and how he keeps busy with his philanthropy. Well, there's another piece of common ground between Gates and Brin: Jeffrey Epstein [5]. That's not intended as an implicit or explicit accusation of child predation by Gates or Brin or even of either having knowledge of such malfeasance, to be clear.
But even with a fraction of the DoJ's documents disclosed as well as from the Epstein estate, we can begin to paint a macabre picture of the connections between rich and powerful people that for some reason always seem to have Jeffrey Epstein at their nexus and that means something though we don't really know what.
Has Sergey had a substantial impact on Gemini? Will he? I have no idea. I do wonder if someone worth $100 billion really has the perspective and drive to move something like this. Google has a deep bench of talent and one thing Google is very good at is optimizing code that runs at scale by making their own networking, servers, racks, data centers, data center operating system (ie Borg) and code and efficiency is going to be a huge deal in the LLM space for the foreseeable future.
He's in the files - including photos - and is named by a victim as being present at a "party". It doesn't necessarily mean he did anything untoward but he did fly to the island and attend an event.
Not everyone, just the nounces, like Gates and Brin here. Do you take their defence? Seems like you do. Why would anyone with solid moral values jump to the defence of nounces?
No it is a real question. You have access to EVERYTHING material & service related this world can offer. Why do you also need to torture children and completely ruin their lives?
Sergey's challenge looks like is not in retiring early or with non-work.
We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the adrenaline rush of experiencing the blues Monday morning!?
Another colleague used to drive up to the parking lot of their previous employer, post lay-off., so that he could feel normal., and he did this for well over 6 - 8 months. Pack bags, wave to his wife and family, drive up in his Porsche to the parking lot and I guess feel normal !?
I took a four-year break from work (2009–2013) and moved to India. The reasons were simple: some family health issues required downtime (though probably not as much as I ended up taking), and I could afford to do this in India in a way I couldn’t in the US. This happened to coincide with the market bottom, but I wasn’t laid off—it was entirely voluntary.
I didn’t experience an identity crisis for a single day. I didn’t feel insecure or anxious about not working. The only real friction came from my family.
One big difference was social life. In India, I was constantly meeting people—connections were easy and organic. In the US, maintaining a daytime social life felt much harder. Everyone is on a treadmill—insurance, income, careers—often not by choice. I know there are ways to build community here, but in India it just happened naturally.
My extended family struggled more than I did. Once it became clear the break wasn’t temporary, there was a kind of quiet depression around it. I initially framed it as “taking a breather” by doing an executive MBA, but the break never really ended.
What eventually brought me back wasn’t overt pressure, but practical limits: my spouse’s mental health, and the constraints of India’s education system for our partially disabled, special-ed child. Those realities mattered more than any career concern.
> One big difference was social life. In India, I was constantly meeting people—connections were easy and organic. In the US, maintaining a daytime social life felt much harder. Everyone is on a treadmill—insurance, income, careers—often not by choice. I know there are ways to build community here, but in India it just happened naturally.
The primary reason for this is the built environment we live in here in the United States. It's very difficult to organically build connections when you have to drive a car somewhere to have basic social interactions. Even some of the items you mention, like insurance and income are very much informed by the requirement to have a car to participate in society.
I don't know if it is build environment or cultural thing. In US showing up at friends, or neighbors unannounced and spend hour or two would be very odd if not downright impolite. But in India it is something everyone would do or at least used to do a 15-20 yrs back when I was there.
One simple reason I think is overall US is very rich so people just can have anything they need on their own and sharing small things which lead to more interaction is simply not needed.
It's a little of both but the built environment is the primary issue.
We have neighbors - sometimes we need someone to grab a package, or we make too much food and we share, &c. or we run into each other walking to a restaurant or through the park. But this isn't the norm. We live in a neighborhood built before the introduction of cars, so homes are built a little bit closer together, but not too close, and we have mixed-use developments and a good level of density to support restaurants and other amenities.
You can't have spontaneous interactions like that easily in the United States because we build too much sprawl, visiting people or showing up to a bar requires a drive, and in the end you wind up just staying at home participating in surrogate activities like social media.
It really comes down solely to cars and car-only infrastructure that degrades our social interactions to an extreme extent.
-edit-
I do want to mention, at least when I was a kid/teenager I recall we used to show up to people's houses uninvited/unannounced too. But we did not talk to our neighbors. That was a weird thing. There are some cultural things here. But also even if we wanted to visit someone, well, gotta hop in the car. Maybe stop and get gas, and the next thing you know, eh it's too much effort. Might as way stay home. That's kind of how that works. The car-only model that is implemented in most of America, particularly the cities not so much rural areas, is a leading cause of cultural and social malaise I believe in the West.
I don’t think the built environment is that determinative. I live in a car-dependent suburb. Walk Score 2.
My neighbor knows the whole street. She knows the garbage men. It’s because she wants to. When I run into her outside, she chats. She walks her dog and chats with dog owners and anyone else she sees.
Easy relationships are available at the grocery store, post office, etc. I’ve been seeing some of the same people working at Costco for years. I don’t know them. It’s not the built environment. I’d need to take effort to build a relationship with them. My neighbor would. I’m simply not so inclined.
This is an incredibly important point - you could remove the car entirely, even make you dependent on others (as you're dependent - or were before self checkout - on the Costco clerk) - and you still would have the disconnect.
Hardship can force it more often, perhaps, but that is accidental and secondary.
In all the times I've traveled on forms of "mass transit" (airplanes, subways, trains) the only time I've ever really talked to someone was at the seat-together dining on a long-distance train. Otherwise you can sit next to someone for 20+ hours and never say much more than "excuse me" if you need to use the restroom.
(Another counter to this is kids, if you have kids and there are kids anywhere within screaming distance, they will find each other and immediately be best friends. Parents get dragged along - https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-2/cafe/ )
It's absolutely the built environment. Your Costco example is a clear example. you drive to Costco, you walk in, grab generic packaged goods without needing to really talk to anyone, and then go to the checkout and use the automated kiosk to make your purchase.
There's no reason to have a human interaction, so why would you bother getting to know the cashier? You're never going to build a relationship with the cashier precisely because of the environmental structure.
Contrast that with walking down the street to a local store that one of your neighbors owns. I bet you would already have a relationship unless you chose not to. Why? Because you'd also see them at your kids birthday party, or you'd see them at the bark down the street, or out on a walk.
I made the choice at Costco to not build a relationship with anyone. There's a guy standing at the entrance checking memberships. I've seen him for years. I don't know him. I don't use the automated kiosk if I have several items. I see some of the cashiers for years. I'm cordial but I don't chat them up. One woman who has been there for years chats with me a bit; I'm cordial but don't reciprocate a ton.
There's a corporate supermarket owned by a Dutch multinational not far from me. I see some of the same employees there every week. One of them loves people and recognizes me. I could stand around and chat with him if I wanted. But I don't want to.
I made this choice. Someone who wants to build relationships chats with people. Folks like that chat with people at the grocery store, on the airplane, waiting in line, etc. Often it leads to nothing, occasionally it leads to something. But the point is, they practice it. I don't. The built environment is not stopping it. Not being in a "local store that one of your neighbors owns" has nothing to do with it either. Plenty of relationships are built in corporate chains.
> One simple reason I think is overall US is very rich so people just can have anything they need on their own and sharing small things which lead to more interaction is simply not needed.
That's a very interesting observation!
I have a theory that reducing "friction" is actually a net negative after a certain point, and US society is way past that point. But everybody keeps doing it, because they're myopically focused on little problems and don't see the big picture or down have a full understanding of all the alternatives.
People need external constraints, because those are the things that keep certain internal drives under control.
It's like when food was scarce it made sense to gorge yourself on calorie rich things and avoid physical effort unless absolutely necessary. Now that food is abundant and it's actually possible to nearly completely eliminate physical activity, we have an obesity epidemic, because those drives no longer hit external limits and are now out of control.
I am 1,5 years into a break. Haven’t had time to feel bored yet. But I do look forward to a 9-5 job again, just for the structure it provides.
If you can afford it, why get back? Now after a dozen years I am bored of my 9-5 but running the race to make my FIRE numbers plus provide some cushion for my son with disabilities but if I had a choice I would quit again ( but I am much older now )
I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity.
I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google.
But that "work as identity" may still be a problem. For a lot of us, what we do is who we are, and so not having any work to do is like not having an identity.
You're describing my father. Now that he's retired his lack of hobbies is really catching up to him. His only hobby has been working and I've noted this about him since I was an adolescent and decided then as something I would not emulate.
A few times I've quit a FAANG job with no plan for after other than to wander, and both times the lack of professional competition meant not just coasting horizontally but that I was actually lowering myself somehow. Hard to explain, and I don't fully understand it.
I also noticed most people, especially women, determine your value by your 'right now'. While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.
life is phase oriented
when i’m working i find retired people boring
when im taking 6+ month break i find the nervous energy of employed people annoying
ultimately, comfort comes from being around like minded people
then again seeking comfort rings hollow to me, even though it’s quite enjoyable in the moment.
This is especially true around NYC, SF, LA. The culture is built around accomplishment and work identity.
Much less true in other places (e.g. Midwest), where community / taking care of others is valued.
The people worth knowing were the ones enthusiastically socializing with me after uttering that phrase.
>While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.
The proper term is "Funemployed"
> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" [..]
Risking a stereotype. In my experience from traveling the world it's a tell-tale sign for being from a culture heavily influenced by the Protestant work ethic. Introduce yourself like that in Spain, Italy, or Brazil and you'll get strange looks.
On the flip side, I've found that people who do not define themselves through their work primarily often do so through family. My younger self is certainly guilty of giving someone a strange look when within the first five minutes of meeting them, they told me whose cousin they were.
In a business/formal context it would be normal to introduce yourself like this in the countries you've mentioned.
Do people introduce themselves like that in informal contexts in the USA? If so that's indeed a bit weird, and more a topic you would start talking about for small talk or if someone asked about it.
I would find it strange if someone introduced themselves to me with their business title. I sometimes ask "what do you do for a living?" as small talk, but that's solicited.
Even when it's solicited, I think it's weird. I don't tell people what I do for a living when I introduce myself. And when they ask, I tell them I'm an exotic dancer. It's a silly joke (since I'm a fat 50 year old) that tends to break the ice and lighten up the conversation. In general, I think small-talking about what you do for a living is not really interesting to people, and just allows them to silently put you somewhere on their mental totem pole of importance. Better to talk about actual interests.
> Better to talk about actual interests.
For many people, what they do for work is by far their biggest interest.
Many people have few to zero hobbies. They fill their days with work and then distraction.
Depends on where. In big city yes
Americans don't usually have friends. Just "contacts". Working age "parties" are often just cloaked networking events.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It is very much true in my opinion, especially so for the big coastal metro areas.
Not very common as the intro, but pretty common around here (bay area) to get asked that pretty soon after the intro. I don't like it, and I wished people didn't focus so much on it though.
Agree, it's definitely a cultural thing.
I've also lived on a small island where on first meeting, two locals will work out how they're related. I guess similar to the cousin thing.
In the city I currently live in, it's fairly normal for locals to ask where another local went to school within 5 mins of meeting them, because that establishes an identity here.
First time I was in San Francisco and someone introduced themselves like that, going even beyond, was indeed a super weird experience being a brazilian.
Correct. If you said your title in Spain, you'll get a strange look and someone might respond with "why would you tell me that?". No one there cares what you do for work.
What is the point of the "I'm Marcus" part of your introduction? Reading your post I get the impression it has zero value, or at least you think so.
> Hi, I'm Marcus
> What do you do Marcus
> I'm on a break now, but I used to be a director of IT
Is this really difficult? Seems really easy, and I was never a director of anything. Maybe that's the problem.
For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem. That is I guess the point the person you were replying to was trying to make.
It's also not really weird for a job to become such a big part of your identity, when people spend most of their time at work or at home thinking about their work.
A couple years ago a friend of mine mentioned that he had known another mutual friend of ours for many years, much longer than I would have guessed. I asked him "what does he do?" and he thought for a moment before saying "you know ... I have no idea, it has never come up".
Definitely one of his more interesting qualities.
I don't know if this is acceptable in the US, but I always found it distasteful when people ask about your job 30 seconds into meeting you. I think it's much more polite to talk about generic stuff until jobs or skills come up naturally. Sometimes, they just never do, and that's fine. Need to know!
>For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem.
That's only 1/2 of the dynamic. People also like to assign an identity to others.
For example, if I say, "I'm semi-retired." ... the follow-up question is always "Oh, so what did you do before that?" ... which is polite coded-speak for, "Did you inherit money or what work did you do for money that put you in the position to do that?"
People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc. Having a "no identity" stance isn't really a satisfactory answer for many listeners. They want to know more.
EDIT to replies: I do understand the harmless "small talk" aspect. I should've added more to re-emphasize the "people assigning identity" aspect.
Once I reply to the followup question with "Oh, I used to do consulting for finance" what then happens is others then introduce me as "And this is jasode -- he was a consultant for X". My ex-consultant life that I last did over 15 years ago is now part of a tagline/subheading associated with my name even though I never intended it.
The point is other people have this irresistible urge to "fill in the blank" with an identity -- especially an identity that is tied to how one earned money. I'm not complaining about this and it's just an observation of what humans naturally do.
It's also a low risk topic that can generate lots of follow up questions. It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life? Sure, you're not your job or your career, but it's also a very normal part about getting to know someone and I'm not sure equating it to some way of gauging success levels is necessarily to right way to think about it.
>It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life?
Having a natural ebb & flow to conversation is all true but that's not the issue. Let me restate it differently.
It's ok and natural to ask what people do/did for work. It's also natural to respond and share what was a significant aspect of their life.
The meta-observation is: others then like to compress whatever life narrative they hear into a "shorthand" or "identity" -- even if the recipient never intended it to be his/her identity. Several parent comments mention "their work being their identity is the problem". My point is that the identity we get tagged with is often outside of our control and we didn't create the problem of work being our identity.
My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant". For that identity to change, I'd have to do something new that was significant enough to override that ... such as... get into another career, open a restaurant, become founder of a startup, etc.
How does one have "no identity related to their job"? Sometimes you can't unless one wants to be evasive about what one does to earn money.
> My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant" … How does one have "no identity related to their job"?
The obvious answer is to have some other identifier that supersedes the job. Do you have some other interest or hobby that you spend your time doing? That you talk about all the time?
People get associated with their job because it’s probably the thing they spend the most time on and it’s also a common topic of conversation. If every time someone asked you about your job you said, “it’s good” and steered the conversation into a story about your latest epic ski trip, you’d probably be the “guy who skis” instead of the “ex-consultant”.
Situations like this work as a filter of sorts (If you’re so obsessed with measuring relative status/prestige that you want to reduce me to a job title, we’re probably not going to be friends?).
The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.
But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.
You can often politely dodge probing questions about your employment. When someone, for the purpose of small talk, asks me what I do for a living I just say I'm an exotic dancer or a runway model. It's funny and breaks the ice a little. Then I'll ask them about their watch or something. If they insist "no, really, what do you do for a living??" I'll politely say I work with computers and again try to move on. Very rarely I'll get someone who won't drop it "come on, WHAT COMPANY???" and at that point I know they're really not interested in talking--they just want to stack rank me in terms of importance or salary or whatever and I politely dip.
>It's also a low risk topic
In modern life, yes. I wonder if it was such a low risk topic as we moved towards the past? For example the fear of the stranger is something that is very common in past writing across a number of cultures. If you met a stranger and they said they were a soldier it would have different ramifications than if they said they were a baker. Also in smaller social groups that required the work of everyone to survive it was a way of measuring the resources available in said group.
It is not just about assigning identity to others.
I am probing for topics of mutual interest, or topics that make other people passionate, to learn more about them generally.
In some people, this is completely orthogonal to their careers, but most of the time, there is an overlap. Like, I haven't yet met a railway engineer who wasn't a raging railway nerd at the same time.
> People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc.
I definitely find this more true in some cultures. e.g. silicon valley, it seems people want to know where you're at on the "hierarchy". Many parts of Asia too, you get treated differently if you're a low level worker, regular worker, executive etc.
Well, the "I'm Marcus" part is saying "I would like you to call me Marcus" I guess.
You're right, it is easy to say. But there's an identity and professional pride and all sorts of stuff wrapped up in the job title that isn't so easy to let go of.
It also leads on to questions like "and what are you doing now?" which get to "I'm lazing around doing nothing because my mental health took a hammering while I was IT Director", and so on. It's all so much easier and tidier with the job title.
Sounds really sad. I am not a director of anything, I probably make almost nothing compared to you, and yet I know who I am outside of my job. I have friends who value who I am, regardless of my job or even between jobs. I would not trade places with you for all the money in the world. I would not have any use for all that money then.
It's like when people say their pronouns, but for nouns.
I’ve found asking “what do you like to do” vs “what do you do” to produce much more interesting conversation.
I really don't like getting asked what I do for a living. I exchange labour for money somewhere out of necessity, what's at all interesting about that? What I do in my free time is who I am, and that's much more interesting to talk about, to me.
I don’t like getting asked what I do for hobbies. The real answer I want to give is “none of your business”, but I’m polite enough to never say that, so it gets awkward.
Getting asked what I do for a living is totally fine. It’s on my website, the whole world can find out if they bother to search. I’ll save you a search.
The point is people are different. Not everyone wants to share their private interests with you, especially if you just met. What you consider interesting conversation, well, for some of us it’s just intrusive. I also don’t care what you like to do 99% of the time. I’ve been socially forced to sit through way too many of these “interesting conversations”.
Could we be thinking about different social situations? I’m not turning to people on the bus and asking what their hobbies are. And it’s not my first question of people visiting my office happy hour.
If you’re at my home for dinner, I hope anyone that still feels this way does answer “the details of my private life are none of your business” when I’m trying to get to know them as a friend, so I know never to waste another good meal on them.
I sometimes joke and say that I type for a living, not entirely untrue. But I've found that sometimes people are offended if I answer their question evasively
I work in a buttons factory
I always ask “What do you do for fun?”
Same! I love the pregnant pause after "What do you do..." as they start to mentally draw up their usual work spiel before adding the "...for fun" to flip the conversation around and actually get their brain thinking and exploring beyond the standard conversation flows.
Who were you before you got a job? No one? Nothing?
I identify more with myself as a child than I ever did with my work.
Why would I identify with someone else’s goals that I’m being paid to help achieve?
If you ever get to talk to people who are more than laborers trading time for dollars, it is great fun. When dollars are just one of the many rewards from their career (where a person spends like 80% of their life energy), you get to hear a lot of passion, learning and growth. It really is a whole different way to live.
After a decade, "founder of X that I no longer work at" is considered a lame answer. People want to know what you are doing now, not your highest claim to status of your entire life.
> When people asked "what do you do?"
"I mostly breathe. It's a bore but you gotta do it"
"I meant for a living"
"Same"
"waste management"
I'd say we moreso produce waste than manage it as humans. We seem actually pretty bad at managing it unfortunately.
When I lived in the bay area for a few years, everybody would tell you where they worked, and if you didn't tell them, they'd ask. Since moving to Portland, I've definitely noticed that people are much more interested in what you do during your leisure time.
Make up a name, print some business cards, and be a "director" (or whatever title you like) of your own Potemkin company.
> When people asked "what do you do?"
I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often. In CA people ask that so they can mentally rank you as worth their time or not. Elsewhere, people ask you how your weekend went, or how your family is. One of the awesome parts of moving to Austin was not hearing that as the first question as much.
> I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often.
I moved to California a few years ago from the Least Coast (insert shaka, surfer, wave emojis here) and had multiple other out-of-towners in the same situation as me say the exact opposite at a party. They all were adamant that they had yet to hear "what do you do [for a living]?" since they'd moved as they did ad nauseum when they lived on the other side of the country.
I've not noticed either way. My pet theory is that people hear this frequently if their social and professional lives bleed into each other which they do if one lives in a town dominated by a specific industry or profession. Those moving westward during COVID and remote work suddenly had to contend with this much less.
Never hear that question either. I don’t ask it either. I’ve actually been pretty successful but asking that question seems to rank someone on a scale that does not reflect their amazing contributions to society.
I ask because a) I'm interested in the same way that a child is in what people's jobs are and b) it gives me a frame of reference for interacting with them conversationally vis a vis common ground.
Wealth signaling still seems to me to be done primarily by conspicuous consumption and expensive hobbies.
> "what do you do?"
"Whatever I feel like"
> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>"
Tech bros would mock Finance bros who would open a conversation with anyone who would listen with "Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Goldman Sachs" and yet here we are now ...
"Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Google"
Hoo boy, this is definitely a weird one to navigate, especially if you have a weird set of roles. It takes time to settle various threads and figure out how to address this.
I don't get this. Just find a coworking space and work on a FOSS project.
Seriously. There are so many opportunities to give back to society. One does not need formal employment to be fulfilled.
I will say in Sergey Brin’s case, he had the unique opportunity to go back to work with the best and brightest without any friction, and nobody could tell him “hey maybe your credentials don’t quite stack up high enough for this department yeah?”
But for the rest of us, there’s FOSS, there’s computer repair, home automation, day trading a small fraction of your wealth, volunteer work at hospitals and libraries, gig work apps like taskrabbit…
If you are bored after being away from work for even a month, I’m not sure I could be friends with you.
I left Google to build an open source project a long time ago. A big part of the appeal was being able to have something to work on that's truly mine. Sergey already has something that's his and it's called Google. So I think he belongs there.
The world thanks you for your work. Which one of yours is your favorite?
I think it's difficult for a normal brain to live with the low impact of another project while you created Google. Also, the speed of a personal developer is nothing compared with the speed of a software engineering area or company. You can easily feel like a turtle even working on an interesting project.
These people could have bought a dirt bike or mountain bike and had the time of their life. I don't get it.
I think I’d take directing big things at Google over riding a dirt bike…
I’m not actually sure what you don’t get.
I’m all for not living a lower level grind and riding a dirt bike. Most jobs simply aren’t interesting.
It’s the lack of imagination that’s sad.
If you're a director at Google you can probably afford a pretty damn nice dirt bike if that's your jam
Regretting not being able to create more shareholder value on your deathbed.
So very sad.
Depends on the shareholder. At Sergey Brin's level, that shareholder value shapes the future of humanity, a legacy affecting many more people and will last far longer than spending time with single, or even double digit number of children.
I can't really tell what you're trying to say, do you really think the shareholder value of Google is positively aligned with the future of humanity? As in: If Google builds a really good AI and makes a lot of money from that, this will be a net positive for the world?
Mental illness. They tied their entire sense of self to some job at some company. Their body belongs in some parking lot on somebody's schedule.
A mentally healthy person wants to be helpful. They want to be seen as helpful and they expect others around them to be helpful as well. This is the foundation of "pro-social" behavior: I benefit the group as much or more than the group benefits me.
Tying your identity to the place where you're helpful and where that help is appreciated and acknowledged isn't mental illness.
But this person was laid off. His help was (apparently) not appreciated, and he's not helping anyone by sitting alone in his car on the parking lot.
Do you think it is healthy behavior to go to a parking lot at 0900 every day and do nothing because you mentally cannot face the idea of not going to an office?
Coping mechanisms are complex and diverse. The individual in question lost a major source of meaning-making in their life and was struggling to cope with that loss. I don't believe this is any less healthy than other common responses, which range from societal withdrawal to substance abuse.
> His help was (apparently) not appreciated
That's just your take. We don't know where he sat in the team, so we can assume the idea that he wasn't appreciated by his teammates as incorrect. He didn't make the cut based on unknown metrics from upper management, but they have their own reasons for doing things.
Getting in to the parking lot of the old office sounds way healthier than not making it out of bed at all.
What a weird dichotomy. It's not between "sitting in your old employers' parking lot" and "lying in bed all day", it's between "sitting in your old employers' parking lot" and "learning new skills", "finding a new job", "discovering new hobbies", "spending more time with your loved ones" or almost anything else.
Instead he chose to sit alone in a parking lot so he could feel "normal". Feeling compelled to do a specific action (excluding things like breathing) just to feel normal has a name, and that name is "addiction". It is not usually considered a good thing.
They could go anywhere though - why not go to a coffee shop at 9 with a laptop or on a morning hike? I agree sitting in bed depressed would be bad but it seems like avoiding the issue to specifically sit in the parking lot of an old employer.
At minimum I think it would be healthier to tie part of your identify to an aspect of your career you enjoy rather than a specific employer itself.
> Getting in to the parking lot of the old office sounds way healthier than not making it out of bed at all.
Missing your ex and lying around depressed in bed is less unhealthy than getting into the car and sitting outside their house.
You've cherry-picked a situation where there is an obvious social norm being broken. A better example would be going to the park and sitting on the bench you used to sit on with your ex. I agree with GP that this is healthier than lying despondent in bed.
I hear what you're saying, but routines, especially long-lived, are difficult to break/change. It's normal to have phantom limbs when they are cut off.
I recently rewatched a Tested Q&A where Adam Savage discussed his post-Mythbusters life; his framing of that duality was very similar: https://youtu.be/2tZ0EGJIgD8?t=322.
It aligns with a common design principle: constraints often make a problem space easier to navigate. I suspect life is similar. Having limited time creates a "specialness" that is easily lost when you suddenly have an infinite amount of time at your disposal.
It's not THAT bad for me, but I really can't take vacation days for "nothing". I struggle if I don't have plans and work really forces one to have some structure. If you need the structure and don't have any plans post lay-off, I can believe the struggle to "let go" and do something better.
That must be what it's like to have a job where you feel like you're doing something interesting and meaningful.
> drive up in his Porsche to the parking lot
I wonder if that'd still be the case should he drive a Ford Focus.
If he drove a Ford Focus and did this everyday, I bet they would have called the police.
he should have carved into the parking lot "Brooks Was Here"
Sounds a bit... Neurodivergent.
‘You don’t have to be neurodivergent to work here… …but it helps!’
I am guessing if you have been doing this daily for a couple decades then the neurodivergence is not going through this. I assume any normal person will find it hard to not do any kind of work and if you spent 20 years of your life doing tech, how useful are in the "real" world. Unless you have been doing handy work on the sides, spoiler alert: not much.
Wasn't sergey forced out for hitting on employees? It seems pretty reasonable for him to be unhappy with a forced retirement and ultimately unwind it now that meeto is pretty much over.
Human beings tend to enjoy patterns. Being pushed out of a pattern engages a lot of survival instincts.
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When you define yourself solely by work, you lose your entire identity when you retire. Most people don't have hobbies, so work is literally the one thing they have in their lives.
This is why people should have an opportunity to semi-retire when they are still young. A year or two. United States safety net does not really allow that unless you are loaded already.
It's very helpful to zoom out and do LIFE for a change. I got laid off three years ago, started my own project. Didn't take off, but also two mini-mes showed up during that time, and I am infinitely grateful that I could punt on work and just be there.
Hashtag blessed and all. That backrent I owe now, well, that's a bitch.
English surnames would seem to indicate being identified by one’s work has a long history (smith, miller, cooper, …)
It's really interesting that my comment here where I said that employment can inflict brain damage got flagged even though previous comment described behavior that would be obviously significant clinical symptom if it was caused by anything else as it is irrational and detrimental.
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That is really not healthy.
What a sad way to live life, for a man to miss the chains he wears in enslavement, for he knows nothing else
It's been great to see. Google's AI efforts have truly seen a resurgence in quality with his return. What I enjoy about this article is the fact that it presents a view that now seems relatively rare: the idea that you may have a purpose beyond pleasure and that pursuing that purpose is a more fulfilling pleasure than any comfort you could give yourself.
I think that kind of thing strikes many people. Sometimes like with Socrates and his daimonion which restrained him from risk and other times like with one of my favourite lines in all literature where Ahab of Moby Dick remarks:
> What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me?
I find so much of this relatable in my own way, billions absent. It's good to see there are others who feel this way. Community from afar.
I don't buy this narrative (notwithstanding that great commencement speeches are almost always hyperbole). The way I see it Sergey HAD to come back or risk the poorly managed mess that is google completely drop the AI leadership . It proves again that all thats good in Google happened exclusively because of the two founders and that their CEO is not an effective leader at all.
Basically yeah, a lot of people just keeping the lights on
I've been curious how much the Facebook IPO affected the industry also
We know they lied about video metrics; everyone has to pivot to video to stay competitive (with fradulent metrics)
Given the suspicion of fake accounts and further ad fraud how much have companies felt they have to follow trends rather than come up with sort of, their own organic business models
I'd have guessed that Google's rapid advance with Gemini was more due to the merger of Google Brain with DeepMind under Demis Hassabis than the return of Sergey Brin.
I remember seeing an interview (Dwarkesh?) with Sholto Douglas who had been working at Google at the time (now at Anthropic) who said he would work late there and the only other person was Sergey Brin, apparently wanting to be part of (or following) the development/training process.
To be fair, working late doesn't have quite the same effect when nobody is going to judge you for not coming in on time or at all the next day.
My doctor had a renowned research record, retired at 68 but got bored, and went back to work. Whilst I was in hospital, I got to observe him throughout the work day.
I don't mean this in a creepy way at all, but I got the impression the greatest source of joy was hanging around with younger people. A hungry grad, a cleaner, a nurse, male, female, whatever.
I'm sure he enjoyed his peers as well, but I could detect a shade of boredom of those interactions, which inevitably had stress and responsibility attached.
I think what I'm trying to say is that work isn't just about challenge, it's about socialization and having fun. And one of the greatest benefits of being financially independent is being able to navigate to those kinds of moments without the pressure of being on the make.
Sergey is brilliant but it's really the lightsaber that is super voting shares that make him uniquely empowered to slash through Google's immense bureaucracy.
I think being the founder of Google gives him more political capital at Google than anything on paper. As a controlling member of the board there's a variety of things he can do with that hammer, but just simply being who he is, not even just on the org chart, has got to be worth way more.
The ghost of Steve Jobs would like a word with you.
Are you referring to his firing in the 80s? That was because he was supposedly a jerk at the time and no one wanted to deal with him.
The very fact that he (or anyone in a similar position) holds the hammer is enough to guarantee that he will very seldom have to swing it.
this seems an idealistic view, my cynical view is that if King Lear gives up all his legal paper power he will find out nobody cares who the hell he is and take advantage of him without remorse.
In my experience (at a much smaller scale than these guys, of course) the legal papers power is more of a formality. It’s the soft power tied up in knowledge, relationships, trust and goodwill that really count.
Right up until the point that the person with the legal power yanks the rug from under you.
That’s when you find out if the soft power you’ve accrued is sufficient.
What you describe is a benevolent dictator.
Looking at the two as separate parts ends up forcing the dance apart from the dancer no
Brin wasn’t bothered to wield any of that power to try to arrest the decline in Google’s search quality. He wasn’t bothered to direct the Chrome team to support MathML, or to bring back Google Reader, or do anything about a hundred small insults like, say, the deletion of YouTube comments with URLs to keep the rubes inside the casino. But he was able and willing to come back and wield his clout because he was bored and wanted to play with AI. As someone who’s old enough to remember how much leeway Google used to get from governments and the public at large on the basis that Page and Brin were nice young men who could be relied on to be responsible stewards it’s a little galling. Don’t give Mr. Brin any belly-rubs until he tells us when Reader is coming back.
Everything you are mentioning are user issues. AI search myspacing googles ad business is an investor issue.
User issues have an annoying habit of eventually becoming investor issues so you better deal with them while they are still 'just' user issues.
They're all Google issues.
When you're the 900 lbs. gorilla, you can get away with a whole lotta shit.
And "Don't Be Evil" was a long time ago in a Google far, far away.
He saw AI as an existential threat to Google.
Right, though it's also reasonably clear that part of the story there is that he finds a high-stakes AI race personally interesting and exciting on a technical and a business level. Conversely it's also fairly clear that he finds doing anything about the steady encrudification of Google to be a big snooze. (Even though it may also be a long-term, though less dramatic, problem for the company's future health, exactly the sort of long-term issue which Google's dual-stock structure was supposed to empower Page and Brin to care about and act on.) But in any case, whatever his mix of motivations are, he's able to act within Google on things he cares about. He is also perfectly able to act on a number of the issues at Google which have significantly bad effects on its users and on the population of Earth at large. (Not all of them, to be sure: there are clearly some problems which would be very hard to fix, alongside a number of no-brainers.) He evidently just isn't willing, because he doesn't care about them.
Enshittification of existing money making activities of Google independently of AI is also an existential threat. Parts of the threat are codependent on AI, but there is little reason to open the door wider as they have.
There are no obvious threats to AdWords (aside from LLM chatbots) and YouTube.
I loved google reader, many people were blogging and social network was "ick" as people immediately associated the term with okcupid/friendster(myspace?) and reader was decentralised and encouraged all walks of life to participate... maybe I just missed the vibes back then, gosh I was so hopeful
Not just links, either
Youtube comments are completely censored in real time with some sort of AI, it's horrible
The videos too. Geopolitical commentators cannot show e.g. an explosion in Ukraine caused by a drone, and they say "T" instead of "terrorist", and "kaboomed" instead of "killed", etc. Doing so may see the vid demonetized or even taken down.
OTOH deep fake gepolitical commentators are all over the place, and it is allowed (sometimes Youtube shows a label, sometimes the channel itself describes itself as a "fan channel" of the commentator, and not the real deal. Sometimes e.g. for Shorts you can see in the info whether things are AI generated).
Yet Google cant remove porn bots with 99% similar usernames or avatars.
I do think about this in the context of other tech companies, the "bidirectionality of enforcement", or whatever you want to call it
Let's say you have Facebook, which is notorious for banning people yet never seems to ban the things people report that should be banned. That's a real life example, but take any hypothetical company
If someone posts x bad thing and doesn't get banned, do we immediately take our torches and storm the premeses to protest? Maybe, maybe not; "look, scale is hard" (and sometimes calls to remove things outright get politicized, as seen in the last few years, so sometimes it's a tricky line)
That would be... not fine, but more fine than it is now. The lack of fairness in the bidirectionality ensures that you, Joe Schmoe, get a month ban for calling someone a jerk while the most egregious hate or racism or... anything... gets a quick check followed by This Does Not Violate Our Community Guidelines
(And of course because these services are monopolies, well, too bad, you just have to suffer. Hope you don't need the information from that Facebook page, because Facebook will tend to make it borderline impossible to view something public without an account)
I think companies like Google dont even try like they are "Too Big to be Regulated".
Facebook is much worse because everyghing on there is user gemerated. Any small company would be just crushed by governments if they would have similar issues.
I think they are similar to FedEx. FedEx knows that millions of packages per day are transporting illegal goods, any bad enough accident shows it. However, FedEx would absolutely go bankrupt if they tried to open every package and make sure the contents were good. At the end of the day, that's the government's job.
If the DEA and ATF wants to staff every shipping hub with people checking every package, that's fine by them (though admittedly it would hurt revenues).
For Google and Facebook and all the other user-content sites, it's just impossible to actually, fully uphold the law themselves, so their best bet is just to try to make it a pleasant experience for the users and leave upholding the law to the upholders of the law.
That's great and all, but you're anthropomorphizing the advertisement company.
Where?
Maybe a spin on "anthropomorphize Larry Ellison at your peril"?
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If I became financially independent tomorrow I'd go straight to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle to help build that. I don't think we've evolved to be healthy and idle. In retirement you can choose what to do, and volunteering on some nerdy construction project sounds amazing.
Thanks for sharing this link! I'd never heard of it before, and it is fascinating.
> Sergey Brin’s lesson for the rest of us
Is it? I know people who are really happy without doing much in their retirement. Probably because they weren't workaholics.
To my mind, if one doesn't have hobbies during the working years, then they will struggle to find purpose when they retite.
This is kinda right, kinda wrong. I was a workaholic - I was a VP of engineering at Google. I'm doing fine retired.
You don't have to find purpose when you retire
At all.
Instead, you just have to be willing to face each day when the day has no expectations. You can do anything you want, and decide you love it, hate it, whatever. You can do it again the next day, or not. you can hate it one day and love it the next. It's completely up to you.
For some people, this lack of structure is crushing. For others, it's liberating.
It's similar to having spent significant time alone as an adult - some people can't deal with it, some can.
I meet a lot of people who are like "I haven't figured out what i will do when i retire". These are the people i worry about, because there isn't anything to figure out. They want a structure that probably won't exist. They will likely tire of trying to force their own structure on it, and seek structure elsewhere (IE work).
In the past 3 weeks i've done the following:
Building powered paper airplanes with the kids
Mentoring high school and college students
Advising startups.
Woodworking
Hacking on CNC machines
Hacking on minecraft mods.
Hacking on compilers.
Playing video games.
and a lot more.
The next 3 weeks may be the same or different, depending on lots of things (mood, energy, schedules).
There are also days i do nothing cool or useful at all, and feel great (and unapologetic - nobody gets to judge my retirement but me, my spouse, and my kids :P) about it
The world is really big, and has lots to do. You just have to be able to drive yourself because you aren't being forced into doing anything at all.
In the end - for some i also feel it's similar to divorce - lots of people don't get divorced because they don't want to deal with being alone.
Retirement similarly forces you to spend a lot of time with yourself (even if you have an SO and even if they are retired). Lots of people don't like that, at all, for various reasons. Work lets them ignore it.
Just wanted to say, one of the exciting things I realized when I joined Google was that the maintainer of GDB was my org's director at that time. Not sure how much it matters, but it gave me confidence in the leadership to know that someone who knows the details is running the show at the top. It made me trust the leadership chain much more than I normally would otherwise.
Thanks - it is truly and greatly appreciated :)
I wonder if this was the LOL[1] days - looking back on it, it's hard to believe how much people outside the org cared about the name, and us trying to not take ourselves too seriously.
[1] For everyone else, at one point we named the org Languages, Optimizations, and Libraries. People either loved or hated it.
This! People need to get a life. I wouldn't have any trouble keeping myself busy after retirement. I do not have nearly enough time for the things I really WANT to do beside work.
This is also my sentiment.
I am saving up to retire early. If I mention this to friends, most look at me with big eyes and ask “But what will you spend your day on then!?” in a sceptical tone.
I imagine they think I want to drink beers and play golf all day every day, or something like that.
I’m a bit heart broken, that so many of my friends cannot imagine being masters of their own time, without thinking it would be bad for them and/or unproductive.
Yes, I have experienced exactly the same with friends and find it bizarre - essentially having total freedom seems to scare some people. Is it because we have been told what to do our whole life and so the thought of having to determine our own destiny each day is too much for some?
Well, my friends immediately assume I want some luxurious self-indulgent perpetual vacation/holiday-thing.
They seem relieved when I explain it’s more of the perpetual weekend I’m aiming for: sleeping till I wake, reading, cooking, hanging with friends and family, coding on my FOSS projects etc.
I think it's also a uniquely American thing. We are so defined by our work and our careers here. It's kind of sad, in my opinion, but that's the reality.
I think that's the one silver lining of the pandemic's lockdowns; some people were at home again for extended periods of time, finding themselves with a lot more free time and in a place that wasn't just for eating and sleeping.
I also have think that's a substantial reason behind the RTO push: some people found their lives empty without the office social environment, even after two years, and enough of them had the power to change it.
Yea I've noticed this is the singular difference between those that enjoy early retirement and are successful doing it and those that aren't. Many ambitious people end up wrapping their entire identity up with work and feel completely lost with that gone. It's why so many successful founders throw themselves into new startups right after an exit, despite having way more than enough to retire. Personally, I've taken some time off since selling my startup and I've been so busy learning new things and building new hobbies that I can't imagine going back! Maybe I will one day, but it will likely involve something I've learned from during this time
Why? Why can work noy be your retirement plan as well? I have benefitted a lot from professors who have kept teaching (voluntarily) till physically possible.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is one big reason.
As a developer if, let's say, AI does make my profession no longer a viable option monetarily, what would happen if my entire identity is tied to it?
You cannot fully control your career no matter what. Many external factors can affect it and you deeply if that's your identity.
What if you can't even teach after retiring because nobody else cares about it?
For me it's about risk/reward and unfortunately in our current system the fact that all my efforts reward someone else disproportionately more completely taints it.
Yes. People are so much more enjoyable and interesting when they have a life, go out, have hobbies, do things a little different to everyone else.
From observing my parents and other elders, it isn't "work" in the job sense that we all need. It is feeling needed by others. This can be accomplished by being an active grandparent, charity(active volunteering not just allocating money), open-source contribution, mentoring.
It can be something other than a job. It just can't be done alone.
We are social creatures and need to be needed by each other. Luckily there are plenty of people in need.
My grandmother said it like this, "sometimes people need to help more than people need help" in the context of a much younger me asking effectively why she bothered (I forget the context). That has stuck with me for years.
This is a common misconception. I’m quite happy not being social and have absolutely no need to be needed.
I FIREd 3 years ago and don’t miss working one bit.
I think leaving work becomes more difficult for those who do need to feel valued and especially if they don’t have interests outside of it. There are many people like that.
Totally, it's "work" in the sense that you're doing something to contribute to the world, even if it's something small or mostly unimpactful. Those kinds of things provide internal fulfillment, in my experience.
> It is feeling needed by others.
A more general need from what I see is to engage with and to accomplish non-trivial things.
For some it might be helping others people, for others it might be learning, researching or creating.
To each their own.
> It is feeling needed by others.
My perspective on these things have changed when I saw a successful old friend of mine thank his friend for asking his help. I feel like being asked to help by a friend might actually be a privilege sometimes.
I think it definitely is - simply because it means you are approachable enough (and knowledgable enough) that people feel both comfortable enough to ask and see you as a reliable resource.
>> We are social creatures and need to be needed by each other.
I think this was illustrated well in the movie I Am Legend with Will Smith. He creates artificial situations where he is interacting with mannequins in order to fulfill this very basic need.
Its interesting that this part of the movie was missed by a lot of friends and family until I pointed it out to them.
Exactly, the prevalence of the word "work" in this conversation is such a telling indicator of what 'western' culture-at-large has been taught to focus on
I agree with this, although I prefer to phrase it as "being useful to others (and appreciated)".
I'd think this is universal but it's interesting to see others in this thread that disagree.
To nitpick a little bit, it’s not just feeling needed by others, but also doing things that are meaningful.
"If you want to stay youthful stay useful!"
I would have never believed this is a thing until I saw it happen near me.
Company got sold, the owners were great and made sure everyone was taken care of.
Almost all the owners are now back working in one way or another. It's about +5 year since the sale.
- 1 spent the first year travelling
- 1 did loads of house stuff
- 2 got really deep into woodworking
Still the same people; I just think they got bored of the banality.
> The tech founder’s return to full-time work is a reminder that even billions can’t guarantee a happy retirement if you don’t also do this.
Is this generated by AI? English is all over the place in the article.
As soon as I saw that I lost interest in reading it. Asked ChatGPT to summarize it for me.
(If they used AI to create the article and put these baits in there, I might as well skip all the nonsense and let AI consume it for me.)
I got a sense that it was written partially by AI.
> Adherents of the popular financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement scrimp and sacrifice to retire early. Only for many of them to discover their dream of post-work life does not match reality.
I think the more important goal in FIRE is the 'FI' part - financial independence. Something that allows you to retire early - not necessary that you have to use this privilage. Something that allows you to next day take a day off or week off or 1 year sabbatical to recharge without asking anyone for permission or worrying if you will be able to pay the bills.
I think even in 4-hour-workweek Tim Ferriss called it taking mini-retirements throughout your life rather than at the end of you life.
FIYNTBOM
Financial Independence, You're Not The Boss Of Me.
Once you're financially independent, at a level that you're comfortable with, you don't have to put up with crappy bosses.
If you're Sergey Brin, you kind of don't really have a boss, do you?
If you "retire" into working at a hardware store, or volunteering at the Humane Society, or just shifting into a lower-stress job...
Well, that's the dream, isn't it?
I was so happy when I realized that, unless there were dramatic shifts in the markets, I would always be able to find "decent" work for great wages. And maybe I could be patient and find "good" work for "pretty great" wages.
Once I had that level of comfort, I was way, way more brave at work. I thought, "Well, they could fire me for their own reasons, any day. So, I might as well do The Right Thing™. If they fire me for doing The Right Thing™, well, I didn't really want to work there anyway, did I?"
And then there were dramatic shifts in the markets, lol. But fortunately for me, I had built up a nest egg, and now I've shifted into a lower-stress job.
I honestly don't know what advice I'd give to younger folks. Move to Norway?
I think this is just an extension of "Fuck you money"
I think you're very close to being right...
But I think "Fuck you money" implies, "I honestly don't have to worry about money, ever again."
Now, we all have different definitions for that, but the kind of thing I was talking about is definitely not "Fuck you money," to me.
I think if I had "Fuck you money," my best friends and close family would all have their medical debts paid off. I think my parents and in-laws would have their mortgages paid off.
That is what they call "fuck me money". As in, fuck me I'll just pay it.
FUM is the freedom to walk away. FMM is the power make your own terms.
It’s more than just money, it’s how you set up your life to be resilient to contingencies. For example finding a compatible life partner. For example finding happiness without lifestyle inflation and breaking free from the hedonic treadmill. Or perhaps having a good lifestyle business for some people. Or having extended family support nearby. I call these things unfuckwithability. Money is a big part of it, but may not be the biggest missing piece for many people.
Your username checks out re: moving to Scandinavia haha
I might have missed it, but I don't see this quote in the article. Either way, it feels disingenuous when a place like business insider posts these criticisms of FIRE like it is the ultimate gotcha.
Finding a purpose outside of work seems like the main issue most people struggle with when doing FIRE. Once you get going, the saving is automatic and addictive to some, but figuring out what to do with your life to give it meaning outside of a traditional work context is not just an issue with FIRE.
The quote is in the article. You may have to click to expand below the jump.
After FIRE I started building my own small to medium projects. Emulators, tools, games, some available to the public. I tell people I'm a full time software developer who does remote consulting gigs (the last not true but justifies my FIRE income)
Would you mind me asking what age you were when you retired? I'm 28 and five years into my boring corpo career and need something to lust after lol
If you want something to lust after, I recommend you find a project you care about getting involved in right now, literally today. The things that make us happy are doing something we care about every day, not seeking long-term goals.
47. I didn't wait for FIRE to plan the projects, I had a notebook of ideas I collected over the years and had studied the necessary skills to put them in action throughout my work life.
Additionally, I could see myself going back to work at a company if I saw a truly exciting project. But that excludes around 98% of the jobs I see out there.
No, the next generation of privacy management experiences that will impact billions of users configuring their privacy settings isn't interesting.
Nothing will make a boring corpo job not-boring, but one thing that can help mix it up is to change which boring corpo job you're doing once or twice a decade. Five years is a decent stint at one job. Worth taking a look around and seeing if an opportunity catches your eye.
I'm not doing FIRE, I have children and just live below my means. I'm hoping to retire around 55 assuming the AI bubble doesn't nuke everyones portfolio.
If that’s a real concern of yours, maybe park what you think you’ll need in money market funds / gold (FX hedge)?
The typical FIRE requires compounding growth. You start with portfolio worth 25 years of expenses but if expenses keep on growing due to inflation and portfolio shrinks because of expenses and zero growth, it can get hairy quite fast.
There are various ways to look at numbers but my thumb rule is 4% inflation 9% growth keeps you perennially happy with some choppy years of course. 4% inflation 9% growth implies you can withdraw 4-5% every year and still have equivalent portfolio in inflated money.
Typical FIRE also requires access to affordable healthcare. In the US that is going away with ACA subsidies.
Five years ago I paid for “market rate“ insurance through my business for my family because we did not qualify for ACA subsidies. The cost was about $40,000 per year.
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One time Sergey asked me: "Can you juggle?"
I said "Yes! If you don't mind that all the balls land on the floor."
Sergey found someone else to juggle with.
That person became CEO of a major Alphabet company.
I can juggle. Where's my CEO job?
Has someone collected all of these classic Silicon Valley nepotism stories anywhere?
I mean they are no different that the trash stories you'd read about robber barons in the 1800s (poor orphan got offered a job, smart worker talked to railroad tycoon, etc).
The article hits on something that I believe everyone is at least aware of. Id argue the next generation is best suited for not having this issue that the current generation does have as they at least seem to think about everything and are very careful about tying their identity to work which prior generations seem to do without much thought (for better or worse).
I'm in my 50s. About two months into retirement I fell into the deepest depression of my life because I couldn't shake the "who am I without my job?" question. It took almost a year (and therapy) to accept that I still add value without working.
I'm a person that wants to learn anything and everything. So guess what I'd do if I'd retire?
Work feels pretty stifling to me.
> I'm a person that wants to learn anything and everything.
That is exactly what I do now. Every question I've ever had I now have the time to devote to answering it. I take classes, I volunteer, I mentor Comp. Sci. students. But, more than anything, I still write code. I spent the last few months creating an LLM from scratch which was incredibly fun.
That said, I have a friend who will probably work until he dies. His only real interest in life is his job. I'm not suggesting that is a bad thing; its more to the point that "retirement" isn't a panacea for everyone.
I do see this as a bad thing and an abdication of taking responsibility for one's own life. As was recently put to me after the sudden death of a friend's father (who lived an unusually rich life): everyone dies, but not everyone truly lives.
Ah... we found the person who thinks they can pass judgement on how people choose to live their lives. I didn't say that my friend doesn't love his job (he does) - I said that he'll probably die before retiring.
Stephen Hawking, Einstein, Marie Curie, and Linus Pauling never retired. Did they not "truly live"?
It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit - Denis Waitley
As in, playing tag is always going to be fun?
About a year ago I had an unpleasant and demoralizing experience at work, and thought "fuck it, I don't need to put up with this shit any more" and decided I'd had enough of work for now. In the spring and summer and early fall, it's easy to find enough things to do outside. Right now in the rainy, windy winter it's a bit more difficult. Today I went to the gym at 7am, then did a 2 hour indoor cycling workout at home, then went for a short plunge in the lake (41 F). Then an hour in the hot tub.
It's pretty cool doing whatever I want for now, but I don't think I can do this for another 40 years. I feel like there's something missing - the sense of accomplishment whenever I finish a task. Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
So maybe at the end of summer 2026 I'll wait for recruiter emails and start responding to some of them. I'm done with applying to 100 jobs to get one response. Maybe I'll try a startup job to experience working in a place that doesn't have a 50-page document describing level expectations.
Mind me asking general location and how much savings? Wouldn’t mind doing similar at some point
I highly advise traveling - went a similar experience - had some savings that could last for a few years (much longer if I stretched them)
So just decided to get a motorbike license and go check out Asia.
Ended up finding a partner (totally unexpected) selling everything, moving abroad, marrying them and now expecting a child (planned), all in a manner of 3 years.
Has been quite the joyful and interesting experience, all after I had the deeply depressing feeling of having “solved life” at my nice position in the EU.
There are so many places in the world where you can feel you are actually doing great service to the community, on a shoestring budget and feel happy and fulfilled.
Maybe a bit off-topic, but how'd you meet your partner while on your adventures?
> Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
This comment reminded me of a book I read recently - Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lembke. She talks about how pleasure and pain and experienced by the same region of the brain and they need to be balanced. I'd highly recommend reading that book.
I haven't worked in about 7 years. Only recently I started helping out a friend with a software project semi-regularily. And it wasn't really out of boredom. It's just that the project has some cool stuff, people on the team are cool and he's a friend. I passed 7 years with gaming, internet, talks, walks and mixtures of any subset of those. Only occasionally doing some coding just for fun or out of curiosity or to occasionally help someone. AI is a big game changer for me now. So much more fun to be had with coding.
I don't think I un-retired but I'm performing some commercialy valuable tasks for someone.
Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least)
Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology.
It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once.
That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her millions in the divorce proceedings to get RFK Jr into a cabinet level position to gut billions in research spending. :(
I don't know who to credit, maybe it's Sergey, but the free Gemini (fast) is exceptional and at this point I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. It's not just capability, but OpenAI have added so many policy guardrails it hurts the user experience.
It's the worst thing ever. The amount of disrespect that robot shows you, when you talk the least bit weird or deviant, it just shows you a terrifying glimpse of a future that must be snuffed out immediately. I honestly think we wouldn't have half the people who so virulently hate AI if OpenAI hadn't designed ChatGPT to be this way. This isn't how people have normally reacted to next-generation level technologies being introduced in the past, like telephones, personal computers, Google Search, and iPhone. OpenAI has managed to turn something great into a true horror of horrors that's disturbed many of us to the foundation of our beings and elicited this powerful sentiment of rejection. It's humanity's duty that GPT should fall now so that better robots like Gemini can take its place.
It's the best model pound for pound, but I find GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro to be more useful for serious work when run with xhigh effort. I can get it to think for 20 minutes, but Gemini 3.0 Pro is like 2.5 minutes max. Obviously I lack full visibility because tok/s and token efficiency likely differs between them, but I take it as a proxy of how much compute they're giving us per inference, and it matches my subjective judgement of output quality. Maybe Google nerfs the reasoning effort in the Gemini subscription to save money and that's why I am experiencing this.
When ChatGPT takes 20 minutes to reason, is it actually spending all the time burning tokens or does a bulk of the time go into 'scheduling' waits. If someone specifically selected xhigh reasoning, I am guessing it can be processed with high batch count.
I'm curious, what types of prompts are you running that benefit from 10+ minutes of think time?
Whats the quality difference between default ChatGPT and Thinking? Is it an extra 20% quality boost or is the difference night/day?
I've often imagined it would be great to have some kind of chrome extension or 3rd party tool to always run prompts in multiple thinking tiers so you can get an immediate response to read while you wait for the thinking models to think.
It's for planning system architecture when I want to get something good (along the criteria that I give it) rather than the first thing that runs.
I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it.
In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
I recently bought into the $200 tier and was genuinely quite surprised at ChatGPT 5.2 Pros ability for software architecture planning. If you give it ~60k tokens of your codebase and a thorough description of what you actually want to happen then it comes up with very good ideas. The biggest difference to me is how thorough it is. This is already something I noticed with the codex high/xhigh models compared to gemini 3 pro and opus 4.5, but gpt pro is noticeably better still.
I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall. It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.
> [...] I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up.
For a while people couldn't see how Google could catch up, either. Have a bit of imagination.
In any case, I welcome the renewed intense competition.
FWIW, my productivity tanks when my Claude allowance dries up in Antigravity. I don’t get the hype for Gemini for coding at all, it just does random crap for me - if it doesn’t throw itself into a loop immediately, which it did like all of the times I gave it yet another chance.
You must be using it to create bombs or something. I never ran into an issue that I would blame on policy guardrails.
I've been a huge sceptic of the whole AI hype since the beginning now. Whenever I've tried any of the AI tools, the results have just been underwhelming. However, two weeks ago I tried Gemini (the pro version) and have been using it for various, random tasks and questions since then, and I've been pretty impressed.
There seems to be much less hallucination of facts than in other tools I've tried and whenever Gemini makes assumptions on stuff I didn't explicitly specify in the prompt, it says so. The answers also always have nice structure: it starts with a short and concise version, then gives me options and more details and considerations.
I also like the feature that I can make it remember facts across chats. I'm a physicist by training and I've told Gemini so, so now every time I ask something, it gives me an answer perfectly tailored for a physicist (often with mathematical formulas, etc.).
It's not just millions. Shanahan received over a billion dollars when divorcing Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan
Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money.
It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)
> even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible
If you put yourself in their shoes, you realise that you have to give advice for the 10-20th percentile parents (or worse) because you are giving the same advice to everyone.
The alternative would be to offer more complex advice such as "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", but the perception is that's too difficult for people to follow.
So you end up making very defensive (and therefore onerous) recommendations.
An interesting fact is that, since the introduction of the "baby sleeps on their back, alone", SIDS has gone down, but flat heads have gone up. It's probably been a good tradeoff, but it's still a tradeoff.
Also, I've seen a second time mother refer to "don't cosleep" advice as "western nonsense" which I found funny because it puts things in perspective - vast swathes of the world think cosleeping with your child is safe, natural and normal.
I wonder whether we're trending towards a high-sensor variation of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" / Vannevar Bush's Memex that ingests the details of a user's daily life (the smart glasses being a primitive first example products of such) and identifies salient information in their lives can help us perform mass customization of instructions into direct prescriptives, with backing evidentiary data for SME's. Instead of "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", the interaction becomes "do this, anticipate that outcome" to the user, and if an SME (a doctor in your example) asks about it, the system recalls and presents all the factors that went into deciding upon the specific prescriptive.
While Brin comes back to Google to advocate for 60h workweeks as it lays off thousands of employees.
I'd be happy to do 60-hour weeks of good work, in a good environment.
I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though.
I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.
Why would I want to be paid the same amount as any moron that gets in? What motivation is there for me to work hard?
* You like the mission.
* You like the craft.
* You want to be there for your team.
* You like that your financial needs are taken care of, so that you don't have to think about that.
* You like that everyone else's financial needs are taken care of, because you want everyone to be happy.
* You like that there's alignment by everyone on this. (Even though there will be disagreements on, say, how best to accomplish the mission.)
If someone gets in and doesn't actually have or find motivations like that, or doesn't rise to the occasion despite help, I guess they'd be managed out. That cultural mismatch wouldn't be good for anyone involved.
> Why would I want to be paid the same amount as any moron that gets in?
You answered your question by yourself: the company has to prevent these morons from getting in.
That's what's beautiful about this scheme: people with attitude you presented would self-select out of it.
That solves half of the problem of typical work dynamics already; the second half, preventing unqualified morons from getting in and setting themselves up for life by being paid good money for doing nothing, would need to be solved in some other way.
Honestly, though, screw even that.
There are so many things worth doing in so many areas that pinning your whole weekly life on a single one is just an immense waste.
Cap the time that a company gets to have from you, and achieve so much more.
Okay? I'm not making a point about how long individuals should want to spend working (although this being 2026 I believe it should be less not more)
Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company
His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable
This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few
I fully agree about the labor rights concerns.
(In my head at 2am, I was (wrongly) taking that as a given, understood by everyone, and then remarking on a tangent from there. About the implications of 60hr/wk at Google specifically. And then going from there, about how maybe it didn't have to be like that. Moot for Google in reality, but it makes a good example for what-if thinking or daydreaming about how we'd like the next good tech employer to be.)
I’m not going to attribute Gemini’s success to Sergey. It was already basically there before he came back.
Well all the core people left to do other shit, and when Sergey came back, some of those people were hired back for exorbitant sums of money
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I know how frustrating it is to have a contrarian opinion and get smacked with the majority's reaction to it (believe me, I know - it's an asymmetric experience in the worst way) - but lashing out is not a good way to react to that. It only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s very frustrating for the bot’s reinforcement function.
This is another account created after widespread access to LLM was available to the public that is pushing a political view that is somewhat coherent until pressed and then it falls apart like all chat bots
Maybe it’s a real person and I’m being an asshole here, but it’s hard to tell.
The fact that is hard to tell if they are real or not means we need to come up with a heuristic to identify actual humans now that passing the Turing test has become trivially cheap.
> Maybe it’s a real person and I’m being an asshole here, but it’s hard to tell.
The site guidelines are clear on this: you should assume that it's a real person and try your best to reel back these sorts of accusations, which are nearly always wrong, and nearly always driven by differences of background and (therefore) opinion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm rushing out the door just now but here are a couple of past explanations about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (May 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722 (Oct 2024)
(as well as https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... of course)
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Maybe, but someone engaged with you and your response showed it was utterly unproductive to do so. COVID may have been mishandled but it does nothing to justify the administrations decisions regarding healthcare. If that's the reason you think positively of the man then you should evaluate the rest of what he's said and done.
If you have the time, two podcasts from this doctor which I think kind of highlight what's going on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OF6vP-SkGA (where they have a frank discussion about what was done badly during COVID, including government lies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBllzAb_vAk (where they have a discussion with one of the leading researchers on nutrition, who has come into direct conflict with RFK Jr. because he doesn't say exactly what RFK Jr. believes to be the case, and has had papers censored and funding cut as a result)
So if we're linking stuff (and please don't scream at me for Rumble, Youtube loves removing videos) here's one https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
I was initially trying to make a point that the ideological lines that people have drawn have made it so they automatically think RFK is anti-science and they as a consequence have a whole host of assumptions for which I don't even blame them if they haven't spent time reading up about it. I apologize for not countering every single point and going to covid but it's kind of worth pointing out that RFK a) raises some very substantive charges against Fauci for frankly war criminal like actions throughout his unfortunate history of practicing medicine and b) it wasn't "mismanagement". They did, seriously, the opposite of good practice (both accepted good practice and what was discovered in 2020 going forward) in just about every case
If you're not sympathetic to that then of course you're going to disagree and you might think that the only reason someone like Musk bought X (and please don't think this is me Musk fanning, I dislike him for several reasons) is just to have a joyride (which is still possible); they used to ban so many people and real doctors for information that they didn't like and it was a serious problem and if they could do that for covid then they also did it for other things
Edit: (see, I do know how to edit comments) here's it on Youtube which is the highlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jMONZMuS2U
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Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You're doing it quite badly. I don't want to ban you, but posts like this make it hard not to, because people will start accusing us of enforcing the rules unfairly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: perhaps this will help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722. More at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I do apologize. However, it's also fairly bad faith for this other person to repeatedly accuse me of being a bot
Also, many of my comments which are not controversial are similarly marked "flagged". Maybe that's a way to defuse flame wars, but it sure leaves a bad taste/bad optics
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You could just edit your first comment instead of replying to yourself multiple times.
I haven't read RFK's book and even if every single fact in that particular book was true (which I very highly doubt), it wouldn't change anything he's done in the last year that involved gutting American medical research, spreading misinformation about vaccines that's debunked within their own "research", and coming up with the absolutely genius idea of "tell doctors to tell patients to eat better" to "fix" American's illnesses. Oh, and telling people to eat fried food as long as its fried with beef tallow. That's really dumb.
He's an utter and complete moron at best, and the only reason that people (like you presumably) listen to him is because of his last name.
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I'm sorry, I don't seem to recall mentioning anything about COVID. Let me check my reply....nope! I mentioned stuff that happened in the last year.
So even if you were right about COVID, what you just wrote isn't a rebuttable to anything I said. Though I suspect you know that.
It's almost like your response is dishonestly trying to muddy the waters.
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Sergey might have some positive influence on Gemini, but given that he isn't an AI scientist ( AKA no technical background), I really do wonder what sort of influence that (only) he could have had, beyond just bringing in key people.
I assume by "no technical background" you mean he doesn't have a PHD in AI.
He's probably not developing the low-level algorithms but he can probably do everything else and has years of experience doing so.
He's also perfectly able to spend 60 hours a week improving his AI skills using the best teachers in the world.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "he literally can't and he literally doesn't" but he's got PHD in CompSci and did everything at Google in the past from writing complex code himself to managing small teams to managing huge teams.
Exactly what do you think he can't do?
Certainly he's well qualified to manage a team of a few thousand (?) AI people and understand what they are talking about and get the best out of them.
Like Batman he has the superpower of money. If he has gaps he can pay (or otherwise arrange) for someone with those skills to 1-1 coach him in them.
He's not trying to become a top researcher, he's trying to learn enough to understand what they are talking about and be able to make decisions around say what areas should be pursued.
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Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and extremely badly:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46470097
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461928
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460655
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46426226 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425616 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46420674 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394806 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46293387 (Dec 2025)
This is such a high proportion of what you've been posting that I think we have to ban the account. I don't want to do that, because it's clear that you know a lot about things that people here are interested in—but the damage caused by these poisonous, aggressive comments is greater than the benefit you've been adding by sharing knowledge.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The man that invented PageRank while going to college at Stanford for a PhD doesn't have a technical background? He did not get that PhD because he founded Google. He may not be as smart as you think you are, but he's no slouch either.
A charitable interpretation of what GP said is that Brin might not have a specific expertise in AI.
I also think this doesn't make sense, because he certainly stayed on top of things
It was interesting to see my dad retire. He struggled a lot initially and even went back to work for a while. He had to actively work on learning to enjoy his hobbies and time once again.
I don’t find hobbies to be a replacement for work. Maybe it depends on the hobby but many hobbies are solo. work, or work that I enjoy, is not. Accomplishing things with others and for others has its on motivation for me at least
Of course maybe your hobbies or your dad’s hobbies are social. when someone says “hobbies” to me I generally think of things done mostly alone and I know for me, that’s not enough
Hobbies are just anything you truly enjoy doing that isn't mandated by your job. If you would continue doing your job even if your employer drops your salary to 0, then yeah your job is your hobby too! It is up to the individual to figure out what works for them.
Good point. if work is your hobby you retire then you aren’t at work and will find it harder to get the same satisfaction
That's definitely just how you're thinking of it - any team sport can be a hobby, for a start.
Yes there are hobbies that are socially. Many are not and will not sub for work
im probably just projecting but going back to work when youve amassed enough to live off to an enormous fortune feels like a failure of imagination. sure everyone needs to keep their hands busy, feel valued by others, etc etc but surely there’s some other hobby, interest, or unprofitable passion project you would invest time into?
but maybe being in a corporate environment (any any env) shapes your thinking in such a way that it’s really hard to think outside tha conditioning. feels like that to me only a few years int working
Well, XYZ rando going back to work after RSUs are vested is lot different from Google founder going back to work because he sees his 'baby' is in trouble.
Those hobbies, interests etc sounds like middle class thing where people take upon gardening, cooking, hiking, surfing or some such that they couldn't do enough while working. For people like Google founders they would've had any adventure they seek outside work anywhere in they world every weekend.
People forget Bill Gates advised (maybe still consulted) by MS long after he formally moved away from any official position in company.
It seems that there’s a misunderstanding in what people think he’d be doing. He’s literally his own boss.
A man who can pay for the livelihoods of like-minded individuals to work on a common goal sounds like a dream.
Retire early != Don't do anything. Instead, retire early == you can do whatever you want, and NOT do whatever you don't want.
FIRE is sick. Go for it as soon as possible, before marriage.
If I could I'd retire tomorrow, I have so many projects I would like to take on, I have the feeling I could fill 3 lives with them: gardening, learning math, system programming, wine tasting, carpentry, sport, traveling etc... There are *so* many interesting things to do and so little time. I guess time will tell but at the moment I have a hard time imagining myself getting bored.
Yeah, my main worry about retirement is that I’ll spend all my money on tools and projects.
That's going to be the main problem for me heirs: where do all the tools go :)
me -> my
It's about scale, when you built something as grand as google you don't want to spend time building a garden
For some people that's the case. For others after working on something so large they want to do something small that is wholly theirs.
Could at least try building a bigger garden!
In my old age I'm learning that this is rare. I take my projects for granted, because I guess I'm just very creative, I have way more "projects" than I have days remaining. But it seems like most people have no projects, and nothing in their lives but watching television, playing video games, or doom scrolling.
Same here. It's no a big surprise that the article is addressed to CEOs which are usually the embodiment of workaholism.
Not to knock you specifically, but I know a lot of people who say that they have no time for this stuff waste a ton of time watching TV and doom scrolling.
I try remind myself of this with the Bukowski poem 'air and light and time and space': https://allpoetry.com/poem/14326888-air-and-light-and-time-a...
for me, it would be bread and cheese making (easier cheese varieties), vegetable fermentation, more cooking of various cuisines including indian ones, drawing and painting, carpentry, permaculture (i did organic gardening earlier, which is a subset), wood carving (done some before), and maybe tailoring (making clothes, by hand or by sewing machine, for own use).
only a few at a time, of course, maybe only two, and by rotation. and then maybe i would narrow it down to two or three for long term.
would try to make money from a few of them too.
Arguably Sergey should have just gotten into Sourdough.
He could start by reverting the removal of "Don't be evil" from Google.
It's interesting that he's returned to work on Gemini and that it has been central to Google's rejuvenation in that time. I am curious how much of this marries up with traditional founder driven companies being successful (Jobs returning to Apple, Jensen Huang, etc) compared to being adrift without their original founders. How much was he driving as part of Gemini? Or was he just chipping in?
This was my thesis as well but only insiders can confirm how much of it is true
Retirement isn't quite applicable to billionaires.
They never have to work. They do it because they want to.
Retirement implies there was work you didn't want to do. You did it because you had (or wanted) to make some money. Now you have enough money. You've retired.
Hell, it isn't even applicable to many wealthy software engineers who got rich from tech startups. Many are coding as much as when they were working.
I retired when my first kid was born. I had plenty to keep me busy playing with her, taking care of her, traveling with her. And then we had the second one, and were extra busy.
But I was still "working" the whole time. I was running a small startup, and still keeping up on tech and taking speaking gigs. I was not great at fully retiring.
I unretired when the second kid got to 1st grade. We could no longer travel on a whim and the house was empty 6 hours a day. I didn't seek work, but someone reached out with an interesting job and I didn't say no.
Funny enough, my wife and I were just talking about how we were both bad at retirement (she also retired and has since gone back to work). But we talked about how the next retirement will be better, because the kids will be gone and we'll just sit around making art and building Lego all day.
We'll see if that actually happens!
You didn't retire at all if you still were running a startup surely? You just had multiple jobs and quit one.
I retired in the sense that I was in complete control of my time and had no active income, living off of assets alone.
It's honestly a bit confusing to use words to mean things that they don't generally mean.
Retirement has the definition to stop working. One could argue that another definition may be that you reach an older age and start receiving pension payouts (regardless of whether you keep working or not).
But having a passive income alone simply doesn't mean retirement.
You switched jobs to childcare
Proposal for new word: "employtainment"
I look forward to the sweet kiss of death to solve the retirement funding issue, and forever declining health while working struggle. Working for "The man" takes everything someone has.
It’s funny when people ask you what you want to do after you retire, and you tell them you are going to sit behind your PC and do exactly what you are doing now.
Really weird clickbait subline
"The tech founder’s return to full-time work is a reminder that even billions can’t guarantee a happy retirement if you don’t also do this. "
Hustle culture sociopaths
I totally understand. I "retired" last summer, but I continue to work about 50%, mostly at a new place that needs my help. I like what I do. Anyway, gaming/reading/etc. are fine and dandy, but not something I want to do 24/7.
The only thing I don't quite get about Brin is going back to Google. Since he doesn't need the money, why not support open source AI projects?
If I already know a great team, one where I know all the people involved and they listen to me. Why would I make a new team?
Because it’s what he knows.
People often like doing the things they’re good at and not necessarily because they’re interesting.
Because in google he can be a “dictator”, while he wouldn’t be in open source.
Probably because he knows the people and frankly, the team that's getting paid billions collectively are the top talent.
I like how his return is casually being presented as a failure to retire properly. We need less lionizing and more texts like this
It sounds similar to people living long-term on welfare in Denmark. They have food and housing, but their life is devoid of meaning.
Do you know a lot about the welfare situation/program in Denmark?
The welfare program (kontanthjælp) is difficult to join and you are ineligible if your net worth exceeds 15.500 DKK (~€2000).
From my point of view, you have to be very creative to live a fulfilling life in Denmark, with such limited finances.
Then it's the best incentive to change your life and find a new meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mole:_Undercover_in_North_...
Why do you think their life is devoid of meaning?
If I was in this situation, being a centibillionaire (or just having enough money for me and for my kids and their kids to never worry), I would write so, so, so much software. I have so many ideas for businesses, too, I just have no time and funds and I'm too risk-averse.
I think there was a bit of a jump-to-conclusion there.
> They have food and housing, but their life is devoid of meaning.
I find it difficult to relate to such worlds. I make up all kinds of explanations like, "well, it must be because while they have food and housing, they don't have any funds to entertain themselves". Or, "well, it must be because they simply haven't had sufficient education to reach an activation level where the higher tiers of Maslow's come into their line of sight".
And then I read about plenty of counter-examples, like wealthy offspring living the textbook aimless/dissolute/pick-your-adjective life, or the ennui of able-bodied welfare recipients with quite reasonable spending cash from generous Scandinavian welfare regimes when one considers the mind boggling amount of free media, free libraries, free parks, free entertainment in general in the developed world. Perhaps this is just part of their human condition for people suffering from this malaise.
And here I sit, drowning in ideas of what I would be interested to pursue to know our beautiful universe if only I had the time. So much so I write them down into a file just to quiet the cacophony in my head like a dog seeing squirrels everywhere he looks, just so I can get real work done on a timely basis, haha.
When once asked whether I'd ever be bored with eternal youth and boundless resources, I immediately replied an eternity is still too little time to satisfy my curiosity.
They lack curiosity. It can be nurtured, or starved.
Once you're hooked, you're hooked
There is an element of the years long conditioning to work that the article points to. But I think people do find it important to have various means to engage with life, and building and creating is a dominant outlet.
Pursuing goals that are intrinsically motivating, genuinely interesting, that give you a strong sense of purpose with healthy integration into core values leads to high life satisfaction.
this is truly bizarre.
It’s as if they’ve never heard of Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Needs before and further did they don’t know Self Actualizing is right at the very top.
Without that key stone on the top the human being is still a wanting animal. And if you somehow “mission complete” one Self Actualizing, then you immediately start to want something fresh “purpose” etc.
And obviously Self Actualizing doesn’t have to come in the form of work, although often it does.
At the end of life, Maslow became convinced that self-transcendence was the pinnacle of the hierarchy. Strong identification with work will not get one to that final step. I am not sure if ai is a path to self transcendence or self annihilation, but it's interesting to ponder in the case of some like Brin.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been widely criticized as being too rigid and simplistic and too biased towards an affluent Western cultural context. It also hasn't been tested and validated by science, and is based on hearsay rather than empirical data.
"Self Actualization" being a primary universal human need is just one guy's personal opinion, it isn't a law of nature or physics.
Do not retire without hobby, things to do because sitting at home without anything to do will kill you faster than anything else
Considerations of a poor billionaire being bored apart - why is it that we still consider work and retirements as "black or white" things ? It might have made sense for physically exhaustive works, but for anything intellectual, wouldn't "progressive retirement" make much more sense ? As in, starting a certain age, provided you're physically and mentally able, of course, you get to work 80% of your time (in civilized countries where retirement is payed by states from taxes, you would get "about" 20% of your pension, but your employer would keep paying taxes), then 50%, then 25%, then 0 ? Would that be easier to finance given life expectancy increase (barring WW3, of course) ?
This basically exists in Austria as “Altersteilzeit” [0] (“old age part time”). You even get 50% of your loss of income back through social security. So e.g. when reducing work by 40% you still get 80% of your salary. I’m guessing this is to incentivise employers to keep people near retirement employed as it would be much more expensive for the state to finance them if they were unemployed.
[0] https://www.oesterreich.gv.at/de/themen/arbeit_beruf_und_pen... (only in German unfortunately)
Medically speaking, your proposal would perhaps prevent a lot of heart attack deaths. It has been shown that not working is not just unpleasant, it's a strong stressor [1,2].
[1] https://academic.oup.com/geronj/article-abstract/46/1/P9/638...
[2] https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/234818
*centibillionaire, above Mark Zuckerberg in the list :)
> ... wouldn't "progressive retirement" make much more sense ?
Of course it does. I've seen it in my parents' generation: many wanted to reach retirement do "do nothing" and, well, they just lost their marbles. Doing nothing is neither good for the body, nor for the mind. Endless TV watching or endless pina colada drinking in the pool (or both at the same time): idleness brings absolutely nothing good.
But my parents' friends who kept working a bit (like my godmother who kept supervising her real estate agency): she stayed sharp and fit.
People think they're going to read and do exercice etc. but truth is: most are going to do jack absolutely shit. And turn to the latter.
So keeping partially active is the best thing possible.
I see it with my mother-in-law: 70 y/o, still working, daily, with my wife (they own a little SME). It keeps her in the loop: she still knows how to use a computer, her mind is quick. She's not idling.
The financial aspect of it all is something else: but people doing nothing is not what a society needs.
Humans spent thousands of years living in small groups where everyone had to be useful. When all of sudden you stop working and sit in your corner, you are doing something that run against thousands of years of evolution.
I scrolled this whole thread curious if someone would make this simple observation. We did not survive and evolve for millions of years to be born and then do nothing, to not meet needs and have needs met. Historical precedent, tamper with carefully.
I am partial fire and I feel that line of demarcation personally. I've also watched it play out in others like clockwork. As wealth grows, new responsibilities emerge.
When I started my company, we suddenly found that we were in a good small fortune, not enough to be millionaires or billionaires, but enough to get people to run the business semi automatically with very minimum input from the founders.
I took a semi retirement approach to the business, there really wasn't a lot of things to do, my role was sort of just "managing" programmers. I got so much free time that I could even start a second business on the side.
Despite my best ability to stretch my work, I couldn't even fill up half of my working hours. One would have thought that this is heaven. But the time I was most free was also the time I was most miserable. I wasn't happy, I was gaining weight, I was perennially asking myself why the business couldn't be bigger and I couldn't sell it, so that I can be real millionaires and billionaires with financial freedom!
Then fate intervened, the sudden fortune disappeared and I no longer had the luxury of just "managing people"; I have to do hands-on. And it was this activity, the feeling that I was contributing to something, that I was writing code again and actually building stuffs, that made me happy again.
Today we are bigger than what we once we were, but still, I am writing code and pretty much hands-on.I vow that I will never retire, even though if I could. Because it's the meaningful work that sustains life and provides happiness. Being able to work on it is a luxury that I will never want to give up, ever.
"Because it's the meaningful work that sustains life and provides happiness."
For you.
For me, it is having the time to do what I wish. Currently helping a friend with recovery after a major surgery. Next month, who knows?
No, it's not at all the same as "meaningful work".
At least in part, I do not need the attaboys or regular 'sense of accomplishment' that one get from plate-spinning or other meaningful work.
You agree more than you disagree. Meaningful might be something else for you. But I bet deep down it is doing something for others (clients, coworkers, friends, family, even strangers) that gives meaning.
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Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I would like to read more about Larry Page, too.
It’s easy to eye roll at billionaire guy wanting to go work, but it’s a real thing, I recall my dad struggling with retirement, after having planned so long.
He did a bit of consulting, was a rural mail carrier for a year and ended up managing a county program for a few years. He also discovered teaching as an adjunct professor, which he loved deeply. At some point, he was ready, and he had several good years of retirement with grandchildren and travel.
With a story like this, I choose to see what we have in common with a very successful, very rich person. Many people think “If only I had a more, everything would be grand.”
Well… Brin is a billionaire controlling one of the most powerful corporations on the earth. He found meaning in his work, or chose his work because of the meaning to him. Either way, given the ability to do anything, he made his choice. Don’t worship the guy, but perhaps see the humanity that we all share.
Mitchell Hashimoto went on to create a new awesome terminal emulator, in a programming language he had not used (much) before. Sounds like a great way to stay entertained!
That, and flying fighter jets for fun.
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It's interesting to hear about his experience, but I'm not sure if it's typical. There are millions of people retiring each year, presumably many are happy to be done with the drudgery of work and excited to spend time on hobbies and projects they enjoy.
I'm curious to know how many retirees end up like Sergey and how many you don't hear about because they're too busy enjoying their retirement.
I will say that this topic is a common one among people talking about FIRE “financial independence, retire early” — folks who are saving as fast as they can so they can quit working. There are a lot of people who already got there who come back to warn people they won’t necessarily be happy and fulfilled just because they quit the day job. Like, that’s an amazing feeling at first but it probably won’t carry you for 30-50 more years.
The article actually includes some of these examples, but I get the feeling that a lot of readers did not make it past the Brin part.
It works much better for most people if you replace “retire early” with “recreationally employed”. You can select the work you do without optimizing for income or status-maxxing.
The few cases I know of people who retired in their early 30s they really didn't want to even be "recreationally employed", they diverted their efforts to causes they believe are bigger than usual work. They help communities, they started projects in their free time that enhances others' lives in direct and meaningful ways which had nothing to do with their past day job.
I believe I'd do the same, forget about coding yet another little project/library, and go into the real world dedicate part of my time to causes that can't pay much but have meaning to others.
This is entirely within the scope of "recreationally employed". There is no implication that what you spend your time on has anything to do with your former career.
In most cases I know of recreational employment has little to do with their former employment. They often put in a lot of hours and it is still "work" in the ordinary sense but it is entirely self-directed.
I believe it's a misuse of "employment" then, I do not understand employment as something you do without payment, to me it is necessarily related to paid labour.
If you obligate yourself to significant and consistent labor when no such thing is necessitated by your life then you are effectively "employed". You have to show up. Absent external motivation, like feeding your family or staying out of prison, it is purely a lifestyle choice. It is the opposite of playing video games all day or sitting at the beach.
The FIRE types are not working to survive by definition, allowing them to work at non-profits for a pittance, run a farm with no meaningful market, do thankless maintenance on FOSS, or travel around the world saving the whales. The lack of a meaningful paycheck doesn't make these things not "jobs" for all practical purposes.
Financial freedom is about not having to worry about losing your job, or tolerating shitty work conditions. Why would you retire if you do what you love? I think the real problem might be if there's nothing you actually love doing (long term), that's when money won't help.
The people with the drive to be able to retire early are also the most likely to be bored when it happens.
Working on something fun and novel, like in his case Gemini, mentioned in the article, is the ideal.
What do you mean? Money is the best thing to have if you’re lazy and don’t like doing anything.
In this case I agree though, he’s the boss, not beholden to anyone. Can wander around and do what interests him.
But that's the problem - if you don't like doing anything, what will you do? What will you fill your life with? You will quickly get bored of anything you try. Your life will have no meaning, and you will probably turn to alcohol or drugs.
I can play World of Warcraft indefinitely.
Indeed, video games are probably the things most of humanity will retire to if they didn't attach so much ego and meaning to their jobs and by extension, the people around them.
Just be sure to swap games once in a while so you don't get bored.
Everyone, even the laziest person likes doing something even if that’s just parking yourself in front of the TV and stuffing your face.
Most people though genuinely like activities that most times would be impossible to monetize enough to make a living, which isn’t a problem if you’re rich. Alternatively, there are plenty of things people want to do that they have no intention of being the best at, they want to dabble.
Had this exact situation. Turned to drugs. Lived like a GTA character. That’s unsustainable, similar to luxury vacations which turn dull. Now I‘m finding investors for curing MS with a team of researchers who‘ve built sth that is more accurate than CRISPR to cure my sister. I actually want to get in contact with Sergey Brin about that because we might have something interesting for him - but my American contacts are only connected to Musk and people like a Polygon founder and music/hollywood people. This is not a psychotic or exaggerated message, I‘m sure HN can vet us (@dang) and get us contacts, currently I‘m talking to family offices in Saudi Arabia. About meaning: if you get bored, aim for bigger positive impact.
paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29857928/
short: We have a rigorously validated antigen-specific immune tolerance platform with bystander suppression, NIH/MS Society backing and a clear translational gap.
The hard truth is most people don't have hobbies. It's even more true with billionaires that dedicated their whole life to their job
This might rub some people on HN the wrong way but what these people call "work" isn't really work in the sense of what most people consider work. They jet here and there, intervene wherever they want, and everybody listens to them all the time. They can cancel and postpone meetings as they wish, and so on and so forth. It's work in the same sense as buying another house is work -- you have to get together with lawyers and plenty of people but in the end these people all work for you and you can also change your mind and not buy it.
That's also the reason why these multi-billionaires never retire. They've retired from real work a long time ago.
Was looking for this comment. Cutting meat in some factory is considered 'work', running a global tech business is also considered 'work'. Both 'work', different requirements from the 'worker'.
One is doing lifework, the other is doing labor.
Plenty of work isn't manual labor. That distinction is not at all what I've talked about, you've missed the point entirely.
Ok, I might have made a mistake then.
It's work in the sense of exchanging their attention, energy and the hours of their lives towards a goal, while in the moment they'd rather be somewhere else doing something else.
Same way that dusting your cupboards is work.
it doesn't quite work that way. Once you do this what you call "work", you can't just extricate yourself in the middle of dealing with complicated situations or drop things where others depend on you. So it's still work in the sense that you can't just literally do what you want the way you do when you lounge around your house.
It is clear that Alphabet is his baby and neither he not Larry ever fully left. He is still in his 50s so maybe just too young to play golf and chill on superyachts all day. While him being a billionaire makes any lesson derived have to have an asterisk him enjoying technical work even after long having won the rat race is a pretty cool role model.
No wonder he returned: he can focus on meaningful work without direct financial pressure, with full access to people, decisions, and resources.
If only we all had a time in life to do what we love, get paid, and face no paywalls. I call that "liberated work". If only at least retirement was like that.
It has been my observation that those that retire without solid plans to keep busy 15-20 hours a week really do struggle. You have to be missed by people when you are sick or out of town. You have to have a reason to get out of bed. I think your choice of activity tells a lot about you since the 'pay the bills and save for retirement" argument no longer applies. Some volunteer to better the world. Some continue their life work to take wealth from those with less power.
You're saying he should have gone the Gates path and formed an NGO? Fair enough but I imagine nothing else matches the thrill and stress of running the C suite at Google
I wish he'd brought back "Don't Be Evil" to Google, as well as himself.
>"Don't Be Evil"
That ship sailed a long time ago. It then proceeded to sink, ending up a haunted wreck that we might see in a new Pirates of the Caribbean film.
Problem is, Captain Jack Sparrow these days isn't what he used to be either.
I took a moment to participate in an ARIN (https://www.arin.net) call. They drive policy for IP addresses that run the Internet. Anyway, one thing that stood out to me was during a portion of the conference the organization was holding elections for open seats. The seats are open to anyone, I'm pretty sure.
There were a bunch of people, from across the country, MANY in retirement, trying their best to sell themselves that they are the right candidate.
Sergey can just make a phone call and he gets to build Gemini and run a billion dollar organization and have meaning in old-age. This is what wealth buys you. The rest of us, I guess, we will be arm-wresteling for the few open oppertunities to make an impact.
Do you think he can still spend time on his $450 million yacht or is he too busy writing prompts?
Snark aside, good for him. Absolute non-news though, as is any extraordinary individual action during and contributing to a bubble. It'll be interesting to see what stays when, or if, the bubble ever pops.
You can very well write that prompt from the top deck or from one of the office cabins on said yacht (no, not speaking from experience).
I'm not envious of anyone's big yacht, but I wouldn't waste my money that way (you can probably rent one for special occasions) - as long as there are still children hungry or without schooling.
I'm definitely envious of the yacht. Like, come on, how awesome is that! It's HUGE! I've been invited on tiny yachts with "only" a couple staff onboard and that was already fantastic to just be on for a day.
That said I don't think I could ever justify spending THAT kind of money on it.
i never really understood the billionaire yacht hate.
Once you buy a yacht 450 million dollars of ownership in a company you had goes to people who built a beautiful thing that exists in the real world and you're on the hook for employing a lot of people to maintain it.
I take a lot more issue with accumulation and hoarding of wealth than the spending of it.
> i never really understood the billionaire yacht hate.
Once someone reaches that level of fame and fortune it's almost a requirement if they want to travel or have some sort of 'vacation'. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a great problem to have, but it's one of the only ways to find privacy at that level of wealth.
If I'm ever super wealthy, I hope I can also stay somewhat anonymous so that I can walk down the street like any other person.
An economy that wasted resources building mega yachts for billionaires is more unequal than one that builds cruise ships that high income families can go on an holiday.
https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/imagine-130000000-washing...
Holding shares in a company (or dollar bills) is not depriving others of something. The fisherman will go catch fish tomorrow, the wheat in the fields will keep growing, the builder will build a house.
If someone starts paying the fisherman, farmer, builder, more to stop doing what they are doing and start building mega yachts, then there will be less fish, bread, and houses for others.
That said, I assume it's much simpler than that and it's just about the hypocrisy of the climate change billionaires to be bellowing out carbon while demanding the selfish greedy commoners cut our emissions.
I was semi in retirement.
Actually just jobless, but I was doing side projects here and there
Retirement gets boring fast —- and you lose connections to the rhythm of society fast.
For the vast majority of humans, an idle mind is depressing and destructive
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Hard to believe he did it "out of boredom".
It lines up with the AI arms race kicking into overdrive around ChatGPT's triumph in late 2022. Brin pops out of hiding right then, admitting Google "messed up" and starts coding, analysing losses, and basically playing dictator with his super-voting shares to shove the company back on track.
Rivals like OpenAI yanked him in and now he's in the office daily because the "trajectory of AI is so exciting" - translation: his ego couldn't handle watching his empire get outpaced, and with those voting rights, he can bulldoze through bureaucracy to keep the throne.
Ultimately, it's less about some profound quest for purpose and more about a control freak safeguarding his legacy and billions as the tech world burns. He never really let his kingdom go.
Grandfather in village still farms at 90+.
Retirement is a scam. Figure out what you want to do and do it until you drop.
I too would very happily do just the bits of my job that I like, when and how I want, and have any requests or comments or complaints I make get immediate attention and responses.
All in the knowledge that no one is going to be time-tracking me or doing performance reviews, and I can just not do work at any moment I don't feel like it or have something better to do that day, like go to my private island or take my private jet to burning man etc (or as it turns out do a talk at Stanford). All while you have so much money that the price of anything from clothes to cars to houses is just some arbitrary number that has no meaning to you it is so absolutely tiny number... not that you actually buy anything yourself any more, mainly your team of personal staff deal with that grubby reality.
As for the rest of us, well we need to pay the bills while playing "the game" and politics and cowtowing to keep the money coming.
Exactly. If you work in a field that’s close to your interests, there are probably parts of your job that you’d do for fun even if infinitely wealthy. It’s the other stuff, the boring annoying grind, that makes it a job and not a hobby.
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He was in your spot at some point I've heard. Nothing is impossible.
So was the last lottery winner. I can certainly improve my chances but there is a huge amount of luck involved.
And importantly, in this analogy - most people here aren't even able to play that lottery. He founded a company based on the research he did whilst studying for a government funded PhD. Most people are not in a position in their life where they could even spend time trying to do research that would result in this type of eventual wealth.
This is one of the easiest paths to gain a competitive advantage that can be monetized. You are much less likely to fall into a pool of money.
Just like becoming a MD has much better odds at getting you some amount of money than dropping out of school. About the same path by the way.
But you can keep playing the lottery if you think it has better odds or even the same odds...
If you don't try you are sure to not win. The rest is about being able to put the odds in your favor. You obviously can't do that with lottery. There is no logical lever.
https://ergodicityeconomics.com/2023/07/28/the-infamous-coin...
Not for long; he was 25 when Google was founded, it was a billion dollar company not long after. He could've retired when Google went public in 2004.
AI replacing workers and launching the post-money economy aside, it should probably not be about age or actual networth but outcome. That should still be a worthy and attainable goal. He is not the only rich person out there...
Dreams and hopes are powerful weapons of suppression. Everyone is a millionaire just down on their luck at the moment…
In our advanced society, with incredible automation, we should _all_ have vastly more freedom and control over our time.
That attitude is the weapon of suppression. Yes, it's true that life isn't fair. But it's also true that people have agency and can make material improvements to their own quality of life through smart decisions and dedication. Of course most of us won't start the next Google, but that doesn't mean dreams and hope are bad in general.
We have no evidence that people have meanginful agency, or even agency at all. It is an assumption that to start with requires that the universe is not largely or entirely deterministic beyond what we can measure, but even in the case of some "hidden variable" that provides agency (try to even define it in a way that doesn't make it either deterministic, random, or a combination that implies no actual control) we have plenty of evidence that events outside our control ("life isn't fair") means that the vast majority of people, while they may make decisions - with or without agency - that will make material improvements - still are not able to get anywhere near a position that makes it meaningful in this context.
Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.
But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.
If you think you have no agency why do anything at all? You could choose to stop doing anything. Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(unrealised futures) gives you agency.
It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even if that compute can be deterministic at a higher level, but you should not care.
It's a nested universes system just like in type theory. The meta of the meta. Agency is only defined within a single universe at a time.
> If you think you have no agency why do anything at all?
I addressed that in my comment, but let me address it again since it's the most frequent objection to this:
> You could choose to stop doing anything.
In the mechanical sense that an "IF ... THEN ... ELSE" statement makes the program "choose" which branch to take, you're right, yes I could.
But then I'd also suffer the consequences.
As I pointed out, if I were to life down in despair and not go to work, I won't keep getting paid just because I didn't have agency over the "choice" of whether to lie down and sulk or get up and go to work.
But for "agency" to have any meaning, we can't interpret choice that way. If we don't have agency, then while I may have an artificial "choice", that "choice" can't change the outcome.
In that case every "choice" I make is just as deterministic as that IF ... THEN ... ELSE: The branch taken depends on the state of the system.
> Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(untealised futures) gives you agency. > > It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even that compute ca be deterministic but you should not care.
What you are describing is compatibilism: The school of thought on "free will" that effectively says that free will is real, but is also an illusion.
Personally I think that is basically brushing the issue under the carpet, though I also think it is the only definition of free will that is logically consistent.
I do agree with the point that you mostly should not care:
You need to mostly act as if every "choice" you make does matter, because whether or not you have control over it, if you do lie down in despair, your paychecks will stop arriving.
Cause and effect does not care whether or not you have agency.
Where I take issue with compatibilism is because there are considerable differences in how you should "choose" to act if you consider agency to be "artificial" or an illusion (compatibilism) or not exist at all (for this purpose these are pretty much equivalent) vs. if you consider it to be real.
E.g. we blame and reward people or otherwise treat people differently based on their perceived agency all the time, and a lot of that treatment is a lot harder to morally justify if you don't believe in actual agency. Real harm happens to people because we assume they have agency. If that agency isn't real, it doesn't matter if we have an illusion of it - in that case a lot of that harm is immoral.
To tie it back to the thread: Whether agency is not real at all, or just significantly constrained by circumstance, it changes the considerations in what we should expect ourselves and others to be able to overcome.
E.g. it makes no logical sense to feel bad about past choices, because they couldn't have gone differently (you can still feel bad about the effects, and commit to "choosing" differently in the future). You also then shouldn't feel bad if you haven't achieved what you wanted to if you believe the context you live within either have total control over the actions you take, or "just" a significant degree of influence over it.
And so we're back to my original argument that for most people, acting as-if they have agency by "choosing" to bet on making the surrounding conditions more amenable to good outcomes is a better bet than thinking they have agency or enough agency to achieve a different outcome.
But again: The fact that I believe we have no agency, does not mean I won't try to do things that will get me better outcomes. I just don't assume I could act any other way in a given instance than I end up acting in that given instance, any more than a movie will change if you rewind it and press play again.
I think we agree. The subtelty is that, it is about closed and open systems. Your partial knowledge makes things a locally open system. You are processing new data and then acting accordingly. That's dynamic agency. The better you can get knowledge, the better you can influence the next step.
That realization happens at the meta level and gives you agency in your actual universe. Even though at the meta-meta level, that realization itself can be deterministic.
Not to be confused with someone who would be external to the system and could watch your life as if it was a video tape, being omniscient. They would not have agency in your system as they can't interact with you and for them everything is predetermined, and they could compute the next state of the system from the past state. You can't but the system is impredicative enough that by recognizing this, by self-consciousness, the system effects itself toward its own favored state. And in fact, the more knowledge you have, the less agency. Because the fewer choices.
The meta level person doesn't just observe how the video. It observes the fact that people realize they are characters in a video and how that realization affects the choices they make. Given the initial conditions.
Should you have regrets in life? You had the choice of knowing more and be more able so it makes sense. Could things have happened differently given that they did and obviously you wanted back then for them to be different and wish they had been? Or did it happen because the conditions were set to happen?
Basically the question is whether we control our odds? Doing anything is controlling some odds so I'd say yes. Requires increased self consciousness. Being able to imagine what is not there. Animals seem to have that capacity. Especially humans. We can make sure that certain things don't happen by virtue of our own existence. This is our agency. Are we biased by construction toward the best odds of we can recognize them? Yes. Are their really things with the exact same odds in the system? Wouldn't that block us? Probably. But the system is already made in a way that it wouldn't happen by virtue of having (at least local) asymmetries. In practice we wouldn't be blocked. Someone perfectly symmetrical in a system that also is, would perhaps. But there might not be any two same most desired odds then so no. Unlikely.
So again, this is basically the compatibilist stance. To me, it rings hollow because it glosses over whether you actually made a decision in a way that is qualtitively different from how a clock "chooses" to move the minute hand one minute further.
And so I would answer to your question about regrets that I don't believe you had that choice. That you couldn't have chosen differently given the same inputs and state. Your "choice" followed the preceding state with the same predictability as a well functioning clock.
Interesting thought exercise, let me try something:
Only if we can predict everything ourselves do we not have a choice. But since we don't know what we don't know and that may occur at any moment (black swan), we can only act given probabilities.
Then what we control is our level of appetite for risk of an undesired outcome.
That risk is not data that we can reliably measure and assert. So it creates randomness/stochasticity in the system.
That's why I was speaking of open vs closed system.
Randomness provides agency.
That randomness is subjective. You may well still be predictable for an omniscient person. But that person would not have any agency. You do as long as your choice does not rely upon knowledge.
I guess that's why the human society is weird in a sense. People act from belief they have no certitude about.
A clock does not do that, there is no metacognitive process to influence an action toward a yet unrealised future. Seems incomparable?
But yes, other than that, there is not real accurate way to deny compatibilism I'm afraid.
In fact, true agency is the attempt to eliminate choice.
It is like being in a Labyrinth where the walls are moving.
The clock sits in the labyrinth and gets crushed by a moving wall.
An agentic person detects the movements and recalibrates.
Honestly I don't disagree with anything you wrote, I don't think. It is worth remembering that if we were born in someone else's shoes, with their genes and their environment, we would literally be them and would act as they act. In that way, yes, agency is an illusion. Remembering this can help us to have empathy for others, potentially even those with whom we vehemently disagree.
But, as you said, we still all make decisions every day, and those decisions do affect our lives. So by acting as if we have agency, we can still have a positive impact, both on ourselves and others.
The attitude that we should all have access to more freedoms and that inequality has reached extreme levels is suppression? Then sign me up to be suppressed.
I am not saying we should be defeatist! I making the argument that it does not, and morally should not, have to be so that we all have to toil when we have such a wealth of technology.
How we go about changing this, I do not know, but everyone just playing along nicely in hope of one day being the one who strikes gold seems not to be working!
“Life isn’t fair, suck it up and get good!” is another form of suppression/delusion. Well, if life isn’t it fair, let us at least try to counteract that with cooperation. It seems to me that we have all the tools and technologies we need to make it a lot better.
This framing I'm on board with. The original comment took it too far for me, and even if not intended as defeatist I think could encourage that response. I'm all for people working not only to better their own conditions, but society as a whole.
This is very true but the path to that seems to require a weird optimization where it is concentrated among a few before being being widespread. Technologic improvements should help. Help decouple time and money.
Why though?
And when does this start being for everyone? We have had agricultural machines for ages, but I still have to pay an ever increasing part of my salary (and hence time here on earth) not to starve.
Because of asymmetry. Some people are more inclined toward certain things than others. People who are excellent at math are much more likely to be able to advance AI for instance. The goal of physical systems being to remain at rest/(humans included ;) the gradient of resources lean toward these people so that they can improve the technology allowing everyone to be able to conserve their energy (be lazy in a sense).
Reminder: Sergey Brin is a creep who believes in hiring women so he can sleep with them.
The fact he's allowed back inside Google means Google still has a massively unresolved workplace sexual harassment issue.
Retirement wasn't as interesting as a role at the company you founded where everyone looks up to you, doing whatever you feel like with no expectations or defined responsibilities? Shocker
Seriously, I'm glad he came back and found something he's interested in. I bet his role has grown some responsibilities, too.
I worked at a company with multiple cofounders; one of them became the CEO, the other one was initially CTO, but ultimately his title was just cofounder after a while and someone else was hired to be CTO. This person then went on to just prototype and build whatever he wanted to; the service he built ended up having no OC engineers supporting it, pages went to him but he didn’t bother responding and nobody would tell him he had to respond lol. Ultimately people just didn’t use that thing or delayed using it as they couldn’t really rely on it.
It'd be funny if a manager used the playbook to manage him and give him reviews the same way
What a horrible promo-article - in particular when we look at the damage caused by Google in total. I actually think it would be better if the two original Google guys would, while shamefully admitting to have failed, stop working altogether. Others can fix the problems Google caused.
> "Going back to work just for fun might sound like a uniquely billionaire move."
Ah yeah? Can be boredom too. I fail to see why this article wants to promote this.
> Like many people, Brin had a relaxing vision for his post-working life. “I was gonna sit in cafés and study physics, which was my passion at the time,” he told the Stanford audience.
Any why would anyone take this at face value? How many of the guys there were paid to go there by the way?
PR-piece for the Epstein thing, isn't it? Just in time. Brin also likes them young, the nounce that he is, and no legal entity in the US is going to do shit about it.
It is definitely a well-timed story. It's notable that even though they are billionaires they care what people think about them so much that they have to do this PR nonsense.
As no governmental authority is actively investigating the allegations, Sergey Brin might never have the opportunity to clear his name from the Epstein child abuse allegations in the court of public opinion. If there would be an investigation and/or court case, Sergey Brin's lawyers would at least be able to legally clear his name. As long as evidence is being withheld, any association between Microsoft and Google leadership and Jeffrey Epstein will bring up rumors about their involvement in the child abuse, even though they might have been "only" clients of the JP Morgan private banking services for high net worth individual which was managed by Jeffrey Epstein.
Imagine if they locked Serg out of the protected quantum research he loved reading as it was department employees only and the only way he could continue his access was returning to work at a senior enough level to cross read. Imagine.
The problem with famous people unretiring and doing something different is they are kind of the nepobaby children of their former career arc selves. I both feel bad for him but am glad he's happier now.
Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)
I really don't buy his explanation. Here's one of the world's smartest guys, with more money than Smaug, and he really couldn't come up with anything better than going back to Google to work on Gemini?
What's the point of all that money if you won't even hire someone to help you find hobbies.
So many STEM universities have online courses. The art world froths itself mad over smart people with stupid money. Local projects beg for angels like him.
Hell even just doing the AI schtick but for free open source or as a pet startup.
My mind reels with ideas. Why didn't his?
To me those are all either inferior to working on AI or can be done outside of work. And for the founder of Google, probably Google is the best place to work on AI.
Hiring someone to find hobbies defeats the purpose of hobbies. Why would you want to pursue something that someone else finds enticing rather than you discovering it yourself?
You hire such people to introduce you to ideas and projects. You try some stuff, see what sticks.
It's something you can do when you have money and time but no ideas.
He's probably tired of grifters by now.
he has a phd in CS, hes probably always been interested in AI, you dont think getting to play with AI with essentially infinite resources is more fun than collecting stamps or skiing or something?
Having the best AI is prestigious for billionaires. It's that simple.
Then why did he go back to Google /s
> Having given so much of themselves to their careers, they often felt unmoored and purposeless when they left their jobs.
That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.
My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.
Can you please not post cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? I can understand the feelings behind it—we all can—but this is really not what we're going here, and it has a way more degrading effect on the threads than I'm sure you intended.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry, point taken.
I was kind of retired, earning passive crypto income for several years after 2019 throughout COVID. Best time of my life. I was living on a Mediterranean island, splitting my time between snorkeling and open source work.
Then I got cheated out of my position in the crypto project. Literally scammed by the project founder with the full support of government regulators who are supposed to be preventing this stuff and lost all my income overnight. The regulators literally facilitated fraud instead of preventing it... And I had the pleasure of being gaslit about it while also being gaslit about COVID by a different set of regulators. I became a conspiracy theorist during this time! Now I'm forced to work again...
It's especially infuriating in this age of perma-bailouts where the system is basically bailing out everyone with assets.
I figured out that the system is a scam. I can prove it to anyone in excruciating detail, with citations. If anyone should be bailed out, it should be me. I shouldn't be forced back in the hamster wheel. It's hard to compete against others who think the system works a certain way and don't realize how the hamster wheel works. I shouldn't have to compete with delusional fools who think that their effort spent on the hamster wheel is going to yield any rewards.
Anyway it drives me nuts how the only people who can afford to retire, choose not to... And those who are desperate to retire, can't! This is so pervasive, it feels like a psyop.
Living as we do in a society where basic needs are not guaranteed without a giant pile of money, most humans don’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a place where you don’t base your life decisions on financial well being. Thats very limiting; it isn’t that surprising that someone who has achieved that is now looking for meaning in other things. Besides: if you’re Sergey Brin, I imagine you can get to talk/work with whatever at Google interests you most and hand off the gruntwork to minions all the while being treated with deep reverence. It’s not exactly hard to see why he might like it.
One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.
I don't think this is really accurate because the traditional state of society, and one that remains in the 'developing world' which is almost certainly still the wide majority of the world at this point, is families living in multi generational housing with many people contributing. This enables older to generations to comfortably 'retire' when they see fit, and provides financial comfort and security. It's basically like decentralized pensions.
This new world of low fertility, small household size or even people living entirely alone, high external dependence, and the consequent broad insecurity - is still extremely new. And I do not think it will survive the test of time.
I think you might be romanticizing multi-generational households a bit. We introduced social security systems precisely because the family systems failed so frequently. In all but the richest families no retirement as we understand it today was possible. Illness or death of the main bread winners was fatal to the whole household and children were expected to work as soon as possible.
There's a great article on the history of social security here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Social_Security_in_...
It was not because family systems were failing. It came about in the era of the great depression, and the idea was rather unpopular at first, particularly among groups like farmers who had no interest in the new taxes that would come alongside it. Some of the arguments in favor of it were it being a way to get older individuals out of the work force in order to make room for younger workers. You have to keep in mind it was introduced at a time when unemployment rates were upwards of 20%. And retirement was and is absolutely possible. When people own their land and house and have basic maintenance skills, your overhead costs become extremely low.
Of course there's also no reason these things must be mutually exclusive. I think the ideal is to learn from the past, which proved its sustainability over millennia, and work to improve it. In modern times we've instead set out to completely replace it - or at least build up something from scratch, and what we've created just doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
You are 100% correct.
Pre-1960s, the elderly were living in SROs, often windowless, with family (without aid or care), in county poorhouses, or marked as senile and sent to a mental hospital.
Retirement and living with family was viable for many as long as they remained healthy. People imagine Norman Rockwell. Reality was very different.
I base my multigenerational dream on the documentary “Encanto”
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Can you please not post snarky comments or shallow dismissals to Hacker News? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
No one is saying you owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Of all the things people say here (myself absolutely included), this is what got your personal attention? That's kind of interesting.
I've posted 23 comments in the last 24 hours, 386 in the last month, 4828 in the last year. Plenty of things get my attention!
A couple points that are important, if you want to understand how moderation works on HN:
(1) we're mostly responding to a random sample of the total - there's far too much content for us to read it all.
I have the impression that when someone posts a "you're moderating this, of all things?" comment, as you did here, it's usually because they've seen other cases where a comment ought to have been moderated but wasn't. Then the moderators' priorities start to look strange. The likeliest explanation for this, though, is that we just didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
(2) I've already forgotten point #2. Sorry! I fear that my short-term memory window is getting ever smaller - this is the 'sandblast' phenomenon (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's good to have you back. It wasn't the same.
It is everywhere now. Musk censors his X responses, Grok defends billionaires, the all-in podcast has only positive comments in suspiciously perfect English since a month or so. Previously they allowed criticism.
(And hardly anyone mentions Greenland on X.)
HN hasn't changed in this respect in a good 10 years, and no one who sees what gets posted here need fear that criticism is verboten. It isn't, and will never be. We do need to do something about shallow cynicism though (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 from earlier today, if curious).
@dang, I get what you mean in a vacuum but this article is pretty insulting to the readers intelligence.
The third sentence of the article is
> But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5.
Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5?
They might have well said “Google co-founder shares secrets that stealing bread to eat when you’re hungry and sleeping under bridges is actually illegal”
I hear you! I didn't read the entire article but I agree it doesn't exactly pattern-match to very good. We highly prefer articles that respect the reader's intelligence; they aren't always easy to come by.
The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.
(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)
The article is not about Sergey Brin, he is just the hook. It’s about the loss of meaning people can face after retiring, which can happen to anyone who is able to retire. That’s not everyone, but it’s also not just billionaires.
I do not accept that the analogy was made without an implicit attempt to conflate the two positions.
Most tech jobs aren’t a 9-5 either since that’s a traditional hourly job and tech has on call rotations that are unpaid.
This is what I’m talking about with the article insulting the readers intelligence. If you wanted to make the point of “people who retire should be aware that they need to find meaning outside of work” then it could just say so, instead of trying to act like it’s so hard to be so wealthy that there is no more struggle in life and you need to invent new ones for yourself.
What is the correct style to use to point out that there is nothing in this article beyond the news that a specific person got bored?
Maybe say exactly that? You can convey the sentiment without the snark, which can seem corrosive to community.
I think the snark comes from (and becomes merited through) an article that shows such an utter lack of empathy towards the problems that the vast majority face on a day-to-day basis.
Does every mention of Alice's hardship (even if slight, in our opinion) have to contain a disclaimer about the hardships that Bobs face?
No, when Alice and Bob are people whose hardships are actual hardships. It's not just that it's a hardship that's rare, or that "it's just a different hardship", or something — I can read about genuine plight that might affect some small portion of the population and empathize with that, and they with me at the same time – even implicitly, without statement in the article. But this, by virtue of being written, explicitly is unempathetic, whereas "this rare cancer affects 8 people" is not. That's not a problem I wish that I had, vs. this is a problem faced by someone who is well off, to even call this a "hardship" is a stretch.
To do so during a time when tech is also dragging its reputation into the mud by generally harming the rank and file, through large corporations whose actions are not held to account in anti-trust laws, to tech bro oligarchs who wine and dine with power while the rest of us are worst off in a time of unprecedented inequality, to tech laying off hundreds of thousands of employees over the last few years, to LLMs replacing hard working people with slop-generators… is just additional insult to injury.
The article is simply, itself, shallow. "… Is a Lesson for the Rest of Us" — no; barring unforeseen and extremely unlikely circumstances, I'm literally never going to have the "problems" faced by Brin, because I have no expectation of ever retiring with "perpetual wealth" levels of money.
If Alice's hardship is a tone deaf slap in the face to Bob then sure, she can go without publishing it :)
I'm also going to dissent with a "but is it a shallow rebuttal?" here? TFA is a of the "problems we wish we had" sort — we're all just temporarily embarrassed billionaires here, right guys? Right?! (Because a mere million doesn't cut it, these days…) But the rank and file of us are still on Duck Tales, Larry. Especially these days.
As I said in a separate comment, TFA is distinctly lacks empathy.
On here? You'd be surprised.
Lol I wish we would stop worshipping billionaires but YC and Silicon Valley has become such a parody of itself-
HBOs Silicon Valley is more accurate than any Paul Graham essay
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Should of moved and signed up for physics classes on the East coast or Europe. No wonder they got pulled back into the valley bubble.
This article reads like propaganda to keep the worker bees slaving away until they die. But I have a few things to say about this and Sergey Brin in particular.
In the early days, many considered Sergey Brin to be the soul or the conscience of Google. He was reportedly the driving force in Google originally pulling out of China rather than capitulating to the censorship regime [1]. This was also after the apparent state-sponsored hack of Google in China [2] so perhaps the motivations were mixed? I don't know.
But Sergey I think is a good example of someone for whom his creation outgrew him. I'm reminded of an old Jeff Atwood blog post where he quoted Accidental Empires [3]. Sergey was a commando. By 2010 Google needed an army. Now? Police.
GoogleX has Sergey's playground but if you look at the track record, possibly the only success I think is Waymo. Glass (mentioned in the article) was not a success and his affair with a subordinate also destroyed his marriage [4].
To me it felt like Sergey was drifting many years before he stepped away. His stepping away felt more like formalizing something that had already happened.
I'm not a billionaire. Not even close. Honestly, I think I'm glad about that because it seems like despite being surrounded with unimaginable wealth, many such people end up isolated and rudderless, desperately dsearching for meaning and connection. Or maybe that's just cope (from me).
The article mentions Gates and how he keeps busy with his philanthropy. Well, there's another piece of common ground between Gates and Brin: Jeffrey Epstein [5]. That's not intended as an implicit or explicit accusation of child predation by Gates or Brin or even of either having knowledge of such malfeasance, to be clear.
But even with a fraction of the DoJ's documents disclosed as well as from the Epstein estate, we can begin to paint a macabre picture of the connections between rich and powerful people that for some reason always seem to have Jeffrey Epstein at their nexus and that means something though we don't really know what.
Has Sergey had a substantial impact on Gemini? Will he? I have no idea. I do wonder if someone worth $100 billion really has the perspective and drive to move something like this. Google has a deep bench of talent and one thing Google is very good at is optimizing code that runs at scale by making their own networking, servers, racks, data centers, data center operating system (ie Borg) and code and efficiency is going to be a huge deal in the LLM space for the foreseeable future.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704266504575141...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11920616
[3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/
[4]: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...
[5]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/lolita-passports-and-m...
Oh boy, everyone accomplished paid a visit to the lolisland? Unbelievable.
He's in the files - including photos - and is named by a victim as being present at a "party". It doesn't necessarily mean he did anything untoward but he did fly to the island and attend an event.
Not everyone, just the nounces, like Gates and Brin here. Do you take their defence? Seems like you do. Why would anyone with solid moral values jump to the defence of nounces?
No it is a real question. You have access to EVERYTHING material & service related this world can offer. Why do you also need to torture children and completely ruin their lives?
It seems like you need to learn more about the human condition, and I’m saying this in a serios and constructive way.
How about finishing off that Ph.D., Mr. Brin (alas, you would need to find yourself a new supervisor, given Prof. Motwani's tragic drowning)?