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Sergey Brin's Unretirement

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Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#111

Post by dyauspitr »

p1esk wrote: post #12
dyauspitr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#112

Post by leptons »

vander_elst wrote: post #46

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.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#113

Post by burner420042 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #94
cuttothechase wrote: post #47

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 a…

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 " 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…

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.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#114

Post by senorqa »

> 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.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#115

Post by cj »

energy123 wrote: post #105
m348e912 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 ju…

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.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#116

Post by burner420042 »

dang wrote: post #83
Brian_K_White wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"…

It's good to have you back. It wasn't the same.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#117

Post by mattlondon »

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.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#118

Post by bryanrasmussen »

fragmede wrote: post #107
siliconc0w wrote: post #79

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.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#119

Post by ngcazz »

neilv wrote: post #103
ngcazz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

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

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#120

Post by intended »

fragmede wrote: post #107
siliconc0w wrote: post #79

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.

Looking at the two as separate parts ends up forcing the dance apart from the dancer no
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