121–130 of 499 posts
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.
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 st…
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
(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.)
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 whil…
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.