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Sergey Brin's Unretirement
291–300 of 499 posts
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#292It’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.
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#293It 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?
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#294What 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?
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#295I 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.
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of " [..] 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…
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.
Depends on where. In big city yes
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#297I 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?
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#299Earlier 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…
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.
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Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#300Sergey'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 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.