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.
Sergey Brin's Unretirement
41–50 of 499 posts
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#42[flagged]
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.
@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”
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
If Alice's hardship is a tone deaf slap in the face to Bob then sure, she can go without publishing it :)
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#44Mitchell 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!
[dupe]
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#46If 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.
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#47Sergey'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 !?
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#48[deleted]
Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#49Sergey 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 milli…
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Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement
#50Sergey 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 milli…
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.