441–450 of 499 posts
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.
Has someone collected all of these classic Silicon Valley nepotism stories anywhere?
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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 m…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
It's about scale, when you built something as grand as google you don't want to spend time building a garden
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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?
> 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.
Missing your ex and lying around depressed in bed is less unhealthy than getting into the car and sitting outside their house.
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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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 a…
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> 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…
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, t…
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.